When i was in high school, you had to face a girl and tell her you were breaking up. Now you have email and messaging. Much easier.
Anybody remember how to work out square roots by pencil?
Spill a Pepsi on your term paper, you retype the whole thing.
When an airplane flew over, people went out to see.
You could see the Milky Way.
You could swim in the rivers and find fish and frogs.
I was never taught that. Share?
I tend to do the guess and check, though I vaguely remember being taught the algorithm method. I can usually find it fairly quickly.
I remember being taught the algorithm method at some point, but never had to use it afterwards so don’t remember the specifics. Looking at the link seems familiar, but I won’t remember the details later.
Oh yes, there was no such thing as a self-serve elevator.
And I remember the escalators in department stores. They got narrower and narrower the higher up you went. And for the last couple of floors the steps were made of slats of wood. Nobody ever knew why.
When I was a kid in the 50s, wherever you drove there always seemed to be people on the side of the road, fixing a flat or other repair. We used to yell out the window “Get a horse!”
You didn’t have to worry about it crashing into any thing. 
Kind of sad, but in 2003 I was outside with some friends and a plane was flying low. Everyone panicked. I did, too.
Mum & Dad have told me many, many stories of NZ before the 1980s and it sounds a lot like a real life version of Pleasantville in many respects.
The “Travel Used To Be More Of An Adventure Until Recently” thing has already been covered, but when I was finishing High School (1998/1999) trying to organise plans for an evening with friends was complicated by TV schedules, because there was no way that so-and-so was coming out if The X-Files was on (for example) and even though everyone had VCRs, there were about three of us (myself and two others) in our social circle who actually knew how to programme ours to record things automatically/on timer; everyone else used theirs to play tapes or record stuff they were watching at the time and might want to see again.
There were always people broken down on the side of the road when I was a kid. We traveled quite a bit and every time we took a trip I saw this.
Cars have come a long way since then.
Not quite a “pre-tech” hardship, but, in elementary school, girls had to wear dresses to school. If it was Really Cold, you could wear pants UNDER YOUR DRESS. If you wanted to climb on the “monkey bars”, you had to wear shorts under your dress.
I did not have a pair of blue jeans until my freshman year in college.