Remember when cars came equipped with cigarette lighters?
Remember when credit cards had to be swiped in a little roller-machine with some carbon-paper?
I recall getting sodapop in glass bottles, not cans (only beer came in cans). The bottle tops often had games - on the bottom side of the cap would be a letter, and you had to collect enough letters to spell out a phrase like “THE PEPSI CHALLENGE” or something like that, you’d win a load of cash. The trick was that you could collect all the letters, but one or two of them would be extremely rare, so you could never actually complete the phrase.
Speaking of, remember “the Pepsi Challenge”?
How about Susan B. Anthony dollars?
I clearly remember the outrage I felt as a young lad when the price of comic books rose to an outrageous 25 cents apiece! Therefore, I could only get a mere four of them with my dollar-a-week allowance. Oh the humanity!
Now that I think about it, I don’t know. The nuns always presented it to us as a selfless choice to sacrifice our candy for poor starving children. They guilt tripped us so much that we all took the boxes home but very few people ever brought them back. I’m not sure if my mom (who thinks she’s Miss Manners) thought that it was greedy to ask for 2 things or if she bought into the sacrifice thing too.
Erm, they still do. Unless they stopped last year - my '07 Mazda3 has a cigarette lighter and I’m under the impression they are still standard on most cars. There are a ton of gadgets that can use cigarette-lighter adapters as a power source, so I don’t see any reason to discontinue them.
Haha yep, I use rabbit ears too… I don’t have cable so it’s the only way for me to get channels on this TV. Since I don’t plan to spend any money for a digital converter box come February I just won’t watch TV anymore (Og knows I hardly ever watch it now).
Although I might end up getting an HDTV soonish anyway, just to enhance the experience of XBox360 games. And I promised my girlfriend if I do she can have my rabbit ears to send to her family in Guatemala.
Do little girls still make gum wrapper chains? I never did too many, but I had friends who did, and I’d be willing to bet I could remember the right folds if I tried a bit. I don’t remember what they were for, other than fun, but I think there was some story that went with them.
Yeah, it seems like so long ago, but really not THAT many years ago since the sun went super-nova and doomsday occurred. Yeah, remember life in those eco-pods on the spaceark that brought us here to NEW Earth?
And all that wrangling about keeping the whole Armaggeddon thing a secret from the stupid people because…
…Oh wait. Um, forget I said anything.
Hey, do you remember comedy recordings? Lps not with music, but with the stand-up routines of people like Steve Martin, George Carlin, Cheech & Chong. Do comedians still even do this?
Remember making popcorn in a pan on the stove top? Shaking the pan to keep the unpopped kernels on the bottom and listening for the popping to slow down and all but stop? We made popcorn on the stove at home and dad poured melted butter over it, then put it in a paper grocery bag before my sister and I put on our pajamas and climbed into the back of the station wagon to go see the drive-in movie.
Remember the big clunky speaker on the pole at the drive in, before they all went to AM radio?
Remember console stereos and TV’s? Remember turning them on and having to wait a few seconds for the tubes inside to warm up before any sound came out?
Remember the record player had a variable speed switch, 16, 33, 45 and 78 rpm? Remember 45 singles with the big hole in the middle, and you could put a yellow plastic spacer in the hole to adapt it to the little spindle on the record player?
Remember A&W rootbeer at the A&W drive-in? Served in a big heavy glass mug on a tray that hung from your car door.
How about the TRS-80 (Trash 80) that my daughter received from her dad one Xmas, sometime around the early Eighties? He bought it at Radio Shack. We plugged it into a TV (the monitor) and stored files on cassettes.
Apple IIe, bought secondhand in 1983 or 84 for $2000! The first time I printed a long document (5 pages) the screen response was something like, “You have a very long document that may take a while to print.”
Around 1989 the ex gave our daughter his work laptop, a Zenith, as he was receiving an upgrade. It was one of the first laptops to have a hard drive. They can still be purchased on eBay now for $30 - $80.
I can’t remember what we had next, but it was followed by an IBM 286.
Each new computer was a whole new world and we fought for computer time.
Also - games were all text, green lettering on a black screen. I remember playing “Mansion” some time around 1985 and was thrilled!
On another vein - we had a large mirror tucked behind the sofa so that when my Dad had to adjust the vertical/horizontal or brightness (knobs on back of set), he’d place the mirror opposite the TV so that he could watch his progress. This was waaay back - we had only 3 channels, the largest operating only between 3 and 7 PM - and this was in San Francisco! I remember being very young and watching the miracle of broadcasts that originated in Los Angeles and then a short time later from New York.
