Star Trek (TOS, naturally), The Time Tunnel, Lost In Space, Land of the Giants, Voyage To the Bottom of the Sea, Green Hornet, Doctor Who (classic version), The Night Stalker, etc… were actually COOL!
We had a black & white TV that only had the VHF channels. I’d heard about Star Trek (then in reruns) but couldn’t watch it because it was on UHF. The set finally broker and we got a new one with UHF, yeah! But that week was when the station, after years, finally stopped showing Star Trek in reruns. Never saw any episodes for years.
A visit one summer to grandma up in Iowa and I was flipping through the channels on her console TV, a big credenza-like piece of wood furniture which also housed a phnograph and its record storage. I just happened to hit the pschedelic opening credits of some show I had never seen. It was called “Dr. Who” and starred Tom Baker. I watched the thirty minute episode. It ended with a cliff hanger and I couldn’t see it or any other episode for another year and another visit to grandma’s!
Don’t forget Batman!
Just got back from the barber where the old guy in the chair next to mine talked about working on the new A-6 Intruders when he was in the Marines. They came out in 1964. He said the gun calculator weighed 75 pounds and was less powerful than his current wrist watch. Also, it had a mean failure time of about an hour. Which meant it had to be fixed after almost every mission.
The Boys and I have been netflixing the HELL out of the old Dr. Who reruns.
Which makes me think about what they’ll be saying 25 years from now: When I was a kid, we had to let our streaming media buffer first!
When I left grad school in 1998, I smiled when I realized that I’d never have to use the old microfiche readers again. A few months later, I’m in my new job looking up old, old deeds and plat books on a microfiche and microfilm machine. If I wanted really old records I had to go to the property records office down the street, look through reels of microfilm and get the nice lady at the counter (not the MEAN one) to print it out. But we have since scanned those old books and films and put them on shared drives.
I had internet access to my dorm room in 1989. I could log into my computer in the Dorm, from home. It was awesome. When I left college in 1994, it was still another 2 or 3 years before my State Government Job got internet access to the desk.
My entire music collection fit in a shoebox…well, except for the 7 records…2 of which were scratched.
To this day, there are certain songs that I expect to hear with a skip or scratch at certain points. When I listen to downloaded copies or on the radio, it still surprises me a little to hear it play properly.
Likewise, I’m accustomed to hearing certain songs in a specific order. In my youth, you either listened to songs in the order they were bought, got up to move the needle/switch sides, or fast forwarded to get past the crap songs. Or you made your own mix tape, either with the local DJ talking over the begining and ending of the song or from records/other tapes (at diminishing quality). But you still had the issue of having your songs in an unalterable order.
Now I can make and change preselected lists which I can change on the spot. Or just hit “shuffle.” All in pristine quality.
Those of us in libraries use microfilm every day still - not sure if I’ve mentioned that before in this thread.
Those of us who kept their 83 channel UHF TVs past the truncation of UHF to channel 69 got the bonus of listening into random snippets (one side only) of people’s cell phone conversations.
I was just talking to my parents this weekend about the semi-annual telephone calls we used to make to our grandparents. My parents grew up in Australia, but moved to America when they got married, in 1956. The main communications were letters, but on certain special occasions, like Christmas, we would actually place a call to my mother’s parents.
First my father would call the operator and get the overseas operator, and request that she place a call to my grandparents’ number. After about an hour (maybe it was more or less, this was almost 50 years ago and I was pretty young), the operator would call us back and tell us to hold the line while she connected the call. Once connected, it was a scratchy distant connection, and no one could think of what to say, but we knew we’d better say something - it was expensive!
My father recalls it costing $13.00 a minute in the 60’s, which comes out to almost $90/minute if you adjust for inflation. My mother would have a few minutes to talk to her parents, then each of us kids would be handed the phone for about 30 seconds for our grandparents to hear our voices. Then it was over with a teary good-bye until next time, maybe six months from then.
It just amazes me that I could call home from China on a recent vacation for two cents a minute using Skype!
Ahh that brings back memories of the old Land Titles Office. Long shelves of large old leather lined volumes containing all the certificates of title. A hand tinted diagram of the lot and hand-written memorials recording every transfer, mortgage and other interest in the land. Anything older than about 1930 on proper vellum even!
There were a number of search clerks whose sole business was to look up titles for lawyers and send copies to them. Good searchers could get you a copy within an hour even (depending on how fast the bike courier pedalled). Older lawyers used to talk of the days where property deals were settled in the Titles Office so that registration could be completed as soon as possible.
Sadly gone now since New Zealand digitised all their land records around 2000 or so.
Probably not that many at banks. They used to make us (tellers) do the postings when we weren’t waiting on customers.
We also used to “render” monthly statements - all on the same day of the month! All the bank employees (well, not the VP’s of course) had to stay late and get the statements out. We had to match the paper statement to the customer’s checks (which were all physically filed in drawers daily), go through the checks to make sure there were no misfiles, count the number of checks, fold the statement around the checks and stuff the whole mess into an envelope.
Also bank related, as a teller I used to go through $20K per hour in twenty dollar bills on busy Fridays, especially at the first of the month. No ATM’s, and most of my customers didn’t have bank accounts, so I just cashed checks like a mabbatabba all bleeping day long.
We had “teller machines” that allowed us to accumulate two running totals: cash in and cash out. The machines were full keyboard, and had a capacity of 6-digit numbers. This limitation was actually a feature, because if you made an error in entering the cash amount, you could reverse the entry by doing a “9-out” - entering an amount that when added to the wrong entry came up to a 7-digit number. It was the ONLY way to reverse the cash entry, as a matter of fact.
For me, it’s all about cell phones and tv’s. My parents were both habitually late to pick us up anywhere, on the rare occasion they did agree to pick us up anywhere. We would start to get more and more panicky as we waited but there was no way to get in touch with them. Both of them (they’re divorced so it was at different times) liked to stay out late sometimes - really late on occasion - and, again, there was no way to make sure they weren’t dead in a ditch. So, we’d be alone, late at night, scared that we were about to be half an orphan. Sometimes my mom had overtime and wouldn’t tell us and we’d freak out the same way. If there had been cell phones back then I might not take special medicine today!
As for TV’s, we only had a portable black and white (TV’s were more expensive then) until I was 14 years old. It was old, it was worn out, it certainly didn’t have cable and there was no remote. We were lucky when we got all 4 channels, but, meanwhile, how lucky because sometimes it meant watching Lawrence Welk or some show about current affairs. The dial was such that my sister couldn’t figure out how to select channels and would always yell “Channel Changer!” to get someone else to do it. She didn’t admit she didn’t know how to do it though so we’d fight about her being lazy. The horizontal hold or vertical hold or whatever did not work and there were times we’d drag my mom out of bed yelling “Fix it! Fix it! Now you’ve gotta mix it!” at 7 am on a Saturday. She get up, fix it, go back to bed and it would immediately start flipping again.
And, of course there was no DVR. If you had to pee during Dark Shadows and you couldn’t wait till the commercial because you were too young to realize not everything had to be immediate and there would be a commercial soon, you were screwed. I used to imagine that I could stick a metal plate of some sort into the back vents of the TV so that it would stop and wait for me. The real DVR was not even possible to imagine!
As many have noted, the big difference with modern technology (well, the internet) is how easy it is to Look Stuff Up.
I will give you an example. I noticed the phrase “See You Next Wednesday” in the background in John Landis films (and the Thriller video) in the Eighties. I did not have a clue why it was there, or what it meant. And there was, quite simply, no easy way to find out. I wasn’t that interested as to scouring the film books in a bookshop. I might have happened across it in a magazine. But it was a mystery until the internet.
The other big difference is how easy it is now to actually see footage of bands playing. Back in the day you either had to hope for a glimpse on TV (Top of the Pops or The Old Grey Whistle Test over here), or go and see a movie like The Song Remains the Same. I first saw the latter on a double bill with Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii - at the time I had only seen a few photographs of Pink Floyd, and didn’t really know what they looked like, let alone who sang what bit. Unthinkable now.
I remember the smell of our old B&W TV. It smelled hot; I guess it was the tubes inside or something. And I actually remember seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live, in not-so-sharp black and white. Ours looked kind likethis, but the screen was a little larger and the cabinet was white.
Blue laws kept a number of businesses closed on Sundays. When we went to church sunday mornings in the 1960s, sometimes we would stop at a gas station on the way because they had a vending machine that sold a quart of milk. No grocery stores would be open. I remember when they were finally repealed (1975?) one gas station owner pointed out that while he could legally sell gasoline on sundays (a necessary item), he wasn’t allowed to sell wiperblades under the old law.
For NFL games, about 5 minutes before halftime the announcers would always tell you to stay tune for the great half time show. Which was showing the high school band at the stadium that inevitably played “up with people”. Finally when Monday Night Football started to show 90 seconds of highlights from the previous sunday (and young uns would be amazed how popular that was. Howard Cosell got death threats if some team wasn’t shown) so soon CBS (NFC) and NBC (AFC) started to have studio shows at halftime and show other games highlights.
At least every three hours, the picture on the tv would start to roll and you had to adjust using the dial located on the front of the tv below the picture.
8 track tapes. I was given one as a high school graduation. I remember playing a particular tape once in college when some guy walked by, said “that’s a great song, please play it again”. I explained that an 8 track had no rewind button, that I would have to fast forward it for a couple minutes and hope I hit the right spot again.
Lots of the early cassette and video decks didn’t have a real time counter. They had some kind of counter of whatever design they wanted. So if you had three movies on one VHS tape, you would have to write somewhere that “The Lonely Lady”, the second movie on the tape, started at 1246. No index markers either for a new recording.
I bought my first VCR in 1982 when I was stationed in Japan. I told the officer who was going into the main shopping center for electronics in Japan (Shinjuku?) that I wanted a remote control for it. You’d have thought I was buying gold plated handles for a bathroom sink the way he reacted. But he did…it was on a 25 foot cord.
Oh yeah, the non-time based counters on VCRs and tape decks were a bitch weren’t they? And I swear there was no consistency between diferent brands.
God yes, I had a bunch of tapes with movie titles and numbers written on the labels, and they only applied to my VCR. If I loaned you a movie, you were on your own chump!
I’m fairly certain that they counted feet (or some other measurement distance), based on that’s how counters worked for reel-to-reel air traffic control recording equipment. Notice that the capstan moves as a constant rotational velocity, but as there was more or less tape on the reel, the counter would move at a different rate.