I was reading the “Old Farts” thread when it suddenly occurred to me that there is a wealth of baffling information we can share with the younger set. Someone mentioned “Jiffy Pop Popcorn” and I just started thinking…
[ul][li]Beverage cans were made of STEEL! They were heavy and durable, and if you could crush one in your bare hands it was a sign that you were tough![/li]
[li]Almost nothing came in easy-opening containers. Bottled beer didn’t have screw-off caps, canned beverages had to be opened with a “church key”, and as far as I can recall, only sardines and Spam came in “easy-open” containers. They came with a metal key that you used to peel off the top or a thin band of metal around the top. If you never cut your fingers doing this, you are too young to remember them.[/li]
[li]Cars did not come with seatbelts, air bags, or antilock brakes. No-one offered them because they were afraid it would put customers off to mention that driving a car wasn’t perfectly safe.[/li]
“Sure, kid. Stand up on the front seat and lean against the dashboard. You can see out better that way.”
[li]A computer was a prop in a movie that took up a whole room (yeah, a BIG one!), had thousands of flashing lights, an incomprehensible input system (insert punch cards and flip switches/push buttons randomly) and printed out results on a narrow strip of paper. It wasn’t connected to anything but the wall socket, and you had to have an advanced degree before they’d let you plug it in.[/ul][/li]
I could go on, but let’s see what the rest of the living fossils have to add.
And NOTHING had a remote control. You had to get out of the chair, walk to the tv, change the channel, and sit back down. And if you had a color tv, either you were rich or your dad was an engineer(as mine was) and built it himself(Heathkit).
An automatic transmission was only found in luxury cars.
You couldn’t save any of your work on your computer until app. 1985 (I know someone will correct me on this one). And there were no color monitors! Oh, it was a wasteland, a wasteland I tell you! Littered with the debris of amber and green monitors, whirring fruitlessly away… Hey! Where are you going, ya punk? Dern whippersnappers. When does Jeopardy come on…
I’m not old but my car had two piece seatbelts and the shoulder Harness was attached to the roof, no power steering, 4 speed manual, am radio, no a/c, and 4 wheel drum brakes. I also had a B/W t.v. and my first radio had a record player. The survivors.
Hey, recall tape drives? I recall playing with them on the Atari 400, Commie vic20, TRS 80 Model 1, and god knows what else. Heck, the Sinclair had one, they used to broadcast programs over the air! Just record it on your raido set and you were good to go.
Oh… Cars came in two sizes: Huge and Coffin.
There were these things called V8’s. They came in sizes from 302 cubic inches up. Cadillac had a 502 V8 they put in some cars.
two words: leaded gas.
I was watching Adam 12 on TV land and nearly had a fit when I saw at one gas station 102 octaine LEADED gas. Those were the days.
Okay, I’m not an old fart, but I remember when Dos was THE OS. I remember manual transmission being the only way, I remember cabbage patch kids . . . I remember he-man and she-ra, I remember the Challenger blowing up. So I’m not an infant, k?
And we used to have cars with 2-piece seat belts. Same car didn’t have AC. We had 4/30 AC: four windows open, 30 miles an hour.
Better yet, TVs that, when you turned them off, did a slow visual cool-down, the picture first shrinking vertically to a line, then horizontally until there was just one bright point in the center, which slowly faded…plus, if your area got a TV station other than one of the Big Three, you had to turn the top dial to “U” (using pliers if the knob had fallen off), then turn the other dial around until you found the station, which was impossible, because Dad never bothered to hook up the UHF loop antenna…
Snack-Pack pudding (and Pringles, for that matter) that came in cans with metal tops that would slice the holy hell out of you if you mishandled them. Nowadays, they’re probably banned from schools under “zero tolerance for weapons” policies.
A manual choke on your vehicle.
Trick-or-treating at night.
A Datasette drive that used regular cassette tapes and took 5 minutes to load an 8K game into your computer’s memory. For that matter, double-sided floppy disks that you had to flip over. For that matter, floppy disks that FLOPPED.
Heating food in the oven because you didn’t have a microwave. Melting butter in a double-boiler. Making popcorn with oil in a machine that you flipped over so that it BECAME the bowl.
Big four-engine prop airliners, back when flying was a luxury. I was standing on the observation deck at the airport (does anyone remember observations decks at airports) when a Super Constellation fired up its engines and sprayed me with oil.
Ahh the Constellation. What a gorgeous piece of sculpture.
Another TV one…if you wanted to watch a show that started at 8:00, you better have that TV turned on at 7:55 to give the TV time to warm-up.
Banana seats on bikes.
Jack Purcells.
Metal lunch boxes.
Putting tin foil on the TV antenna to pick up better reception.
Big Buddy gum…it was 12 inches long, anyone remember that one?
I remember getting up on the back “deck” thing under the rear window of a car and taking a nap on a long trip.
Seat belts…who wore those? Anyone? Usually they were stuffed down into the seat.
Going off to play with your friends…being gone ALL DAY LONG…and your mom didn’t have to worry about where you were or what you were doing…and the worst thing you could even do was smoke a cigarette.
Riding in the back of the station wagon…in the cargo area, with the seat folded down, and hanging out the back window (which actually went DOWN!)
Computer programs were written on cards the size of Real Old dollar bills. It took hundreds of them to store a program, and people kept them in special drawers devoted only to punched cards. You had to load these ponderous stacks of thin cardboard into a Card Reader, which sucked them up via some vacuum system into the heart of the reader, then spit them out into another pile. The readers and computers were kept in climate-controlled air-conditioned rooms with raised floors to accommodate all the cables. You didn’t DARE drop the piles of cards, because you’d never get them back in order again (even though you magic-markered the edges in case that happened). Subroutines were additional stacks you slapped on the end of your stack of program cards. Debugging was a joy, and you fixed your errors by punching NEW cards and shuffling them into the deck.
You programmed in BASIC or FORTRAN or Machine Language, and your output came off an incredibly noisy and usually mis-registered printer.
Oh, and you had to walk uphill through the snow for forty miles to get to the computer.
[ul][]Kids rode “stingray” bikes that had (count 'em) one speed. You braked by locking the pedals.[]“VD” was cured with penicillin.[]People would go outside at night and look up to try and catch a view of “the satellite” as it hurtled across the sky.[]AIDs was an over the counter “weight loss” supplement. Really.[/ul]
Television shows being advertised as and opening with the graphic and voice over In Color.
Of course, since no one around me had a color TV, I thought it was just a gimmick. Never knew what the big deal in Oz was until I was about fourteen!
DOS came out right after I graduated from college. Manual transmission is still the only way. I remember the original Cabbage Patch Kids - hand-made with hand-painted faces that cost about $400 apiece, then the toy company bought the concept from the original designer. I remember discussing the Challenger at my first programming job (again after I graduated from college)
And when I grew up, shoulder harnesses didn’t exist. Cars had lap belts only.
I recall playing with them on the Atari 400, Commie vic20, TRS 80 Model 1, and god knows what else. Heck, the Sinclair had one, they used to broadcast programs over the air! Just record it on your raido set and you were good to go.