I’ve still got one of those in the back of a drawer someplace…
I was a freshman in college in fall of 1992 and I remember going to this presentation that was being given by the journalism department and this old guy going on and on about the “information superhighway.” It was a boring lecture other than that, and of course, we all thought he was a little crazy. We did have computer labs at that time where you could go and use a primitive email and chat with people from different places, they called it the VAX lab. I never did forget that old professor and his information superhighway, and finally gave him the respect he deserved when the first versions of AOL started coming out. He was right!
But we still call record albums “albums”, even though they haven’t been anything like albums for 60+ years.
Grandma kept her 78’s in albums. If I wanted to hear Frankie Laine sing Mule Train, I found the right album, then the right record, the right side of the record, then had to place the needle in the right spot so as not to scratch the record.
I had completely forgotten those! They’re a great intermediate step between an abacus and a calculator for helping to develop an understanding of place value, though.
I think this is the adding machine that my grandmother used to use to do the farm accounts. I remember adding up huge columns of numbers on it for fun.
When I was in grade school in Washington State inthe mid-80’s, we had an assigned project where we were to gather information on a town in out state and write up a paper all about it (I think mine was Wenatchee?)
The method we used to gather the info was not encyclopedias, but we were to write a letter to that town’s Chamber of Commerce with a self-addressed stamped envelope included requesting pamphlets and any other information they could send.
I started college in 1993, it was interesting because it was right on the cusp of the technology explosion. I remember signing yearbooks my senior year of high school, and one friend saying, “get an email address at college.” I only vaguely knew what an “email address” was, and wasn’t sure if I would need it or not. My freshman year I still regularly wrote letters to my friends at other colleges. By about March the letters stop - we had all figured out how to use email.
Most people went down to the lab in the dorm next door to check their email. You could tell how many messages you were going to get by the way the POP client downloaded them. If you got three in a day, it was AMAZING. You were the most popular person on the internet.
Yahoo was just starting to Index the internet, using human indexers. You could go an look at what was new every day! It didn’t even fill a page! There was a “site of the day” - webcams were novel and popular - usually something like fish swimming in a fish tank, or the amount of coffee left in the machine at an office at MIT.
If you wanted internet in your room, you had to register with college telecom and get an ADI box (asynchronous Data Interface) which unlike a modem allowed you to use the line for data, and still get phone calls on the same line. My sophomore year was the first time the number of people who wanted an ADI exceeded their supply.
You had to handshake the ADI manually by hitting =-=-=-=-=-= at the right time. I found out about the Univ. of Michigan MERIT Mac software Archives - downloading a simple game, like a pacman knock off or Snake, took all afternoon. Then you had to figure out about binhex or other compression schemes. If I found an .sea (self-extracting archive) I thought it was SO cool.
you could use Internet Relay Chat to talk with people at other schools, but most people didn’t know about it. It could be kind of flukey and laggy sometimes, making conversation frustrating to impossible. If you wanted to talk in private you had to agree beforehand on the time and channel name.
I remember programming the fax machine to transmit in the middle of the night whenever possible for cheaper phone rates, as late as 1999.
I remember being 10 and wanting my own phone (landline) so bad. My world was rocked so hard when cell phones became main stream and had affordable plans. I still didn’t get one until I was 18, though, and could afford to pay for it on my own. :o
The past: Go to the Motor Vehicle department to do, well, anything.
Wait in line for an hour. Get a form to fill out. Wait for another hour. Be told you don’t have the right form. Repeat. Motor vehicle departments in those days were grey, soulless dens of Kafka-esque bureaucracy whose very walls were permeated with the years of rage and hopelessness of frustrated citizens. If you had to do business with the MVD, you pretty much planned on it taking half a day and probably two trips.
Now: Log on and renew practically anything. If you actually have to show up at the MVD, there’s usually still a wait, but then you’re greeted by a cheerful clerk who whacks a few buttons on a keyboard and you’re on your way.
Also:
The past: If you wanted a record album that was out of print, your best bet was to go to Ye Olde Record store and flip through the bins, hoping to find a cut-out or used version. You could look for years trying to find an album.
The present: Go on EBay or Amazon or some specialist store. If it exists, you’ll be able to find it. I once had a CD I’d been looking for mailed to me from Australia. The total cost, including postage, was under $10.00.
Not to mention having to spend a small fortune in the process. I used to drive for an hour to go to Discontinued Records at Hurstville, or catch the bus into Town to Red Eye Records. Browse for hours and hours to find old, much loved LPs which would often sell for more than the price of a brand new one. “Wow, found Badfinger!! I’ve been looking for this for years.” “Fantastic, at last a decent copy of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood I’ve been hankering after has appeared.” It used to be endlessly satisfying to finally find an album you’d been wanting for years but it was time-consuming and, as I said, often extremely expensive.
One of my favorite stories from an acquaintance circa 2000. She had just relocated to New Jersey and needed to get a NJ license. She figured that she would go out at lunch and get it all done. She told her boss just before lunch that she was going to Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to get her NJ license. He said “see you tomorrow.” She said that she would be back after lunch. She got out of the DMV around 6 at night.
During my early teen years I had a radio with tape cassette built in. Would listen for hours to the radio … and you always kept a blank cassette in there … just in case. Couldn’t afford every album that you liked so you waited and waited.
A DJ would be introducing the next track, over the beginning of the song, and you would realize THAT’S IT, THAT’S THE SONG! and lunge for the record button to try to get most of it. If a song had a great beginning you might have it recorded 3 or 4 times, trying to get the most complete capture, with the least amount of DJ chatter at the beginning or end of the song.
It was pitiful if you weren’t at the right spot in the cassette and be trying to fast forward in time, or record over part of another song.
Flashback, re-used cassettes storing programs for our TRS-80, there were spots between songs where it would <Screech! Static, static> where some of the program was still stored.
you watched tv standing next to the tv set because your body interacted with the set top rabbit ears antenna in a way to just get a snowy black and white picture on one of the 1,2 or 3 channels that you could receive.
put air in tires with a hand pump.
Before that, if you needed cash, you had to go to your bank (not any bank, but your bank) between the hours of 9AM and 3PM M-F not counting major holidays plus minor ones like Veterans Day, Columbus Day, etc. Stores did not give cash back routinely, you had to have a personal relationship with a proprietor.
If you were in a town that didn’t have a branch of your bank and you needed cash, you usually had to deal with Western Union.
This cracked me the fuck up.
Other people have touched on this, but the sheer amount of legwork - literally - required to get information. Need to look something up? Go to the library. If the town library doesn’t have it, drive to the neighboring town, or maybe the county library. You might end up going to university library or big-city library (New York City or Philadelphia, in my case) to dig up information.
There’s no automatic keyword indexing in the universe of dead-tree information sources. If you were looking for information on a particular topic, you might miss something (books, magazines, etc.) right there in the town library simply because you didn’t know enough about the topic to guess how the librarian might have cataloged it.
Lycos (Yahoo, Google) changed my life.
Oh, yeah, that too. I remember it was a big deal when our local supermarket started cashing personal checks for customers. One had to apply for this privilege; approved applicants received a card that would allow them to cash checks at the service desk.
Before that, if you needed cash for the weekend, you had to make sure to get to your bank before close of business on Friday, speak with a teller, and withdraw your money. Depending on what state you lived in, you might only be able to do business at a particular location of your bank (no branch banking in some places). When I was a child, I was convinced that we were broke because my Mom would say, “We can’t do (whatever) because I don’t have any money,” not understanding that she meant that she was out of cash for the weekend.
15 years ago, if you were into any kind of music that wasn’t on a major record label, you’d have to get hold of a catalog (a catalog which you may have had to request in writing from the label along with a couple bucks for shipping) and mail order any album you wanted.
That eventually gave way to nobody buying albums and every short-lived band that has ever existed having a Myspace page.
Along with the cash thing, I remember my parents taking out a bunch of cash (during bankers hours) when we went on vacation. There are tons of old movies where getting all that cash stolen is a plot point (Trains, Planes, and Automobiles is one) that no longer makes sense.
Back in the early eighties, I moonlighted in an all night gas station in farm country. We were on a busy state highway, so between the farmers and the truckers, we did a lot of business in diesel.
The farmers all had exemption numbers to keep them from having to pay road tax on the diesel. The road tax had to be calculated manually with a formula that changed from time to time and paperwork (in triplicate) to be filled out.
The last time that I was in that station while visiting the folks, I watched as the cashier entered the exemption number for a farmer, the register took off the tax and spit out a receipt, all in about five seconds.
At the same station, we had the aforementioned manual credit card machines too. Any purchase over, IIRC, $50 had to have the card verified by phone. The truckers also had something called ComChecks in the pre-debit card age. These were good for fuel anywhere in the country and usually came in preset amounts, so that if the driver came in soon after your cash drop, he (and they were almost always a he) might have to wait until a couple of customers had paid before getting his change back.
Ahhhh, the good old days. 