We had a black 'n white TV that used an audio remote control. Instead of an infrared light, the remote made a high pitched metallic “boing” that was picked up by a little mic on the TV that allowed you to channel up/down.
It worked…but any similar noise such as coins in your pocket, putting silverware away, or the dog rattling the tags on his collar, would usually cause the TV to bounce up and down channels randomly. We learned what sounds not to make while watching shows, though the dog was always an unpredictable problem.
I can’t believe that it took 28 posts to get to the TV remote. Think about the number of times you change channels in an evenings viewing (if you’re anything like me). Now imagine walking that 10’ to the TV and back each time. And then going back to adjust the antenna because the picture changes when you move away from the TV. Next to the wheel, the remote is the most important technological breakthrough in history!
I had a girlfriend who could scream in the pitch needed to turn on/off the TV.
Imagine how scared we got (we were teenagers, you know), when in the middle of being “alone” together one afternoon, the TV suddenly turned on. We thought we were seriously nakedly busted.
I remember the Christmas when my mom got a 4-slot toaster. Before that she would lay slices of bread out on a pan and put them in the oven.
My brother used to copy cassette tapes. He would borrow an original from a friend and put it in his stereo. My grandmother had a cassette tape recorder with a small microphone. He would set the microphone in front of one of the speakers, hit “play” and “record” simultaneously, then quietly sneak out of his bedroom. Obviously, the copies were crap, but they were no worse than listening to these songs on a (pre-XM) radio.
If you missed the movie when it was in theaters, you had to wait until it came out on a network TV station, maybe 5 or 10 years later.
If you wanted to look at a picture of a naked girl, you had to go to a shady store, pick out a magazine and shamefully carry it to the checkout counter. And if you were too young, then you had to get somebody older to buy them for you. And that creepy old guy might expect something in return.
Years later, after the internet was invented, a guy from work showed me how to get onto come college sites at yadda/college/yadda/alt/pics/yadda and download a big file. Then I used a program that he gave me on a floppy disk (1.44 MB!) to translate that file into a .bmp with boobies. The whole process of getting one picture of boobies took about an hour. After it was done, I said “I could have just gone to the 7-11 and bought a magazine!” (I was old enough by then.)
BTW, the previous story is from 1995, when our supervisors got the fancy 15” CRT monitors. The rest of us used the standard 14” monitors.
Back before XM, if you had a long trip, you could find a station that would come in for an hour or so. Then you had to find another station.
It is a really good movie but it’s 1985 and you’d be surprised how much hell can be avoided with a cell phone and an ATM. Heck just an ATM would have saved his ass.
I’m amazed at how computers date a movie/TV show. I used to think it was pretty cool when they’d throw them into a show to show how ‘Modern’ the cops were (They had Amigas in Miami Vice!)
Now if they’re not LCD’s you know the show is old. (Heck, even the LCDs in Star Trek:Enterprise are starting to look a little long in the tooth.)
I remember Bank Street Writer! I got an Apple IIc as a High School graduation present in 1987, and that machine was a godsend in college. At the time, people with their own PC computers in their dorm rooms were rare, so anyone needing to use computers had to wait in line at the computer lab. As you can imagine, things got quite crowded at term paper time. Not only did I have a computer in my room with Bank Street Writer for a word-processor, but I was also the proud owner of a thermal-head dot-matrix printer -much quieter than a true DMP. I also had a color ribbon for special occasions.
As a result, I not only never had to wait in line at the computer lab, I could also compose my rough-drafts on the computer, then go back and make edits and such for the final version. In those days, everybody else had to write stuff out on paper by hand, first, then type up the final draft when ready. I remember quite a few students on campus who turned their fast-touch-typing skills into a lucrative side-business by offering to type up papers from hand-written notes for a modest fee.
Nowadays, not only does everyone have a computer, printers are almost unnecessary when so many teachers/professors let you e-mail them your papers.
We have one in my office, it makes a good cup too. One time we found a roach in the cup that dropped down but were able to dump it prior to the coffee coming.
This just happened to me and my friend at this year’s county fair, a few weeks ago. Some cell phones just don’t get good reception out in the country.
As to the OP, my high school graduation present was a typewriter, and it was nice.
People used to drive around town on Friday afternoons after they cashed their paycheck at the bank, to pay their bills. I still know some people that do this, and I tease them about getting into their horse and buggy to go pay their telegraph bills.
A friend of mine had an 8mm version of Alien that was about 20 minutes long and surprisingly good. They basically cut out all the tension-building scenes, which turns out to be the bulk of the movies. With just the violence, it was tense and shocking enough.
would often overheat in the summer, especially if you were stuck in traffic with the A/C on (if you were rich enough to even have the luxury of A/C)
typically got about 15mpg; getting over 20mpg was only possible in those tiny, tinny imports
just had AM radios (only luxury cars had FM) with those push-buttons that actually moved the needle across the analog dial;
reaching 100,000 miles was worthy of a party
would get flat tires so frequently that changing a tire was part of driver ed
Entertainment…
“Music Television” meant watching bands play live on Ed Sullivan or the Tonight Show
If you lived in a large metropolitan area like NYC, you had 7 channels (including PBS)
Even those few TV stations would go off the air late at night, and show a “test pattern” for the next few hours
most homes had just one TV, and color TVs were expensive luxury items
the news was only on about twice a day, in the evening and late at night. An earthquake could strike a state away, and you might not know about it for almost 24 hours
Medicine:
your doctor or dentist would let you take home your just-removed body parts, like your appendix or wisdom teeth (now they’re considered “hazardous medical waste”)
you went to just one doctor, a “general practitioner”, unless you had something really exotic
getting your tonsils out was extremely common
Computers:
filled rooms the size of football fields; the idea of a “personal” computer was pure scifi (I just read somewhere that the iPad2 is more powerful than the original Cray2 supercomputer of yesteryear)
were out of reach even for many smaller colleges; you used a “timeshare” terminal to login to the mainframe at the nearest large university
9600bps modems were available and unbelievably fast, but expensive (at my first job, we actually had a 300bps connection to Bahrain for a major bank’s electronic funds transfer network)
disk drives were the size of washing machines, with removable “disk packs” the size of a large hatbox that weighed about 20 lbs and only held a few hundred KB
Telephones:
pushbutton phones were new-fangled luxuries
“tone-dialing” was not even available everywhere, so when you bought a new phone, it had a “tone/pulse” selector switch on it, to let it work with older networks
before that, there was only one phone company, and anything and everything had to come from them - in fact, you couldn’t even buy your own phone, they were all leased from the Ma Bell!
when cell phones finally came out, they were >$1000, the size and weight of bricks, and only worked in a few downtown areas in large cities
you young whippersnappers don’t appreciate how good you’ve got it…
My boyfriend at college and I had a collect call code. He just had access to a pay phone at school, which was more expensive to use than my home phone, so he would call with a collect call from Egbert (or whatever the false name was that we settled on - I don’t remember), I would refuse the call, then call him back at the pay phone. It was a few years after that when it became almost impossible to find pay phones that would accept incoming calls. Sorry about that.
Unless you had a VW Beetle. In that case, you had long lost count of how many times you’d rolled over the odometer. However, you’d also lost count of how many overhauls and engine rebuilds you’d done, but that was ok, because there was a robust social network of VW mechanics and parts. Our yearly cross-country trips also involved making sure we had a little black book of VW mechanics along the way.
It was a magical logistics network whose secret has been lost to time. No matter what part you dropped or destroyed, no matter what small roadside town you were in, my parents would make a phone call (10 cents!) and a guy in a greasy hat would show up a couple of hours later and get us back on the road
Has anyone mentioned horizontal/vertical hold on a tv? It was annoying as hell to keep having to adjust it, especially since you couldn’t do it with a remote.
