One of my aunts told me that she was very happy when the family finally got a butter churn, because up until then they made butter by shaking a jar of cream until it turned into butter, and as she was a small child, it was very tiring and hard on her tiny arms.
Punching your computer programs and data onto punched cards. God help you if you dropped your card deck (unless you were really fancy and had sequence numbers punched into columns 73-80 - then you could use a card sorter to get them back in order). A “fun” little bit of mischief is no longer possible - throw a handful of punched card “confetti” in between a guy’s bedsheets; the little cardboard squares were nice and pointy and made for an unconfortable snooze until the victim managed to sweep them out again.
Someone else mentioned core memory. You could actually SEE the the little ferrite cores with the naked eye (or a magnifying glass if your vision wasn’t that good).
I’ve used paper tape (with holes punched in it) a few times.
How about an IBM PC with no suffix? (i.e. not a PC/XT, PC/AT). Daddy - what’s a clone?
I’m a sophomore in high school and in grade school Latin was mandatory. I have -count 'em - eight full years of Latin under my belt, although I forgot most of it.
Don’t forget to tell the kids why your two-album sets had sides 1 & 4 on one record, and sides 2 & 3 on other.
On one side of Monty Python’s Matching Tie & Handkerchief, there are two sets of grooves (the second starting just inside the first). If you had an automatic tone arm that always started at the same place, or if you always lowered the arm onto the same place, you never heard one-third of the record.
Taking the pledge and theories of parallel universes reigned if after years the tone arm dropped into the second groove for the first time.
First World War Noises, among other skits, were in the second groove, as I recall.
12 channels? There’s no such thing.
There’s NBC, ABC, CBS and perhaps one more if you’re lucky. We had channel 5 in Washington DC in the early 1950’s. That was our fourth.
12!! ::::hrrummph!:::walks away:::::::
Analog TV tuners, with the ‘fine tuning’ ring around the outside. I remember our first TV had an analog tuner that was wearing out, and we used to jam a toothpick between it and the fine tuning ring to hold it in place. Every time you changed the channel you’d have to go through the same routine - turn the knob to the channel, then jam in the toothpick, then work the dial back and forth until the picture stayed o the screen.
Then after that, you had to re-adjust the rabbit ears for best reception for that station.
All that, plus the lack of a remote control, meant that ‘channel surfing’ was a totally unknown phenomenon. You figured out what you wanted to watch in the TV guide (easy when you only get 3 stations), then five minutes before the show starts you’d go through the TV tuning ritual to make sure you could be back in your seat and ready to watch when the show started.
My aunt in Middlesbrough had an odd Rediffusion cable TV in the 1960s & 70s. I think they were in a poor reception area.
The TV had just an on/off switch, a volume control knob and a contrast control knob. It didn’t have an external aerial (US = antenna) but was fed by a cable that was routed via a little white box on the windowsill. The box had a dial on it, lettered A to about H, which selected the channels. It could receive the basic three channels that existed then (BBC1, BBC2 and Tyne Tees regional ITV) but also got Yorkshire regional ITV as well (although fairly poorly), plus a few radio stations.
Oddly for a cable-delivered system, reception was affected by the weather.
Test pattern?
What the heck is a test pattern!
One “chain” store that does not use UPC scanners is Aldi grocery stores. At least last time I went there they didn’t. And the cashiers are twice as fast as the regular stores, mainly because they are not trying to scan the ice cream about 20 times before they finally give up and type in the freakin’ code!!!
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“Daddy, what’s a CD?”
CD’s are already becoming obsolete with the iPod generation. Will they ever have a stereo that someone yells at them to turn down??
DuMont WTTG was actually first in Washington – beat NBC on the air by 6 months. They’re still on, now a Fox affil.
When watching “Poltergeist” with our young’uns we had to explain what happened to the TV… “Back when mommy and daddy were young, the TV station would stop broadcasting at the end of the day…” Weeks later, our 9-year old forgot the name of the movie but wanted to ask a question about it. With a perfectly straight face she looked at me and asked, “Remember that movie we watched, the one from the olden days?”
Groan
I can remember gas costing less then a dollar.
Having to watch the news channel to get your stock up dates, and then phoning in a trade.
Live television.
That only poor people would wear denim jeans and there was no such thing as designer jeans.
Abercrombie and Fitch was a camping store.
The Ford Mustang was named after a plane and not a horse.
Only sailors had tattoos.
Not eating meat on Fridays at all and all that pre-Vatican II stuff.
I’m pretty sure the list is endless.
They’re just thinking ahead. They’ll be the only grocery store with working cash registers after the Cylons take over.
I just hosted a jam session with a 28 year old friend of mine. I mentioned this thread and the fact that so many people had responded to the mention of a Mimeograph. His response: “What’s a mimeograph?”
Oy. :rolleyes:
At least he knows who the Rolling Stones are. I guess that’s all that matters 
“Grandpa, what’s a SYSOP?”
Holiday Inn
Single Bed: $21
Double Bed: $27
(circa 1966)
As long as Microsoft runs our computers, that will never go away.
How about the Turbo switch? If you were lucky, you could automate kicking the computer into high speed with an entry in your autoexec.bat (Daddy, what’s an autoexec?)
Computer-related:
“What’s a BBS?”
“What’s a modem?”
“Is it true there that were really computers with no pictures on them and no mouse?”
The opening line of Neuromancer is already out of date. “The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a blank channel.” With modern TVs, that would mean that it was bright blue.
“What does ‘turn off’ mean?” You push buttons or flip switches. There’s no turning involved in electrical appliances anymore.
If some people get their way with excessive safety in parks, the next crop of kids might be asking, “What’s a ‘swing?’ What’re ‘monkey bars?’” and “What’s a ‘jungle gym?’”
I like manual transmissions better than automatics, but it’s already getting hard to find newer cars with them. I won’t be surprised if my (as yet to be conceived) kids ask me what a “stick shift” is. Forget about “push starting” a car; that’s already passe.
“What’s ‘calling time?’ Is it like syncing with the network clock?”
Hey Grandpa, what’s a “polaroid?”