Several have asked me to repost this series from my prior blog on life today vs. the world 25-35 years ago, so here we go! So much was different back when I started practicing law. Lawyers and their secretaries (that’s what we called them then) did not have computers, only a word processing center in the basement did. The fax machine was very new and very very slow. FedEx was still Federal Express. Email and the Internet did not exist (at least as far as we knew), nor did cell phones, PDAs or “car phones” (as we called them for awhile before they became portable).

Cable TV was pretty new and had about 30 channels with a wire-connected push-button channel selector. There were no video games except very rudimentary ones for the home. There was no app for anything!

CNN was just a few years old. People smoked everywhere, in the office, in restaurants, movie theaters and airplanes. There were still the vestiges of the “Mad Men” days where folks indeed enjoyed the famous three-martini lunch and yes many were a bit indiscreet in their personal dealings around the office.

Is today’s life better, worse or just different? With the wonderful benefit of hindsight mixed with an admittedly warped remembrance of things past, I decided to run a series here addressing a number of these changes I have witnessed and my thoughts on what’s made things better, or maybe not. Hope you enjoy it, more to come…