My dad was gasman and my mom was binque (pronounced ‘bink’). I have no idea where my mom’s call sign came from.
I think that maybe I invented PowerPoint. (I’m sorry about that.)
I was a sophomore in high school (1987). I took public speaking. I borrowed the AV setup, and brought in my Commodore 128, and gave a presentation that I had coded in Commodore BASIC.
(Okay, don’t blame me for PowerPoint… a quick Wikipedia check indicates that Harvard Graphics beat me by a year).
In 1990 just out of high school I worked for a bit as a keyliner for a local classified advertising newspaper. Hell, even in high-school we’d had Macs (although still did a lot of light board work), but the newspaper was all tape, typewriters, headline printing machines for fancy and large type, and real optical cameras for enlarging and shrinking and copying clipare out of clipart books. It probably took me about an hour to build a small display ad for a car dealer, versus 10 minutes of work it would take me to do these days.
Maybe I missed it - but has this really gotten to 162 posts with nary a mention of Pornography?
I had to find porn out in the woods! And even when we first had Internet porn, it was ASCII, and then multi-part encoded binaries posted to Usenet groups, and you’d have to download and combine all the parts, and usually post #7 of 18 parts had gone missing somehow! People don’t know how easy they have it these days…
I never did set the timing by ear, but I did have to set the points on the side of the road a few times. All it took was a pull tab and an empty cigarette pack–the usual roadside litter. A flip tab is about the right thickness to set the point gap, and you can set the static timing by sticking the cellophane wrapper for the cigarette pack in the points and adjusting the points plate until the wrapper comes loose when the timing marks line up.
No, it was M. et Mme. Marsaud and their irritating fucking kids Jean-Paul, Marie-France et Claudette. They were obsessed avec aller au boum pour ecouter les disques et boire de la limonade, aller au acheter, ou faire du ski. It was unremittingly dull.
There was one page which I presume was meant to be comedic, where a dog ruined his flowerbed. Similar to your reaction about the bomb, I wished death on M. Marsaud, and vandalized the illustration with white-out and different colored pens to show M. Marsaud having his throat ripped out by the dog while he wailed “O, mes fleurs!”
Remember how the mimeo paper was all curled, and you’d have to sandwich it between books to flatten it out to something usable? Ours was also really waxy, so writing on it was a challenge. (It really sucked for those Math Minute worksheets!) Pen or pencil were both equally bad. (This was 1986.) I remember when my school got its first computer, some no name that had obscure text commands (“catalog” instead of “list” or “ls,” that sort of thing). We were hot stuff when we made that first newsletter, complete with clip art!
My dad’s a doctor, and his pager talked! The beeper would go off, then you’d hear a short, 15 second or so message, like a one-way talk radio. We could never go far from town when he was on call, because he needed to be able to get to either a phone or the hospital quickly.
I’m not in sales, but my husband’s business partner is. He told me once about how much it used to be a challenge to be on the road. He’d get some sort of allowance from the company for phone calls. While out on the road, he’d pull off whenever convenient and use a pay phone to call back to the office to get his messages, then he’d call those contacts. Or leave them messages, if they were out, and rinse and repeat. Because of the costs, the phone call allowance was pretty generous (and a significant portion of the budget, no doubt). He says that you can’t believe how much modern technology has affected how he does his job.
Would you believe Google Images doesn’t know Monsieur Thibault? You have failed me, modern technology.
The internets used to be the Whole Earth Catalogue. Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation… It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”
The mention of PowerPoint reminds me of this big pain. When you presented a talk at a big conference, you had to have 35 mm slides made, which was expensive and time consuming, especially when your art department messed up the colors. When I was on the Program Committee one of our jobs was to review the slides of the speakers, since they were often unreadable. This required me pulling out my father’s old slide projector from 1961 and projecting them on the wall of my hallway. If they were bad, you’d give the author corrections to make, which once in a while they actually did. You also brought a copy of the slides with you to the conference, just in case they forgot.
Now we have a template so almost all slides are of good quality, you can bring them on a thumb drive, and they are all on-line anyway. The only downside is people making last minute changes, but that is pretty minor. Vugraphs are another happily extinct presentation method.
I was in Minneapolis during the 1987 baseball playoffs. After the Minnesota Twins won the first playoff series against the Detroit Tigers, World Series tickets were to go on sale by phone on Monday or Tuesday afternoon. I picked up the phone shortly after they first went on sale to call some friend or family, and there was no dial tone. I just stared at the phone dumbfounded. I’m pretty sure it was the first and last time of getting no dial tone due to swamped phone circuits.
One year in grad school around 1995, I had to do the register for class by phone. It would result in something like this:
dial - busy signal - hangup
dial - busy signal - hangup
repeat about 82 times
dial - ringing - hangup - realize mistake and swear for two minutes
How many concerts did us old farts miss because we couldn’t get through to buy the hot tickets?
I also remember nickel photocopies being a big deal in the late 80s and 90s. We’d scout out where the cheapest ones were, and go there if we had to have articles out of magazines, etc… for school, or for inviting people to parties/events/etc…
I’m guessing that the prevalence of digital media has reduced the need for photocopies; I think I’ve made personal photocopies less than a dozen times in the past 5 years, and those have usually been of official documents for government offices anyway.
Those cold mornings, trying to get my dinosaur started for the 5 mile trek (through the snow, up hill, both ways) to and from school.
The biggest pre-tech thing to me was typewriters, even though I thought I had the modern tech at the time (1970’s). For a 5 page term paper I would plan a full weekend just for the typing part.
An accounting spreadsheet was exactly that. Large large sheets of paper with a grid that were bounded in ledger books. Make one change and you’d have to start making changes by hand in a lot of places. Then came the electronic spreadsheets, the first great app that helped launch the rise of personal computers.
The one “hardship” for me was typing up my thesis in math. You had two choices in those days: (1) hire a technical typist who would charge by the page, or (2) type it up yourself using a typewriter that can take changeable type like my old trusty Smith Corona or a fancy Selectric that allowed font changes. Needless to say, it was a brutal process because one mistake and you have to retype a page. The school was very strict about erasures and whiteout for theses. Nowadays, with LaTeX or comparable typesetting systems, writing technical documents is a whole lot easier.
Having said all that, I would have to say the hardest thing was doing research and finding information. Without the Internet and email, you had to spend time in a library or write a lot of letters requesting information and then wait for replies.
Ah, I remember turning on the TV, then having to wait 5 minutes for the TV to warm up and actually start showing an image. And there were 4 channels–CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS. And when you changed the channel by getting up and turning a knob on the TV. And after you changed the channel the new channel would be blurry and wobbly, so you’d adjust the rabbit ears on top of the TV, and eventually it would come in OK, so you’d go to sit down and then it wouldn’t work and the picture would blur. And then you’d go up to adjust and when you were standing next to the rabbit ears it would be perfect again. Sometimes you’d have to tell your little sister to stand there holding the antennae to make the damn thing work.
One non-technology Ye Olde Tyme thing. I was working as an assistant for a small law office during the summer in college, it must have been around 1986 or 87. I brought some coffee to my boss while she was on the phone to one of her cronies. She laughed and said, “Hey Marge, guess what? I just had my male secretary bring me coffee!” That made her whole day. She also told me that when she first started as an attorney she made sure to never let anyone know she could type, because if a woman could type that meant she was a secretary.
One attorney at that office was really into computerization. He had a luggable computer the size of a suitcase. I had used computers, and had an Apple //e. But this computer was special. Not only was it portable, it had a HARD DRIVE, where programs and data could be stored permanently, not like those five inch floppies I was used to. And this hard drive could store 10 megabytes of information.
Speaking of really cherishing albums…
I used to drive to other cities for the specific purpose of checking out the book and/or music stores, to see if I could find some of the items I’d long heard about but didn’t have any way of getting my hands on. I’d go to the library so I could look at yellow pages in their collection of phone books to try to find out where the stores were, then make the drive to try to find them and see what they had. If there was something I’d heard about for a long time but never seen for sale anywhere before… SCORE! I could now own a copy of _____.
Nowadays, of course, the vast majority of that kind of thing is readily available to order online.
Five pages of posts, so I hope I didn’t miss this one:
Trying to make “Expenses through 2011-04-30 (China) v2.xls” fit into 8.3 format (or rather, I was lucky and always had 16 characters to play with).
My dot matrix printer needed six passes to produce “near letter quality”…still, I had it better than my friend, his Kaypro used a ribbon cable to go to his printer, if it were much longer than 3 feet or so, it’d introduce typos all by itself!
I have to say, this makes me grateful for my college Russian courses, in which Igor and Boris routinely staggered around mourning the early death of Pushkin.