Oh, yeah. And to watch the bad creature features, I had to stay up to midnight (in Atlanta) so I could catch them on the UHF station, WTCG, channel 17.
Nowadays, WTCG is better known as TBS and is piped to pretty much all US homes that have cable/satellite. It was the first “superstation” (i.e., the first over-the-air tv channel available in all 50 states) when it began being aired by satellite in December, 1976.
One day, when I was 12 or 13, I went to the branch bank, with my passbook, and withdrew five whole American dollars. Then, with my little brother in tow, walked to the bus stop, and got on the bus to the mall across town. The mall had an arcade. Woot! Of course, we blew through the 20 quarters in a hurry and soon had to go back and get on the bus back home.
Now days, if my kid wants to play a game, he just has GameFly deliver it to the door.
I majored in mechanical engineering. I started undergrad in 1988, and I was one of the last classes to actually be taught drafting with real drafting hardware:
-mechanical pencils with thick lead and a special sharpener for them. Once you got a needle-sharp point, you could tweak it on an emery board to get just the right chisel-tip for making the line the way you wanted.
-drafting tables with a thin rubber top surface, so your compass points could sink in and not wander. You taped your drawing sheet onto the table and then used…
-T squares and french curves for producing straight/orthogonal and curved lines.
-templates for basic geometric shapes.
-scales for measuring real-world lengths on scaled drawings.
They taught us how to draw objects when seen from various perspectives, figuring out which lines would be visible on the drawing, or hidden (drawn as dashed lines, if at all). Two academic quarters of this stuff.
By the time I got to grad school, CAD software was available, with all kinds of built in aids for common drafting operations like shading, hatching, hidden/center/phantom lines, and all kinds of features whose existence was enabled by the software, like the ability to group objects in the drawing and move/rotate them as a single unit, bring items to the foreground, background, and so on.
Halfway through grad school I was introduced to solid modeling software, which enables the user to create 3-dimensional models of parts and assemblies. I worked with it a little bit for a couple of parts in my research, but didn’t do much more with it until a few years ago, when my employer sent me for training on Solidworks. Now I can draw 3-dimensional things on the screen, assemble separate parts into an assembly, even make a machine with moving parts so I can test things like range of motion, mechanical interference, contact area, and so on.
Pretty cool stuff, for having started out with pencils.
That’s small-time. We have models of entire cars, with moving components to test things like range of motion, mechanical interference, contact area, and so on. But that’s still small-time. We can build the car using models of every bit of machinery from start to finish. Think 400 robots, conveyors, actuators, cylinders, clamps, servos, car bits and pieces, and even fake people, all in one, viewable simulation.
Hmmm… I wonder why there’s no Sim Factory video game???
Phone calls weren’t cheap. When I was in college (1993-98), we did have direct-dial phones in our dorm rooms, but the long-distance rates were something like 25 cents a minute (and I’m pretty sure that was the night rate). Everyone who called home often got the phone-bill-shock experience, at least once. I certainly did.
I thought it would be a good idea to spend $400 on four more megs of RAM for my computer. Fortunately, I never got around to it.
We had portable music on headphones, but you had to lug the tapes and (later) CDs along with you. Walkmans and Discmans ate batteries.
When you wanted to get online (when I was in college and grad school, 1990s), you had to dial in first. The places that the then-future Mr. Neville and I dialed into never had enough modems, so this could involve waiting upwards of an hour.
Computer disk space was limited. I remember calculating, around 2000, that the astronomy department I worked for had about a terabyte of disk space, in total. Some quick Googling found a one-terabyte external drive on Amazon for less than $100.
Big monitors were rare, expensive, and heavy. A 19" monitor might weigh as much as 50 pounds. Moving computer equipment around was, of course, a much bigger deal than it is now.
TV dinners took 30 minutes to cook in the oven. The only food you could get delivered was pizza.
People tried to do actual cooking, not just reheating food and making popcorn, in microwaves. There were many special sets of dishes for this purpose. The results were generally pretty bad.
Your music and book shopping was limited by what you could find in your local shops. These were (for me, at least, until the 90s) generally like the Waldenbooks in the mall, not huge bookstores with coffee bars. Sometimes you took trips to out-of-the-way used book or tape stores to look for obscure stuff.
You had to pay bills with checks, and envelopes and stamps. That sucked.
Mr. Neville learned observational astronomy using glass plates. They had switched to CCDs by the time I took the class.
Film and picture developing weren’t cheap. I got scolded at least once for wasting film.
Taking videos was an even bigger deal. My family never had a video camera. My grandfather did have an old movie camera, and would sometimes take movies.
If you didn’t have a computer in your dorm room (as I didn’t, until 1994), you had to go down to the computer lab and type up your papers before you handed them in. You hand-wrote your drafts, then typed up the final copy to hand in.
I didn’t, because I knew long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive, so calling home meant calling collect. (Do people still make collect calls?)
Watching “videos” meant Dad had to set up the movie projector and screen. In those pre-VCR days, you could buy Super-8 movie reels of scenes from theatrical movies (we had some from Star Wars and Mary Poppins, I remember) and cartoons.
There were 1-900 phone numbers that commercials on MTV would try to get you to call. The catch was, you got charged for calling them. My sister got in trouble over this, when she called in to vote for her favorite video.
There were tape clubs that promised you “8 albums for a penny” (or something like that). Every month afterward, they’d send you a card, and if you didn’t send it back on time, they sent you a tape that you had to pay for. You didn’t really get much if anything of a discount off the normal price of the tape, either. I remember my sister complaining about “Columbia House Music Scam”. There were also “book clubs” that worked the same way.
When I was a tyke, around 1972, my friend’s dad was a band director at a fairly well-to-do nearby high school. i remember feeling like I was visiting rich people when he’d borrow a 16 mm film from the scool library, such as the silent Phantom of The Opera, and show it in his basement for the kids. Good times.
Quantum Link and Compuserve and Prodigy cost you your monthly fee plus 6¢ per minute. There was no getting on and off quickly, either. Fast, expensive modems were only 2400 bps – that’s bits per second.
Later on, you rented videos. You signed up with Blockbuster or Erols or another video rental store (there were lots of them), and you picked out a video to rent from the store. They charged you extra if you forgot to rewind the tape before you took it back.
Someone needs to port that stuff over to civil engineering. I can’t help but think that the ability to model traffic within the simulation, and have the engineers actually simulate driving in traffic on their designs would help their road design immensely.
Back to the OP… I recall how bill paying every month was much larger of an event than it is now- it was some odd combination of reconciling one’s check book and writing checks to pay your bills, with an eye toward the check float and pay days.
Nowadays, you set up auto bill pay on the day you want, and as long as you organize it all intelligently, you’ll almost always get your bills paid and not have to go through a lot of effort to do so.
VCR clocks were hard to set. Many people never figured out how, and it always blinked 12:00. If you couldn’t understand the directions in the manual (manuals were often badly written or translated, and sometimes got lost), didn’t know anybody who knew how to set your model of VCR clock (it wasn’t standardized- every manufacturer and model could be different), and didn’t want to pay anybody to do it, you were stuck. You couldn’t Google to find other instructions on how to do it. You couldn’t set a VCR to record something in advance if you didn’t set the clock, though you could still press record and record what was on at that time, or use it to play a tape.
Some PC games required you to keep the manual around. Either when you started the game, or at some later time in the game, you’d have to type a specific word from the manual into the game, or it would stop running. This was done to keep people from making illegal copies of games. If you wanted to play an illegal copy, or just found word hunting in the manual annoying, you could get a cracked version.
If you couldn’t figure out how to do something in a game, there was no gamefaqs or Google to help you. There were gaming magazines and game hint books, but of course you had to pay for them.
If you wanted a cup of coffee, it was lunch counter swill, or made at home Folgers. gourmet coffee shops were only to be found in college towns, and they were full of hippies!
I rememer as a kid begging to see this new movie. Mom took me and we had to wait around the back of the building because the line was so long. I got in, but had to stand in the back and watch the movie. I still had lots of fun watching Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster.
I remember when the local library got this computerized card catalog terminal. It was a CRT screen with underlined areas and words lightly burned into the phosphor. I played with it and found an input that would jump out of the library card catalog form to a plain command line prompt. Playing around there I found a command that tried to connect to the police department computer which was on the same network. Unfortunately it knew the library terminal wasn’t allowed access.
I would be driving and the Volkswagen would idle a bit hard when I stopped. So I pulled over, got out, and opened the back hatch. There the engine chugged along and the fan belt spun right in front of me. I reached over and turned the idle screw until it settled down and ran smoothly. Then I got in and drove off.
I created my own card catalog of my books by typing information onto 3x5 index cards using manual typewriter. It was the type with the semicircle of keys on posts. Each key pressed had to swing into the middle to hit the paper lifted by the roller and it was fun to see how many keys I could get to jam up together and stay jammed when I let go of the keys.
I worked in the college TV station (what a novelty) to get money for college. I opened the office door carefully because the aisles inside were only two feet wide. To fit in all the VCR recorders, “Red” had squeezed together these 6 foot tall racks all along the walls and created a maze in the middle. You would go ahead 6 feet, turn left, then left again back behind the inner rack and then to the right to get to where the desk was hidden away from the door. A small 13 inch TV in the far corner let you view the TVs in the classrooms. A large pushbutton switch panel underneath select the TVs or one of the VCRs to view.
The instructors all needed multiple VCR copies of their lectures. When one class ended and before the next began, you had to pop all the tapes out, stack them, then gather your blank tapes from the giant blank tape stack, and get them all into the recorders before the next class began. If all that went well and “Red” was out, you could patch the TV into the cable TV he’d wired into the room and watch R-rated movies if one was on.
If it was your turn to erase the tapes, you would go to the storage room where the used VCR tapes were [del]tossed[/del] stacked. You turned on the giant brick and it began humming in a way that soon got under your skin. To get clean VCR tapes you would stand for hours running tape after tape over the degausser. If you got good at it you could shave off a bit of time doing a mind-numbing type of wax-on-wax-off dance with the tapes over the surface of the degausser.
I friend told me about a microwave TV station that played movies (and X-rated ones late at night). I bought the bootleg receiver and its 18" dish. I needed just a bit of height to get line of sight to the signal, so I poured cement into a bucket and inserted an aluminum pole to make a tower. Except when the wind blew too much and the trees whipped in front of the beam, I would get a great black and white signal.
I often got the job at work of making blueprint copies. I would take the giant 3 foot square drafting paper with its pencilled lines to the makeshift closet with the copier. As the copier warmed up the ammonia begans to drift up and sting my eyes. I fed in the edge of the paper and turned the knob to advance the original at the right speed. Too slow and the ammonia pours on thick, the copy is too deep blue, and the lines are hard to see. Too fast and the copy is faded out from too little ammonia. The fresh air afterwards was almost giddy.
There weren’t ATMs. You had to go to the bank, during bank hours, to get money. And if you went out of town and forgot to go to the bank to get money first, you could be in real trouble. (This happened to my aunt and uncle once) From what I’ve heard, fewer places accepted credit cards back then, too. Now, I’ve been down to about $12 in cash in my wallet for God alone knows how long, and doing something about this is far from a priority.
My family tended to be late adopters of technology (my parents still are), and I remember before call waiting and answering machines. You used to give people 10 rings to answer the phone when you called them. Now, it generally goes to voice mail or the answering machine after 4. I also remember not being able to use the phone, because one of my parents was “waiting for a call”. I don’t remember ever not being able to go out because we were waiting for a call, but it could have happened.
OTOH, your answering machine had a little light that blinked if you had messages, and getting those messages was just a matter of pushing one button (at least, this was how ours worked). No annoying beeps to tell you you got a message, no calling voice mail, no voice mail passcode.
It was and is a bigger deal if you’re likely to not have enough in the account to cover the bill, at some point. It’s always been easier if that isn’t the case.
It also had a little cassette tape inside to hold your outgoing message, and another one to collect the incoming message.
Once upon a time, there were no answering machines and no voice mail at all. If someone called and no one was home, you were out of luck. Offices were stocked with pads of pink, 1/4 page “While you were out” slips.
No Google Maps. No cel phones. No GPS unless you were military.
Get lost on the way to a gig? Fuck you, get here. Can’t understand the directions? Fuck you, get here. Road signage crappy? Fuck you, get here. Can’t find a working payphone? Fuck you, get here. Get there 15 minutes late? Fuck you, period.
Yeah, from prison.