My earliest remembrance would be the odyssey gaming system in 1976 when i was 5. Seen HERE.

    i remember in my brothers room of wood panelled walls, there was a 17 inch tv on a stand, and i watched them take this machine and hook it up to the back of the tv, and then they attached little boxes with wires, one for each person. then they had in a box all these transparent pieces of plastic that theyd stick up to the screen (the overlays provided the 'background' graphics), and then theyd turn the machine on and holding the little boxes they were able to move these white lines on the black screen, and there was a white ball on the screen moving back and forth and they were making sure it didnt get past the white line they were controlling. but thats all i remember, i dont know if i ever played it or saw it much, i just remember them on the ground around the tv and really excited about the onscreen black and white action created with about 34 pixels. and i remember thinking somehow those sheets had something to do with it, and i took them outside and held them up to my neighborhood, to see if the overlay would somehow do some type of magic with white lines and white squares. but nothing. so i remember cutting the cats whiskers that night with scissors, probably the cruelest thing ive ever done in my life to an animal, but i was 5 and it didnt end up with squirrel hides in the closet by 9, so im allowed that mistake of thinking cats have to have there whiskers trimmed just humans.

 

 

 

 

 

    my second remembrance would be in 77-80, when i was around 6-9. Seen HERE.

    my dad has what was called the 'radio room'. it was in our new house out in the woods of really west, west palm beach.

he built the radio room from scratch, the shelves and the desk which took up two complete walls. it was his hobby room, and he did enjoy his hobbies, at the time one of them was leather-crafting, and so many tools and parts for him to make his belts and purses and wallets, it was fun to go through them all even though i wasnt supposed to, but there were so many neat little designs on the punchtools.

anyways, in a corner of the radio room, was of course his radio. but it was a ham radio, the yaezu-500, and now 30 years later, that thing is still at my moms house, though stored away for about 20 years unused, and that thing is still selling for over $500 in ebay and it considered a classic piece of well-built solid machinery.

    the ham radio was like something out of a wartime movie, sized as a big stereo unit, and had a microphone on a stand. and lots of notepads around filled with his notes, and an ashtray and a desklight for his latenight adventures 'online'. behind the desk taking up the ENTIRE wall was a wall-map, and on it were over 100 postcards from all over the world in random spots. every postcard was from another ham radio operator in some random spot on earth. and thats where the fun was as a 'man hobby'.

    see, a ham radio is about the 'broadest' of all 'freuqncy recievers' a normal person can buy and use. you have to learn morse code and be registered for operating one, because its so powerful, but then once you were licensed you got a name and you gave yourself also a nickname. my dads was WD4ATY, and i still remember it even though i havent heard it in 27 years, and thats because for many nights and years, he would sit there, repeating that signature over and over, and asking if anyone was out there.

    i would sit behind him, and he would have his microphone in hand, and he would have his big bulky airmen headphones on. he would have his beer off to the side and a cigarette polluting up the room, and his hand would be turning this wheel on the front of the ham radio. this wheel was just like a normal tuner like for a car stereo, but whereas car radio gets about 2 dozen stations, and a tv tuned in a dozen stations, well a ham radio is so broad of a range of reception of frequencies, that it could tune in literally almost any manmade frequency that was broadcast. radio, tv, airplanes, police, cb operators, and not only those, it could tune in manmade items from space, like the buzz and sweeps of satellites, the madmade logic-gated music which seemed to make no sense, but after hours of listening, you could begin getting the 'feel' of it to appreciate the noises that 100s of satellites were beaming up and down to various companies and governments. and not only could manmade items be heard, but you could hear them anywhere in the world, so those few radio stations turned into 1000s of ones, and so on for all manmade signals, so that the options were in the 1000s of what you could listen to. add to this the fact that you could also listen to space, which is what all white noise we see and hear on electronic items really is; just the songs of billions of stars and universes and events all singing in a chorus, but all their own individual songs. so you could turn that dial and listen to the fuzz and flicker of events in space, all happening millions and billions of years ago and just now being snagged by a roof antenna and transcribed into that ham radio. now add to the ability to listen in on manmade and 'natural' broadcasts, the fact that he was actually also able to transmit his own signals out to the world, and out to all the stars as well. now you go from a one-way form of communication, and it turns into an instant two-way form of communication, which, as we see today, means all the world of difference.

    so he would sit there for hours, just turning that wheel ever so slowly, going thru the whines and whirs of million of individual frequencies, trying to catch some break in the white noise, and if he did find where there was something, anything, whether it be silence, a manmade digital sound, or a transmission from somewhere in the world, or another ham radio person calling out; no matter what he would chart it in his notebook, the frequency and what he guessed it was. there was no 'presets' back then with analog dials, if you didnt remember the exact spot, youd probably never find it again. now what randomized the whole setup was the fact that ham radio frequencies, and all manmade ones for that matter, were affected by the suns own transmissions, and because of that you never knew what part of earth you'd pick up the best, it all depended on how the suns transmissions were twisting and warping and scattering the waves of all manmade ones. so of course the prize catch as a ham radio operator, would be to find things on the exact opposite side of earth, like austrailia or russia. in order to send and recieve from so far away though, you had a have a big antenna, and i mean big, like the size of half a house, or going up 30 feet above the house, so constantly lightning strikes were something you became used to, because ham operators have these massive lightning rods above their homes that are also being amplified with great amounts of electric running through them, making them more sensitive to pick up the slight weak frequencies that otherwise wouldve floated by unseen.

    of all items which could be heard, the ones he would look for was the transmissions from other ham radio operators. he would be going through the white noise then suddenly a very staticy voice was coming thru, very devoid of range and monotonsly repeating something like 'this is W65YTG does anybody have a read.....this is W65YTG out of ireland.........W65YTG does anyone copy?.....over.....' and they would repeat it every 30 second or minute. if my dad found someone calling out, he would jot down the frequency and then grab the mic and give his own nickname and where he was from 'this is WD4ATY out of florida, i hear you....over'....and then there would be those second of silence, not knowing if the other side would hear him. when they did hear him, they would introduce each other, where they were from, what the weather was like there, and then they would exchange addresses. then, a month later in the mail, a postcard came in the mail, a postcard with an image of the city that the person was from, and on the back of it he would sign his nickname and just a short note saying hi. my dad would take these and tack it on on the world map, and over time some areas were really filled up, whereas other areas were quite empty, and his goal seemed to be to fill those empty areas, like russias west and the poles where researchers would sometimes broadcast. sometimes the person was not speaking, they were using morse code, just the flat longbeep longbeep longbeep shortbeepshortbeep longbeep of morse code coming through, and then my dad would use his morsecode pad and tap out his own beeps back. i think that was the way for people who didnt speak the same language to be able to trade address info or have basic conversations just to say hi. or maybe people were using it because it was the leet-speak of the time.

    i found that mesmerizing. even though there was a regular speaker on the ham radio, i would put on those headphines, and crouched on the chair, i would creep creep creep that knobbed dial ever slowly, hearing the delicacy by the way each frequency slipped into ears range, and then slide back out as another one would rise up. the slower you turned it, the smoother the rises and falls, and it would put me in a state of peace as a kid, and i know that because it gave me the strongest goosepimples, nothing else mattered. i never knew what was going to rise from the white noise, nor what my own mind would begin assuming it was hearing after hours of it, as it was early learning of how the mind plays tricks on you.

if i was hearing another ham radio operator calling out, i would not respond because i was scared of what might happen to me, but sometimes if they were talking in another language, i would just say 'hi' and wait for those seconds, and see if i could tell that the person could tell i had said something. and sometimes i would just listen to faraway radio stations, just to hear the music, the arabic music i remember they way it faded in and out with static, it just seemed like everything of which i knew not, just haunting and distant yet somehow familiar. but certainly i heard 100s of stations over the time using the ham radio. and sometimes i would hear soldiers talking, perhaps in wars or in some type of engagement because they were really in a rush and dead serious. and sometimes i would listen to the propagandas of countries, like russia or cuba, where they would just be broadcasting stories about how wonderful their countries were, and how twisted the united states was. they would have news guys with russian accents telling bad stories that happened in america, and they would have 'a happy american couple who moved to our country' come on the transmission, and talk about how they were so happy to move from new york over to russia, how it is such a wonderful life, and full of culture, and natural beauties.

    sometimes on the ham radio there were sounds so unhuman they were freeze me up, just squeals and vibrations and tones that almost seemed like a black hole was writhing in pain and i was catching its death rattle, perhaps these 1,253,203,864 years later. i tried to wrap my head around the fact that the sound i was hearing was not just far in space, but also far back in time. i did not get that. i still find it hard to wrap my head around it.

    but the most ones which almost scared me, were what today is called 'spy numbers'. see, the ham radio was so almost-infinite in its frequencies, that anyone could almost 'hide' on ham radio, meaning, they could transmit and the odds of someone hearing them would be millions-to-one. because of this, the ham radio was the number one effective choice for spies, people who were living in another country on a mission, and they would collect the needed information, and they would have to get it back to their governments headquarters. but you can't just take a plane every month without looking suspicious, and you cant just mail it off, or fax it, or make a phone call. so spies instead used ham radio to transmit their information back to their country, it was pretty safe, very cheap, and easy to do with no trace left behind and nothing physical floating around.

    so i would be slowly turning the dial, and by sheer luck, i would suddenly hear a strange clicking, and then something like a icecream-truck music, then a deadpan female voice repeat a series of numbers for a minute, and then the clicks again, and the music again, and then she would repeat the numbers once more. and then, the frequency went right back to white noise. she opened the curtain, did her act, then retreated. back to the empty stage. i would be sitting there just puzzled. i had no idea what these were, but like my dad did, i would jot the frequency and time on the notepad, and maybe, just maybe days later at the same time, the frequency would open up again, and she would do the same music, but not the same set of numbers. and sometimes it was men talking, and it was always different types of opening music or clicks, or sometimes just a man repeats the same sound over and over for minutes at a time. and this was the way that spies were telling who-knows-what to god-knows-who, knowing that their mother country would know at what time and frequency, but hoping noone else would ever hear it, and if they did, it was so coded that they couldn't be traced, where odds are they would probably be killed without a jury if caught sending these freaky transmissions.

here are some examples, these were not recorded by me but by others who put them online, it gives you an idea of what i was hearing, yet not knowing why.

 

 

 

 

 

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