And order pizza.
Which you had to pay for with cash.
Maybe I missed it earlier in the thread, but remember camping out all night in front of the record store that would be selling concert tickets? The only way to get concert tickets back then was to line up as early as they would let you, and hope they didn’t run out before you got to the front of the line.
Yea, and as you shot an arrow you had to erase “19” and replace it with “18”, and so on. After a while that box was a smudged, shredded mess and you had to record your arrow elsewhere.
Thirty years ago yesterday, I went to London to see Pink Floyd perform The Wall. When I got home, I got out a journal, and painstakingly wrote (yes, with a pen) a blow-by-blow account of the whole show, describing each animation, each puppet and so on. With diagrams. All because I didn’t want to forget what it looked like. Sure, I bought the next Melody Maker and other music mags for the reviews - but they would have one photo only. For all intents and purposes, the only record of the show was in my memory, and I had to transcribe it or lose it.
Last month, I went to London to see Roger Waters perform The Wall. The next day, I overdosed on YouTube videos, Google image searches, Facebook updates, blog entries, online reviews…
LOL heck yes. Last time I did this was in college. My childhood pal Mitch and I slept out for Genesis tickets. We were like 25th in line. In Philly at least, you had to wake up once an hour to go initial next to your name to prove you’d done your time and been there all night. No signing up at 10pm and sneaking back in at 7am !!
Come early morning, some guy offered us $ 50 for our place in line. We took the money and bolted. The show sold out in seconds. We went to IHOP, had breakfast and went to sleep. 
And which was the more gratifying experience?
I think you know the answer to that, and I was going to mention it in my original posting. But we can’t uninvent technology.
I did deliberately avoid looking up any footage, photos or reviews in the run up to the 2011 show, so everything was a surprise. But I daresay some folks don’t even do that. Everything’s just so… accessible these days.
Did anyone mention having to actually compute the bowling scores with your own brain? I’m still great at doing that, but there’s sure no call for it anymore.
Hell, I’ll take it back even a bit further. I remember a few lanes that still had pinboys when I was a kid. They got tipped at the end of the game, by throwing some change down the lane to them.
Is that the origin of the word guttersnipe ?
I just had the following conversation on using iPhones to take great photos:
Ha ! Tell your kids you spent High School reeking of acetic acid and they’ll think you’re a veteran stoner.
The scent of a darkroom is one of the great olfactory joys in life…
Been there, done that. At one point, I was the #1 source in the US of Kate Bush videos. My wife and I were constantly dubbing tapes, compiling collections for other collectors, trying to get other rarities. There were some traders who would have something you wanted, but you wouldn’t have anything they wanted. So you’d mail them a copy of your local TV Guide. They’d look through it and see a show they wanted, and you’d record it for them. I got Kate Bush on the Kenny Everett show from a guy, trading it for recording the old movie Topper for him.
And our first PAL to NTSC conversions were so-called “optical” conversions - literally aiming an NTSC camera at a PAL TV set. You can’t imagine how much it sucked. Combine that with the inevitable loss of multiple generations of analog VHS, and you got something just barely watchable.
Known and loathed by all old credit-card hands as a “knucklebuster”. My friend who sells merchandise aboard the Blues Cruise has to use one still. In theory, she could process credit cards via the ship’s Internet connection, but they charge insanely high rates for it.
Remember it will. I’ve been trying to get Stuart Brand to let Google Books make them fully available - they are currently only available in the nearly useless “Snippet” view. It is not as if they are going to re-print them.
I much preferred the old method. The people who were willing to wait in line for hours got the best seats, got closest to the artists, and the artists got an excited audience and delivered a better performance for it. Now, the best seats go to whoever has the most money, or random schmoe.
As hard as it it to believe, there are still people who buy those things, and claim they prefer them!
Hook it up to a HD tuner, and you will get the best HD signal you’ll ever see. The damn cable companies always compress the network signals more, so they can fit more channels on their system.
Heh…I was at the Kansas City Amiga Users Group meeting where Tim Jennison showed his prototype. There were actually Macintosh users who bought Amiga 1000s as a way to get color images into their machines.
Remember when friends would drop by to listen to a new album? It was a social thing, instead of everyone having their own headphones.
Did Anyone ever make their own 8 track tapes with your favorite songs?
My local record store had this 8 track recorder. It was like a jukebox. You’d tell them which 45 rpm singles you wanted on the 8 track. They’d load them into this machine. They’d sell me a blank 8 track tape. We put quarters in the machine and selected our songs (just like a jukebox). Because of copyright, we had to punch the buttons. The employees wouldn’t do it.
At one time, I had six 8 tracks filled with my favorite 1970’s songs.
Tut, tut. They’re were much more than 48 great songs that came out of the 1970’s.
Sitting around listening to an album. That social activity defines my generation. LP’s were expensive.You would invite friends over to hear the latest Yes album. Or Billy Joel. Or CSN. Or Queen. Wait, did I mention Yes ?
My first record player was my grammas old one. It ran at 16, 33 1/3, 45 & 78. It tuned in am, fm and worldwide shortwave. I ran huge lengths of antenna cable and listened to other languages late at night. It was magical.
I remember when we had our second TV. The first was a big 48 in set in a box, the big living room monster. Then we had a second TV, a 14 in black and white set in the kitchen. Dad would watch the news on it during dinner.
So the inevitable “Two things on at once” debate would happen, and one set gets the big TV in the living room with the couches and color, and one set gets the tiny black and white kitchen set and kitchen chairs. But we were happy we could watch the show.
I remember my family getting HBO on our cable in 1976. They would not start broadcasting until around 430PM everyday and the newspapers would carry carry them on their tv listings. They would mail you a monthly guide telling you what they were broadcasting that month,
Paychecks. Actual, physical pieces of paper you got every other week or for some of us once a month. That you had to get from someone and then race to the bank at lunchtime because the bank closed before you got off work on Fridays and if you didn’t deposit it and get some cash, your weekend was ruined.
My first few jobs paid in cash. Actual real money (with coins as well) in a buff envelope. Every Friday. It was great.
If we wanted hot chocolate, we had to heat milk in a pan on the stove (careful not to get a “skin” on top)!
When I took my first college programming classes (1976), we had to punch the programs onto cards at keypunch machines (one line per card), arrange the cards carefully in order, and submit the “deck” at the computer room window. Then, we’d go do something else for a couple of hours, and come back to get our printout, which indicated that we had a typo on the third card. Lather, rinse, repeat…
Did anyone else play a computer game called “Nuclear Destruction”? It was played by mail. We all picked a country and signed up for the game. We’d get our starting printout and then mail in our actions for the turn. After everyone’s actions were received (or the time limit expired), they’d run the calculations and mail us each a new printout.
I still count back change to customers in my bookstore, and my kids (who both work there) have been able to do that since they were 13.
I was one of the lucky few that had an 8-track RECORDER. When I wanted to make a tape of an album, I’d sit for ten minutes carefully planning which songs would go on which tracks so there wouldn’t be a “kaCHUNK” in the middle of any of them and the dead space at the end of the track would be minimized. It meant, of course, changing the order of the songs, which drove my friends up the wall.
I remember building a massive spreadsheet in VisiCalc on my Apple /// computer, which I had upgraded to 256K of RAM. I got everything debugged, went to save it, and realized the floppy diskette held only 140K. I had to rebuild the spreadsheet as two separate files and manually copy numbers from one to the other.
I still have my CRC Handbook of Mathematical Tables. I have my 12-inch magnesium Pickett sliderule in its leather belt case, too! Did anyone else learn to use one using a 6-foot or 8-foot long sliderule that hung on the front of the blackboard in class so everyone could watch the teacher? That was in high school in 1975!