Chris, I was going to mention those little wax bottles but forgot while I was writing my post. I loved those things, for what reason I haven’t a clue.
Jim
When I first started working, there was one fax machine for about 10,000 employees, and it was only to be used for life-or-death situations or matters of national security (I worked for the DoD). Nobody called it a “fax” either - it was a “telephone facsimile machine.” We used it about once every 4 months.
How about 19 cents a gallon gas?
29 cents a pack cigarettes.
A pack of gum with free baseball cards. (some of which are worth thousands now)
I remember going to the grocery store in my station wagon with the back seats folded down and filing up the WHOLE BACK END of the car with groceries for $40.00. What do you get for $40.00 now? Half a bag? (plastic to)
Going to a gas station when they were called “service stations” and you actually got service.
grin
I remember walking 5 miles to school in the snow and then 5 miles home. I had to shovel the snow and then do my homework on the shovel.
<singing>
we didn’t start the fire
it was always burnin’
since the worlds been turnin’
we didn’t start the fire
no we didn’t light it
but we tried to fight it
<ends bad billy joel impression>
Sorry… The thread just made me want to sing that song.
Screeme
Oh, I know her! She played the Female Shapeshifter on DS9. (She had also played the Protohumanoid in “The Chase” (TNG).)
You don’t have to be old to reminisce about what has fallen by the wayside. I’m only 20, and I already give shpiels like “I remember when our hard drive was only 20 MB. Hell, I rememeber when we didn’t have a hard drive!”
[profound]
Time is forever marching on. The posessions we have in the prime of our lives will be only hazy memories to our children, and unknown to our grandchildren. Images are all we have of yesteryear. Every know and then though, we see something, a boy toting a metal lunchbox, or a girl playing with a top, and realize that after you dig, and scrape, and brush off the piles of dust covering the old and forgotten, that perhaps, down there, a piece of the past still lives on.
“Like grains of sand in an hourglass, so go the Days of Our Lives.”
[/profound]
Sorry if I got that quote wrong…
Chocolate Cows
CalM — YES! Crusader Rabbit! Raggs the tiger. The villan was Dudley Nightshade.
My best friends’ parents got the first TV on the block!
Small pox vaccinations.
Not being able to go to the public swimming pool starting about this time of summer because mothers were scared to death of their kids getting polio.
It was a given that every kid would get measles, mumps and chicken pox.
The first cars with ONE PIECE windshields!
Then the came the wrap-around windshields.
“Doctors” advertising Chesterfield cigarettes.
Being able to play outside after dark - safely.
lots and lots more
-Those little trianglar car windows between the windshield and the side window, which you could angle so you’d get a breeze right on you.
-How every science fiction movie and TV show depicted that in the future, all women would be wearing miniskirts and go-go boots. 
-On network television, the hour would be marked by a voice saying, for example: “The time is now eight o’ clock” <BONG>.
-each season, thirteen uninterrupted new episodes.
-Having thirty seconds at the end of television shows where nothing happened except the credits rolled and the theme song played.
-television shows were always shown at the same day of the week and time.
-Pinball machines with electomechanical displays, and targets that scored 5 and 10 points.
-Rock music was a silly fad that would doubtless fade away in a few years.
-Vacuum tube testing machines in your local drugstore.
-Having to replace shorted fuses in your home’s fusebox.
-No one other than Olympic racers wore helmets to ride a bike.
-School papers copied in blue ink on Mimeograph machines.
-Cola made with real cane sugar.
-rotary phones; giant, clunky first-generation electronic calculators; and modems the size of shoe boxes, that you attached your phone’s handset to.
-toys made out of metal and wood.
Ahhh, Adam-12, partially filmed inside the wonderful American Motors Matador, with an AMC-made 360 or 401 cubic inch (WTF’s a liter? ;)) V8…8-13 miles per gallon, even worse when used in an AMC Jeep Wagoneer (like mine)…
AuntiePam, you are obviously “old” if you remember Tom Tryon as an actor and not as an author! I saw him on Mike Douglas reminiscing about his Hollywood days while plugging Harvest Home.
Ah, The Mike Douglas Show before it went national. Merv Griffin as the ultimate sycophantic host. Arthur Treacher as a second banana. Regis Philbin as a second banana.
Personal computers before IBM capitalized them.
Woven vinyl car upholstery with chrome accents that got white hot in the sun.
AM radio with something worth listening to.
No miniseries or made for TV movies. You had to get your disease of the week from Ben Casey, with the weekly “Doctor, is it malignant or benign?” since the disease of the week was always brain cancer.
Turning a knob on the radio to move a needle along the indicator dial, then marking your favorite station(s) with a grease pencil.
After Sunday dinner the whole family would climb into the huge, fat, disgusting Detroit chrome mountain and drive aimlessly for hours. Before returning home, we’d stop at an ice cream stand (Foster’s Freeze in our neck of the woods) and get ice cream cones. They had THREE WHOLE FLAVORS! Wow!
Chicken delight (or some other no-name fried chicken place) was the only business that would deliver hot food to your home. Pizza? Call about an hour in advance and go pick it up yourself.
When I was little, I remember seeing the last Mercury mission launched (just 1 guy), and all the Gemini launches (bigger capsule – 2 guys). They’d show about 60 seconds of the rocket going up then switch to some guys in the studio playing with models or a “Nasa simulation” (read: cheesy slide show – not animated) to explain what would happen next.
When the president spoke on TV it was BIG NEWS. You could not tune to a station that didn’t have him yammering away. This usually happened when you were watching something you’d rather see, but pre-empted it.
During most live-action shows, they didn’t always break for a commercial, but just did it during the show. I remember watching Sky King (a western with airplanes) and while they were flying to head off the bad guys, they’d start talking about the wholesome goodness of Fig Newtons (all snack foods were chock-full of Wholesome Goodness – “The preservatives and chemicals are GOOD for you!”
Television sets with 12" screens in a wooden cabinet the size of a washing machine. Television stations stopped broadcasting after the Johnny Carson show ended, and didn’t start up again until the Farm report at 5:00 a.m.
~~Baloo
The Flintstones hawking Winston Cigarettes.
I don’t think anyones mentioned slide rules yet. They put a man on the moon with those things. For the first several years after calculators came out, the older folks, who didn’t trust these new-fangled gadgets would double check the results by hand.
No answering machines. When you called someone and they weren’t home, the phone would ring and ring. And if you were home and avoiding someone, there was nothing you could do short of pulling the plug out of the wall. Oh and the plug was this big four pronged thing. And you didn’t own the phone, the phone company did. And if someone called you and didn’t hang up, you were stuck with them. You could hang up and wait five minutes then pick up the receiver again and they’d still be there.
Acoustic couplers on modems. You would pick up your phone and dial the number (oh, yeah, did I mention dial phones), and physcially place the receiver on the modem. And they were 110 baud.
A top notch computer game was text (no graphics) and written in a few hundred lines of BASIC. Wumpus, sttr2, adventure. Anyone remember XYZZY and PLUGH?
I don’t remember much if any mail or phone spam.
No VCRs. If you missed it, tough doo-doo.
Censors on television shows. I remember when Richard Pryor did Saturday Night Live and they put it on a 5 second electronic delay, just in case.
Televisions had tubes. They’d take a while to warm up. And drug stores had do-it-yourself tube checkers.
Manual typewriters. White out. If you’ve never used a manual typewriter, you can’t possibly imagine what a blessing a word processor is. Imagine typing a 25 page paper for school and realizing you have to add an extra paragraph to page 2.
Cars had engine components I understood. You know, carburators and stuff. And forget this smog cleaning stuff.
Drunk driving just wasn’t that big a deal.
Cloth diapers.
Most likly to freak out the young:
(I mean other than "we didn’t always all have computers.My Mother tells me we didn’t all always have televisions, but I assume she’s senile)
Phones use to have dials.
Going to the movie theater and staying all day. Just watching everything over and over. My sibs and must have watched “Help” 6 times in one day.
Parades for everything. (In Colorado)
Spraying insecticide to kill mosquitoes.
Knowing all of your neighbors in at least a 3-block area.
Hobos.
Department store located downtown.
Buying a big bag of candy for $1.00.
Mandatory dance classes in elementary school.
Air conditioning in the movie theaters only.
Yeah, but back then, he was actually saying something worth listening to, like the evil Russkies were about to bomb us, not to talk about getting a blow-job from some little sleaze-bag.