You win. I never actually saw one of those old pumps in use. I do rememeber the 54 Caddy, though not when it was new. 
How about the first electronic tuners on televisions. The TV would have about a dozen that you could preset and you changed stations just by touching the button for the desired station. I can still remember watching TV while lying on the floor and changing the station with my toe.
Slide rules
Tang, Like The Astronauts Drink
Freakies Cereal (we are the Freakies, we are the Freakies, and this is our Freakies tree…)
The Frito Bandito
Wooden TV/stereo cabinets
The Emergency Broadcast System
Women wore gloves when they went out of the house
Men wore hats
Taking the family to the drive-in theater
8-track cassettes
TV stations played the National Anthem before going off for the night, leaving no TV at all between midnight and 6 am
Vacuum tubes
Smoking was permitted everywhere
Bacon, eggs, and whole milk were considered a healthy breakfast
The Campbell Twins (MM MM good, MM MM good, that’s what Campbell’s Soups are, MM MM good!)
Dippity Doo and Brylcream
Monte Hall and “Let’s Make A Deal”
TV variety shows, like “The Red Skelton Show”, “The Ed Sullivan Show”
There was no national speed limit
Rotary dial phones
wooden phone booths
In NYC, the Automat
Air travel was a luxury for the rich; most people drove cross-country on vacation
We didn’t need a welfare state, everybody pulled his weight, gee our old LaSalle ran great, those were the days!
Does anyone else remember the Pilsbury Dough Boy getting a kiss from a cute little girl and getting embarrassed.
Wizardy?
One Helluva interactive game on a orange monitor.
I remember when “playing” meant GOING OUTSIDE!!!
When the other kids and I would ask “Whatcha wanna do?”, the answer was always the same: “I know…let’s PRETEND!”
Remember playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians (which is not even PC today), or Superman???
And remember when “playing with guns” meant pointing your finger and yelling “POW!!!” (Which was immediately followed by a round of “I got you!”, “No, you didn’t”, “Yes, I did, now fall down”, “You only winged me”).
I have had great adventures, saved the world, and visited far-away places - all within the confines of my back yard.
Back then, we had something we called “imagination”.
Ah, yes, I did that. Except I was Snake Eyes on G.I. Joe…
Hmmm… the good old days.
I can only imagine what our kids will be telling our grandchildren…
I remember when our computer took up a whole desktop and didn’t have a holographic display. It weighed at least 50 pounds.
Cars used to use something called gasoline.It cost $.70 a litre. Some of those cars could go way faster than the electric fuel cell one we drive now but they were expensive and smelly.
People used to carry paper money and coins to buy things. If you had too much change it was really heavy.
Movies used to come on these really big discs or really big tapes.
There were only 60 television channels and you had to watch shows at certain times. You could record them on a VCR which used really big tapes.
We used to play video games on a pocket sized thing called a game boy, no… there was no such thing as a holosuite or personal VR’s.
Nobody lived on the moon. We should go there for the weekend.
Go talk to your grandfather, he will tell you things that will really freak you out. He remembers some really wierd stuff.
Liquid Television
REmote Control <the show>
Jem
Snorkels
Popples
Muppet Show was still airing new episodes
Hot Wheels
Turbo Booster
Square One Television
Airwolf
Knight Rider
Miami Vice
A-Team
Also… Top-loading VCRs.
Hell yeah, someone remembers AirWolf. I also watched RipTide and Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Two questions for you old timers. What was the name of that show that Starred Pierce Brosnan and this other woman, they drove around in a Volkwagen Rabbit convertible. There was this other show that had the song “I need a hero” as the theme song when it came on. Does anyone know about those 2 shows?
And don’t forget about Hardcastle and McCormick. That was a great show.
The first has to be “Remington Steele.”
The other…I know the song…but can’t think.
Not “Greatest American Hero” ?
I wouldn’t know if it even if that was the name. My mom really liked it and it came on in the evening on NBC.
Hardcastle and McCormick! i have been trying to remember that name forever and a day! I loved AirWolf, and sometimtes still weatch it when it’s on.
Yes, I think the other one is Greatest American Hero, but I am not sure.
BTW, they are making a new movie of that. I don’t remember who is going to star in it, but they were talking about it in Wizard Magazine.
You forgot the part about only having 3 channels, on a good day. And the big, out-door, TV antenna that was adjusted by someone outside turning it a little and calling over the intercom (i.e. yelling), “Is that better?”
How about the phrase, “This has been a Filmways Presentation”?
Josie and the Pussycats.
SouthernStyle, I still have a gas cap behind the license plate of my car!!! …but I drive an '85 Olds, so I guess that’s not as exciting as it sounds. Still annoys me every time I’m in a rental and have to hunt for it, though.
RonA, yeah, remember PRETEND??? Wasn’t it the greatest game of all time? When I was a kid, board games were reserved for group gatherings (not that you weren’t allowed to play them other times, but why would you, when pretend was so much more fun?), and pinball, the only “video” game, was only for older kids, since little kids didn’t have any money. We never ran out of ideas, and I can’t remember ever complaining to my mom that there was “nothing to do”. Oh, and while you’re at it, a trip in the car (yeah, I loved riding in the back of the station wagon, facing backwards with the window down) meant you actually LOOKED OUT THE WINDOWS and PLAYED DUMB GAMES like license plate alphabet and bury your horses. I’m sure Mom and Dad got tired of antsy kids after the first 800 miles or so, but I can’t help thinking that the kids today who plug into the backseat VCR as they pull out of the driveway and play movies for the first hour and video games for the second until they get to the hotel where they can turn on the HBO - are missing out on something. Like, real experiences, maybe? I don’t quite get the idea that kids have to be entertained by one outside medium or another, quite literally around the clock. Scary.
BillH, my oldest brother studied engineering and I remember seeing him many times out back at the picnic table with his slide rule and his homework. He would let me play with it, and I would slide its parts around wondering about the mystery of it. I never got into advanced math and so never used one myself, but by the time I got to high school, hand-held calculators had come into existence - although only the very rich kids could afford them.
Remember when digital watches cost hundreds of dollars? Now you can get them in gumball machines (seriously). And I recall when my sister’s boyfriend brought over a borrowed “Pong” game and hooked it up to our tv. What an amazing piece of technology - a GAME on your TV that you could play by pushing little buttons and stuff.
Roller skates with keys, which you wore around your neck on a string. 78 rpm records. Librarians who checked out your books by taking a white card out of the book pocket, putting it in the “chu-chunk” machine to stamp the due date on it for their file, and then putting a blue card back in the pocket with the due date on it for you. Library card catalogs that were big wooden cabinets with small sliding drawers filled with thousands of index cards. Swimming in a river with no thought of pollution. Going door to door all around the neighborhood to sell potato chips to total strangers for 4-H. Alone, no less.
My teenage neice found one of those plastic swirl pieces you put in the center of a 45 rpm single to make it fit on the record spindle. She had no idea what it could be.
If you couldn’t afford a color TV, you could put colored screen in front of the black and white TV. Blue on the top,and various shades of flesh tones on the bottom…truly hideous.
Big Jim action figures.
Trick or Treating…and getting hot dogs and popcorn balls, being invited inside someone’s house to tour the haunted house and to put your hands in a bowl of noodles!!
G.I.Joe…the REAL ones…not these dinky little things.
Johnny West…Johnny Quest too.
Good Times…Good Times
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic (by Whammo!): a little tube of rubbery sludge that you put on the end of a straw and blew into balloons STILL EXISTS! My daughter has some that her friends brought back from the Philippines. Accept no substitutes: Philippine knock-off Super Elastic Bubble Plastic is made from real toxic waste, not soy derivatives!
Yes, but there were only a potential 12 channels (six for practical purposes, had to skip to avoid interference) and a medium size city like Tucson where I grew up only had four, the three network affiliates and one local station.
Who remembers local afternoon kiddie shows? I’m not talking about Chicago’s Bozo or Howdy Doody who got national distribution. Tucson had The Uncle Bob Show on Channel 11, KZAZ. Bob Love was a Tucson institution for years. I was first on his show in '66 when my mom and her best friend drug the kids down because two of us had birthdays that month. When I went up for my birthday spanking, another anachronism, he asked me how old I was. I was five but at the time I hadn’t a clue what to tell him. My mother was mortified as he grilled me about my age on live television.
Bob’s show evolved over the sixties and early seventies until it was cancelled. He always had the staple Hanna Barbera cartoon shorts like Wally Gator and Lippy the Lion but he took on a heavy space motif after Apollo 11. I remember Bob giving out space food sticks as goodies when I was there with cub scouts and him hawking Fisher space pens for a local jewlery store.
Oh, the good old days! I remember:
The Spice Girls
George Clooney as Batman
The Yankees winning the World Series every year
Playstation 1
Gas was only $1.80 per gallon
War in Bosnia
Clinton was President
“Crack” was this little white cocaine rock that you smoked