One more thing: When I was in high school I had to write formal term papers a few times. These included full footnotes and bibliographies. I typed them on a regular electric typewriter, since the PC wasn’t around yet. Typing papers with footnotes was a headache students nowadays should be glad every day they don’t have to experience.
(If you young whippersnappers want to know what it was like, every time you came to a place in your text where a footnote was required, you had to figure out how many lines the footnote would take up, then use that to adjust the line number where your text should end on the current page. You kept notes on the last line of text on a piece of scratch paper.)
In the old days a gas station attendant would pump your gas, check your oil and clean your windows. They only sold gas.
When printers first came out they were loud with clicking noise. they were automatic typewriters.
Business calculators did about 9 digits and were as big as a desk. They did fairly simple math but you could program them with a punch card. That way you could do simple trig functions.
I’d forgotten train travel. Even in a small country like Denmark, the timetable was a book of several hundred pages, with weird and magical runes to indicate possible connections or trains being divided to go in different directions or “except on Sundays” or roughly one hundred other ways to mess up your travel plans. Planning a trip outside your normal well-trodden path took skill. One slip-up, and you’d be stuck at a desolate railroad station for hours.
I used to show movies in my science classes- using reels of film and a 16 mm projector. The last term paper I wrote was accomplished using note cards and books in a library. I did use a program on an ancient Apple computer (in '86) called Bank Street Writer to type it up. Eventually, by '92, I had a whole biology course test question bank assembled using that computer. I became very skilled at using the dot matrix printer with ditto sheets to produce the tests. When I changed to a different school in '93, we only had access to xerographic copiers. 'Twas the end of an era.
In middle school in Korea, we had no central heating. Just a wood stove. And a ration of wood every day, which was never enough. Since winter is the end of the school year in Korea, we would all tear up the parts of our textbooks we’d already learned (textbooks are bought in Korea, not borrowed) and feed the fire between classes.
Mimeograph. I’m a teacher now and glad for photocopiers, but when I was a wee bairn I still got my test papers this way. They did smell funny, didn’t they.
I would rack up $200 - $300 changes per month using Exec-PC in the 80’s and early 90’s.
In the 80’s and 90’s it would not be uncommon to pay 100-150 dollars to have several rolls of color film developed. for commercial real estate listings.
Oddly the calculator we used in the early 90 the HP12C is still a preferred calculator for commercial real estate use.
The computer wish book was “Computer Shopper” magazine. At it’s height in the early 90’s some issues had over 800 pages and weighed several lbs.
The good news from your customers’ perspective is that car owners need the services of a mechanic far more rarely than we used to. I think my 2000 Accord needed servicing other than the regular maintenance about twice in the first 150K miles.
Yes, but as a kid born in the middle of the transition, I think it’s awesome. My car has two problems, a wheel speed sensor issue (right front, either the sensor, or the wiring going to the sensor) and the driver’s side O2 sensor, who’s replacement is sitting on my workbench.
Troubleshooting consisted of pressing a couple of buttons on the dash, writing down a couple of numbers, and googling, where I discovered all the other people that have had the same problems I have had, and I can lean on their experiences.
Likewise, a leaky peer steering pump repair that could have maxed out at $800 to have the dealership look at, cost $2 worth of o-rings, and $40 in hoses and fluids, again thanks to google.
When I started my period, back in, I dunno, maybe 1979, can’t remember, and my Mom was completely clueless on feminine hygeine trends, I had the thrills of wearing abeltedpad to school.
If you had cold food and you wanted hot food, you had to put it in a pan and put the pan on the stove and wait for the food to heat.
My father never used the microwave once in his life, despite the extremely simple directions I left for him (1. Open door. 2. Put plate on glass tray. 3. Close door.) He thought it would blow up.
I’m not even all that old (38) but I remember what a total PITA banking and cash were before about 2000.
To get cash, you had to do one of 3 things:
Cash a check at the grocery for some amount over your purchase, which was usually limited to something like 20-30 dollars.
Go to the bank and make a withdrawal/cash a check. Of course you had to deal with bankers’ hours, and all that. Before the mid-80’s, there were laws against branch banking or something, so you had to go to a particular location for all this crap- none of that “Bank of America” on every corner stuff back then.
Find an ATM that not only had money inside, but that was on YOUR bank’s particular network. I distinctly recall being really hacked one time in college because I needed cash and I found a working ATM that was on the Pulse network, and my bank used Cirrus. I was SOL.
I also remember that it was a fairly big operation to transfer money between accounts back then- IIRC, it took a savings withdrawal slip and a deposit slip to remove money from savings then to deposit it into the checking account.
On top of that, you had to actually keep your check register up to date- all you got was the canceled checks and a statement at the end of the month that you could use to reconcile your register. None of this log in and check your balance and see all your transactions for the past decade business!
I also recall that compounding the banking pain was a set of inconsistent rules on what businesses would and wouldn’t take checks, and what they required to be printed vs. what they’d write in, etc… or they just wouldn’t flat-out take checks period.
Wait, wait, did you have Monsieur Thibault? Fuck Monsier Thibault, who is an engineer and lives on the tenth floor at Place D’Italie and has a straw hat in his attic. There was a bombing once at Place D’Italie, and I apologize to any Parisians out there but we cheered. Monsieur Thibault est mort!
ETA - Monsieur Thibault came with a filmstrip, though, as I recall. The kind you have to advance yourself.
I would type up the footnotes I planned on using formatted with the source info in the format the teacher preferred [what the fuck, you both work for the same university, can’t you please use the same format for documentation?!!] so I knew how much space to leave at the bottom for each footnote I needed to slap in. That way I only had to pay attention to where I was in my rough copy.