I remember the dial wheel phones well and how fascinating the new button phone was! Definitely an improvement. But that didn't happen all over the country at the same time: At the age of 16 I had a summer job at a summer camp and there you had to call the operator to place a phone call.
As long as I can remember we had a television, most likely we got one when I was about 4. At the age of 5 they showed the Batman series "on the same Bat channel at the same Bat time". We also lived near the capital so we had both TV channels - something that e.g. my wife had to wait a decade longer, living close to wherer we now live.
The quality of dental care still seemed to vary. Before my time getting false teeth as a confirmation present at the mid teens was very common, still people younger than me say that their teeth are bad because there was no information available about mouth hygiene. To me that sounds odd since both me and my wife still remember the advertising jingles of various tooth pastes. So most likely their parents just didn't care, possibly thinking that bad teeth were hereditary and that Pepsodent is snake oil for the wealthy but stupid people in the capital area.
So many things really are better than they used to be.
But I still miss the printed Yellow Pages. Many of my customers used to find my services through them - the last edition was back in 2017 and before that smart phones weren't as common as they now are. But even today there's still many elderly people who either don't have a smart phone or can't use the google search to find a service to fix their Internet connection. An ad in the local Yellow Pages was also somewhat of a proof of a honorable company.
Paper maps... I've had a navigator for some 15 years now and it truly helps to find an address. But: The data may be incorrect, you still have to look around. Trying to find the "fastest" route I've been guided to grass covered field roads instead of the tarmac, most likely because the smaller roads were marked as "common speed limit" instead of the lower limit through the village. That has improved through the years, though. But recently we found a paper map invaluable. We were returning from a road trip back to Helsinki. As we were heading East the navigator tells to go through the city but the street from the harbour is narrow, there's crossings with multiple lanes to several directions etc. and the row of trucks is endless. So my wife took a paper map of Helsinki and advised us to choose the first street to West which then led us to the Western end of the ringway. The navigator went nuts, asking to make a U turn at every corner until we reached the ringway.
