Yeah, I love the idea of long distance being prohibitively expensive, only being able to rent phones, never having heard of an affordable conference call, etc. Ahh, the good old days.
Well here they were never everywhere, shit we never had bowling alleys or transit stations, I never knew anyone who went to church (maybe they did and I just didn’t notice) and I never got close to a hotel but phone boxes were on EVERY corner and a call cost 2 cents and you could talk forever. Nobody needed a cellphone, you just spent 2 cents phoning a mate saying “meet me at the beach” and you met up for a good gossip/support/whinge session.
It saddens me that my 14 yr old son sees his friends LESS often then I saw friends at the same age because they can talk on cell phones and on the computer.
I could post about ten things that I disagree with on this thread. How is being able to call from my car worse than having that heavy thing tied to the wall? How are CDs worse than records or tapes?
Even Car and Driver ran an editorial about how cars were NOT better in “the good old days”, and made the point that anyone who says so has forgotten about their car being scrap at 90K miles, changing tires in the rain, peeling vinyl roofs, the constant need for upkeep, the horrible comparitive performance, the bad mileage, the minimal safety features, etc.
Things were not automatically better when I was a kid, especially not technologically. Except that the technology has pulled a lot of kids indoors. I wonder if the old neighborhood still has pickup games of kickball with the 7-10 year olds.
Don’t you miss the times when you could genuinely be out of reach?
Tapes were bloody good in their day! One day you will slag of CD’s the way you do tapes now, that doesn’t mean CD’s are bad but tapes had the fun of …rewind…no too far…forward…nooooooooooooo too far…back…STOP!! that CD’s will never have 
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this thread was as a kid, traveling from point A to point B was much easier.
As a few posters have pointed out, state laws require children to be locked down in a car seat. And the age of the child required to be strapped in is creeping upward.
When I was a kid, we could all pile into a car (or the horror! The back of a pickup truck!) and just go. Granted, it wasn’t the safest mode of transportation, and I’ve never seen any statistics that showed how many people died by riding in the back of a pickup, but it was fun, quick, and we all lived. Now if the truck rolled, I’m sure we’d all be toast, but I never knew anyone to be injured in an accident by not being in a car seat, or because kids were sitting in the back of a pickup. I can’t imagine how much time it would have taken my parents to strap us all into a car seat. And since there were more of us than seats, we probably wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere without buying a van or station wagon.
I don’t even know the answer to this, but is it illegal to transport people in the back of an open pickup bed? If not, is there an age requirement? I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone riding in the back of a pickup.
I have a pay phone story from this weekend. We had a terrible rainstorm while I was running an errand. So, to avoid driving back home in the storm, I ended up going across the street to the mall until it died down. I had forgotten my phone, so I couldn’t call my husband so he wouldn’t worry.
So when it was safe to drive, I drove to the grocery store and, thankfully, saw a pay phone. First of all, the entire frame that the phone was in was covered in a black soot, the receiver was all dented and had a chunk missing out of the earpiece. Aaaaand, it didn’t work. So convenient. :rolleyes:
I figured everyone would know what I meant. But thanks for the clarification. Fighting ignorance and all… 
Anyway, we still have a corded phone for those times that the power goes out. It’s the only way to (fruitlessly) call to see when the power will be back on.
Say what? The only place I’ve ever come across spruce beer is in Manhattan… tasted like weird root beer.
I’m currently going through options for internet/cable/phone/cellular in a new city. Goddamn sucks, I tell ya. I have to look at three companies, compare all their billing/bundling/we’re-overcharging-you-because-we-feel-like-it rates, and decide which of 500 channels I want to watch. Grr…
No.
This does seem to the point of disconnect. I don’t get frivolous calls on my cell, but I know that some people like my dad get a few calls a day from stock brokers and mortgage houses. He’s tried to use the DNC on them, but they claim they’re not selling anything, just informing him of opportunities. Sheesh.
IIRC, in California, the people must have a seat belt, even in the truck bed. I think the state’s point is that even if the truck doesn’t turn over, people are banging heads, falling out of the truck into traffic, etc. I’ve seen someone with a bench seat bolted in the open bed, and two people belted in, facing backwards.
Addressing envelopes. Once upon a time I could simply insert an envelope into an ingenious machine called a “typewriter” and use the attached keyboard to quickly imprint the necessary information on the envelope. I didn’t need to fire up a computer, didn’t worry that the printer might jam.
“Stay fresh” packaging. Hell, you just ripped the top off the bag and if you couldn’t finish everything in one sitting, you dumped what was left in Tupperware.
Is that nostalgic? Yes. But more convenient than CDs, which is what the OP is actually asking?
Hell no. Not in a million billion years. Hell, they were even less convenient than records in regards to that (if you look at a record, you can easily see where the groove is further apart after one track.) But being smaller, more portable, and tougher than records made them more convenient for anything other than a radio station. 
Wait, so you’re complaining about having a choice and not being serviced by a monopoly that barely manages to acknowledge your existance, and has no incentive to give you reasonable service?
Really? I use a ballpoint pen.
Nah, I own shares in one of those former monopolies, which everyone knows is the only way to get your existence acknowledged
I’m complaining because I have to examine the websites for three companies and try to decipher all the hidden fees, extra charges, and everything else they hide as hard as they can to find out if their supposed deals really are deals. I have literally spent 6 hours running through all the permutations, and I’m a trained researcher!
My favourite so far is one company’s internet access. You can get their high-speed access for $20/month for 6 months, then the price jumps to $33/mos. Or you can get their super access, which includes rental of a wireless router, for $45 a month. They make it real tough to find that you could buy the wireless router from them for under $100… and use it with their vanilla high-speed access. The only difference between the two plans is the $12-$25 monthly rental cost of the wireless router! Vile. Absolutely vile.
Coing through this stuff makes playing 1st edition D&D look easy… and makes me long for the days of one price, one service, one company.
I can find spruce beer in some supermarkets, but it’s not extremely common either. I personally like it, but I know that many others don’t.
I know what you mean about the horrible TOS, etc. But it’s a little like complaining that we aren’t all relieved of our awful choices in regards to cars. “I wish we were all forced to drive black Model-Ts again!”.
Videogames were so much easier to figure out with six-button controllers.
Heck, Pong was the only game I ever really liked.
Wow - I thought that went away with the dinosaurs!
We too had milk delivered - probably until early High School years mumble-mumble years ago. The cap on the skim milk had black or dark blue lettering, the cap on the whole milk (which was for my dad) had red lettering so we could tell the difference. The milkman brought it to an insulated box we had sitting on our back porch; we just had to go out the back door and bring it inside. A couple of houses in our neighborhood had installed milk-boxes - an actual hole in the wall to the outside, with a door on each side. The milkman would open the outside door and deposit the bottles; a few hours later, the family would open their side of the door and grab.