I'm sitting at home, watching the Steve McQueen classic "Bullitt", and it occurs to me that everything that seems old-fashioned in the movie was actually quite contemporary and modern when the movie was released in 1968. McQueen's San Francisco of 1968 is quite nearly unrecognizable to me.
37 years doesn't seem like a long time, but I find it fascinating that so much has changed. In the extended entry is a list of things that I found were modern for the time that you don't really see anymore.
- magnetic tape reels
- typewriters, and calculators with paper tape
- aluminum strip desk decoration.
- main credits and copyright mpaa logos at the beginning.
- phones have rotary dials
- The streets of San Francisco are much clearer, and have ample streetside parking
- people wear hats! and driving gloves!
- revolving doors to enter into the Mark Hopkins hotel.
- concierge checking the mail
- mailboxes behind concierge in hotel
- they had bobblehead dogs in the 60s!
- the trolleys aren't packed with tourists, and you don't see a camera.
- phone numbers appear to be only 5 digits long.
- John Ross' wallet has a little notebook in it, along with what appears to be a driver's license or social security card.
- Payphones appear to be everywhere.
- women wear rainbox striped hats to match their rainbow striped lady's suit.
- newspaper dispensers look more like newpaper racks.
- to ring someone in, you need to use the speakerbox, speakerboxes weren't connected to telephones.
- Is Steve McQueen wearing paisley pajamas?
- To unlock a door, you pulled a release handle.
- Blinds drop down rather than raise up.
- McQueen's partner reads a story about a mumps vaccine that just entered the market.
- women and men wear dead animal fur on their heads
- Hotel Daniels 226 Embarcadero Road... does it even exist anymore?
- The Hotel Daniels has an elevator with metal accordian style gate
- The pier hasn't changed a bit.
- the woman engineer has a spinning spiral thing.
- almanacs exist with charts and tables and precomputed values.
- Oh! It looks like I'm wrong. Phone numbers do have 7 digits.
- Sirens are different
- Newspaper Photographers show up en masse to shooting at 1 in the morning.
- Medical technology does not appear to have made enormous strides in dealing with gunshot/shotgun wounds
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