I remember a lot of these, including using a slide rule and splicing recording tape.
I remember “correcting” a ditto master that I made for a handout for a talk in high school. I retyped the correct word immediately after the typo, then scraped the transferred wax with the error off of the ditto master, leaving a gap with a very faint blur.
Actually, the guts are pretty similar. Oh, you don’t have line numbers any more, and the programming interface is all pretty and requires you to drag stuff around, but way down deep it’s basically BASIC.
I first learned BASIC on an IBM/360 timesharing system using MUSIC (the McGill University System for Interactive Computing). Taught college courses in HP/2000 BASIC in the 1970s and in Visual Basic in the 2000s. I actually got paid for writing BASIC code on Apple ][ and Apple /// computers.
It’s all BASIC in the sense that a banana split is still ice cream.
Yeah. A lot of these aren’t obsolete. Rabbit ears, for one.
Calligraphy isn’t obsolete. I can still do a basic font if you give me a leftie nib, but nothing professional quality. Wait, cursive is obsolete?! :eek: I call BS on that one. Sure, a lot of the geeks here can’t write in cursive for love nor money, but a good number of us still can.
Also, a lot of those skills look like ones that’re still around in some form thanks to SCAdians.
I would have thought that there’re still snillions of coffee percolators around in less than highbrow dining establishments. :dubious:
I use pencils for crosswords, and I don’t have a real sharpener, so I just use a penknife or my lockback knife to shave it down properly.
Speaking of obsolete mathematical skills. I must have been one of the last to learn how to use logarithms and log tables to calculate with in high school. (Logarithms are still around, in plenty of contexts; they’re just no longer used by humans to simplify complex arithmetic.) And I remember being delighted to learn how to “cast out nines” to check my arithmetic. (I was never taught this in school; it’s something I happened to pick up from a book I got from the library. Yes, I was the kind of kid who checked out math textbooks to read.)
Awww, come on.
I will show you my obsolete skill:
I can read 7-track computer tape by eye with magna-see.
(of course just the 556 bits/in density. No one can read those high-density 800 dpi tapes!).
I can write a thoughtful and original thank-you note. As opposed to, say, the one I received yesterday. It was from a baby shower for one of Mr. S’s relatives (I did not attend, as I doubt I could pick her out of a lineup and vice versa, but I sent a gift to be nice). (I might add that it was addressed to “[Mr. S’s full name] & [my first name].” They managed to get my name right on the invitation (we have different surnames), but that was sent by the hostess, not the mother-to-be.) Here is the entire text of the note:
“[Mr. S] and [Scarlett], Thank you for the [list of items]. John & Mary.”
Really, why bother? Real correspondence is such a lost art.
I don’t get the rotary phone being mentioned so much. I can understand the stories of young people who have never seen one trying to press the holes (though even that is a bit of a stretch actually - haven’t they seen old movies?), but all these people saying, “although I haven’t used one in decades, I probably still could”???
What the…? How is this a “skill”? Of course you still could. That’s a bit like saying, “I haven’t ridden a bus for ten years, but I suppose I still could.”
I could repair an electro-mechanical telephone exchange - Click click click rattle.
I can, and still do, repair most home electronics without throwing the main board away - but its actually not very economic, its just pride that won’t let me do this.
As a result my main sound system is around 40 years old, and its much better than most systems out there.
I can still use a whip and top, whatever happened to those ?
Although its not an old skill, I can do almost all of the maintenance work on my house, mainly the quick fixes, but seems now that tradesmen can only do one small part of a job, so a kitchen fitter cannot put in the electrics, and neither can clear a drain or drywall.
It seems very old fashioned these days to be able to walk onto a job, do everything associated and leave it clean and with no further issues to resolve.
Its like the skill base has narrowed and become shallow.
It also seems old fashioned in the modern ‘touchy feely’ world of prisons and prisoners, but I despise almost all of them, I wouldn’t give them the smell off my crap - compassion and understanding for the scum I ain’t got.
Whatever happend to holding yourself responsible for your own actions instead of complaining about your upbringing ?
Since I spent my summers growing up with my Mennonite grandparents, I can:
milk a cow/goat
battle enraged hens and end up with the eggs
butcher a chicken/duck/goose/pig
tie off and blow up a pig bladder to make a neat balloony thing
whittle
fish and put my own worm on my hook
handle a shotgun (up to a .12 gauge)
balance on a chamberpot
I can BinHex or UUEncode a file attachment, break it up into 256K segments, upload it to the mainframe, and subsume it within the 7-bit ASCII email for you to save as separate text files, concatenate, and decode on your end.
I can usually get your frozen MacOS 9/8/7/6 application to leggo the computer so you can gracefully save your other work and do a restart, by invoking the programmer’s key and entering SMFA700A9F4 PCFA700 G
I know how to reset the PRAM under System 6, and I know how to expand the system heap so you can run System 6 with all those disk accessories and INITs and CDEVs you like to run.
I know how to install an FKEY, and associate it with ⌘-Shift-7, so as to convert your line endings from Mac-centric carriage returns to Unix-centric line feeds, so you can copy and paste entire paragraphs into a terminal window.
I can sort of use a typewriter. And by that I mean that after I spent twenty minutes getting the damn label properly lined up, I can type it. Ask me to replace any of the components or anything, and I’m at a total loss.
I think I can also still do extremely simple Basic program. I went through a phase in late elementary school where my parents could not tear me away from my “Basic for Beginners” book. QBasic on a Gateway 486, IIRC.
Despite working in a library, I have no idea how to use a card catalog. Nor do I know how to use a turntable, despite having several of them in the library.
I think I’ve seen a credit card imprint machine at a flea market-type place. How the hell does that work - does the merchant just take it on faith that the card is real and valid and not going to be rejected, and somehow submit all the slips for authorization at the end of the day or something?
Your memory may be faulty here. 78 RPM records were completely passe by the time “The Twist” came out, and the gramophone was ancient history. It was released on 45 and on 33-1/3.
I can:
Use a skate key.
Use a church key.
Use spring bindings on skis.
Use a manual shift.
Use a slide rule (log log duplex decitrig, baby!)
Do math in my head faster than many people can use a calculator.
Diagram a sentence.
Drive a bulldozer with rabbit ear controls (most have joysticks nowadays).
Spit shine a pair of shoes.
Thread a movie projector.
Make most any food dish from scratch.
Sew on a button.
Find and pick blueberries.
