My father had something called a Dictaphone ™ that used a wide sheet of magnetic tape, wrapped into a loop. Instead of magnetic heads, the device used some sort of stylus to record onto the tape. He could then slip the tape out and give it to a stenographer to transcribe while he put in a new tape and continued on. I think the capacity was something like 5 minutes.
Shorthand – that’s soooo old school. I’m talking the ultimate in 1950s office technology here.
That’s exactly what I didn’t like about manuals. I grew up playing around with our old Smith-Corona manual, but I never learned to type properly until I started using an electric, because the manual was impossible. My pinkies were never going to get strong enough to work those outer keys.
But the term is not as much of as holdover as “dialling” a phone, because the starter turns the engine crank, inside the crankcase.
I thought that calling Limbaugh’s followers ditto heads invoked in everyone’s mind the image of cranks sticking out of their ears as they mindlessly dittoed his goofy pronouncements.
Ooo0! Oooo. . . ! Giant, curved-front cash registers made of wood, with enough buttons to create a hundred-dollar row and with six drawers (and with cranks attached), in now-defunct Eaton’s department stores. Each of the six drawers was assigned to one salesperson.
Eaton’s children’s shoes department with huge x-ray machines to see the child’s foot bones through the new shoes to check for fit. Hey, Kid, stick your feet in that and die of cancer in 20 years.
The hospital near me uses tubes to pass lab results and all kinds of paperwork from one department to another.
how many techie people still talk of an overload as “pegging out the meter”
(as in audio geeks recording on reel-to-reel tapes, or car mechanics looking at the tachometer. )
Hey Grandpa, why do they call these floats “inner tubes?”
hey! my hospital just got those tubes about 6 years ago!
and I remember when white-out came out–a boon, a veritable boon to all typists!
“Two pounds eleven and fourpence ha’penny”
“The First Division” (this used to mean the highest level of football in England. Now, it’s the third highest behind the Premiership and the Championship).
“British Rail”
“Margaret effing Thatcher”
Wallace and Gromit, the recent movie, had a van that needed cranking in the front instead of just turning the ignition. I wonder how many kids thought that was crazy.
I learned typing on an electric Smith&Corona, and… huh. the keys were much steeper than any computer kbd I’ve had. I wonder if that’s why I tend to smack the hell out of the kbds I have, especially the no-angle-laptop kbds. I didn’t have too much of a problem with my grandmother’s manual, either, but I tend to type with eight fingers (nine when I need my pinky to shift). Never re-inked a ribbon, but I had loads of fun playing with the typewriter and using it to write my first baby stories as a kid.
I remember when my dad had his video camera and you needed the entire tape deck in a bag with you to tape anything. shakes head
Thought barbers still used straight razors to trim the neck bits. Mine uses a comb and a serrated razor thingy, not an electric one.
As far as I’m concerned, the White Sox and the Astros won their respective pennants. Kids today think the teams won this new fangled LCS, and don’t know what a “pennant” is. Grumble.
Just when I thought I was the only one who had noticed this tragic, um, change.
Ours has one too, and every once in a while there will be a general memo about being sure to tighten blood sample tubes before sending them through the pneumatic tube :eek:
I remember some sort of blue carbon-type form your could type on and later make mimeographs; you could use this blue liquid to fill in errors.
Feh! I’m only 44, but we had ONE TV channel in the mid-sized Saskatchewan town I grew up in! And it was the CBC!
I can just recall when a local radio station would read out the Saturday newspaper “funnies.”
I remember that there were separate home deliveries of milk, eggs, and bread.
The smell of Oil of Cloves in the dentist’s office.
When we visited my Granny in Scotland in the late 1960s, there was still a horse-drawn cart that came around with the Rag & Bone Man; likewise the smell of coal fires (I guess by then it was probably coke, a result of the Clean Air Act) still takes me back.
When I started at McDonalds in the mid-70s, there were no timers or computers. We were taught how to judge the “doneness” of the meat by eye. And chop all our own lettuce and onions. No breakfast menu, neither!
And the old “Sweda” cash registers (which had a removable crank in csae of power failure) and menu pads: you had to know how to add on the fly, and make change (since the register didn’t tell you). And yes, you counted it back properly!
I had an actual thumb-operated bell on my bike, with a big sissy bar and banana seat. (My friend’s sister had those colourful plastic streamer things on her handgrips, but that was “girly.”)
Has anyone mentioned drive-in movies yet?
This one is spot on…I deal with a fair few teenagers who have to think hard about it, if there’s no analogue clock on the wall
When I was a kid (back in the Mesozoic Era) and my mother took me to Penney’s to buy new socks for school, back in those days socks came in sizes like shoes. None of this one-size-fits-all procrustean foolishness. The socks were measured in a peculiar manner. The child was told to make a fist, and the sales lady would take one sock and wrap it around the fist. If the heel and the toe touched, the sock was the right size. How this arcane bit of juju came into being I have no idea.
Grandpa, do you mean you could actually buy something with a dime or a nickel? Then what did you use for change? What did you use for nearly worthless clumps of metal jangling in your pockets and covering your dressertop?
Airmail.
About a decade ago, I used to drive a Citroen 2CV (exactly like this one - although it had an electric starter motor as standard, the brace supplied for removing the wheel bolts could be used (the opposite end of it from the socket) to manually crank the car; I used this on a couple of occasions when the battery was playing up. Damn I miss that car.
Until about 6 years ago, I had to dictate my correspondence and get a typist to produce it; this wouldn’t have been my choice, but the job was at a company that was quite late in adopting desktop computers and had a generally archaic setup - even when we eventually got computers, they only ran DOS (yes, only 6 years ago). After dragging them kicking and screaming into the 20th century (although they arrived there after the rest of us had passed into the 21st), they had to drop the dictation because they couldn’t work out how to do it with emails (So let me see, I dictate the email, the typist types it and prints three copies, then she gives one copy back to me and I send it… how do I send an email that has been handed to me on paper?)
That reason was that the energy you were putting it was being radiated out of the bulbs as light (well, those parts of it that weren’t lost due to inefficiencies etc) - has to come from somewhere so it comes from your legs.
Actually, I’d say this was completely wrong…thanks to Ebay. The true cost of delivering items is more real to the average Ebayer than it would’ve been to many people a few years ago.
