Slashdot Mirror
'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?
What is this, the yearbook?
Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?
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.
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
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
I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!
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
Until a few years ago, my parents were still using a 16" CRT TV with a built in VCR player. Really looked quite Space 1999'ish with the square 4:3 aspect ratio. Still have a memory of seeing those monochrome globe TV sets along with a sphere chair and thinking that would be so cool for my room.
(Apparently, the fibreglass chipped really easily so they broke quickly)
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
http://modculture.typepad.com/...
https://media.fds.fi/product_i...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Walk your doggie and ride your bicycle. Everything else is banned.
Oh, and "leaded or unleaded."
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The deluxe TV sets the 60s-70s kept a small bit of electricity going to the TV tube. That way, they were instant-on. Plus, they had a lot of manual adjustements (vertical hold, etc.)
Whichever of us kids was closest to the TV.
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
No one called it a CRT TV, It was just the TV, or sometime Tube
CRT TV at the time was almost a redundant statement.
Actually the Idea of having your TV hooked up to your computer as its monitor was a thing, then monitors were a separate thing, then today we hook them back to our computers again. However if you were a kid of the 1990's seeing a computer, with an embedded keyboard, hooked up to a TV. Was considered old tech.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
(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.
Remember when you could click the channel up or down button on the remote, and the channel would change INSTANTLY?
As far as I remember, the TV never came on instantly... if the TV was not too bungled by crapware to do so, it was old enough to be a CRT and need to warm up.
I do remember our first remote remote that had only one button. It would turn the physical knob on the TV one click clockwise. If you missed your channel, you had to go all the way around the dial. You had to get up and go over to the set to turn the TV on or off or change bands between UHF and VHF.
Someone had to do it.
I remember when there was no TSA, I remember when there wasn't even a metal detector.
I remember in high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in the racks behind their seats of their pickup trucks IN the school parking lot, because they had been hunting before classes started.....
I remember kids (myself) playing freely in the neighborhood and beyond 100% unsupervised ...which was the norm for all kids.
I remember being able to feel quite safe going for day trips across the MX border in Nogales and such places, and not fearing a drug killing might get you, at worst, you might drink too much tequila and come home with a black velvet Elvis picture.
I remember when you used to say "Thank You" to someone, they would replay with "You're Welcome"...instead of "no problem".
I remember when you used to buy something in the US, and it didn't take you 15 fucking minutes to find the "English" version of the instructions.
I remember growing up, and in games, there were winners and losers....and ONLY the winners got the trophy.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
When I was a kid, I was in a rural area and we only had one. If it wasn't NBC, we didn't get it. My first school didn't have indoor plumbing. There was a hand-pump out in the yard, and outhouses way in back.
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 might still have my old RCA TV in the closet. The tuner indicator was that vertical line that scrolled across the screen and numbers printed across the bottom bezel to tell you which channel the line stopped on. And when you flipped the switch from VHF to UHF the line would change from green to orange.
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.
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.
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.
We only got a 2-3 off-airs, the rest of the channels were static. My brothers and I, when we wanted to change channels would walk over to the TV (no remote), grab the dial and rapidly spin it until we saw the channel flash by on the TV screen, and then back it off one or two clicks because we'd overshot. My dad would then yell at us not to do that because they were not meant to be turned that fast and we were going to break it.
I guess now, were I in his shoes, I probably would say the same thing but we did that for years and years on many different TV's, and you know what? Not a single dial ever broke.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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
That's nothing. I remember lighting a fire by knocking two rocks together!
Remember rocks, kids?
#DeleteFacebook
Until a few years ago, my parents were still using a 16" CRT TV with a built in VCR player. Really looked quite Space 1999'ish with the square 4:3 aspect ratio. Still have a memory of seeing those monochrome globe TV sets along with a sphere chair and thinking that would be so cool for my room.
(Apparently, the fibreglass chipped really easily so they broke quickly)
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
http://modculture.typepad.com/...
https://media.fds.fi/product_i...
Yeah, I was REALLY impressed that they somehow scared-up about 6 of those for the first Men In Black movie, in the "Interview" scene. It was hilarious to see those guys trying to figure out how to fill-out their questionnaires up against the sides of those egg-chairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I would really like to have one, and put some nice surface-mount car speakers in it. How retro would that be?!?
The deluxe TV sets the 60s-70s kept a small bit of electricity going to the TV tube. That way, they were instant-on. Plus, they had a lot of manual adjustements (vertical hold, etc.)
Some did; until they started starting fires...
CGA/EGA/VGA programming. Those were the fast moving days; Hercules monochrome cards, CGA four color 320x200 modes. Your card could display 16 colors, but only 4 at any time, so it was a choice of four palettes. EGA allowed 16 colors, VGA did 320x200x256,or 640x480x16 then SVGA with accelerated pix-blitting for 800x600x256 and upwards. You needed a multi-sync monitor to handle all those modes. The MK_FP macro to make a far pointer to access the VGA memory space. then the SSE/AVX Intel instructions to do vector processing on images.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I have fond memories of lawn darts.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Hell, my friends and I used to goof around in the airport when we were bored. We'd even walk down the airport jetways late at night...and sometimes there would be a plane sitting there, open and completely empty.
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.
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.
That was because they had a remote control that used "tuning forks" (tuned metal bars), that emitted ultrasonic sounds the TV was designed to "hear".
We had an old Zenith TV that had a three-command Ultrasonic Remote: Cycle through 3 levels of Volume, Up Channel, Down Channel. I accidently found a metal bar that mimicked the Channel Up function, much like those pipes.
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
LOADING...
LOAD 8,1
"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!
I told my roommate's teenage daughters that you used to be able to buy a videotape and put it in the VCR, and the movie would start playing immediately. They thought that was great.
Remember when you could click the channel up or down button on the remote, and the channel would change INSTANTLY?
You could turn on the TV and it would start showing a picture and playing sound INSTANTLY?
You could change incoming video sources INSTANTLY?
It seems all this new-fangled digital crap makes me wait wait wait all the time...
Remember when a fast-moving scene, a pan, or an explosion on TV didn't momentarily devolve into pixellated crap?
Remember when the word "Pixellated" didn't exist?
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
My hometown airport had an observation deck... you could see someone off at the gate, then walk outside to watch them taxi out and take off.
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?
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.
I remember those VARACTOR tuners.
And how could you lose that Remote? IIRC, it was tethered to the main-unit by its signal-WIRE.
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
Yeah, you could instantly start playing the previews for other movies. At least you could fast forward to the movie, watch it, and then rewind to beginning of the movie so you could start there next time.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
come home with a black velvet Elvis picture...
Thanks! I have always wondered what Elvis was drinking in that tattoo I woke up with...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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.
What was the "biscuit"? A pre-set Tuner section? A Pre-Aimed Antenna?
Or what? I can't find any reference on Google...
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.
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.
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.
OP Here:
Nope we had a fancy "Infra-Red" remote control unit. Here's a website dedicated to it, because of course there is one on the internet:
http://vintageelectronics.beta...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
You could actually run through the airport and people would just assume you're running late. No ID check necessary as long as you had a boarding pass.
Oh yeah, PEEK and POKE directly into memory! I remember making my own "flip-book frame" animation that way, making my own little drawing program, then another part to snap the "frame" into a peek/poke routine to record and do playback.
Back then I also ran into the "hard limit" of lines of code in QBasic, had to learn writing all the data to floppy and loading it back in. I wrote a "campaign creator" for DnD using the various source manuals, each "tab" was actually a different program and they just read from a data file when switching between them. Towns, cities, inns, pubs, random names, creature encounters...Any source book that had a chart in it I stuck in there. All on my 512kb 4.77XT clone.
used to use this stuff called flim.
Have gnu, will travel.
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)
Meh,
We had a TV with four tuning dials.
Two concentric ones on top, one for channels 2-13 that made a loud "ker-thunk" as you flipped it through the notches. A smaller concentric one to fine-adjust the tuning. TV took a good 20 seconds or so to "turn on and warm up".
Fixing said TV by getting stickers to put on the tubes in the back and taking the tubes to the nearest drugstore to use the tube-tester machine.
Then there was the other set of magic concentric dials. Those were the UHF channels. Those were where the gold was found in the after-school hours: F-Troop, Addams Family, Little Rascals, Three Stooges, Mc Hale's Navy, Dr. Who, Speed Racer, Ultraman, Johnny Sokko, and Kimba. Hell, there was even Abbot and Costello for a while. I miss KBSC-TV, good old channel 52.
Another thing you don't see anymore: Schlocky B movies at 2 or 3 AM. The infomercials killed all that stuff off.
No cable, but we had ONTV and SelectTV. The former used to show screeners for the Oscars back before we had VCRs.
Watching the trailer for Star Wars in the theater and wondering what the what's the big deal about a movie with a big screaming monkey flying a spaceship.
Everyone going apeshit when Star Wars was broadcast on TV for the first time (on ONTV as pay-per-view).
Back in the days it was illegal to hook up anything to the phone line other than the phone you rented from Ma Bell. And when that finally ended, you could buy push-button phones that didn't dial any faster than the old rotary phones - because of pulse dialing.
Paying extra each month to GTE for touch tone dialing that took forever to connect, because GTE converted the tones back to pulse back in the central office in order to connect the call.
The joy of typing papers on an IBM Selectric II typewriter - one with the correction tape in it.
You knew what a Maxell XL-IIS was for, as well as the TDK SA - and why they were popular.
Not only did we have cassettes, the decks we played them in had switches for CrO2 and Metal. These were not for music genres.
Dolby used to be all about getting rid of hiss on your tapes.
You knew what wow and flutter was.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Remember when a fast-moving scene, a pan, or an explosion on TV didn't momentarily devolve into pixellated crap?
Instead the vertical hold would get lost and the picture would start flipping around.
I remember to save money you would call your parents on payphone and hang up after a couple rings ie time to pick you up at the library.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Diapers.
OP Here:
Nope we had a fancy "Infra-Red" remote control unit. Here's a website dedicated to it, because of course there is one on the internet:
http://vintageelectronics.beta...
Interesting. A friend at the time had an identical JVC deck; but it must've been the prior model. It did have a tethered remote.
Interesting.
You have a collect call from ... "PickMeUp Library" ... will you accept ...
I remember how cars would develop this mysterious malady where they would start, and a second later the engine would die. That was a symptom of either a bad fuel pump or, more likely, the condensor inside the distributor needed to be replaced. If this happened to a clueless about cars friend, you could look like a mechanical genius just by replacing a 60 cent part for them.
I suppose one could still use feeler guages to regap spark plugs. Does anybody still do that?
For some reason, one thing I remember was mechanical voltage regulators. Seems like I was always having to replace them.
Also I drove a couple of vehicles with column shifts ('three on the tree' remember that expression?) And, the linkage to the gear shift would go bad. Usually it was just the bushings that needed replacing.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Yes on the feeler gauges -- you have to use them for motorcycle plugs, which are often set odd from the factory. Bike ignitions tend to work poorly at high RPM if the plug gap is off.
...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-...
I remember when Microsoft really sucked ..... oh, wait
Table-ized A.I.
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
Really looked quite Space 1999'ish
That's something else that people won't believe, the optimism that we would have colonised the moon and maybe mars by the year 2,000!
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 when you used to buy something in the US, and it didn't take you 15 fucking minutes to find the "English" version of the instructions.
I have tecentrly bought a lenovo Laptop PC an I was pleasently surprised that the keyboard was Italian, the plug of the power supply was 10A Italian and not "Schuko" or "BS 1363", this one not used in Italy, by the way, and finally a small "Guida dell'utente" aka user guide.
On the other hand, I remember the first Grundig colour TV with the manual only in German and also the labels on the TV set and remote were in German...
Lautstärke
Kontrast
Helligkeit
Farbe
Ein/Aus
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.
Member? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't have one
OLD CS1
(this is probably too short ... filling in .... for a TI 99/4A)
I trolled my daughter by telling her they used to shut the internet down at midnight to let it cool and drain off the excess voltage. And we only had B&W GIFs on the pages.
Just junk food for thought...
So I'm REALLY old because I remember the well water that I currently have in my house? Or is it only hand-pumped wells that you're talking about, which my friend had at his rural house in the 90s, along with an outhouse, both of which, I might add, can still be found all over the place in parks and forest preserves, and the like.
Now I actually am fairly old, since I do remember going to the store to get replacement vacuum tubes. But I'm not old enough to remember party lines - although they still existing when I was younger, they were only found in remote rural areas.
That people don't know that mimeographs were originally known as 'policy machines' is further proof of the decline of Western Civilization.
That people don't know that 'Ditto' was a brand name clinches it.
That people don't know that the third ribbon position on typewriters, the one usually marked with a white dot, was the 'stencil' position, for policy stencils, is indeed sad. So also carbon paper, Paymaster check writers, Addressographs/Multigraphs (aka clever mini mimeographs), and bursters.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
CRT TV at the time was almost a redundant statement.
It's like these days when they say "flat screen TV" as if there's any other kind.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Don't like it? Eliminate child marriages from all 50 states.
Yes, do that. just because something is legal doesn't make it right you sick fucks.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I don't have a problem with this at all, at least they're responding positively. It's the same sentiment, I don't care what the exact words are.
It's bad when you hold a door for someone though and they say nothing at all, no "thanks" or "thank you". That rubs me the wrong way.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
My hometown airport had an observation deck
Amsterdam Airport still has this. If the person you dropped off is flying an el-cheapo carrier who uses a bus terminal, you can still watch them board the plane. They even have a decommissioned airplane on the deck for kids to go play in.
https://www.schiphol.nl/en/pag...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Reminds me of my website http://houghi.org/
To Whom It May Concern:
I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult. I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of a 6 year old again.
I want to go to McDonald's and think that it's a four star restaurant.
I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make ripples with rocks.
I want to think M&Ms are better than money, because you can eat them.
I want to play kickball during recess and paint with watercolors in art.
I want to lie under a big Oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends on a hot summers day.
I want to return to a time when life was simple.
I want to know only colors, addition tables and simple nursery rhymes.
I want to think that the world is fair and that everyone in it is honest and good.
Somewhere in my youth...I matured and I learned too much.
I learned of nuclear weapons, war, prejudice, starvation and abused children.
I learned of lies, unhappy marriages, suffering, illness, pain and death.
I learned of a world where men left their families to go and fight for our country, and returned only to end up living on the streets... begging for their next meal.
I learned of a world where children knew how to kill...and did.
I want to be oblivious to the complexity of life and be overly excited by little things once again.
I want to return to the days when reading was fun and music was clean.
I want television to be something I watch for fun, not something I use for escape from the things I should be doing.
I want to live knowing the little things I find exciting will always make me as happy as when I first learned them.
I want to believe that anything is possible.
I want to be naive and thinking that everyone was happy because I was.
I want to walk on the beach and only think of the sand between my toes and the prettiest seashell I could find.
I want to spend my afternoon climbing trees and riding my bike.
Somewhere in my youth...I matured and I learned too much.
I learned of computer crashes of mountains of paperwork.
I learned of depressing news of how to survive more days in the month than there is money in the bank.
I learned of doctor bills, gossip, illness and loss of loved ones.
I learned of politics, rasicism and discrimination.
I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs and a kind word.
I want to see the world not as a whole, but rather being aware of only the things that directly concerned me.
I want to be naive enough to think that if I'm happy, so is everyone else.
I want to spend my afternoons climbing trees and riding my bike.
I want to wonder what I'll do when I grow up, and what I'll be.
I want to live simple again.
I want that time back.
I want to be 6 again.
And if you want to discuss this further, you'll have to catch me first, cause,
"Tag! You're It
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
The later models would turn on in a couple of seconds, though. First they had pre-heaters that kept the tube filaments on all the time at a low voltage so they took less time to heat up; later fast-heating cathodes were developed that needed less warm-up time. But my family's first TV took nearly 30 seconds to come on from a cold start; that set was all tubes, not just the CRT.
I remember those! Some airports still had them until 9/11 happened.
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."
Darn, you must be almost as old as I am! :-)
My first PC (purchased when I was already 30.....) was an Apple ][+ with a whopping 48K of RAM. But I thought I was super-special, because I'd paid for the 16K expansion card.....
I remember a remote that drove the motor moving the dial on the TV.
Complete with "Whirr chunk"
I remember that too
How only the "winners" got to make decisions, and the working stiffs who got things done only earned a decent wage if some of them had DIED standing up to those "winners"
An MFM or RLL ?
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
The black & white set we kids used had those dials, but if memory serves, the fancy color set my parents had in the bedroom had dispensed with the fine-tuning knobs.
I watched a fair bit of programming in black & white, and I dare say I enjoyed it about as much as I enjoy anything on the HD set these days. By pretty much any measure, there's more quality programming available today - because there's more programming in total - but there was some good stuff then, too.
And for me it was really more about the social experience of watching with other people. I don't think we need Yet Another rant about smartphones and the death of shared experience, though.
Nope.
How about having to pull the choke out, or pushing the gas pedal a couple times to set the choke on your carburated engine start your car?
I used to boot my computer using a boot tape. Much easier than toggling in the bootstrap using the switches on the control panel.
We had to hand-key-in the loader that loaded the boot tape. If you paid the extra moolah, you could buy the ROM (or whatever it was in those days) that would do the job that the hand-keying did. We didn't buy that.