When I was learning to fly the instruction kit came with a plastic circular slide rule to calculate such things as crosswind component. The flight test had answers that differed by fractions of numbers and the slide rule just wasn’t accurate enough. But I had recently purchased a large screen flight calculator that not only gave precise answers but it prompted for the right input. Yay science. I have no idea how to use a circular slide rule anymore.
Damned dirty smelly hippies! What have they ever done for us!
If you wanted to get movie times and didn’t have a newspaper handy, you called the theater and listened to a prerecorded message listing the 5-10 films showing at what time. There was no, Press 1 for Pineapple express. Press Two for Hot Sorority Sluts. You had to sit through the whole enchilda to get the freaking time you wanted for the film you wanted. AND, every farking time, someone would start talking to you during the announcement telling you when the movie you were interested listing.
So, you’d have to listen to the whole speil all over again.
My first car (a VW beetle that was older than I was - it could have voted!) had a manual choke, and its indicators were little arms that flipped out of the pillar behind the door and were (very dimly) lit from within, and its rear window was about the size of a dinner plate. It had a 6v battery, which dropped to about 4v by the time it got to the pathetic excuses for headlights. Turning them on seemed to make the road darker. Seat belts were retrofitted, fortunately as the dashboard was solid metal and would have been instant death to your forehead in any collision faster than walking speed.
Before that I used to get taken to school in a little bus (yes, the original short bus, or as we called it then the Spastic Bus) which had no indicators; instead the driver had a mechanical hand of white metal, that could signal “pulling out” or “stopping” by cunning use of handles and levers. He used to let a privileged boy sitting just behind him do all the signalling. Luckily there weren’t many cars on the road in those days.
I was in the last class at my high school to learn typing on electric typewriters instead of computers. (Actually, the changeover happened halfway through the quarter; so I started out on an electric typewriter but then switched.) We learned how to calculate the distance of a line in order to center it, and how to use correction paper, etc. I had a feeling even at the time (this would have been 1993 or so) that we were learning a skill that was about to become totally obsolete.
Not at all true.
You could get (nasty, disgusting) coffee from vending machines as well. 
Yup, a paper cup would fall down (and hopefully not bounce and land on its side), with coffee being poured into it.
Apparently, they still make the things but it’s been years since I’ve seen one myself.
I once saw one at a truck stop on a school trip. It was right next to a vending maching that dispensed hot food like french fries, sandwiches, or chicken nuggets. Even the pictures of what the food was supposed to be looked nasty and the few guys in our group that actually bought something spit it out after one bite.
Oh God, I do not miss this. I had the phone number for the local movie theater memorized. I remember that my hometown’s main movie theater had a glitch in the line so that occasionally when you called in for listings, it would route the call to the desk instead, and a person would actually pick up. So you’d have to say, “Sorry, I just needed listings” and hang up and call back to get the automated message.
Not only that, but the on TV we had through most of my childhood, the plastic channel changing knob broke, so we kept a pair of pliers atop the set and when we wanted to change the channel we would have to stand up, walk across the room, take the pliers from atop the set and use them to twist the metal stub that stuck out in the middle of the channel changer. Good times…
Hey, when I took typing in high school, in 1975, we used manual typewriters in class!
I did have an electric one at home.
Oh Og, I remember that crap. To this day I still can’t do the math properly to get the center of a page. Do they still teach typing [or keyboarding] in high school, or is it assumed that most, if not all kids can type?
I treasured my Walkman when I first got one, maybe around 1995 or so. When the batteries started dying, the music would play slower and sloooooower until it finally stopped.
The little theatre across the border from my hometown still has phone listings. The same lady has been doing it for as long as I can remember. Her Maine accent still makes me laugh.
I couldn’t afford a walkman. My generic tape layer didn’t have reverse, you had to turn the tape over, press FF, wait a bit, turn it back over and press play to see if you’d gone far enough back.
I had an 8-track player. There’s nothing to compare to that moment in a particularly long song when it suddenly goes quiet and then “kaCHUNK”, followed by resumption of the song.
Man, 8-tracks were stupid, even back then.
Similarly, exotic food was Italian or Mexican or Chinese. Sushi, Indian, Thai - that was hard to find and cosmopolitan.
I don’t know about high schools, but Whatsit Jr. is learning typing in 3rd grade.
I had an adapter gadget thingy that let me play cassettes in my 8-track player.
We had these things in Houston called “Key Maps”, which I believe were produced by the Key company. In Dallas/Fort Worth, they’re called “Mapsco Maps”.
Anyway, these things were 3-ring or spiral bound books of map pages that were roughly 1 mile square, subdivided into 16 (25?) lettered smaller squares and that covered the entire metropolitan area. There was a street index in the front where you could look up something like “Kirby Dr.” and then it had a series of listings telling you what page and letter that say… 1800 Kirby Dr. was at.
There was also a large-scale map with the page squares and numbers overlaid over it, so if you knew roughly where the place in question was, you could just go hunt on the map page, or at least know which entry in the street index was the right one.
You still had to know the Dr. vs. Pkwy. vs. St. stuff or you’d get sent to the wrong place. You still had to figure out how to actually get there- I recall many a photocopy of the large scale map and the page in question with highlighted routes to indicate the route.
Exotic food definitely differed depending on where you lived; I grew up eating Mexican/Tex-Mex food, and Chinese food, and I remember Japanese and Greek/Mediterranean restaurants being fairly common in Houston in the 1970s, but I don’t recall really seeing much in the way of Thai, Indian or Vietnamese being common until I was in high school (mid-late 1980s).
And no computers or microchips in car engines. If something broke you raised the hood and tinkered. if it was major, maybe the repair guy at the corner station, but only if your neiighbor was stumped as well.
And unleaded gasoline was only available at racetracks for racecars.
Someone upthread mentioned tire studs for winter, my dad was on the team at Alcoa Aluminum that developed those, oops.
True enough. However, more places took checks. In fact, most places took checks, but required a buttload of ID. I used to have my driver’s license number printed on my checks, just to save time.