Travelers checks were huge. If you had a credit card, you couldn’t depend on it to be universally accepted - particularly at places where you might just want to spend a few bucks - like McDonalds. And good luck getting an out of state check cashed. So you had to have cash. Travelers checks made getting cash possible away from home.
My sister and I were stuck in Copenhagen with about $4.25 worth of kronar and a Eurail pass on a Sunday. We ate bread and caught a train out at 8pm so we would’t be sleeping on the street.
I was in college from 85-89, and some of my friends were at schools that didn’t have phones in the rooms, just a pay phone in the dorm hallway. So, you called, if anyone was around, they’d pick it up, and you’d ask for whoever you were calling. Then shouts would go up and down the hall “JEN? JEN ARE YOU THERE? HAS ANYONE SEEN JENNIFER, SHE HAS A PHONE CALL!” Of course, Jennifer was never there, and whoever you were talking to would always say she would leave a message, but of course Jen would never get it.
And, we had busy signals back then. The phone would be busy for hours on end, and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. Then call waiting came out, and my dad said he wasn’t going to pay an extra $3 a month so us kids could yak on the phone all day.
Kids today with their own phones and texting will never know the frustration of not being able to reach someone they want to reach.
Ca. 1980, I was a paralegal for a large D.C. law firm with a communications law practice. Much of my work consisted of walking the half-dozen blocks to the FCC, checking out paper copies of documents that other law firms had filed in FCC proceedings on behalf of their clients, waiting in line to use the photocopier in that room, photocopying the documents, checking the originals back in, then walking the documents back to the firm and giving them to the secretary of the lawyer who’d asked for them, who would make an extra set of copies for the lawyer to make notes on.
Now, I’m sure, it’s just go to the FCC website, click on the filings you want, download, and you’ve got 'em. No need for a paralegal or a secretary.
The same thing applied to filings in court dockets, proceedings before other agencies, D.C. land records, and a host of other things. You’d go to the SEC and photocopy a corporation’s 10-K and annual report. Again, I’m sure that stuff’s all been available for instant downloading online for eons now.
Before email. Late 80s and early 90s, travelling around Asia: poste restante as mentioned by China Guy. Have people address your mail to “Your Name, Poste Restante, Name of Post Office, City, Country”. Then I’d drop in and see if there were any letters for me, usually which had been written a couple of weeks beforehand. ETA: they do still exist though! Used one in Sydney in 2005 after mailing my winter clothes from Tibet.
To make an international call from China I had to book it, sometimes a day in advance, then come back to make it - and it cost a fortune and was almost inaudible.
No ATMs - everything via traveller’s checks.
Man, we were really on our own then… even our families didn’t know where we were for weeks or even months at a time.
Flying out to Hong Kong back in the dark distant time of 1997. No cellphones. I had to fly over to London early to renew my passport. My girlfriend was flying in from Dublin a couple of days later. We worked out her likely time out of the airport, which train she’d get, how long the train would take. So I sat on the station platform and sure enough she got off the right train at the right time, and we carried on together to Heathrow. Nobody would ever do anything like that these days.
When I was in High School, I worked on the school newspaper. Manual paste up sucks, and for that reason alone I hated it.
Having to draw up an arrangement of items on gridded paper; carefully shaping them to exact sizes; typing up articles repeatedly so that the right number of words filled the right amount of space, in unusual shapes; drawing advertisement graphics; using Letraset labels for headlines and article dividers; then sticking them on with tape and glue (inevitably one or two bits would fall off during transport); taking them to an expensive printer in another town to get them photographed as a (thing whose name I forget, prepress, acetate, emulsion, something something, I don’t know); and they get printed and folded and then distributed.
If I had had access to Desktop Publishing Software I would’ve fallen in love with it and a whole career could’ve unfolded before me. As it is, I went in a different direction, and as a result am only cursorily aware of DTP. I missed out.
How about library research in grad school? If you were lucky, your university library actually carried the journal(s) you needed. Or one of the professors in the department would subscribe and you could borrow the journal or book. If so, you’d then wait in line and spend a fortune in nickels or dimes to make bad photocopies of the articles in question. Then you’d check out the bibliography and citation indices to find other authors who were doing relevant work and rinse/repeat.
If you couldn’t find a journal with the paper you needed, then you could always write the author. And maybe, if you were lucky, he’d send you a copy. In a month or two.
It was easy to get blind-sided by someone doing similar research because you might just not have access to the workshop or conference proceedings that they published in.
The plus side of all this drudgery was that you could convince yourself that the stack of photocopies on your desk represented research, even if you never got around to reading them.
Present: Every academic has a web page with everything they’ve published since about 1990 on it. Doing a literature review is only slightly more difficult and time-consuming than typing a few names into Google. If the paper isn’t available on-line, you can shoot the person an email and they can send you a copy instantly.
The downside of this technology is that you actually have to read the papers, most of which are boring beyond belief
My tales seem pretty mundane by comparison to some people’s woes.
I used to drive for a living. I had a map of every county in a 150 mile radius in the backseat of my car. Some of them got used more than others so they would actually wear out. I trusted my map-reading skills often well ahead of the direction giving skills of the secretaries of the places I was going.
If I got lost - usually because the maps had mistakes (lots of mistakes!) I would have to call the place I was going. This meant finding a payphone somewhere, which could be a frustrating thing.
In the last couple of years I was working there they gave us cell phones. They were bricks of things but it meant I didn’t have to hunt down a cell phone or I could call if there was a traffic situation.
When I left that job some websites like mapquest.com were coming online and my fellow workers were happily printing out directions. I always thought that was a waste of paper.
When I started the job I was told I was lucky because the last of the cars without tape decks had just been retired so my car would have a tape deck. I used to carry, in addition to my contractors briefcase, a small satchel with mix tapes, etc. I travelled so much I actually got kinda sick of my own musical tastes. Late in the game I discovered the local library had a wide selection of books on tape.
My memories of ordering books are not pleasant. For example, a book review in the newspaper. I’d cut it out. Take the clipping to the bookstore. Not in stock. Hand the clipping to the bookstore owner. 15 minutes later after searching, she had the ISBN to order. Prepay. Two to three months later I’d get the book.
Today, I can find it on Amazon in 5 minutes. Orders arrive in a week. Overnight if I want to pay the extra shipping costs.
OK I’ve been staring at the thing for far too long, and I can’t figure out how it works. I mean, I see the stylus on the side, and you use it to move the numbers up and down, but after that I don’t see how you calculate a math problem. I’ve used slide rules before, but this thing…
Mom had a plastic calculator like that. 5 round dials with numbered holes. She used a ink pen to turn the dials. Great for adding up groceries as she shopped.
Let’s say you wanted to look up phone numbers for some business outside of your area. Maybe you were going to Hawaii and wanted to call ahead about car rentals. You had to get hold of a phone book from that area.
You went to the library and asked them if they had a phone book for the area you wanted. And they probably didn’t. There was no systematic attempt to collect all of the country’s phone books. Most libraries just had local phone books and a haphazard collection of whatever else they had picked up somewhere.
A few months ago at work a young man of about 22 needed to use the phone at my desk to call student tech support. He made the call and sat there with a puzzled look on his face. After a minute he said “What is this sound? Is it a fax machine or something?” I listened, and it was the busy signal. The tech support lines were busy, and the guy had never in his life heard it before.
I guess I can see where if you grew up with call waiting and all of your friends had it, you could be in your 20’s and not know what a busy signal is. But that still strikes me as just wrong somehow!
I’m 45 and went to high school and college in the days of almost no computers, absolutely no cell phones, nobody carried bottled water, and of course there was no internet. We used typewriters and had to go look up things in books at the library.
Did you know that you could actually overload a phone system to such a degree that you could no longer even get a busy signal?
My first year of college, signing up for classes was a cattle-chute business: everyone lining up and inching through a maze of ropes to find the right table to apply for the class and timeslot they wanted. It was an all-day affair, and it frustrated everyone, but we knew the school was working on a new system. Sure enough, my second year, they proudly rolled out a phone registration system. You could dial in, punch in a student ID number, and enter codes for the courses you had looked up in a booklet they distributed a few weeks before; if the course was full, a mechanical voice would tell you so, and you could enter a code for another timeslot.
Now, everyone had plenty of experience with the good timeslots (and even whole required courses) filling up fast, and no one wanted to get left out. Naturally, that meant that the entire student body stayed up until midnight waiting for the system to go live, hoping to be the first to use it.
The system had eight whole phone lines dedicated to it. At about 12:00:01 AM, over 30,000 people called those eight lines. The first eight people got through. Hundreds after that got busy signals. A few hundred more got “All circuits are busy” messages, but those quickly ran out. Many thousands just got a click, and dead silence. It took the phone network most of the day to recover completely.
These days, if you call a company and want to talk to a representative, they have automated phone answering systems. If all of the representatives are busy, they will put some kind of music on the line as well as some kind of message saying’ “Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.” One very seldom has to hear a busy signal any more.
When I was a junior or senior in high school (not too long ago - late '90s) at a dance they played a remix of the Four Season’s song December 1963. I loved it, was vaguely aware that it was a remix of an oldie, and wanted a copy. Of course I had no idea who it was by, and had only a snatch of the lyrics in my head. Flash forward to what felt like hours and hours over a very long period of time combing through CDs in record stores, trying to find this mysterious song. Add the fact that I was looking for a song that I assumed was called “Oh What A Night” and that a friend was sure that the original was by the Eagles, and I ended up with several oldies compilations that included the Dell’s song and at least one Eagle’s greatest hits CDs.
By the time I got to college, the internet had advanced enough that I could type what I knew of the lyrics into yahoo and voila - long, frustrating search finally come to an end.
Whenever I moved to a new city, the first thing I did was to find some kind of street-finder map guide that I would keep in the car with me at all times. That way, if I got lost, I could pull over, consult my street-finder map, and carefully route my way to my destination. My Thomas Bros. guide was one of my most treasured possessions when I lived in Seattle.
I had a bit of a shock the other day when I realized that it’s seriously been years at this point since I consulted a map. I’m not sure this is 100% good, but I do get lost a lot less frequently.
Found my moms adder.