Old guy stuff. (Old girls welcome.)

[Triskadecamus]

When I was a boy my father built a Hi-Fi for our house. It was a very nice Hi-Fi, with a tuner, an amplifier, and turntable, all in one room, on shelves, with aluminum breadboards, and wires going here and there. The speaker, which was a big piece of furniture in another room actually had three speakers in it, one big, one medium sized, and one tiny. They were covered by a cloth, stretched over a frame on the front. My father built the box the speaker was in. He also strung wires up to his bedroom, where he intended to put another speaker, but evidently my mother found that undesirable for some reason.

No one in our neighborhood had a Hi-Fi then. (It was a fairly well to do neighborhood, mostly Government middle wigs.) Within a year or so, though, you could buy a Hi-Fi already made, in either one big cabinet, or several cabinets. I always felt my dad was somewhat surprised by that. I was crushed. All that factory finished stuff, shiny and built into a cabinet. But, the speakers didn't get as big as dad's for another three or four years. However, by then there were mumbles about "stereo" sets for the home. I didn't believe a word of it.

I have Stereo AM/FM/MP3 player in my pocket. I feel very old.

Tris

[ultrafilter]

I suppose that pointing out that this is General Questions isn't going to help, is it?

[Triskadecamus]

Ok, so it isn't a question. Sue me. (or, move it, please.)

[gigi]

My father still has his reel-to-reel tape player, turntable and forty-odd-year-old speakers I grew up with. He had the separate amplifier and tuner as well. He had about 7000 records at his peak, and umpteen reel-to-reel recordings (mostly classical off public radio). I remember him getting up in the middle of the night to press record and capture something he was missing.

[NoCoolUserName]

My dad bought for me, and I built, an AM radio. It was breadboard wiring with bakelite headphones. I fell asleep listening to that puppy for years. Sometimes woke up with the phones still on my ears.

Feel better now? :)

[Rico]

(with many abject apologies to Trisk)

<mod>

When I was a boy my father built a message board. It was a very nice message board, with many forums.

Many people were not sure what forum posts belonged in. I was crushed. All that work we went to, describing each forum with great detail.

I have to move this post to MPSIMS. I feel very old.

</mod>

[Punoqllads]

I have never been called old. At least, not by anyone within reach of my cane. But I remember well the day that I got the computer of my dreams -- with 16k of memory, and the ability to display 8 different colors.

[Master Wang-Ka]

I still remember my first real stereo turntable.

Quadraphonic.

[Can Handle the Truth]

My dad worked for Abner Doble (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble) building steam cars.
The 1924 model Doble steam car could run for 1,500 miles on a 24-gallon tank (62.5 mpg for a 4300 lbs. automobile), had a flash boiler that could produce a working head of steam in one minute, and reach speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour, all in eerie silence. It was a luxury car that film stars and royalty were proud to own.

[kunilou]

My father still has his reel-to-reel tape player, turntable and forty-odd-year-old speakers I grew up with.

I still have my reel-to-reel tape deck (from 1969) my last turntable (1979) and the speakers I bought in 1978. They all still work, and I'm still using the speakers as my main set.

Now get the hell off my lawn!

[fishbicycle]

My old man was continually in the process of rebuilding the TV. It was a 22" Admiral b/w, in a square metal box. He kept a cigar box of tubes on the windowsill, and would replace whatever blew. I remember he'd put a chair in front of the set, with a mirror on it, and sit behind the TV with the back open, adjusting the focus, master hold and other parameters with a screwdriver. He also had a little box of tuning elements, whose coils he could rewind, for when a channel on the mechanical tuner went bad. Every now and then he'd take his box of tubes to the hardware store and check their measurements on the tube tester, which you could find in any hardware store.

Now, when your TV goes wonky, you throw it out and buy a new one. Yeah, I'm old, too.

[Master Wang-Ka]

Ghod, I MUST be old.

I remember tube testers in hardware stores!

[Archergal]

Ghod, I MUST be old.

I remember tube testers in hardware stores!

Me too. My dad repaired televisions when I was growing up. He had to sell the business when color sets started coming in. (My dad is red-green colorblind.)

And last weekend, when I was doing a handspinning demo, a kid told me I looked just like her grandmother. <whimpers>

[cornflakes]

When I was a boy my father bought a 1938 Ford Deluxe Coupe. He was about sixteen when the car was built. It was in pieces when he bought it but all of the pieces were there. It sat in the garage, and I used to go out and look at it. I spent hours admiring the lines of the car, holding the grille and other pieces of chrome. I found the moth-eaten Vargas calendars that someone had left under the seat and wondered if this was the type of woman that my dad was attracted to when he was young. I tried to get him to go out and rebuild it, but he never found the time. Eventually he died and the Ford was given to a cousin to restore.

On Monday I got a call from my cousin's wife. They are getting ready to retire and will need to get rid of the '38 Ford sometime within the next few years. I'd like to have it, but first I have to rebuild a '78 Triumph Spitfire that I have in my backyard. I'd like for my son to drive it when he gets his license. I was about sixteen when the Triumph was built....

[Tikki]

I remember our all-in-one Hi-Fi stereo cabinet. It had an alarm clock. a radio (probably only AM) and a turntable that my Dad would play Herb Alpert and Bill Cosby records on. We kids loved Bill Cosby's tales of Chicken Heart and one about making a go-kart. We also loved listening to the Grand Canyon Suite and another record with The Yellow Rose of Texas, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Four-Leaf Clover on it.

I remember the Hi-Fi's alarm clock because my parents didn't have a clock in their bedroom so my Dad would use that one to get him up for work. Thing was, my parents were apparently very sound sleepers. The alarm would wake me up but not them. So, at a very young age, I got in the habit of getting up, going downstairs, turning off the alarm and coming back upstairs to wake up Dad. Should have woken him up and made him go turn it off but I was a kid--what did I know?

We had a series of black-and-white televisions back then. Even in those early days of broadcasting, they probably came to us already well-used. Dad would try to keep them in good repair but it always seemed to be a loosing battle. I remember us sitting in from of the set and having to call out, "Dad, the TV is flubby!" That was our way of saying that the horizontal hold had gone out yet again. We weren't allowed to try to fix it ourselves.

I remember several times when Dad took tubes to one of those testing machines. The last one I remember stood in a local drug store until the mid- or late-seventies.

[Tikki]

Oh, I also remember way back then a popular color for cars was tomato soup pink. Well, they'd be two-toned usually, with white being the other color.

We lived at a lake in the early '60's. There was a fellow who lived across the way. He was a car salesman and sometimes we'd see him out on the lake with prospective client in an amphibious car something like this one. (http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.1001boats.com/pics/B2040a.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.1001boats.com/single-ad.asp%3FRecnumber%3D2040%26SearchMethod%3D2&h=250&w=420&sz=26&hl=en&start=56&tbnid=a65CefOUMFzpHM:&tbnh=74&tbnw=125&prev=/images%3Fq%3Damphibious%2Bcar%26start%3D40%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26hs%3Dnf9%26lr%3D%26c lient%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official_s%26sa%3DN)

[Askance]

I remember my younger brother playing his first cassette tape. As it got near the end we inched it forward slowly just in case the end wasn't attached, as we had no idea how to thread it back on again if it wasn't.

[Zoe]

I was the first kid in my class to have a TV set in 1951. I had driven 16 miles to see the only other television around.

After the 17 inch Motorola was delivered, people came to our house just to watch it -- even when the sound didn't work. There was only one channel and it carried NBC. Howdy Doody was on when it was first turned on.

Shows didn't come on until late in the morning. One day I was watching Howdy and Buffalo Bob and they had a special guest on the show. It was a man who said that he was going to start a news program that would come on early in the mornings. It was going to be called Today The man was Dave Garroway.

I watched the first show. I remember when they celebrated fifty years of flight and one hundred years of flight. That's old.

[LiveOnAPlane]

Ghod, I MUST be old.

I remember tube testers in hardware stores!
Naw, you ain't old. I remember them being in every 7-11 (convenience store) in town back when.

Old is when you asked your mother to read you the text on black-and-white cartoons because they didn't have sound yet...and you were too young to read. That's old.

[RandMcnally]

What's a "Hi-FI?"

[gabriela]

When I was a kid my dad, who was an electrical engineer, built a home computer from components he got through mail order.

I remember the hefty wooden box he built to put it in.

And the:
Eight-inch floppy disks that it took.

Wrote my first story on one of them eight-inch floppies.

[gigi]

Eight-inch floppy disks that it took.

Wrote my first story on one of them eight-inch floppies.They showed those on "I Love the 70s". I have to admit that the 5-1/4" ones are the earliest I remember.
I remember my younger brother playing his first cassette tape. As it got near the end we inched it forward slowly just in case the end wasn't attached, as we had no idea how to thread it back on again if it wasn't.I heard a Margaret Cho bit once about recording songs off the radio using a cassette player held up the radio. She mentions how the tape captured the sounds of her bedroom door slamming and it sounded so familiar. I would listen to Casey's Top 40 Saturday morning and then I would know when my favorites were coming on during the repeat Sunday PM. Sometimes I would have to run and slam my door in the middle of the song to prevent my brother coming in and ruining the high-quality recording.

[chappachula]

What's a "Hi-FI?"
I hope you're whooshing me.....

But in case you really are just a young 'un and don't know .... Hi Fi was short for High Fidelity. (Fidelity means truth in Latin, and as a marketing slogan it worked, because people used to know these things back in the dinosaur days...like The Marine corps motto "Semper Fi(delity).)

anyway--there was this new idea back in 1950 or so that music didnt have to be scratchy and tinny sounding. Stereo hadnt been invented yet, but higher quality (Hi Fi) sound was available as a huge piece of furniture with one or two speakers, a flat table-top that opened up as a lid for the phonograph underneath, and a radio dial concealed behind a sliding wooden door.

[elmwood]

In 1976, the parents of one of my friends bought a remote control RCA television. The remote would turn the set on and off, control the volum, and move the tuner knob in one direction only. Click on the channel button, and the result was a harsh mechanical whirring noise, concluding with a KER-CHUNK!

My parents, despite being late adopters of technology for almost everything else, splurged on cable when they bought their first color television in 1973. Yes, Nineteen Seventy Three. The system had a whopping twelve channels; the five local stations, two from Toronto, a public access channel, one for showing pre-empted programs aired on stations in Erie (Buffalo stations preempted network programming quite a lot in those days), one with a slow-moving stock market and Reuters ticker, and one empty, to become HBO a couple years later. Channel 13 aired analog clock, occasionally switching to an analog thermometer, and later back to the clock, with a 60 cycle hum in the abckground that was occasionally interrupted by NOAA weather radio. Did I mention that channel was in black and white?

[Count Blucher]

I remember my Dad bringing home the first pocket calculator I had ever seen in 1972. It was a Texas Instruments model and the numbers were in red LED. My brother and I used to have fun spelling out 'ShELLl OIL' in numbers on it.

Does anyone remember big cabinet b&w TV sets that took a few minutes to 'warm up'? Or 'Hi-Fi' sets where the turntable speed was controlled by rubber belts and metal pulleys underneath it?

Feel Old? Hell, I was Born old.

[Sunrazor]

Generational payback is lots of fun. When Razorette and I visited our son's place in San Diego in the spring, he showed off his shiny new home entertainment system, and we watched "The Last Samurai" in wide-screen splendor with floor-shaking Dolby sound. He was so proud. I can't wait for him to come home in September -- the audio from our living room TV set plugs directly into my 1975-vintage Pioneer tuner/amp, and I get better sound from my 30-year-old Kenwood speakers than he does from whatever the hell he has.

[Chefguy]

"We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don’t go anywhere -- like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. 'Give me five bees for a quarter,' you’d say.
"Now where were we? Oh yeah -- the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..." - Grandpa Simpson

[Triskadecamus]

What's a "Hi-FI?"Get off my lawn!

[Paul in Qatar]

I remember listening to short wave broadcast. From East Germany. Glowing tubes in the night I could feel the room heat up.

[ShelliBean]

(It was a fairly well to do neighborhood, mostly Government middle wigs.)


This quote + combination of thread title =
So, were they members of the Whig Party?

<rim shot>

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal. Tip your waitress!

[freckafree]

Oh, I also remember way back then a popular color for cars was tomato soup pink. Well, they'd be two-toned usually, with white being the other color.

Yup, that was the family car growing up -- a tomato soup pink and white Ford Fairlane station wagon. When we drove to the beach, my sister and I rode in the way-back where we could stretch out with our books and stuff. No seat belts or nuthin'. It's amazing we survived to adulthood.

I remember my Dad bringing home the first pocket calculator I had ever seen in 1972. It was a Texas Instruments model and the numbers were in red LED. My brother and I used to have fun spelling out 'ShELLl OIL' in numbers on it.

In about '74, my mom used her jury duty money to buy me a TI scientific calculator. It was hideously expensive (IIRC, nearly $200). I don't think she ever forgave me for changing my major from geology to theater.

[romansperson]

Ghod, I MUST be old.

I remember tube testers in hardware stores!

We still have a portable tube tester, for the tubes in DH's stereo receiver.


I remember my Dad bringing home the first pocket calculator I had ever seen in 1972. It was a Texas Instruments model and the numbers were in red LED. My brother and I used to have fun spelling out 'ShELLl OIL' in numbers on it.

My dad had one of these too - except it was definitely too big to really fit in a pocket. It came in its own hard case.

[gigi]

My father bought my mom one of the first digital watches that came out; it was a Casio with the red numbers like the TI calculator (he had one of those too). He's since tried to sell it on eBay but no takers.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

anyway--there was this new idea back in 1950 or so that music didnt have to be scratchy and tinny sounding. Stereo hadnt been invented yet, but higher quality (Hi Fi) sound was available as a huge piece of furniture with one or two speakers, a flat table-top that opened up as a lid for the phonograph underneath, and a radio dial concealed behind a sliding wooden door.

As chappachula said, it wasn't stereo, but it did start the later trend of having the different frequency ranges handled by separate speaker cones, sometimes in the same boxes, sometimes not. Not as good as stereo but a long sight better than a cheap phonograph or tinny radio. My father put together a hi-fi system in the early 1960s, and, inexplicably, thereafter lost all interest in listening to music on any but the lowest-fi transistor radio. After stereo became the norm, some people still used the phrase "hi-fi" for a stereo system.

[Pixisis]

I remember my Dad bringing home the first pocket calculator I had ever seen in 1972. It was a Texas Instruments model and the numbers were in red LED. My brother and I used to have fun spelling out 'ShELLl OIL' in numbers on it.

Yeah, but did you tell the story that went along with it ?


if 142 Arabs fought 154 Jews, and 69 camels were killed (x'd or multiplied) in their 5 day war, who won ? =



Does anyone remember big cabinet b&w TV sets that took a few minutes to 'warm up'? Or 'Hi-Fi' sets where the turntable speed was controlled by rubber belts and metal pulleys underneath it?


I do. My grandparents kept theirs. Didn't see the need for anything else.

[Tikki]

I remember listening to short wave broadcast. From East Germany. Glowing tubes in the night I could feel the room heat up.

I remember my brother doing that. The stations would give out their addresses on the air and you could write them and they'd send you a postcard with the station's logo and such. It was quite a big hobby for some people but I think my brother lost interest in it pretty quick. I wonder what happened to his shortwave set? Would be cool to have it again.

[Misnomer]

Fidelity means truth in LatinNope, it means "faithfulness (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=fidelity&x=15&y=15)." The term "high fidelity" referred to how faithfully the device reproduced the sound.

"Semper Fidelus" means "always faithful."

[AskNott]

In 1958, my family moved into a new house. It had a pool in the lower level. None of the local contractors had ever done that before, and several refused to build the house. When we moved in, my folks decided to put an upright piano and a big TV/radio down there. Within the first month, the heavy moisture destroyed both of them.

To replace the rotted TV, we got a "portable" TV, to be lugged back upstairs when not in use. It had a pneumatic remote control. There was a twenty foot plastic tube with a squeeze bulb on the end. Each hard squeeze would bump up to the next channel (2 thru 13); when it came around to 1, it turned off. There were stations on 4, 6, 8, and 13. Everything else was snow.

[GusNSpot]

As an adult, I ran my first survey calculations on a hand cranked mechanical calculator about the size of a typewriter. It would do all four functions. We got the sine and cosine out of books.

We had the largest outboard motor on the lake. It was an 22 HP Evinrude with opposed cylinders, exposed plug wires, was started by wrapping a rope around the flywheel and there were no gears. If it started ( big IF ) you left.

As a kid in 48 -49 we had a big Zenith radio with the flip lever for the different bands.

Green Hornet, Lone Ranger, Fiber McGee and Molly, Texaco theater, etc.

My older sister was the hit of the neighborhood with her 'portable' record player .........

My ( 62 - bought while in the ARMY ) Sony TC-500 reel to reel still plays just fine.

My problem is that I can't figure who that old guy in the mirror is.......

[Surly Chick]

Get off my lawn!
And take that weird flying plastic disc thingy with you too!!

[pinkfreud]

When I was in ninth grade (in 1962), I won my school's Science Fair. Much to my surprise, I went on to take third place in the city Science Fair, and I made it to the state competition.

The State Science Fair was held at the University of Oklahoma. All the contestants were given a tour of the university's computer center, which was a huge building filled with millions of dollars' worth of clattering, blinking equipment whose entire computing power (and more) can now be duplicated by an inexpensive device that I can put in my purse. Wow. Future shock.

[butler1850]

The first color TV in my parent's house was one built buy my father as part of a correspondence course in electronics. Paid for by his post-vietnam era GI Bill. We had that TV through the mid 80's.

My first color TV of my own was an old Apple IIe monitor, which I hooked to my VCR (for the tuner) when I wasn't using my computer.

I also had home built CB radios and shortwave sets as a kid in the '70s.

[gonzomax]

Any one want to buy a Comodore 64 with monitor and a printer that could wake the neighborhood.Fan paper of course.We were the last to get a color tv. Dad thought it would pass as a fad. Princess summer fall winter spring ,Clabell . Black and white cartoons with a cat that kept getting hit in the nuts.

[rowrrbazzle]

Ghod, I MUST be old.

I remember tube testers in hardware stores!Naw, you ain't old. I remember them being in every 7-11 (convenience store) in town back when.I remember one in the local corner drugstore (non-chain).

My father was a CPA and had a hand-cranked adding machine, something like this http://home.vicnet.net.au/~wolff/calculators/printing/RoyalOfficeMaster5.jpg. Key in the number, pull the crank, and it added. IIRC you could move a lever to set it for subtraction.

[nazz]

When I was a kid, we didn't have gravity. We had to carry rocks when walking to school so we wouldn't float away.

[Hilarity N. Suze]

I learned how to play tennis with a wooden racquet, which was what everybody had, and the balls were white.

[danceswithcats]

Dad and I built our family's first color TV-it was a Heathkit. Two others followed over the years, and I still have the last. Tube operated radios abounded in our household-my brother got a Heathkit AM/SW radio for Christmas when I was just a little peep-Dad strung an antenna inside the attic so my brother could listen to stations from around the world on SW (along with Jerry Blavat, Hy Lit and other Philly rock n' rollers).

We had a tube tester in the Lafayette Electronics store where I worked as a teenager. Dunno why, but people seemed to invariably come in 5 minutes before closing time with a shopping bag full of tubes, and it drove the Boss nuts-he finally put up a sign prohibiting tube testing with a half hour of store closure. Dad still has boxes of tubes in the basement, and my friends with antique cars call when they need radio fixing.

The Catville sound system is a Lafayette Quadraphonic tuner/amp, four Criterion (Lafayette) speakers, a Dual belt-drive turntable, a JVC cassette deck, a Lafayette 8 track deck, and two Akai reel-to-reel decks. Everything works.

Heck-I've got a Tektronix oscilloscope downstairs in the shop which is older than many people on this board!

[blondebear]

Dad and I built our family's first color TV-it was a Heathkit. Behold the Heathkit Virtual Museum (http://www.heathkit-museum.com/).

[elelle]

When I was a kid, we didn't have gravity. We had to carry rocks when walking to school so we wouldn't float away.

Hee, I love this!

I'm just approaching GOML status, so don't remember the tube-testing as a normal route. But: in the late seventies, my divorced engineer Dad sent us kidlets the first Atari Pong game for a Christmas present. As old and simple as it looks now, slow and black and white, it was just amazing then. No one else had one, big score for Dad. All the neighborhood kids would come over to play it, "Wow, a game you can play on the TV!!!!" Bink...binkk...bonk....

Kinda like playing tic tac toe in the dirt now, tho.

[Klaatu]

I'm "only" 47 but I remember the tube testers, Heathkits, crystal radios, etc.

But what did we call those damn plastic spiral looking things you put in the hole of a 45 record so it would fit over the spindle on the console hi-fi? Later you could get a plastic thing that fit over the spindle itself.

I swear they had an actual name for those things, not just "inserts for 45's" or whatever.
I think I asked this in a thread years ago, but the memory is going....

[Tuckerfan]

My dad worked for Abner Doble (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble) building steam cars.
Hey, one of my other interests just so happens to be steam cars. Is your dad still around? There's not too much published on Dobles and I'm awfully curious about 'em.

I can remember when there were people on the Moon, when mom and pop stores outnumbered chain stores, when we had five and dime stores, and when small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

[Johanna]

Hi-fi enthusiasts called the big speaker a "woofer" and the little one a "tweeter."

In the early 1960s, my parents had put their old 1950s hi-fi in the basement playroom. I don't remember the make, but its metal surfaces were colored gold. In a small storage room down there my father had placed his collection of heavy 78 RPM records from the 1930s. I used to take them out, spin them, and dance to big band music from when my dad was a little child. That was my introduction to Jazz.
Nowadays my kids have even shown more interest in the psychedelic rock from my childhood than I took in the big band music of my parents' childhood. The records were stacked up naked on a shelf. They were twice as thick as 33⅓ disks and made of a more brittle material.

The record player had some dubious wiring, and sometimes when I grasped the needle arm the wrong way, I got an electric shock. The farther back you go in time, the more objects become bulky, massive, and solid, while safety was less a concern than today.

That phonograph was typical of the 1950s: it had FOUR speed settings to accommodate the different record manufacturers, because playback speeds (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_258b.html) were in flux as different standards battled for market domination in the recording industry in those days. It had a switch for 78, 45, 33⅓, and 16 RPM. The manufacturers must have been optimistically hedging their bets including the 16 RPM setting, expecting that such products would hit the market any day now. As far as I know, though, 16 RPMs never appeared. So instead we kids used to play "Monster" by putting on a record at the 16 speed and voices would come out horrifyingly deep and slow. Then we yelled "Frankenstein!!!" and ran out of the room.

[Can Handle the Truth]

Is your dad still around? There's not too much published on Dobles and I'm awfully curious about 'emNo, my dad died in 2002. But Jay Leno (http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/sub_coll_leno/1302916.html) loves his 1925 Doble Series E!

[Caractacus Pott]

The farther back you go in time, the more objects become bulky, massive, and solid, while safety was less a concern than today.

<snip>The manufacturers must have been optimistically hedging their bets including the 16 RPM setting, expecting that such products would hit the market any day now. As far as I know, though, 16 RPMs never appeared.
Johanna,
You're right about the weight and safety. I have an "portable" fan from the 1930's. Must weight 50 pounds including the cast iron base and 3/4 hp motor spinning those shiny brass blades that could double as propeller on an outboard motor. And a blade guard that couldn't stop a boxing glove!

That doesn't worry me as much as the 120 volts exposed by the open contact power switch. I, a large man, can easily stick my pinky between the contacts. Must have been an unexpected ending to some gene pools.

But to everyone writing, it's not that we're getting old. Others are too young. I make our new arrivals at work feel even less experienced when I show them my Visa credit card with "member since" date prior to their births!

Which means only one thing: our job is to put those young whippersnappers in their place. They may have physical agility but we can use our life experiences to manipulate them to do our hard labor. Who's with me?

============

PS: There were 16 rpm records. They were audiobooks for the blind. We had some at our local library when I was a kid. I couldn't listen to them because I was supposed to READ books.

[pullin]

We had a Quasar TV when I was a kid. Does anybody remember these? Most of the electrical parts were in a compartment which could slide out for repair.

The tagline of their commercials was "with the works in a drawer". This launched several jokes in which attractive females were referred to as "Quasars". (They had nice "works in their drawers").

[Archergal]

We had a Quasar TV when I was a kid. Does anybody remember these? Most of the electrical parts were in a compartment which could slide out for repair.

I remember them! My dad sold Zenith tv's. Quasar was The Competition.

[Tuckerfan]

No, my dad died in 2002. But Jay Leno (http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/sub_coll_leno/1302916.html) loves his 1925 Doble Series E!
Sorry to hear about your father, and Jay certainly does love his Doble. I wish you'd been around to take part in this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=127604), since your cite supports my position in that thread.

[kunilou]

We had a Quasar TV when I was a kid. Does anybody remember these? Most of the electrical parts were in a compartment which could slide out for repair.

And whenever a Quasar needed service, it always seemed to be the "master power module" that had to be replaced -- and which cost more than the picture tube.

[Tuckerfan]

Speaking of TVs, remember Curtis Mathis?

[Sam Stone]

I'm "only" 47 but I remember the tube testers, Heathkits, crystal radios, etc.

But what did we call those damn plastic spiral looking things you put in the hole of a 45 record so it would fit over the spindle on the console hi-fi? Later you could get a plastic thing that fit over the spindle itself.

I swear they had an actual name for those things, not just "inserts for 45's" or whatever.
I think I asked this in a thread years ago, but the memory is going....

I'm pretty sure we called the yellow 45 inserts 'spindle adapters'. I remember them well.

Remember 'suitcase portable' record players? It would look like a small suitcase, but when you opened it, the lid was a speaker and would detach. Inside was a record player. Fairly clever packaging for the time. You would take them to people's houses who didn't have record players, so there would be music for a party. The very first boom-boxes.

And remember when stereos and TVs were major pieces of furniture? They'd come in huge wooden cabinets with legs - the TV's would sometimes have a sliding door or opening doors in front of the screen, so when you weren't watching you have a lovely...large wooden box... in the middle of your living room. The most sophisticated ones would have a TV, a record player, 8-track player, and radio all built into one big unit with incredibly crappy sound.

But man, we thought all that stuff was the bleemin' space age. I grew up with my grandparents, and for years I lived in a farm house with no running water, no central heat, and only recently installed electricity. We got heat from a big cast-iron stove that you would use to cook supper and then it would throw enough residual heat to keep the house warm until everyone went to bed. My grandmother was extremly proud of her washing machine with the power wringer attachment - it was basically a huge tub with a motor in it to slosh clothes around, and a contraption on top that looked like two wooden rolling pins. You'd pluck clothes out of the washer, then run them through the wringer to get the water out before hanging them on the line to finish drying. No finger guards, by the way. Just two big rotating cylinders of death, waiting to catch careless fingers and mash them to a pulp.

Our first TV was an old Zenith black-and-white. It had a rotating knob tuner, with a fine-tune ring around the outside. We used to have to stick toothpicks between the tuner and the fine-tuning ring once we got a channel to come in reasonably well, becuase the tuner's indent stops didn't match the frequency any more. So you'd have to tune it slighly off detent and jam it in place. Fun times.

[Cyn]

My parents still have the stereo that is a peice of furniture---AM/FM turntable w/ 8 track deck in a giant oak cabinet that stands 3 feet high and is 7 feet long. 2 big speakers covrered in red crushed velvet. My kids think it's some kind of table/sideboard. There are records in that thing to this day.

[GrizzRich]

I'm currently posting this on a computer more powerful than the ones used to land astronauts on the moon.......or so I'm told.

[Evil Captor]

The Internet is on computers now? By jingies, what'll they think of next? I'm posting the old fashioned way, via cuneiform tablets carried by oxen. Can't be bothered by these newfangled keyboards when I can already chisel 15 words per minute.

[DMark]

I can remember going to a shoe store and putting my feet in the Xray machine to see how the shoes fit (it is a miracle that everybody from that generation doesn't have 15 toes on each foot now).

Our neighbors had the first television in town and on fight nights, they put cinder blocks and planks over them so all the neighbors could fit in the living room and watch the fight on that whopping 13 inch black and white, oval screen. They later bought the first color television which was especially odd considering the husband was color blind - but he always had to have the first gadgets in town.

He also had the first electric garage door opener in town, and the door would pop open whenever a plane flew over the house and we would have to go over, press the button and dash out of the garage before the door closed on us.

They also had the first aluminum Christmas tree - remember those, that spun slowly in a circle and a color wheel was pointed towards it and the tree turned green, yellow, blue and red?

When I was about 12, I was reading Popular Mechanics (remember that magazine) and there was a picture of a new "fad" in California...so I went out and took an old roller skate, dismantled it and bent it with a hammer, nailed it to the bottom of a wooden board, and went out and tried that new invention, called the "skate board". Fell a few times but got the hang of it rather quickly. Cars actually stopped on the street and people looked at me like either I was insane, or a circus performer doing a new trick. Soon a couple of friends did the same thing and we got pretty good at it. It was a good three years later before the first skateboards went on sale at the local bike shop.

Oh, and I had one of the first bikes with a "banana seat and butterfly handlebars" put on it.

[Tuckerfan]

Oh, and I had one of the first bikes with a "banana seat and butterfly handlebars" put on it.Sounds like a Schwinn Sting Ray like I had as a kid.

[DMark]

Sounds like a Schwinn Sting Ray like I had as a kid.

Well, it was a prototype...it was an old, hand-me-down, Schwinn 24 inch bike, and bought the seat and handlebars independently and put them on the bike. Trying to do wheelies, I stripped the threads of the handlebars so often, my father drilled a hole and put a deadbolt in the handlebars so they would stay up. Sting Ray bikes didn't come out a few years later and they were a compact 20 inch - hey, this was small town Illinois - we didn't get no fancy stuff there.

[Johanna]

My grandmother was extremly proud of her washing machine with the power wringer attachment - it was basically a huge tub with a motor in it to slosh clothes around, and a contraption on top that looked like two wooden rolling pins. You'd pluck clothes out of the washer, then run them through the wringer to get the water out before hanging them on the line to finish drying. No finger guards, by the way. Just two big rotating cylinders of death, waiting to catch careless fingers and mash them to a pulp.My grandmother had that in her basement. As if your description wasn't horrific enough, the name of the contraption is "mangle." Yes, it's actually called a mangle. Maybe to scare kids away. We kids were always warned not to touch it.

[kunilou]

He also had the first electric garage door opener in town, and the door would pop open whenever a plane flew over the house and we would have to go over, press the button and dash out of the garage before the door closed on us.

I remember when our neighbors got a yard light installed with a "magic eye" that would turn itself on at dusk and off at dawn. And for the first few nights, people in the neighborhood would assemble at sunset and wait for the light to turn on.

Can you imagine the whole neighborhood coming to your house to watch you make a call on your new cellphone?

[Triskadecamus]

I'm currently posting this on a computer more powerful than the ones used to land astronauts on the moon.......or so I'm told.My computer, a three year old Desk Top from HP has a million times more computing power than the computer that set the Pentagon on fire (!) when it got upgraded to 32 kilobytes. (Or was it 16?).

Tris

[DMark]

My grandmother had that in her basement. As if your description wasn't horrific enough, the name of the contraption is "mangle." Yes, it's actually called a mangle. Maybe to scare kids away. We kids were always warned not to touch it.

Ha! Was your grandmother German? Mangel means "to wring" as in put your clothes through the wringer. And yes, those machines are called Mangel in German, but I believe they are stilled called wringers in English...still, if it kept you kids away, then it worked in both languages!