I did a driving job in 1991. I drove 500 miles a day, delivering random crap all round the UK. I had a map of the UK and not a lot else. If my destination was a bigger place I would pull into a gas station and borrow a street atlas, then memorize the route from where I was to where I needed to be - but most of the time I was quite good at guessing the location within a small town of places by the name of the street. I became adept at working out from the name if the street was municipal (then guess the era of the street by its name and follow the ages of surrounding architecture to the destination), residential, residential modern, industrial estate, etc. I have friends who have passed their tests recently, and have never used a map; they’re crippled without a GPS. There must be a happy medium.
When it wasn’t mandatory to wear a seat belt and your neighbor’s mom was going to the car wash ( BIG TIME FUN) and she’d load up the station wagon with every kid in the neighborhood for this. We’d pack that thing to capacity for that afternoon’s entertainment.
Then go home to play jarts in our barefeet.
Three safety violations in one day.
If anyone has a set of jarts out there they dont’ want, I’m very interested. Nothing says Wholesome Summertime Fun than an emergency room trip with a foot injury.
They still make them…but due to legal liability, you have to buy the separate parts and assemble them yourself. 
Physical maps, although even when I’m using Google Maps or my smartphone, I tend to just tell it to map driving directions for me, rather than using it to navigate on my own.
This is a little specialized so I don’t know if it’s what you are looking for or how many can relate. But as an electronics engineer, the biggest changes and pre-tech hardships for me are related to my job. In fact, sometime I find it difficult to believe what I went through to do certain aspects of my job back then, and how we even managed to ever get anything done in the pre-internet days and when computers weren’t as powerful or widespread.
One of the major things is the process for creating “printed circuit boards” or “PCBs”. Those are the thin flat things you see inside electronic equipment that all the components are attached to. There are copper “traces” on each side of the PCB (and sometimes also inside the PCB) that are what make the physical electronic connections between different components. Designing these PCBs is all done now using software, of course. Electronic CAD systems are used to make the schematics (a type of drawing showing the connections in a way that makes sense in terms of visualizing the electronic signal flow) and the PCB “layout” (the design of how things are physically going to be implemented and located). When you are done, you generate electronic files that the PCB vendor uses to fabricate the PCB.
When I started out, first you would use pencil and graph paper (or usually Clearprint paper) to sketch the schematic. This would usually be handed off to the drafting department (which no longer exists in any company I deal with) to re-draw the schematic neatly in ink. For the PCB, you started off with a big sheet of Mylar, placed on top of a sheet of plastic with a grid. You used small pieces of red, blue, and/or black tape that you cut precisely with an X-Acto knife and stuck down on the Mylar in exacting position to represent where the components and copper “traces” were supposed to be. Of course, making any changes along the way was incredibly painful, involving ripping up tape and starting over with new tape. Once you were done, you sent this sheet of Mylar+tape to a photographer. The photographer would use filters to separate out the different tape colors and create individual artwork of each tape color. (One tape color might represent copper on the top side of the PCB, and another would represent the copper on the bottom side, for example, and these had to be separated for the fabricator to to be able to make the PCB. ) Then those pieces of photographic artwork were sent to the PCB vendor, who would have to use other time-consuming manual processes to make sure everything lined up properly on the final PCBs they fabricated.
This process was really incredibly painful, time-consuming, and fraught with potential for human error. The process now isn’t completely immune to this and still involves some manual effort (i.e. it’s not all 100% automated and human brains and care are still necessary), but it’s light-years beyond what it was then.
Similar revolutions occurred for other areas of the design process such as industrial and mechanical design.
In 1988 I brought my little black and white 13 inch tv to University. I had rabbit ears and a really really tall friend who got us through watching the 1988 Canadian Election coverage.
We kept telling him YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MOVE. We had forks, tin foil, a wire coat hanger all delicately arranged to where my friend was sitting with one hand on the window frame. Nothing else worked as well as my 6 ft 8 friend.
The jarts I want are rusty metal darts of jaundiced death. I will accept no substitutes.
My kids’ friends know what it is. I find call waiting to be the rudest thing humans ever invented.
I’m old enough to remember the Land Before Cell Phones (Were At All Popular) and how my family travelled either before we had a cell phone, period, or (more likely) when we only had one cell phone that was the size of a small purse, stayed plugged into the cigarette lighter, and didn’t leave my dad’s truck. (If you imagine an early 1990s WWII-era touch-tone satchel phone, you’re about right.) On the other hand, it wasn’t the Old Days: My mom had her own vehicle, and on longer trips she drove hers and dad drove his and us kids got divided up like pogs or warring states.
So, how did we coordinate routes and stops? CBs. Citizens band radio like we were in a convoy in a song I’m too young to have going through my head right now (“and eleven long-haired Sons Of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus!”). We never used real names, opting instead for frankly bizarre handles. Couple that with rendezvous points such as gas stations and restaurants and you end up with a workable system that isn’t much worse than what exists today as long as you don’t need to contact emergency services on the road.
On the other hand, the whole idea of being on-call before you could be called anywhere was meaningfully different, and relied on technology I haven’t seen in a while: pagers. (Or, if you’re being a little less formal, beepers.) The thing about pagers is that they’re one-way and can, at most, show a single phone number on their little display. To actually get a message, you’d have to get to a phone (often a pay phone) and call the number and hope you hadn’t taken too much time doing that if the case turned out to be a real emergency. On the other side of the equation, if you think someone talking at a low volume during a film is distracting, imagine someone having to get up and leave the theater at odd intervals! Cell phones are simply better in every respect.
Here’s one I just thought of: Waiting in line to get into hit movies.
When “The Empire Strikes Back” came out, and again when “The Return of the Jedi” came out a few years later, I had to wait in line with my friends several hours before showtime in order to be sure of getting tickets. I had to physically stand in line on the sidewalk. It was miserable.
Nowadays you can buy tickets on the Internet way in advance from the comfort of your living room.
My Mother had a brief stint as a telephone operator for a hospital. When calls came in, she had to put a little plug in a socket next to the blinking light, ask them who they wanted to contact, then plug a second adjacent cable into the socket that represented the contact (usually knowing which from memory). She twiddled a switch to manually ring the phone at the contact’s end, then had to be aware of all the conversations going on, so as to be ready to unplug everything when the lights stopped blinking, which signalled the callers had hung up.
I think that’s how it worked. This would’ve been around 1981, so my memory is a bit rough around the edges.
So what were your call signs?
Not sure if this fits the OP as it is kinda opposite. Business trips used to be like a semi-vacation. Get to fly business class somewhere, was expected at a *maximum *to call your admin or the group admin once a day for 5 - 10 minutes to take care of totally urgent shit, it was a rare day in hell when you actually had to do jack shit with your day job back home (and only with the event of the fax have to any kind of work), people covered for you, rack up the expense account without much oversight, not only was it normal for customers/bosses to not expect you to work on you day job during the trip - you had about a week’s grace period to catch up when you got home.
Nowadays, it can be a career decision if you’re a half day slow in responding to your normal day job when halfway around the world. You respond to email as normal, you keep whatever con-calls are scheduled, your boss expects to reach you during his normal timezone, ad nauseum. It was much better before.
On the other hand, let’s rant about what a piece of shit voice mail was. Remember all the vmail bombs you’d drop (or more accurately sometimes your manager but usually some politically conniving little shit). Eg, wait for someone to go to lunch, call their number and leave just the most asine request and deadline, and then fuck off on a three week business trip. And those political ninnies would pull this shit every day, leave vmail for your manager that was complete backstabbing bullshit, etc. The worst part was that you could easily spend 1-2 hours a day just listening to the damn messages, trying to write down the details, and then trying to find someone else to pawn off via vmail. Now, you can get your vmail transcribed as email in your in box. Email has it’s own circle in hell, but vmail was much much worse.
When the phone rang during the 10:00 news, we knew that it was my older sister. She lived on the West Coast would wait until the phone rates dropped to call us.
I seem to remember that the day rate for long distance was over a dollar per minute, sixty cents per minute in the evening and thirty eight cents per minute after ten o’clock (This was in 1970s dollars.) It was a big thing in the early Ninetys when Sprint offered long distance for a dime a minute.
I’m not saying I’m old, but I remember when we were the first family on the block to have fire.
mmm
Back in the late 90’s a friend of mine had collected hundreds of “The Simpsons” episodes on VHS tape, no small accomplishment. TV shows weren’t generally available for purchase by the season yet and there wasn’t any way to download episodes either. If you missed a new episode, that was it. Catch it in reruns, sometime, if you’re lucky. So, he really had something special.
So when his house burned down (he was fine) it was as if we lost the Library of Alexandria. We were filled with grief. No more 15-hour marathons of Simpsons awesomness.
Also, when CD burners first came out they cost several hundred dollars and were hard to use. Few people had one, and a friend of mine did a roaring trade in copying CDs and selling the copies for $10 each. He didn’t even have to buy the originals because he would borrow the originals from one person (giving them credits for future copies) and sell the copies to another. He was backlogged for weeks and made tons of cash. He even went so far as to print labels, artwork, and paperwork for the discs and jewel cases so they resembled the originals. He did a great job and they looked really pro. When I showed one of these to my Dad he was dumbfounded:
“What do you mean Mike made this?”
“I mean he copied the songs on to the disc, designed labels and paperwork on his computer and printed it out, cut it out, folded it, and assembled everything.”
The look on my Dad’s face was priceless. You’d have thought I told him that Mike had built a working starship.
I’ve actually done that in the cockpit of a plane - not a jumbo jet, but in a private plane on the way to an island in the Bahamas. Because my friends rented the plane I paid for gas when we stopped in Nassau. Guy came up, I gave him my gas credit card, and he ran it. When I saw Airplane a few years later I loved that scene.
In the old days we actually had to watch commercials on TV. :eek:
When you saw a movie you liked, and wanted to see it again, you either paid again or waited until it was on TV. When a show was gone, it was gone. During the original run of ST:TOS my girlfriend was going to miss a show because her parents were dragging her to a movie. I taped it for her - with audio tape. (It was Trouble With Tribbles.)
I was a computer scientist, so I wrote my dissertation using Multics. But it was before the days of laser printers, so I made sure that nothing in there couldn’t be done on a line printer. A professor was doing the final draft of his dissertation, which was heavily mathematical, and he had to run the whole thing through an IBM selectric terminal twice to get subscripts and superscripts right. The first papers I wrote were printed on a computer, but I had to make the columns small and cut and paste them onto camera ready paper.
The first few years I was on the program committee of a conference, we all met to sort through the submissions, and took a big bunch home with us. We had to mail them to reviewers, Now everything is done on-line, which is so much easier.
Finally, when shopping for Christmas presents I often had to run around the mall looking at prices and seeing if the stores actually had something. Now I can type the most obscure request imaginable into Google and get five stores and find the best price.
Yep. Although practically every college town had a ‘repertory theatre’ that played a mixture of current ‘art’ films and older movies that people wanted to see from time to time. In downtown DC, there were a few movie houses devoted to playing and replaying flicks whose first run was (often distant) history - the Circle and the Biograph come to mind. Once every few months, you could count on the Circle doing a double feature of King of Hearts and Harold and Maude.
It was a lot of fun to get together with friends and go see Casablanca or some other classic on the big screen. The easy availability of movies has made movie-watching much more of a solitary event, and I miss the social aspect of it.
Being able to be a shade-tree mechanic. I could change the plugs and points and set the timing by ear. Nowadays, I’m afraid to open the hood for fear I’ll blow out the computer somehow.