My dad picked up the LifeSavers PepOMint habit, probably when he quit smoking, hence the habit of keeping some in the car’s ashtray.
Heh. In 1980 I wanted to make a call from Paris to Oxford. I had to go to the French post office, reserve the call, wait 20 minutes before they got to us, go into a room, and have the call put through. No one there, and no answering machines back then.
When I did my MIT campus visit, I stayed with people who played the tie lines. They got from the MIT system to the Lincoln Labs system to the Pentagon. They said they once called a bomber over Vietnam. (This was 1969).
Ah yes, the good old days when no line was secure. In '71-'72, I was in the dorms, on the same floor as a couple of other physics students who had built a Blue Box, and spent off hours in the gentle art of phreaking.
*Well, they were able to supply free long distance and prank call London until it was discovered they had several thousand dollars worth of electronics in their room, “appropriated” from several labs in the physics department.
My mom was an immigrant, and back in the 70s she exchanged a lot of these with her relatives back in her home country. I remember being about 9 years old and putting one of these in a typewriter to pound out a letter to my grandmother.
Speaking of which, have typewriters been mentioned upthread? Because ISTM they are definitely in the dustbin of our cultural history. Our household had one in the 70s and 80s, but there wasn’t much use for it after we got a computer and a printer.
I got a Royal Portable typewriter when I was about 13 years old (circa 1963), for either my birthday or Hanukkah or my Bar Mitzvah (I forget which). I put myself through school with it. I still have it to this day, although I haven’t used it for years and years. Can you even buy ribbons for it any more? It used the same ribbon reels as Model 33 Teletype machines.
I taught myself to type (not very fast, but better than hunt-and-peck) on an ancient manual we had in the basement. IIRC, I had a small portable in college.
It was a huge advance when they came out with correctable ribbons. No more messing around with Wite-Out! I rented an IBM Selectric to type my thesis on in 1980. No telling how long it would have taken me without the correcting feature.
I inherited one of those ancient black and gold manual typewriters. I used it for years, until I lent it to a friend who accidentally dropped it down a flight of stairs.
My father insisted that I take a semester of typing during my senior year of high school (early 1983). I was unhappy about this; I suspected that I would be terrible at it, and it would drag down my GPA. My dad’s reasoning was, “If you know how to type, you won’t have to pay a a co-ed to type term papers for you when you’re in college.” (Yes, my dad used that phrasing. 
)
They also gave me a typewriter – a refurbished Smith-Corona portable, which came in its own case.
In the typing class, I managed to get up to 20 wpm, on a manual typewriter, by the end of the semester, which was what was required to get an “A.” I took the typewriter with me to college, and used it a fair amount, but by the time I was in grad school in the late '80s, I was doing my papers on an IBM PC in my work-study office, and printing them on the laser printer there, so I no longer needed the typewriter.
I still have the typewriter, though it hasn’t come out of the case in decades. I thank my dad for making me learn touch-typing, as it’s been a boon for me in my various jobs (something that I’m sure he didn’t foresee back then) – thanks to years of typing on computer keyboards, I’m now a 70 wpm typist.
I found touch typing the most useful class I took in high school.
I came back to look at this thread I started.
OMG, it’s probably the longest thread I ever was OP for.
Oh, and I had to take typing in high school and I’m glad I did. It’s come in handy.
I learned to type on a typewriter that our family bought from a school surplus equipment sale. I got pretty good at it eventually.
Imagine my surprise when we had to take a typing class in high school. I sat down at the typewriter, and it actually had the letters printed on the keys! Our school-surplus typewriter was from back in the day when they thought it would be a good idea to have all black keys so you had to learn to touch type. I aced that class!
Actually, I ended up taking three semesters of typing in high school. I was good at it (the class champion), and the second semester was much more interesting, since it was based on how to format a letter and things like centering headings and making tables. My third semester was an ad-hoc class; the typing teacher was also the athletic director, so I ended up typing the schedules and bulletins for all the sports in the school.
I also got to make ditto-sheets (the blue ink duplicating pages - they smelled heavenly!) and the mimeograph sheets with the characters cut into a plastic film. The things we had to do before copy machines…
Obligatory link to Fast Times at Ridgemont High; I show this to my college students. Some were quite a bit older than the typical just-out-of-high school bunch, and we had to explain why sniffing the handouts was so common.
Did anyone else have a family typewriter made of cast iron? Ours was a heavy sucker. I think it was an Underwood.
Telephones, too, were once made out of solid neutronium. Or whatever, they were heavy and wherever you put them on your desk, they stayed put. Modern phones are so featherweight, if you so much as breathe on them they fall off the table onto the floor.
I inherited a 1940’s Royal and a 1960’s Olympia. My mom signed me up for a
summer school typing class when I was in jr. high; it may have been the
most useful class I ever took.
Telephones were heavy and rugged because they were not sold, only rented, and the telephone company provided free repairs. So it was in their interest to have a telephone that never failed.
Which brings up another dustbin item: If you wanted a second telephone on an extension (under the same number), you had to pay an additional fee and rent one from the telephone company. (I don’t recall if running the wires for the extension line was gratis, but the homeowner wasn’t supposed to do it.)
Book from a telephone install person: Hollywood Unlisted by Alan Kimble Fahey. Definitely non PC in spots.
My best friend suggested we take typing in summer school between junior and senior years. We did. Hands down one of the most useful classes I took in high school. I thanked her a few years ago for suggesting the class. We thought we were cool because - this was 1981 - we got to use IBM Selectrics.
Yeah, old movies show people bashing someone with a phone and concussing/killing them, and it was perfectly believable. Try that with an IPhone sometime.
You can’t even strangle somebody with the iPhone’s handset cord.