The Way we Were...Italian Style

As part of my occasional series on how far we've come in Italy (from telephones to cinema chairs -- click to read posts) just in the last few decades or so, this post takes on our 'Information Age'.  In our over-blogged, tumbled, stumbled and tweeted world, it's said that a person today gets more information per minute than the entire contents of the New York Times back in the day (which is not to say that the information they get is quite as valuable as it was back then.)  Today, we can 'Channel Surf' hundreds of channels, with programming bursting on the screen 24/7.

But in Italy, it wasn't so long ago when we were fairly contented with just taking our pick of one of three stations.  We'd have those delightful presenter-women telling us what to expect on the tube momentarily, and then, we'd simply wait for the program to begin.  Wait. And wait some more. [We were blessed back then not to have adverts filling the synapses with their rowdy blathering and vacuous housewives]. So we just watched the clock. Literally.
And here's how it looked like as far back as 1986 [try and see if you can kindly refrain from checking emails / text msgs / twitter / facebook pages for the duration of the video]:

Other live links to The Way We Were above.