Do you remember watching movies in school?

The AV club (the guys….or, more rarely, girls….who knew how to run the complicated movie projector) would come in and set things up for us….and then with a flick of the light switch, and after turning the movie projector on….we were off into the world of entertainment.

In retrospect, I know that movie time was just a time that the teacher could take a break.

But, I think that we felt like we were getting away with something when we could sit and watch a movie.

That was a pretty low-tech experience.

The sound….the picture….the delivery of the sound and picture….the big reels of film….everything about watching a movie at school was low-tech.

There wasn’t any HDMI or flat screen TV….just the whirring of the machine and the reels of film going round and round.

We weren’t conscious of the quality of this experience….except if the film broke or got jammed.

I think that we just liked sitting in the dark for a while….watching time lapse flowers grow before our eyes.

It wasn’t a “better” experience…just a really different kind of experience.

That’s what you call “premature codgerism”…when you wax rhapsodic over the merits of crummy old movie projectors….or get nostalgic for anything that’s changed for the better.

I guess that the more that I understand that there’s something “better” out there ….the more chance I have to get dissatisfied with what I have.

That’s what they call marketing, I guess.

There’s always going to be a clearer picture.

There’s always going to be more realistic sound.

But I really did enjoy watching some old (even at the time, the movies all seemed to be old…) movie with my friends at school.

No matter that it was not very technologically advanced….that was a high time to escape the normal school experience.

We all got the point…no matter how low-tech it all was.