I remember literally dialing to make telephone call.
Changing the tv channel required getting up and going to the TV to turn the knob and fiddle with the rabbit ears antenna.
You guys remember the old school cable boxes? Looked like this:
So you had a three-way toggle on the left, that let you choose between three rows of about a dozen channels. I remember MTV was down on the bottom right, public access was upper left. But there was also a Playboy channel down on the lower end of the dial, and I also remember that you could manipulate the buttons and dial to almost see porn when the planet were aligned just so. Kids these days, with their internet access and free porn sites, they have no idea how we suffered.
- Iranian hostage crisis
- Carter losing to Reagan in '80 (I thought they’d have a rematch the next year)
- TAB
- Purple mimeograph sheets at school
- Burger Chef restaurants
Standing up and walking across the room to change the TV channel. To one of the other five channels.
Holy shit. After reading this, I just remembered, out of the blue, our phone number from 1968 to 1974, when I was 8 to 14 years old: 255-2677. I have never even tried to remember that number even once in all the years since, so no idea how I snagged that particular one.
Time to get to work on my school locker combination from that era.
I remember the smell! Like Elmer’s Glue!
I remember every last moment of Blazing Saddles because when movies on cable TV started, they started with the Z Channel in LA with two movies every two weeks. So for two weeks, Blazing Saddles was on six times a day, and I watched it over and over again. (Which I don’t d not do with the other movie, Save the Tiger.)
When I was 6, the family got our first television, a couple years after “everyone else” in the neighborhood had jumped in on the new invention. I remember how it got one station well, one other one if my parents fiddled endlessly with the rabbit ears. It never worked very well, and I soon came to hate TV as the thing that prevented the other kids from wanting to play baseball. But I did enjoy going down to the drugstore with my Dad to test out all the tubes from the innards of the TV set, to see which needed replacing.
I also remember party line phones, where busybodies were always listening into other peoples’ conversations.
Oh, and mandatory school prayers.
Not sure if my parents were just behind the times or what, but I also remember a lot of “older” elements that some folks I think have a decade on me do, too.
Growing up our first TV was gigantic console TV complete with the UHF and VHF dials. I actually kept it all the way through college in my bedroom, because when we moved into that house, it was a four person, multi-hour job to drag it up the steps, and no one was willing to pull it back down again at any point to give me an upgrade. I remember I couldn’t really follow the plots of RPGs because the words were too fuzzy.
First PC was a green-screen IBM compatible with a 5.25" drive, no HDD, and this awesome dot matrix printer that smelled heavily of ozone anytime you’d use it. I got into the paper once and pulled the punch-out “treads” off of like 200 sheets once as a kid; dad was furious.
I remember that obnoxious era before cellphones; I hated it. Organizing activities with friends was impossible, you always had to have this series of contingency meet-up locations and times if you and the people you were out somewhere with wanted to split up, etc. The era before internet combined with that to make staying in touch with people extremely annoying :(
Heh, I also do remember stuff y’all would consider more recent, including my first graphics card upgrade (a Diamond Stealth 64, IIRC; a whopping 2MB of VRAM strapped to an ISA connector) and first 3D graphics card (a glorious Voodoo 2; I installed it myself in the back room of my grandparents house we were staying in for Christmas and stayed up all night playing the shitty included demo games). How far we’ve come :)
God, I miss those.
TBH some of my favorite memories growing up were going with my dad to the huge mainframe room in the basement of Electrolux, where he worked as a systems programmer. The whole place just smelled of charged air and pristine plastic, which I realize might be a weird thing to enjoy, but it had this awesome high-tech, sci-fi vibe to it. Walking around on the raised floors, surrounded by cables and cabinets full of more raw computer power than I figured I’d ever have for myself, damn that was cool as hell.
That’s awesome, Armando :)
Mr. Yuck Stickers
Super Size at McDonald’s
30-40 Dollar CD Albums
Having to get up Saturday mornings to watch the good cartoons and if you missed one maybe not getting to see that episode again for a few years.
Everything Sweet Valley High related
Being trained to do bad dating with Girl Talk the boardgame
Phone cords that could lap the perimeter of a house, twice.
Lip Phones
Also Health class basically told us sex kills, except oral sex… so have at that.
@Nesrie your mention of CD’s gave me a flashback to when I was a member of BMG Music club and also Columbia House for movies. As a teen it was amazing to get like 12 CDs for the price of 1.
I think they are both out of business now, I haven’t seen or heard anything about either in over a decade.
Hell to think of it, just owning CDs dates all of us. I still have probably 300± CDs in the house.
Oh you’re right. My sister was totally into those. Her allowance went to that club often.
Not sure why, but that reminds me of… Blockbuster late fees. Sometimes more than buying the actual movie.
Considering the amount of CDs that people ordered for a penny and then never made another purchase, I’m not surprised.
Watching the moon landing live.
Dialing into the UT mainframe at my high school via a cradle style modem and using a dot matrix line printer as the display, ostensibly for school, in reality to play Star Trek.
Getting an IBM PC in 1981.
Running a BBS for years and subsequently being amused when the rest of the world discovered the internet via browsers because we’d been a part of running the “internet” before it was called that. The piece I helped support was called FidoNet and the games we played referred to as doors because you accessed them by leaving the BBS environment to run the sub program games.
Using memory managers to be able to play various games in particular Wing Commander.
Knowing how to change settings on a modem
Actually shopping in various Mom & Pop stores (where the family lived in the back or second floor of the store).
A grocery store using a wooden sliding thing to pull your groceries forward (pre-electronic belts by the register).
Knowing how to count change without a calculator.
When spelling bees were actually important
Yowza! :)
These things were already on their way out, but I can remember seeing them when I was a kid:
Old pinball tables with mechanical score reels.
Cigarette vending machines everywhere. 60¢ a pack.
Green stamps at the grocery store.
The PLATO system on the local university’s mainframe. I was taken on a tour! It remembered my name, but I was not impressed.
Inflation, which I measured by the price of candy bars and cans of soda. Every year I’d ask for a raise in my allowance.
Allowed to buy the cigarettes for my dad and anyone else in the family I think I was nine when they would send me up the street.
I suppose being able to walk to the store on my own in Brooklyn without worrying
Getting in a lot of trouble because my friend and I stayed at the movies watching Diamonds are Forever three times in a row (you were allowed to keep watching as long as you liked).