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'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter (theatlantic.com)
Alexis C. Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic: There's a question going around on Twitter, courtesy of the writer Matt Whitlock: "Without revealing your actual age, what's something you remember that if you told a younger person they wouldn't understand?" This simple query has received, at this date, 18,000 responses. Here is just a tiny selection: A/S/L, pagers, manual car windows, "be kind, please rewind", "Waiting by the radio for my song to come on so I could record it on a cassette tape", floppy disks, the smell of purple mimeograph ink, WordPerfect, busy signals, paper maps, Winamp, smoking in the hospital, the card catalogue. Our favorite response, "The remote to change the channel on the TV was attached to a box that was attached to the TV", which elicited a response, "What about the remote that was really a clicker... In that it clicked like a frog toy",
Remember when calling 'first' was cool?
So my future's so bright I gotta wear shades?
What is this, the yearbook?
Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?
Until 1983 my dad had a 1957 RCA Victor TV set. Black/white and NO remote. Remotes were for fancy families that didn't have kids who could be told to change the channel. Mind you, we had 3 channels with only 2 in English so it wasn't really a big deal...
Pagers: doctors and first responders still use them. Some work via satellite, meaning there are no network dead spots.
Pretty sure I've been in a car with manual windows (and manual transmission, even!) in the last year.
Busy signals? Pretty common when calling a business -- once there's a call on call waiting and one on the line, 3rd caller gets a busy.
Paper maps -- maybe road maps aren't as common, but any hiker typically gets a paper maps of a park, and maps of buildings like museums are often given out.
Technology my tail! What about things changed by our caring, loving, and omniscient government? When traveling — by air or train — without registering with authorities was possible? When being mistreated at the airport would cause the mistreater to be disciplined, rather than the victim — arrested?
When one could buy health insurance for about $140/month (just over $200 in today's money)? Remember?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Direct hardware programming, doing it all yourself and crafting your own algorithms, using bit shifting/swapping/masking, working your way around memory segments and interrupts
Only three black and white channels because of the coat hanger rabbit ears. The sign off at the end of the TV day. Needing to wait a week to see the next episode of a cartoon.
Oh yea, I lived that one. It was one step up from the crank, talk to the switchboard operator thing...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Supposedly, my goofy uncle used to bother his brothers and sisters by banging on some exposed pipes while they were watching TV; the noise caused the TV to change the channel.
Everyone who is not mentally challenged would understand every one of those things. I'm using mentally challenged in the literal sense, every one of these things is logical and takes, if even needed, one simple sentence to "explain".
There was a time when a President of the USA accepting money from foreign governments was serious enough that he'd at least try to hide it.
At a previous job, we used to get NOAA ocean data on tape. Along with the tape came a piece of paper telling you what the header and record sizes were on that tape because none of it was standardized - the (FORTRAN) program I'd written to read the tape had to be tweaked each time.
#DeleteChrome
LOADING...
I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!
People miss being able to do things.
BananaCom, ICQ, Powwow, The Palace, Tsunami, connecting to BBSs after midnight to download .mod songs, Dr. Sbaitso, Fantavision.... I could go on and on
Every month or two, it seemed, when the TV started having problems, my Dad and I would take all of its glass tubes out of their sockets and take them down to the drug store or hardware store to test them. Usually, we found one that was weak or bad, and bought a replacement on the spot. My Dad preferred RCA tubes, but I liked the look of the Philips boxes better. We took them all home and put them back into the TV. It always worked after we did that. A couple of times, while I was still in grade school, I was allowed to do this all by myself, which made me feel pretty important.
When color TVs finally became affordable, they were all-transister except for the picture tube, and so this little ritual ended.
More and more roads are going electronic toll only. Fortunately, there's still generally an option to buy and top up the toll tag itself with cash.
the smell of purple mimeograph ink
Oh man... That brings back memories of high school.
I remember all of these examples
Fuck Ajit Pai
I remember ... .. No Internet at all, browsing through library cards to find information...
.. Having to decide which city to call long distance to connect to CompuServe...
.. logging into the Library of congress to look up things via telnet...
.. Listening to the modem connect sounds...
.. being disconnected from all that, because grandma picked up the phone in the other room...
.. dialling on a rotary phone...
.. trying (and failing) to transit C64 datasette tapes via a phone line...
.. Damn, I'm old.
Whichever of us kids was closest to the TV.
.. with a dual casette recorder and a watch screwdriver to tune in the heads by ear.
Whoops, the dead media list at Bruce Stirling's Dead Media Project 404s.
Luckilly, Archive.Org is on the case!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Our first VCR (a JVC) had a hatch on the top near the front. Underneath was an array of ten knobs and dials to set which channels it could receive. That is, you couldn't just pick any channel you wanted, you had to manually tune each channel by setting it's band and fine-tuning it with a small knob. You could set up ten. In front was a removable plastic strip with punch-out numbers where you would fill in the channels you programmed in. When you set it up and put the strip back in, a light would come on behind each number so you could see what channel it was set to. The only display was the vacuum-florescent time display which, I'm pretty sure, was surplus from a digital clock.
Also fun - the control panel with the transport controls would pop off and become the remote control. If you loose the remote, you're SOL if you want to control the thing. Also, the indicator that a tape was inside was mechanical - if a tape was in the transport the dust flaps would close differently and a red tape would appear between them.
It's somewhat amazing the thing worked at all. I don't think it had any sort of microcontroller or anything - pretty sure it was all logic gates and a few timer chips.
(1) Programming was done on a typewriter (a what?) like device that punched holes into paper cards, one line per card, or a paper tape, that you fed into another machine, etc ... (Note: I still have an actual, regular, typewriter at home.)
(2) The term "dial-up" meant you manually dialed the phone -- on a phone with an actual dial -- then put the receiver into a device when you heard the wobble tone. (Pro Tip: You could also dial the phone by quickly pressing/releasing the hook: 5 times for 5, pause, 3 times for 3, etc...)
(I did #1 and #2 in high school and #1 when I started college.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
my thing young people wouldnâ(TM)t understand is the time before things like chain topics âoewithout revealing your age post some old shitâ where front page tech news.
Degaussing monitors. Strafe Jumping.
Not just that TV had antennas but when you changed the TV channel, you had to adjust the antenna to get the picture to come in.
There were no home computers, no Internet, no cell phones (of any kind), no CD/DVDs, no (home) videotape, no cable TV, only 4 television channels: ABC, CBS, NBC (on VHF) and PBS (on UHF) that you received via an antenna on a television set with actual (and only) knobs to change the channels.
And I'm just talking about the early 1970s - when I was 10.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I can remember when the console TV started showing up. Before, they were all table top. And the crystal radio set - no battery needed. Just clip the alligator clip to a piece of metal.
to play on my Edison Standard Model B player.
Most new TV for the Past 20 years or so, don't show static. They just give you the blue screen. Back in the old days if the channel wasn't available you get static visually and audio. Often very jarring noise as there isn't anything limiting the volume.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
actually looking at the neon vacancy/no vacancy signs when deciding where to sleep on a long road trip instead of booking ahead online, science museums that had motorized miniatures and hands-on exhibits instead of a bunch of touchscreens and videos, being able to learn something by watching the History, Discovery, or Learning channels, TV news that was actual news instead of a bunch of people sitting around a table in NY or DC talking at each other, newspapers with actual information content, phone calls that didn't sound like compression artifacts, saturday morning cartoons that didn't look like crude drawings made on an acid trip, and of course....funny Simpsons.
Back in 81 when I got into IT in Australia, a TI 765 with keyboard, thermal printer and acoustic coupler was THE portable terminal to have. Interesting that as I type this spellcheck has apparently never encountered this word.
Oh...and using the Univac CP-642B from my first duty station...the one with the Front panel of Control registers where we entered the boot strap sequence in assembly code so it could go out and access the 7-track tape unit with the System Control Program(SCP) tape and load up the OS we used at the time.
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist...
Good Times...Good Times...
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
It sounds stupid, but sometimes I honestly miss being bored. When you got bored you got creative to keep yourself entertained. That sort of creativity by necessity has died with the rise of the Internet and 24x7 continual entertainment. Kids growing up today will never know that sort of creativity.
I also miss being able to go completely off the grid. If you wanted to get away from everything (and everyone) you actually could. Now days there's really no easy way to do that. You're always under surveillance and you're always tethered to 'the system' somehow (your phone, your credit cards, etc.).
The last thing I really miss is having conversations with random people. Yeah that seems strange to say, but 'Back in the day' when you were waiting in a line or at a bus stop or something, you'd generally make friendly conversation with the person next to you, if just to pass the time. Today no one actually talks to each other anymore, everyone has their face down in a phone (I'm guilty of it myself) or have their headphones on. We're losing the art of human interaction. Hell, I've been with a group of friends who were actually texting each other rather than talking even though we were all right there. It was both eye opening and sad. Those days are gone I suppose.
Slashdot has become Facebook.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this question/meme on my FB newsfeed.
And yes, I can count, I was a math major waaaay back when before I became a CS major.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Google it yourselves, I'm too old.
Heathkit
CB Radio
8mm video cassettes
MiniDisc audio recorders
Cameras that used film.
Most reliable server OS....... .... in the world
~corporate tool, but employed~
Was when I was in high school - made a few extra bucks doing keypunch. Tedious as hell.
Now if you are REALLY old, you remember Party Lines, Vacuum Tubes, Out Houses, Root Cellers, and Well Water
Come on you young whippersnappers, get with the program
It's still around and you can still run it in Win10. I know because I still run it.
The need to wake up early to watch them, and also the fact that you would watch a cartoon you really didn't like because it was between two cartoons you did like are both completely foreign to the on-demand children of today.
I need to make a phone call.
4-prong telephone jack on the kitchen wall, with a 40-lb ITT phone that really RANG, and a home phone number that started with WEbster-3. AND you had to listen closely before dialing, because the folks across the street (on our party line) might be using the phone....
My current car has manual car windows and I would be willing to pay a premium for that feature in the future. Electric windows fail often.
-Dave
Hi jellomizer. I wanted to let you know that you're responding to creimer/cdreimer's shitposting account. He's normally at -1 so he keeps making sockpuppets that he uses to vote up his article submissions and -1 comments from his primary account. It's insanely important to him that he has a positive karma account with his real name. At one point he was pretty excited about making $3/day posting referrer links to amazon... really he was making thousands of comments to do this.
He also talks about a lot of creepy stuff like marrying underage girls from mexico. He says that some trolls on slashdot are twisting his words about "underage sweet things" and "child brides are as american as apple pie"
So I thought I'd present his defense http://archive.is/Bfzo1 you can read in his own words how he feels about american engineers retiring to mexico to marry 16 year old girls. I'd hate to twist creimer's words or give people the wrong impression.
Creimer's recent blog entry on mexican child brides and the "false narrative" being pushed by slashdot trolls:
http://archive.is/Bfzo1
When I was a kid we'd play army with realistic looking plastic guns or Daisy BB guns. Almost every kid I knew had a BB gun (except me... dad: "you'll shoot your eye out kid!", because he almost did when he was a kid). Older kids were getting 22 rifles. Schools had rifle clubs and you could bring your gun to school. Plinking after school wasn't a big deal. And mass shootings were extremely rare (no 24 hour news cycle to beat you over the head with it either).
Watching men walk on the moon.
Hmmm, fond memories of typing that, hitting play on the tape deck and praying it would load...
... from Radio Shack to store/recall BASICA programs (using the Kansas City method of mod/demod) fot the TRS-80.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Hosts protect when addons can't (or as well):
Bad sites (past ads)
Botnet C&Cs
DNS down/poisoned
Trackers (dns logs/ads/transparent ISP proxy)
Dns blocks
Spam/phish payload
Slowdown 2 ways: adblocks & hardcodes
Hosts = Ez edit.
AB+ 151mb https://www.google.com/search?q=Adblock+memory+consumption&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1/
UBlock 64MB https://www.google.com/search?q=UBlock+memory+consumption&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1/
Hosts~6mb
Addons = ClarityRay defeatable & crippled http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboola-pay-adblock-plus-to-stop-blocking-their-ads-2015-2/
NoScript tag parses. Hosts block script prior to it!
No 1 addon does as much.
Stacked addons slowup.
ADDONS = EXPLOITABLE https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11166303&cid=55266729/
APK
P.S.=> APK Hosts File Engine 10++ 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/
"the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter" describes the Slashdot community about as well as anything I could come up with.
Oh the fun we had carefully typing each card, one mistake and you had to go to a new one. You fed your cards into the reader and listened to the musical whirrr as it zipped through the cards. Then you carefully took them out and put them into your box because if you got one card misplaced, your program wouldn't work. Then about an hour later, your output would magically appear in a folder deposited by some computer gnome. Scan the oversized output which included a listing of your program and its output (if you didn't screw it up), fix card deck, rinse repeat. You had to really want to program back then.
Have gnu, will travel.
We got our first TV in 1958 at a time when new stations were coming online pretty regularly. When ever there was a new one we had to get the man to come out and install a new "biscuit" for the new station. They must have been expensive for there not to be a full set to begin with.
I think on the Model I they ran something like 300 baud. I remember playing a TRS-80 game that came on a cassette. It came with a flyer with step-by-step instructions on how to load the game and a quip at the end that said something like "loading will take awhile. Go make a sandwich."
One of my fondest memories is of the Golden Age of GNU/Linux. This was the period between 1999 to 2005, when GNU/Linux had matured enough to be an extraordinarily powerful OS, but at the same time it was still mainly community-driven.
This was a time when the users steered the direction of GNU/Linux, either by discussing how the software should evolve, or even by making the changes themselves. The focus was on usability, and not fad-chasing. Stupid changes were soundly rejected, causing GNU/Linux to just work.
Today, of course, things are very different. Linux is now mainly developed by corporations. And this shows! Users and their needs have become a secondary concern. Unwanted software like systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3, and Wayland have been forced on unwilling GNU/Linux users, ruining the Linux experience for these users. The most popular Linux variant, Android, is essentially a proprietary OS with the Linux kernel deeply buried underneath.
Back in the early 2000s, the future for GNU/Linux was looking so bright! It was seeing greater adoption. Its hardware support was becoming the best around. And then it all went to hell so quickly. What was once the most productive, capable and robust OS was reduced to a joke.
Some of us former GNU/Linux users went to FreeBSD. Some of us went to macOS. Some of us even went to Windows. But we will never forget what GNU/Linux used to be. We'll never forget what GNU/Linux could have been.
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
You know, the monsters like that 70's show's Vista Cruiser. Mine was a Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon, with the rear facing 3rd row seats. For reference, see the movie "Used Cars"
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
n/t
Have gnu, will travel.
http://southpark.wikia.com/wik...
#DeleteFacebook
Not the SX 70 with the squidgy little whine... I mean the ones where you pulled the tab which dragged the film through the rollers... you had to wait a certain amount of time... like 2 minutes, no more, no less. Then peel the photo off the paper tab with the chemical cocktail that did Lord knows what.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Have gnu, will travel.
I need to take hours to download low-resolution monochromatic porn.
#DeleteFacebook
I have fond memories of lawn darts.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Setting the points with a feeler gauge, checking the accuracy with the dwell meter, and setting the engine timing with a timing light.
I remember having to use a little gizmo to punch a second hole in 5 1/4 inch single-sided floppies, just to be able to write on the backside.
Nowadays the young whippersnappers hardly remember hard 3,5 inch 'floppies' which didn't flop at all.
There was a rare event of a girl getting pregnant while still in high school.
Pregnant girls were not allowed to attend class, this was small-town in the South. So she would have to leave school. The better families would send her to a home in the city where she was taken care of until she had the baby, which was inevitably given up for adoption.
I think it may have been different in schools where poor people attended.
I'm 50, and admit I'm sometimes afflicted by it but I generally don't get the constant nostalgia binging.
I was truly an 80s kid - turned 13 in 1980, graduated from college in 1990. Love 80s music, etc.
But for millennials and hipsters - why do you possibly give a shit about the 80s? I can look through rose-colored glasses but TBH: everything really is pretty much better now, objectively.
-Styopa
Must have been 1975 first video game ever - Pong. Seemed mind-blowing. It was only ten years earlier that an Etch-A-Sketch impressed kids.
When I was a child I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"It's like the internet, only local"
"Why? Couldn't you connect to a BBS across the country?"
"Well, you could, but you'd be hit with long distance charges like you wouldn't believe"
"Long distance charges?"
"Damn it, get off my lawn"
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
You could use a clothespin to attach a playing card to the fender support on your bicycle so that it would be hit by the spokes when you were rolling.
It made a sound somewhat like a small motor. You could attach 8 cards to convince yourself you had a 8 cylinder engine.
Another: we all knew what was meant by the flathead some of us had in our car, and didn't confuse that with our haircuts.
EPROMs you had to erase under ultraviolet light
Keying in the bootloader on your minicomputer using front panel switches
Taking your card deck to the "computer center", then waiting a few hours to go get your printout
Turning off the TV and seeing the picture collapse to a little bright dot that slowly fades away
Mylar punch tape for those programs you either couldn't afford to lose or that you loaded over and over and over again
Wall-mounted punch tape rewinders
Computers with a vast array of front-panel light/buttons representing registers, which you could alter by pressing them
Calculators that had stations wired to a base unit via half-inch-thick cables, and that cost more than your car
Guys who'd come to your house with dairy products and leave them on your doorstep
Drive-in movie theaters
In 1947, my father worked for RCA. TVs were new. RCA engineers could buy TV components from RCA and build their own TVs.
I watched Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, a puppet show. Fran was a woman much healthier than my parents, so watching the show was good for me.
Also: Remember carbon paper?
I used to boot my computer using a boot tape. Much easier than toggling in the bootstrap using the switches on the control panel.
and then there were the sliderules we used before pocket calculators.
Remember when Slashdot was cool? Bill Gates bashing, Linux matters, IRC, DSL, and people knew who Rob Malda was..
When you could tell the quality of your transistor radio because the name told you how many transistors there were inside .. 8 was good, 12 was sooo much better (thanks, Zenith).
Open coal fires in every room. Late 80s early 90s.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
When we used to make our own hi-fi because that was the only way we could afford sounds. The BD1 turntable was - well, basic I think the word is, but I couldn't beat the value. I made a wooden plinth for it, spent two weeks wages on a Transcriptors Fluid arm and Shure cartridge. This was for playing LPs, people. I was given a pair of Riga loudspeakers, and I made a stereo amp from a project in Practical Electronics magazine. I think Nursery Cryme by Genesis was the first LP that I played on it. Oh, nope, I just remembered - Deep Purple in Rock.
In 10-20 years in some European cities (like Oslo or Freiburg) fossil fuel powered cars could be almost if not completely obsolete. Possibly internal combustion in general. Unrealistic? Possibly. But who would bet in 1940, that in 20 years almost no trains would be steam powered?
ICE cars could go the same route. Several EU countries already have serious political proposals made on banning fossil fuel powered cars, starting in 2025 or 2030. This would mean making EV:s default for new car sales quite a while ahead of the deadline. Several cities are also making bold changes to reduce car usage in favor of transit and cycling (some even propose city wide zones free from car traffic without a special permit); and low-emission zones grow in number.
I once typed in the whole of the small-C compiler into a Z80 machine I made.
candy cigarettes
This one has come up a couple times on a Facebook group I am subscribed to called Do You Remember.
I can't recall what answers I have given so far; but if I haven't used it yet, my next will be, "Don't touch that dial."
This space unintentionally left blank.
> Here is just a tiny selection:
> A/S/L
WTF is this? Oh...
> pagers
those would really be neat these days of constant interruption
> manual car windows
my kid saw them in a cheap car and actually asked me "what's that?" when he learned about them, he went nuts. He loves to open and close the rear windows and loathes when I close them (e.g. in a tunnel or for security reasons).
> "be kind, please rewind"
actually I never knew why it had to be asked; it seems obvious to rewind the tape once you finished watching the movie; I guess there's different types of people, but I found weird associating an order issue with kindness
> "Waiting by the radio for my song to come on so I could record it on a cassette tape"
People nowadays can't wait. There's no wait. None. Not a single little hope that someone will wait for anything. They don't wait for a song, nor their favorite song, nor the favorite movie -- waiting for someone you love? Hah, fat chance. This is most animal age there has been since a long. long time. No romantism at all.
> floppy disks
OK, that's easy because hard disks are essentially the same.
> the smell of purple mimeograph ink
Forget about that, I remember the smell of new book and how that announced a brave new world of adventures and enjoyment. Now it's somewhat hard to smell the currents that change the color of the pixels on screen.
> WordPerfect
THIS ^
How many times one had to explain that Word is not Wordperfect. Did it make any difference? No, Word was adopted and Wordperfect forgotten.
Now, it's the same sh*t everyday about Word and Writer, Excel and Calc, Gimp and Photoshop etc. etc. Except, of course, Free software is unable to bribe people into buying it. And there will always be people who confuse price with value, "there's no free lunch" and other BS -- and even more idiots willing to submit to those idiocies.
You know what? Gimp is really not the same as Photoshop, also for me... it's way better. I know only Gimp, therefore PS is worse.
> busy signals
I still get those; we still use phones. Not every phone has a message service.
> paper maps
In practice they still exist as Google Maps printouts or even as signs on the walls of the Metro.
> Winamp
qmmp... rules!
> smoking in the hospital
Doctors smoking in the hospital! Sometimes on TV, in a hospital setting! I never understood that.
> the card catalogue
I got to use those at some libraries. Computers could be useful back then, but they were prohibitively expensive, while paper and low frequency updates made cards a good enough alternative. Come to think, computers are still too pricey... :-/
Fascinating that icons remain, even if devices are no longer seen... like a Rolodex in Android for Contacts or a handset before the phone number (he actually asked about the worm before the number or something to that effect).
My daughter once bought an old turntable and it wouldn't play albums. She thought it was broken until I removed the 45 RPM disc from the spindle.
How 'Pandora' and other streaming services really aren't all that different from broadcast radio.
How 'cutting the cord' means having an ANTENNA on your roof (or at least connected to the TV), and that paying for Internet and Hulu is NOT 'cutting the cord' at all, it's just paying for a different cord.
How there were 'operating systems' before Windows, and that there was no such thing as a 'GUI'.
Public payphones.
That you could (and still can!) build a working radio receiver with 5 components, and a length of wire for an antenna (crystal AM radio).
That you could (and still could, if you hunted around a bit!) build a working computer (of sorts!) on perfboard. (My first one was like that).
'Video games' were something you had to go to a public place to find, and you'd need a bunch of quarters to play.
'Pinball machines' used to be a Real Thing. Not so much anymore. They're still out there, but hard to find.
Hardest Mode: Completely electromechanical pinball machines. The average Millennial, if you opened one up to show them, would still think you were kidding them, even after they saw it working and played it themselves.
As someone else said in their comment: "Doing things yourself". More and more there are too many 'conveniences' that mean you don't have to learn how to actually DO anything yourself -- and people are getting dumber and lazier because of it. This worries me greatly -- and annoys the hell out of me.
Never mind all that "clicker" crap - I remember when my remote control was a pool cue.
Nothing quite like trying to load a game off cassette tape, trying to get the volume just right so the computer will read it properly. Trying again and again, with different audio gear to try to read the frickin tape. Yeah, good times.
used to use this stuff called flim.
Have gnu, will travel.
...saying "cool" was 23 skidoo?
Changing channels on a TV, for channels with no station in the area you'd just get 'snow' or white noise, on the screen; the equivalent for sound was called static. Trying to watch a show on a station with a weak signal would be fuzzy. Also, the picture would often 'roll' if some vacuum tube in the electronics was weak. If you were capable enough, you could pull the tubes out and test them at a testing machine down at Radio Shack. Otherwise you'd bring in the television repair man.
Also, when telephone modems or fax machines were first making a connection that static like sound of the protocol handshake when they first connected.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
...you needed a pan to write on a Facebook?
To ask if there'd be school today? She'd have called certain rural residents to see if the roads in their area were passable for the buses during heavy rain or snow storms and during spring mud season. We'd get a week or two off from school each school year. This was in eastern Washington State.The rural counties have paved roads now.
My grandmother as a child watched with fascination as the first automobile came to her town, as electric wires were strung up on poles and the first electric lights arrived where she lived. Her family would have to hitch up a team to the wagon if they wanted to drive to "town"--the neigboring, slightly larger rural town.
While in midlife, she was responsible for sending and receiving teletype messages where she worked, a place that tested jet ejection seats. She would tell me, when I showed her e-mail, that it was very much similar to what she'd worked with in the 1950s, except with more parts automated. From horse and buggy to the world-wide-web, I suspect she would have quite the lengthy list of terminology and cultural references that I'd have to google before I could converse with her. I'd be an ignorant infant. (And certainly the reverse would hold true too.)
So this isn't entirely a "new" issue, this change. Merely the rate is increasing.
My father remembers the first airplane to land near his village in Italy. Many of the villagers went out to see it.
I miss my slide rule.
Are two Sparc 2 "pizza boxes" running Solaris 7. Remarkable machines, even now. They make great DNS or file servers for a small business.
My family had one of those dedicated VHS tape rewinders so that you wouldn't wear out the VCR motors rewinding all of those movie rentals.
...before the picture finally started to show up, when you first turned on the TV.
There was really such a thing, before "radio buttons" became a computer user interface thing!
Beep beep!
https://www.amazon.com/Mattel-...
to be going through puberty during the VCR era and then dial up internet days and beyond
From Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler sold at gas stations to the VCR and then the internet.
I am so glad the VCR and the internet kept me from ever considering going to an x-rated flick *in the theatre*. No wonder our parents' generation was so whack.
before floppy disk drives became affordable, my atari 400 had a (standard) cassette tape drive. Apparently it was effectively a built in steganography where the (low bitrate) recorded program overlapped with cheesy loading music that you got to listen to at the same time the code was loading into ram. Or you could listen to the music on its own by putting the standard cassette tape in an ordinary non-computer cassette player.
The floppy disk drive upgrade IIRC was $100-$200, quite a bit of money in the early eighties.
R-O-L-A.....
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Banks closed at 3:00 PM
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When people referred to "Elites," it did not have "Liberal" in front of it, it was considered an honor to be an elite, yes, there were the Kennedy's, but they were outnumbered by Business Leaders, Country Club Republicans, local political dynasties, Professional Association such as the AMA, Ivy League schools and the Academic Elites (see above, an honor, not a slur), Prep Schools, upscale stores for the rich, the rich, anyone...any male that was at the top of a field as long as the field was something most people looked up to.
I remember when Microsoft really sucked ..... oh, wait
Table-ized A.I.
Lotus 123 .. wordstar !!!
What is wrong with you people
not to mention horizontal.
Steam trains in Paddington Station. And a booth on the platform where you could "make a record", talk for three minutes then a disk would come out. When I tell young people about this they assume it was in Queen Victoria's realm (do I really look that old?), but it was actually in the 1960s
Seeing Islam as something harmless and exotic, like Sinbad, Aladin and Ali Baba. The idea that it would be killing people in the west for drawing cartoons would have been laughed at
Before shopping malls, you would periodically see picketers right outside the front door of businesses whose employees had a beef, because once upon a time, picketing could actually be effective. Once shopping malls came about, picketing was no longer useful because the malls were private property and the storefronts combined and enclosed, and you can't picket within the enclosed mall given its private property reduced status as a "public forum" (your state's laws may vary in this regard). So the best that can be done is to picket at the public street entrance to the mall where the specific store target of the picketing is obscured and non-targeted businesses can then be adversely affected. At that point, picketers have largely "gone the way of the dodo" as they say, though some no doubt are happy about that. Several court cases have come about regarding shopping malls as public forums, with mixed results. I recall in the 1950s and 1960s picketing was a lot more common to see than since retail businesses started circling the wagons and using private property arguments as a defense.
I remember checking the mailbox every day when walking home from the bus stop after school (before school busses became a limo service that stop at every house) to see if I got the newest Software Labs catalog. Itâ(TM)s difficult to explain how shareware circulated before internet access and broadband became popular.
So many of the comments here talk about technologies from the 80's an later that I have to give my story.
I remember back in 1969 sitting in front of the television in July watching the news on the first Apollo moon landing. When the space ship was returning to Earth I recall the anticipation of where it would actually splash down in the Pacific but not totally sure where.
Then in 1981 I watched as the Columbia space shuttle launched from Florida and 2 days later landed exactly on target in California.
And sadly in 2003 I watched the same shuttle burn up.
And then watched as the shuttle program was shutdown.
Mimeograph was a ink based stencil duplicating method. It's ink smelled like oil. Also the ink was (usually) black. The purple colored, sweet smelling duplicator was a "ditto" machine, sometimes called a "spirit duplicator" because mineral spirits was used to damped a page before it was pressed against a master page transferring a little bit of a purple colored wax from the master to a new page, You could get up to a hundred copies before the ink on the master wore away. That people don't know the difference between mimeograph and spirit duplication shows just how old some technologies are.
I remember when you could go for a midnight stroll in the park; now it gets its gates locked on a night!
I remember having a TV with a hard wired remote that when you changed channels actually turned to dial with a surprisingly loud 'Ka-Chunk' each turn.
I remember the days when TVs didn't have remote controls at all. The kids were the remote; the grownups would ask them to go over and change the channel.
I also remember tube electronics - radios and TVs that didn't turn on immediately. You had to wait for them to warm up before they would work. (Pet peeve: movies set before 1960 where somebody turns on a radio and it plays right away.) Some new electronics are an odd sort of throwback to those days; now you have to wait for them to boot up.
Another thing that's mostly in the past: radio stations that signed off at night. Back in the 60s many stations would close up shop at midnight and return to the air at 5 or 6 am. It was also the custom to play The Star Spangled Banner at sign on and sign off.
Adios, cartoons on broadcast television. Once upon a time, stations had cartoon blocks on weekday afternoons and on Saturday and Sunday mornings. (A few even had weekday morning cartoons.) VCRs (and later DVDs) and cable killed them all, and now we also have streaming.
Most of the Sunday morning religious programming is also gone. (But nowadays we have full time religious cable channels.) Anybody out there remember The Christophers? "If everyone lit just one little candle what a bright world it would be."
Not because of magnetic fields or stuff. Because they built nests in boxes filled with punchcards.
An MFM or RLL ?
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
a little while ago I was in line when a slightly older millennial was explaining to a slightly younger millennial what the lollapalooza festival was.
That was my entire family when my dad retired during the dotcom bubble.
600/mo for medical insurance.
Within two years it was *2000*/mo. They kept paying it on everybody until they were essentially broke (I got off it after a year due to issues with my doctors not investigating/diagnosing problems I was having, having had excellent coverage from newborn until I was ~17. I wouldn't be alive without them, but that doesn't mean I could overlook their declining quality of care and safety as I got older and my list of problems would theoretically increase.)
As it is I have been medical coverage free for 15 years now, dental free for 10 years, and mostly have managed to avoid return visits to either with changes in diet and in the latter case, flossing and sensodyne toothpaste. Avoid tooth-chipping hard foods and anything highly acidic or full of sugar and your teeth can last without ongoing dental visits for quite a few years if not for the life of your body.