Kurt Vonnegut suggested occasionally taking a moment during a nice quiet time with others and acknowledge “if this ain’t nice, I don’t know what is.” It’s surprisingly effective at grounding you in the moment.
I try to remember that line constantly to ground me into the present moment. It’s helped on numerous occasions to be very grateful. Since it resonates with so many of us, looks like many of us need that and would agree
My parents bought our first color TV in 1977, same as Conan's father. I remember discovering in college that The Wizard Of Oz starts in black and white, then transitions to color. Woah!
1977?! Luxury!! We finally jettisoned the trusty 12" Magnavox B&W for I think a 16" Zenith color set in October of 1987 when we moved to Cincinnati for my father's new job. I was in 8th grade at this point, and my only sibling had just gone off to college. We weren't poor: he was a successful trust banker. But my parents had been disinclined to indulge anyone with the magic of color television. They finally relented after the move when I guess it dawned on them that I wouldn't have any real friends for like the next two years.
Ed helms is three years older than me and he is describing my childhood, too. Having HBO in 1983/1984 was a big deal. I loved NNTN. I've been on a Conan binge the past few days. He just elevates my mood so much.
@@joemckim1183at my grandmother’s house the remote was huge slide buttons and it was wired to the tv. At my house the tv was that big one in the box that looked like a piece of furniture and was color, but my brother and I were the channel changers because my mom didn’t want the wire out 😂
The real Dr. Andrew Bernard is a professor of economics at Dartmouth who specializes in international trade and global markets. So yeah, pretty much the same as the Nard Dog!
That is the power of education. A person who started with legal pads and a thwapper has been able to overcome the technological gap in order continue telling dad jokes through the decades. Really impressive actually.
Conan talking about technology back in his days, especially the 80's really puts into perspective the astonishingly rapid speed of development of computers. I'm going through a computer science major where I learnt a bit about computer history. I sometimes struggle to realise it but we are still living in an age of unprecedented technological advancement never seen before and perhaps never to be seen (at a similar scale) again.
@@davidlawrence2915 Just checked it out on wikipedia and it's pretty alien to me. Seems to be a somewhat "transitional" bit of technology between books and photos to hard-drives, pretty interesting.
@plussum3255 if you have to read multiple pages or scroll th3ough multiple pages to get the info you need, it'll make you nauseous. Had to use it in grad school
@@plussum3255 I think that one day we will look back at 1990-present as the "technological revolution", the same way that people look back and think of the "industrial revolution". Apparently at the time of the industrial revolution, people did not know they were going though it until they looked back at it years later.
And we still murder and loot and bomb other humans to dust. One might begin to think all these wars are meant by design and we live under pseudo-Gods that also want the new tech to spy and control the masses,. Besiding making us kill each other, of course.
Part of the reason I'm typing on a clacky blue-switch keyboard is I'm nostalgic for the old typewriters my generation had back in the day, not enough to go back to them, just enough to hearken back to them, while still enjoying the befits of present-day editing. Conan's description of how you switched between ink and correction cartridges certainly took me back. I'm also glad they eventually came back to the Andy Bernard thing.
He got a lot of flack for a long time from office fans and from general public. I never soured and he’s as genuine as he seems so it’s great to see it come full circle
@@h3artands0uLL cuz of the nosedive his character tool n how he left the show a lot for hangover movies. Kinda ended up hurting his movie career after launching it n made a lot of folks sour on him which is a shame.
Another battle of the ages episode ... a gentle stroll through the warmth of nostalgia. An education for some, a day of remembrance for others. Chuckled alot. keep 'em comin Conan, keep 'em comin. 🙏
I grew up in the mid 90s with a 1960s faux wood TV set until 2009 in nyc 😅 We also had a typewriter (yes we had one main computer lol) and used a rotary dial phone until it was no longer usable in 2015. It was my mother’s way of honoring the past and a way of creating a direct relationship through common experiences with those she grew up with. She is a good decade older than Conan, so by the time I came along, every piece of furniture was a family heirloom. You could really feel the time, effort, and the lives that poured into every detail. It stirred an interest in the many lives I didn’t get to meet who made it possible for me to be here today- a group effort to live/learn/persist on a world scale generation after generation. We didn’t have much but just being surrounded by history, musicians and artists struck such curiosity for the liminal spaces of any kind + equally silly and serious pattern/probability oriented rumination very young. I know I wrote a wall but it’s amazing the influence using appliances of the past can have on a person. The juxtaposition of the present we all share and the probability of any of us being a part of the same civilization at the same time is so insane and beautiful. In that insanity, I think, is where the power of comedy lies
Like Conan's, my family never got color TV until the late 1970s. The Wizard of Oz used to be shown annually, but I was full adult before I got the "horse of a different color" joke.
If I recall correctly, my first computer had a 30mb hard drive - the very first computer I ever saw, 6-8 years before i got one, used cassette tapes -or something that looked like them - - the fancy typewriters were called a 'Word Processor' - had a few of those too.
When I was a kid a show like Gilligan's Island had the first season filmed in black and white because color was expensive. If the show was a success and picked up for another season, then they went to color. We got our first color set in the mid-sixties. I remember that there was a hue control that went from tinting everything green to red and my grandfather was constantly adjusting it throughout every show mostly ending up in the red zone.
I had a commodre 128, and it had no hard drive, so I bought like an $80 word processor program, and in order to save your writing, you had to change floppy disks, which were the big 5 inch ones and then when the save was done, you put back in the program disk. Playing games were even worse because there were multiple play disks, so at random points in the game, it wold tell you ' insert disk 3' .. and then the same thing, if you wanted to save your game you had to insert a save game disk.
I was an Admin Asst at Exxon and used the Selectric typewriter he is talking about. Later I was doing the accounting for the IT group and got the fastest desktop computer that had a hard drive. Everyone was soooo jealous! People would stop by my office, yes, I had a real office, to see my exciting new computer. My ex worked at Texaco and had to checkout a pencil when he needed a new one.
LOL my mother bought me the same one that Conan is referring to when I was in college. Prior to that I had a manual. Once I got into grad school, after a year or two I had to switch to a computer. In those days for many of us it meant walking to a lab to type up something that we had handwritten and printing it out to double-check it. Only in my later years when I got to my dissertation could I afford to buy one for myself
To further Ed's point about how old they sound. I am a grown man, I pay taxes, I vote, get McDonald's even when we do have food at home, but this was the first time in my life that I've ever heard the word Steno-pool
When I was a little kid there were 6 channels, Pong, and we had an electric typewriter set up in the den. I can remember my mom clacking away on it regularly. My sister and I were not allowed near it. My dad is a nerd so we got a Commodore 64 in 1983. The dot-matrix printer was even louder than the typewriter. I specifically remember my mom spending hours typing up some kind of report on the computer for the first time before she lost the whole thing when it crashed. She hadn't saved anything. She was so mad, she went and got the typewriter from the basement.
I'm an elder millennial who went to college in the early 2000s. Many people had big fat computers in their dorm rooms and very few had laptops. I often worked at the university computer lab because I did not yet have a personal computer. In grade school and middle school I remember playing Oregon trail in class and taking a computer typing class. Somewhere along the line (maybe high school), they taught us about the Microsoft Office suite. Meanwhile, my mom was in college and did her papers on her typewriter. And when I was on the school newspaper in high school, we laid it out every week BY HAND. It was a very interesting transitionary time.
LOL- our family was actually much worse. We didn't get a color TV until 1981 because my dad was too cheap to spring for a new one until the old B&W TV burnt out. What's even more insane, he was a chief electronics engineer at McDonnell Douglas aircraft company!
Through the years my father wanted nothing to do with color TV, ride-on lawn mowers, cable, leaf blowers, etc. We literally had a Jones family for neighbors and he definitely and defiantly did not want to keep up with them and the accoutrements of suburbia. For some reason though, he slipped up and still has an electric carving knife which I saw in a cabinet recently, evoking the sound of Thanksgiving dinners in the early 1970s.
i am still under 40 but not by much hahaha and watching this brought back a childhood memory of me being fascinated with my mom’s typewriter that she used for her job and other stuff before our family got our first computer with MS Dos and Word Perfect which was before MS Word program😅😂😅😂 ohhhhhhhh the memory!
I was born in 73' and I we didn't have a colour T.V. until I was almost a teenager and shortly thereafter we finally got a VCR. My mother had an old fashioned typewriter that I would use until I got an electric typewriter/very early word processor combo after I started high school. And I'm 10 years younger than Conan!
We had internet in 1994 before almost everyone else, it was awesome, though you couldn't do much. I was a child, but I remember the idea of sending an email blew my mind.
I told my young kids for years my childhood was in black and white, and then we got our first colors of blue and green. It's so fun warping the minds of your kids, ensuring a lifetime of trust issues.
I used a type writer and never heard of this cartridge one. We had the extra white out ribbon for errors. We went from the white TV to color with three channels. On HBO I would get tired of the announcing you were watching HBO flying over the neighborhood. Yet it was the best. I still love these sounds for movies and TV. It is wild to see TV in the back of SUV when that use to be in limos.
Up until the late 70's most everyone I knew (in a poor rural town) had 13 inch black and white TV's (my grandparents had a colored TV early on) - This began to change in the early 80's as TV prices continued to fall and the VCR was invented - which, in the early days, you would rent a VCR with the movies from a grocery store - before video rental stores like Blockbuster, etc. - My first 'remote control' came with a VCR - and was attached to it with a 20 ft cord ...
This conversation is making me remember that in the '70s my parents bought a TV that had to be the largest piece of furniture in the room next to the sofa. It was in a big dark wood cabinet.
I'm under 40 and I grew up with dot matrix printers in elementary school XD not quite "thwack thwack" territory for keyboards/typewriters, but they were certainly around, mostly as a relic (electric typewriters are much quieter...certainly quieter than those damn printers).
lol on the tv….. my dad was the same but in the 1990’s and early 00’s…. absolutely refused to get a big screen tv like some of my friends had and that I was so envious of… and also refused to get a flat screen tv for a long time after they came out too. He’s come around now but yah I remember in high school being like, why don’t we have a flat screen 720 hd yet? wtf?
you guys in the US talking about getting a computer in the 80s or 90s... My family bought our first computer in 2008 🤣 before that I only used the internet at my relatives hahah
We had a black and white at our house in the 80's, but I think it went along with our small 13" colour tv. The black and white was one of those floor models we played video games on. Fun.
We had a huge, intricate wooden console TV in the early 80s and it was my job every week to keep that monstrosity dusted. All it's nooks and crannies took me forever to clean. I hated that thing🤣🤣🤣.
This conversation made me remember that my parents had something very similar! It was probably the largest piece of furniture in the living room next to the sofa
A small town in Colorado in the 70s and a B&W in the living room with a little box and a knob. Turn the knob and the antenna on top of a fifty-foot pole would rotate to get better reception. My folks didn't buy a nice color T.V. until I had left...
I had an electric type writter when all my friends had Macintosh computers. It was a newer type writer though and had some awesome features. Today we’d probably call it a “Smart” type writer. Back then we called it a Word Processor.
lol.. our first color TV was in 1984.... i spent most of my childhood without TV and i'm not yet 50, and not from a developing country. We lived in the middle of the city and our downstairs neighbors had to use an outhouse..
My first home computer was the old commodore 64. The floppy discs for games n school work, wow to think now I have an IPHONE is insane. Going from AOL dial up from when I was in my late teens to now having instant 5g in my fourties. My era went from beepers/pagers to mini cell phones to 5g IPHONES n Atari to PS5 DAMN how much we've advanced in my lifetime
Wow I had forgotten all about those whiteout typewriters / word processors. If I remember correctly, you actually had to type the same letter again to delete it, because the “flapper” would only whiteout on the area of that particular character (between the flapper and the whiteout strip). 😂Also, I just remembered “ON TV” subscription service! One switch on a wooden box to access a few channels and even paid per view. I wonder if Conan remembers that one! 😂
That bit at the end reminds me of my grandpa Zabinski who originally came up with the law about "anything that can go wrong will go wrong," but his classmate plagiarized him, and they went in alphabetical order, and well, as Murphy's law would have it...
We didn't get a color TV until the late 90s. That's when the tube TV in the cabinet couldn't be fixed. And I have seen it in photos of my day when he was a toddler.
Too much work to pull out one cartridge and put another in to white it out? That was amazing technology! When I typed papers in high school and college we had a typewriter that was likely from the 1950's, maybe early sixties. It took a bit of effort just to push the keys. Typewriter paper was kind of like thick tissue paper back then, and when you had to erase something you could easily tear right through the paper. I would have killed for a Selectric! At some point my mom bought an electric typewriter, 1980 or so maybe, what a huge improvement that was. Right around the time I'd typed my last paper for school! I might have used it once or twice.
I loved my Dad's old Smith Corona, lugged it with me to college. By the time I graduated in 1985, we could go to the computer lab to use word processors with "floppy disks."
5:03 I always do the "Bewitched test" anytime someone brags about how terrible their parents were about getting a proper TV 😛 Gotta say Conan has a point here: Bewitched (one of the most successful shows of the 60s and 70s) moved to color in 1966, 11 years before Conan O'Brien Sr. upgraded, pretty damn long!
