I agree with TheLoadedDog, and would like to add that “old fartism” knows no “certain age”. I know this from being one before my time myself. 
Or, if you were really living on the edge, ignite a section of the strip with your thumbnail to make it fizz, flare, and smoke – and run the risk of having the powder build up under your nail and then ignite. Ow! That hurt like a bastard! 
Nice, heavy cameras made out of steel, with knobs and dials on the top for things like shutter speed, film speed, pictures taken, film rewind, and that nice big lever for cocking the shutter. Only battery on the whole thing was for the light meter. You had to adjust the aperture with a ring on the lens itself. None of this using two buttons and a thumbwheel to navigate through 80 different options on an LCD screen the size of my wristwatch’s face (and yeah, I only use analogue watches, digital is so tacky 
)
I remember when my dad first handed me his Pentax Spotmatic, and I thought the aperture ring was to make the Super Takumar 50/1.4 lens zoom in and out. Wait, camera lenses that don’t zoom? Who the heck would buy a stupid thing like that?!
Hell, I’m running into people now who are like “Why do you use that old film camera when this little 8 megapixel digital camera takes pictures just as well and fits in my pocket?”
Sometimes, it’s reassuring to know that despite all the various developments in technology, we still keep our shoes on our feet with bits of string.
A few slices of suburban Australiana…
For Brisbanites, Channel 0
The 30 seconds or so of a clock, showing the second hand sweeping to 6 pm, as the news came on each night
The news being made up of largely local stories
Public Service league football results making the sunday night news.
Television prgrams which began on the quarter hour, and the little two to five minute programs local TV stations used to run to buffer their shows - “Just A Minute”, “To Market, To Market” and “Handy Sam”, a primative Tim The Tool Man who’d hawk handyman tools in a disinterested montone.
“Sessions” at pubs on Sundays
Shops in designated 'resort towns" closing Wednesday afternoons to trade Saturday mornings.
Redcliffe being one such resort town…
Brisbane had a fantastic local Rugby League competition which just withered and died after the great satans (Brisbane Broncos) arrived. But the BRL was vibrant, passionate and vital and it’s a great shame it’s heroes and legends and history aren’t celebrated at all by the powers that be.
mm
A few things from my childhood:
Smudge pots. Back in the old days, before those battery-powered orange flashing lights, road construction was marked with oil-fed open-flame smudge pots. Of course, back then they were, without exception, grimy black, not the pleasant colors of the ones in the picture, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t use citronella oil.
Good Humor trucks. The highlight of any summer day was hearing the jingle of the hand-operated bells over the windshield of the converted pickup with the open right side. None of those vans with a big window and horrible synthesized music, like you whippersnappers have now. The Good Humor man would get out of the cab and stand right next to you, opening the small side port to retrieve your ice cream bar from the mysterious foggy interior of the insulated cargo bin that was cooled only by large chunks of dry ice. And he had a cool change maker on his belt. (I haven’t seen one of those in decades.)
Streetcars. Although streetcar systems still exist (especially in Europe) they’ve all but disappeared from American cities. My home town, Baltimore, had a complex streetcar system until 1963, and as kids my sister and I loved to take the ride from our home in Towson to the “end of the line” in Ellicott City. (Baltimore now has a very limited “light rail” system, but it’s just not the same.)
Burning leaves. One of the great pleasures of autumn used to be burning the leaves you raked off your lawn. The fire was an obvious attraction for a budding pyromaniac like myself, but the smell was also very pleasant and evocative.
Now on to some slightly later things related to my early career in audio-visual production.
8mm film. An earlier poster mentioned Super 8mm films. That’s the advanced technology! Before Super 8 (which made the sprockets smaller and the image area larger), there was standard 8mm. And in the earliest 8mm cameras, you shot dual-perf 16mm stock, exposed one longitudinal half of the roll, then turned it around ran it through the camera again, exposing the other half. The lab would process it, slice it in half, and splice the two strips together. (There was, of course, no sound.) Later on 8mm film stock and cameras to shoot it came along. There were even 8mm cartridges you could just drop into the camera without threading.
VTRs. Before Betamax and VHS, we used video *tape *recorders, not video *cassette *recorders. Whether they were high-end broadcast-quality units, like this Ampex 2-inch quadruplex unit (the size of a refrigerator), a semi-pro machine like this IVC 1-inch VTR (my studio had one just like this one), or a B&W EIAJ half-inch recorder like this Sony AV-3600, they used open reels of tape and had to be carefully threaded by hand. Back before you could hold a digital video recorder in the palm of your hand, this is what a portable video camera and recorder looked like: The famous Porta-pak. Back in the early 1970s, we really believed this technology would revolutionize the world by putting the means of media production in the hands of ordinary people. As someone said, it’s taking longer than we thought.
Darkrooms. Previous posters have talked about still film cameras, but no one’s mentioned darkroom work. Unlike many of the other things we’ve discussed, I have very little nostalgia for the hours I spent standing in the dark, smelling chemicals, winding film onto processing reels, shaking the tank every thirty seconds (tap it once or twice each time to dislodge bubbles that might leave blotches), exposing test strips, trying different contrast grades of paper, waiting for prints to dry, and so on. It took forever to get mediocre results and longer to get really good prints. And expensive.
Now you can do millions of things with Photoshop that would have been simply impossible even in the best equipped darkroom, all while sitting comfortably at your computer in ordinary light and with no smelly chemicals. That’s progress!
Embarrasing kid story: when I was about 6 or 7, I saw one of these marking a pot hole in a street near my house. I ran to get my mother to see it because I thought it was a bomb. It was solid black and looked like the bombs you used to see in cartoons.