…the more they stay the same. Read this article, “Friends in Radioland,” from a 1961 issue of Time magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Amateur radio operators are called hams, and it is easy to see why: talk, talk, talk—that’s all they seem to do. There are 250,000 of them in the U.S., and another estimated 100,000 elsewhere in the world, all of them chiefly bent on short-wave conversation about capacitors, resistors, transmitters, antennas, and occasionally, the weather and what is playing at the local movie house.

We still do talk a lot about our gear, but one thing certainly has changed: there are now more than 650,000 licensed radio amateurs in the U.S. and more than 2 million worldwide.

Thanks to Bill, WA6ITF, for posting this link to the ARRL PR mailing list.