When I was in graduate school (not even undergraduate, mind you), I had to type out my research papers on a typewriter. To edit the drafts, I would cut the paragraphs out and shuffle the pieces of paper around on the table to decide what order they should be in.
A couple more.
Up until, I dunno, the early 80’s, most cars were rear wheel drive. There’re probably a lot of advantages of rear wheel drive, but handling in the snow is not one of them. You couldn’t go out on a winter’s day without seeing cars spinning their rear wheels helplessly in the snow. Once front wheel drive came out, there were far fewer times where you’d have to pile out of the car and help someone out of a drift. To be fair, this may also be due to better tire technology. But since I got my All-Wheel Drive car, I’ve never bothered with snow tires, much less studs.
Photography. I just was going through some old photos from 25 years ago and it was just depressing, even if you ignore my hair style of the time. Photography used to suck in so many ways. First of all, you needed film. You got (at best) 36 shots for something like $5.00. The film was ISO 400 at best and usually ISO 100 (to avoid grain). That meant that you were always fighting motion blur. There was no autofocus. No through the lens metering for flashes. Bottom line, you got maybe 3 or 4 keepers out of 36 shots, a handful of adequate snapshots, and the rest were blurry crap. No instant review of the pictures, either. You could feed the film incorrectly or have a bad camera setting and never know until the prints were developed. Those irreplaceable vacation photos? Oops.
Then you got the photos printed in crummy tiny format with crummy matte finish to hide the multiple flaws. You had pay more for larger photos and glossy finishes. Most drugstore prints were far from archival – 20 years on and they’re faded and orange.
There was no Photoshop — you lived with scratches and dust unless you wanted to pay for professional refinishing. Then you looked at the pictures once or twice, maybe showed them to friends and then put them in a shoebox with the other 250 rolls you’d taken. They’d go in a closet and never get viewed again because it meant digging through 1,000’s of old photos to find the ones you wanted.
Now: much, much better point and shoot cameras, much less DSLRs. 30X zoom on a point and shoot is not unheard of. Instant feedback on the photos with histograms of exposures. Much higher ISOs with less grain. You can fit 1000’s of photos on a single card. You can get lab quality prints on a cheap home printer or view them on a huge flatscreen monitor or HDTV. And you can fit years worth of photos on your * terabyte * hard drive. All of them immediately available and they never degrade in quality or fade and you never lose the negatives. And this all happened just in the past 10 years.
Getting your hands on actual money. Here banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm; smaller branches actually closed an hour for lunch too. In a supreme act of generosity they opened til 5pm on Fridays. So we got a whole 22 hours’ opportunity a week.
To get money you had to bring your passbook - like a little passport - physically into the bank, fill out a withdrawal slip (always printed in a forbidding RED), queue for a week and hand it all over to the teller. She would then compare the signature on the slip with the one they had recorded in a big book behind the counter to make sure you were really you. And yes, that meant you could only do it at your exact branch. You account was at that branch, not with the bank as a whole. If you went to another branch they’d have to go backstage and ring your branch to confirm you really had enough in your account to cover the withdrawal.
One day it got to 4pm and I realised I had no cash - none - and was going out that night. I had to go to my branch and knock on the door, and negotiate with the branch manager to be allowed in to get $10 or whatever it was I needed to get through until the next day.
Yes, I remember that well. I also remember banks having individual queues at each teller window, rather than a single line feeding all windows. Pick the wrong one and you could be in for a very long wait.
Also, as this was pre-credit cards, either you had money or you didn’t. So forgetting to get to the bank on time on a Friday could make for a very miserable weekend.
Mind you, since the shops were only open from 9 am to noon on Saturday and were closed all day Sunday, there were limited opportunities to spend the cash anyway. 
I cringed reflexively at the word “Ecoutez”. The year after I finished my high school French classes, someone actually broke into the school and stole the tapes, just so they wouldn’t have to listen to them for a week.
It’s a lingering bastion of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” schtick; they’re trying to protect a generation of French students from traumatic flashbacks.
My small town had a Sonic and all the other hamburger places were mom & pop. It did take longer to get a burger. Some of the mom & pop places sold these paper thin patties. Mostly you got bread and a whiff of meat. No drive up. You had to get out of your car and walk to the order window.
McDonalds, Wendys, and Burger King arrived within the same year. I think around 1969 or 70. Within a few years most of the mom & pop places were gone. In fairness, the chain places did sell bigger burgers and they didn’t have paper thin patties. They have drive up windows and you get the food quicker.
I was a cashier in Yosemite Valley in 1976. The cash registers were electromechanical. You had to call out the price of every item and then key in the amount, holding in a taxable item button if necessary. There was a deposit fee and maybe an alcohol button also. You had to recognize each fruit or vegetable and remember or look up the price and then move a dial on the scale which corresponded to the price per pound which told you the cost. When you totaled the transaction would give you a taxable subtotal which you would look up (I had it memorized) the tax on a table.
You’d take the customer payment, lay it on the till and then count back the change. $1.86, $1.90, $2, $3, $4, $5, $10 and 10 makes 20! There was no automatic calculation of change to be returned. Kids can’t fucking count these days. Some Hispanic gal counted back the change to me the other day at Rite-Aid and I was shocked, amazed and nostalgic. Clearly she wasn’t born in America.
cramming meant really cramming, like typing.
My school c. 1977 used these film strips.
I use PowerPoint in all of my classes, and have the habit of occasionally saying, ‘Bink!’ right before I click to a new slide. My students have learned enough not to question me at these times, nor when I say, ‘Next slide, please. Next slide’ because whenever we did film strips at school, the kid responsible for turning the projector knob invariably stopped paying attention after awhile.
Now there’s a 60’s summer memory! Playing jarts while completely drunk. Ah, the ER visits and the stitches without painkillers. (For some reason they couldn’t or wouldn’t administer painkillers if you were drunk)
Banking during the pre-computer era.
Every checking or savings account had a ledger card. Every deposit you made or withdrawal was recorded on the ledger card and the balance increased or decreased. Interest on savings accounts and CD’s was calculated by hand.
Loan accounts had similar cards. Each payment you made reduced the loan principle after the interest portion was manually calculated and deducted.
It was amazing when the computer age started and card systems were being converted how many battalions of clerks became unemployed.
Getting your oil changed was always at the dealership ( or corner gas station, when gas stations were also fix-it shops instead of stop-n-robs now) and it was an all day affair to just get your oil changed.
The phones were attached to the wall and if you were lucky, had an extra long cord so you could stretch the cord to another room for some privacy in convo’s.
I still have major issues with people hearing me talk on the phone.
Our Ipods were record players.
That reminds me: we had a thread a while back asking if anyone recognized this item.
Oh yes I do.
I work for a Fortune 10 company, and we still don’t have automatic slide advance technology. Depending upon the locale, either the presenter is sitting at his own laptop advancing the slides, or the administrative assistant is advancing the slides, or in the fancy “arena” the IT dude is advancing the slides.
Payroll. My first job in the Air Force was pay and travel claims. Everyone had to come to the base cashier on payday and pick up and sign for cash or a cheque. We manually calculated pay and bonuses and every 3 months we spent a full weekend reconciling each others pay records.
Less than a year after I arrived there I worked on the pilot direct deposit system. We still did everything by hand but after it was all done we sat down at a single computer terminal and entered the deposit amounts for each person. That file was saved to a floppy disk and couriered to the bank.
Regulations stated we should have had one payroll clerk for each 350 service members but that covers both pay and travel claims. Since I was at National Defense HQ in Ottawa we had a busier than normal travel requirement but no extra staff which meant we were handling between 700 and 800 payroll files each. Now I’m sure our office of 20ish people is handled by 3 people and they actually get lunch hours. However they can’t smoke at their desks anymore 
No pics of Monsieur Marsaud, but I did get this.
I remember those little things well. They must’ve had a name, but I don’t recall having ever known it. They were just those little thingies you put in the middle of a 45 so it would play on a standard spindle.
We had a 45 spindle that you could put over the regular spindle for when you were just playing 45s so that you didn’t need the insert, but other than the one we owned, I remember seeing them only rarely. Which raises the question of why the 45s had the bigger hole in the first place. Was there a time when the special spindles for 45s were the norm?
The iPad2 is faster than an 80’s Cray:
And doesn’t need fluorinert.
I was born in 1960. I was very fond of Science Fiction/Monster movies. I would eagerly peruse the Sunday paper’s TV listing for the upcoming week. When something was coming up, I looked forward to it all week. It was so special! When it was on I had planned snacks and nap-time to perfectly sync with the movie. It was great!
Something to be said for 4 simple channels and only at midnight on Friday or Saturday to see these glorious spectacles.
Now with Netflicks, DVD’s, TIVO, whatever, no kid knows what excitement there was waiting for a cool, old movie to play.
oh well, that’s life.
And now a recording! No wonder I was bored by it. :rolleyes: