My first car didn’t even have a radio.
Now I feel absolutely ancient. 
My first car didn’t even have an engine. We ran with our feet thru the open floor.
Good one. But, when I was in high school, I’d keep a recordable cassette in my boombox, so that if I heard a good pop song on the radio, I could just press the RECORD button.
In this vein: a “coffee shop” was like a Denny’s or Norm’s–just an inexpensive restaurant where they usually didn’t serve alcohol. They were really planned more for whole meals, although you could have just coffee if you wanted. If you wanted just plain, regular coffee it wasn’t that bad, but they weren’t great places to hang out, obviously. Excessively lit, noisy when crowded, and Muzak, if any music at all.
Now the meaning of “coffee shop” has changed to mean what we used to call coffee houses. The ambience of the major chains isn’t terrific, but it is a whole lot better than the old kind.
One thing you could do then, and can’t now, is listen to TV on the FM dial. It’s not something I did very much, but there were a few times when I wanted to keep following whatever it was I was watching, but had to go somewhere. I was able to get the audio for at least some of the VHF channels near the lower end of my FM dial in the car.
I wasn’t always able to make it work, and it’s impossible now, since the digital changeover has made the whole concept of “channels” obsolete.
You had feet?
[Yorkshireman]
Luxury.
[/Yorkshireman]
That’s another thing that bears mentioning… back in the 70’s, cars really sucked. They were poorly made, had trouble starting (hell, some had trouble being turned off), were smoky as hell, burned oil, tires didn’t last anywhere close to 50k+ miles, windshields were made of plate glass (not the safety glass of today), seat belts were improperly placed (if they were used), and the rust! Cars used to rust, kiddo’s, and I remember riding in some death traps where the rust got all the way through the undercarriage, allowing me to view the street as it whipped on by…
Emphasis mine. While you’re mostly right, safety glass was in 100% use by the 70’s. Hell, my own company has been using it on every vehicle since the 1920’s.
Fortunately, I have never been in an accident serious enough to test the issue, so all my experience is what I was shown in graphic driver’s ed films back in '80, 81.
I’d look past the tech stories. Yes, there are tons and we all lived a very different life in terms of technology.
Hardships? The pace was slower. While the adult generation probably enjoyed that pace, certain things about the slower pace were murder. On one hand, I would write a letter to my first girlfriend at summer camp. ( Her parents were stupid rich. She went to Tripp Lake Camp in Maine. ).
I would wait for her to get it. She would write back. I would wait to get her letters. Or, she would write to me and our mail would cross in the mail. The lack of speed was maddening. Phone calls? I’d call the dining hall pay phone. Sometimes I’d get lucky and hear her voice. Usually, not so much.
The pace of movement, communication and expectations was different. Perhaps better for one key reason.
Back in the day, we were nearly completely engaged in the moment. Lacking highspeed electronic distractions, when sitting at a table with friends we were WITH friends. When talking to someone, we were mentally engaged so much of the time.
I decry the distractions. I do love my toys, but I admit that they create a splintered focus. Communicating is different because of the toys.
I miss sitting alone and listening with zero distractions.
We can watch TV in taxicabs here. The GPS (which is often satellite-based, and KICKS THE ASS of those horrid NeverLost crappy systems Hertz puts in their rental cars), when it isn’t updating traffic info, can switch over to TV mode. The driver can toggle back and forth between the two.
Thinking about it, though, I remember watching “Little House on the Prairie” reruns in the taxi I took to my English teaching job back in some far-flung berg back in 1989.
Oh yeah, my first car, which I got in 1983, was a 1971 Dodge Dart. To this day I still have to remind myself not to floor the accelerator repeatedly when starting a car.
I took driving lessons here last in Tokyo last summer, and as I rode the brakes going into a curve, the 20-something instructor blurted out “yeah, that’s how they used to teach driving way back when, but nowadays we teach people not to ride the brakes…err, not that you’re that old or anything…err…” 
I got talking to some people last weekend, telling stories about growing up. I mentioned how in 1966 my father had an air conditioner installed in his 1963 station wagon because we were going on a cross country car trip in the middle of summer. The thing would occasionally cause the car to overheat…spent about an hour right outside Yosemite Park for an hour watching car after car enter until it cooled down. Another guy said it was common for factory air conditioners to cause cars to stop working after an hour…lots of morning hour traffic jams because of that.
If you did work on cars or other machinery 30 years ago you had to keep two sets of wrenches…one English and one metric, although every other size roughly matched. Nowadays pretty much everything is metric.
channel 6 audio could be tuned by some FM tuners.
channels still exist, still the same ones, with digital tv with a different type of signal.
That reminds me, it was too long ago that we were all at risk of wrist cramps because we’d have to turn and hold the key until the started had successfully engaged the engine, and then use our poor, little brains to remember to release the key so that we’d not damage the starter once the engine was engaged. Now it’s either just a push of a button, or just engage the start contacts momentarily and let the car start itself.
I’m a Brit and a company in Los Angeles was paying for me to fly to LA. They had to buy the expensive airline ticket that was sent to them through the mail. They then had to send it over to the UK via high security courier. I then had to go to the courier depot with about three proofs of ID in order to get my hands on the ticket. I then had to guard it with my life, more or less, because if I lost that actual paper ticket it would have been next to impossible to actually get on the plane. This whole process took about 3 weeks.
This happened as recently as 1998. Times change even faster than we think.
Today? The company Paypals me the money. Five minutes on Expedia and I’ve got the e-ticket. Done.
In A Face in the Crowd (on TCM again last night), Patricia Neal does roving interviews for a radio program. She carries the tape-recording machine in a good-sized suitcase. She plugs the recorder (a reel-to-reel) into a wall outlet. Another cord connects the recorder to her microphone. If the person she’s interviewing moves around and the cord doesn’t reach, she has to move the whole damn thing.
The whole process of finding rare records.
When I was a teen, it was all about digging through record bins at every used record store you could get to. Once you had exhausted that option, you had to use Goldmine magazine. This was a tabloid size publication pretty much filled with ads placed by some of the cheapest bastards to ever walk the Earth. A Goldmine page would be divided into 12 smaller ad boxes (I think), each ad box being a single typed page of listings of records. So if you were looking for the Irish 7" of Kate Bush’s Night of the Swallow you had to look at every single damn ad in the magazine. You had to at least glance at every dealer’s ad to see what they specialized in - if they only had Rockbilly, you could skip to the next one, but for the most part it was, every month, a several day ordeal grovelling through the tiniest fucking print the world has ever seen.
Imagine reading the phone book every month. Now imagine if the phone book was not alphabetized.
Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have MMORGs. We had to perform our fantasy/Sci-fi adventures in an analog fashion. You had to pull out some paper and write down all the various characteristics of your profile, including base odds of successfully performing tasks and whatever mathematical modifiers might be present. You couldn’t just click on a character and use it. You had to sit down and try to think of what you wanted in a character, all before you could even begin playing. There were no visuals to help you out. One of your group had to describe it to you in words while you tried to picture it in your head. Instead of a pregenerated menu of actions to choose from you had to think of what to do on your own. I mean, you had to sit there and just IMAGINE what you were going to do. And there was no automatic way of knowing whether or not your attack hit. You had to physically generate a random number with some dice, factor in various modifiers, then compare the result to a table printed in a book or often on a cardboard screen and then write down the damage to the recipient.
And to do all this, everyone had to come together in the same place and socialize.