The Things For Which Kids Today Have No Context (another list of how things have changed)

[cochrane]

@Magiver

In the days of yore it was the same switch on almost every car. Something like this with a rheostat for the dash lights and dome light. You could turn the dash lights off/on and adjust the brightness. Turn them up all the way and the dome light came on. The switch controlled the lights directly. To remove the switch you had to reach in from behind and press a button to release the knob which was on a long shaft. It was about as universal as round headlights that had the bulb built into them.

There may still be some switches on the dash in a few cars today but they control relays now.

OK, I remember what you’re talking about now. However, as long as there’s a control on the dash that turns on the headlights, there’s very little functional difference as far as I’m concerned.

Here’s the one in my car. The style is different, but it’s on the dash and turns on the headlights. And has a thumb wheel next to it that brightens the dashboard lights.

It probably wouldn’t make any difference at all to some kid.

Now if you want to talk about something kids haven’t seen, how about car radios with mechanical tuners and a needle that slides up and down the dial?

AM only, of course. No digital display. No CD. No iPod hookup.

[Magiver]

@cochrane

OK, I remember what you’re talking about now. However, as long as there’s a control on the dash that turns on the headlights, there’s very little functional difference as far as I’m concerned.

Here’s the one in my car. The style is different, but it’s on the dash and turns on the headlights. And has a thumb wheel next to it that brightens the dashboard lights.

It probably wouldn’t make any difference at all to some kid.

I stand corrected.

@cochrane

Now if you want to talk about something kids haven’t seen, how about car radios with mechanical tuners and a needle that slides up and down the dial?

AM only, of course. No digital display. No CD. No iPod hookup.

add to that tube radios that took time to warm up before any sound came out.

[X.L.Lent]

Things that need winding up:

• Watches that would stop unless you twisted a little knob on the side
  once a day.
• Clocks that had a key or knob on the back to wind them up. Forget to turn the
  key before you went to bed and you might be late to work or school the next morning.
• Toys that would not run until you wound them up and then pressed the
  release lever.

Before there were answering machines weren’t there companies that offered
a similar service? After you had signed up for the answering service, if
someone could not contact you at your home phone, they
could call the answering service company and speak with a live operator who
would write down any messages. To receive your messages you would have
to call the answering service company and have the operator read the message
back to you. I seem to remember seeing this in a movie years ago.

[cochrane]

Answering machines that used tape cassettes. A 30 second tape you recorded your greeting on. And a standard length tape for incoming messages. Now answering machines have digital chips in them that store all your messages.

[Mister_Rik]

@panache45

We had to take the bus (only one car per family)

I lived for a few years in one of my town’s oldest neighborhoods, and it was painfully obvious that the streets and house lots were not designed with the idea in mind that households might have more than one vehicle. No garages, or even driveways - the “family car” would just be parked on the street in front of the house.

On my particular street, the houses were all on one side of the street, and there was a park on the other side, and in the evenings both sides of the street would be lined with parked cars because every house had 2, 3, or more cars. This all left little more than a single lane down the middle of the street, and it was always a hassle if two cars approached from opposite directions. It was much worse of the streets that had houses on both sides.

[Battle_Pope]

This could be more of an experience from someone who was a hobbyist in a backwater country like Australia was in the 1980’s (and even early 90’s).

I use to build scale model aircraft, often you’d buy a magazine published in the US or UK, see something that was not available here (decals, tools, reference books etc) in order to get it you could:

[ol]
[li]Got to the post office and get an aerogramme.[/li][li]Write to the overseas shop asking if they would ship to Australia and what forms of payment they took. Often you would include a spare post-paid, self-addressed aerogramme inside or you would’nt get a reply.[/li][li]Wait…expect the turn around time to be a month.[/li][li]If they shipped to Australia and if they would accept an International Money Order order or credit card issued in Australia you would then send another airmail letter with either an IMO or CC number & signature.[/li][li]Air shipping on anything heavier than a piece of A4 paper was prohibitive so the parcel would almost always come surface or surface-airlift.[/li][li]If you were really lucky would get your parcel (with minor damage) in around 2-3 months. (Total time 5 - 6 months)[/li][/ol]

Or

Stay up until 2 or 3 am and make an international call (expensive) and hope you got the right number, that there was someone in the shop who could help and then points 4-6 above would come into play. (total time 2 - 3 months up to four or 5 if they wouldn’t take your credit card and you needed to send a money order).

[johnpost]

@Kiber

Also - where I grew up, there was one channel which showed a camera continuously panning back and forth showing a number of dials on a wall. Each dial showed something different - the time, the temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, etc. Kind of a prehistoric weather channel.

this was common in early cable (community antenna) TV. they sourced their local stations (what they only carried) from really tall towers.

[johnpost]

@Rick_Kitchen

The plastic screen you put over your TV screen that had a blue strip at the top, a brown strip in the middle and a green strip at the bottom, so you could say you were watching color TV.

that would be for South American TV.

the middle being flesh colored (for whites) would be some kind of flesh/orange.

[johnpost]

@panache45

Clock radios. You kept it by your bed, because it had an alarm clock in it. Or wherever else you’d want a clock or a radio.

i recently bought a Sony clock radio with a fantastic radio in it with a loop antenna for the AM band, good for distant stations.

they do have a input jack for your mp3 player now.

[DChord568]

@Kiber

Also - where I grew up, there was one channel which showed a camera continuously panning back and forth showing a number of dials on a wall. Each dial showed something different - the time, the temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, etc. Kind of a prehistoric weather channel.

Ca. 1972, cable TV was in its infancy, but the town where I was attending school at the time had a primitive system with an even more primitive local access channel.

Rather than the scenario you describe where the camera panned back and forth, they had a static camera that shot a clock, a temperature gauge, a board with moveable letters that spelled out the forecast, and maybe some kind of community bulletin board announcement — all of which were mounted on a four-sided block resting on a turntable device. It would make a quarter turn, wait 15 seconds or so, and then turn again. Real hi-tech!
When I tell that story, I always follow it up with this one. It may be one of those “you had to be there” bits, but what the heck…

Several months later, that same local access channel made a step up and actually got an electronically generated system that all of the relevant information could be typed into and displayed full-screen. So they no longer needed the camera/turntable set-up.

Several of my friends and I were up late one night, with that channel on in the background. We had, shall we say, availed ourselves of a certain illegal substance and were in the frame of mind said substance would put one in.

One of my friends remarked “I was watching that channel the other night, and something got screwed up with the system. It said the overnight low was gonna be 477 degrees below zero.”

This was followed by 10 straight minutes of out-of-control laughter on the part of everyone present. You know the kind of thing where it would die down a little bit, then someone would think of it, and it would start up all over again, and you eventually end up laughing at everyone else laughing.

A golden moment shared with guys who are still my best friends 42 years later.

[cochrane]

@johnpost

i recently bought a Sony clock radio with a fantastic radio in it with a loop antenna for the AM band, good for distant stations.

they do have a input jack for your mp3 player now.

Mine has an iPhone dock and a remote.

[njtt]

@panache45

Clock radios. You kept it by your bed, because it had an alarm clock in it. Or wherever else you’d want a clock or a radio.

Are you under the impression these are obsolete? I bought a new one a couple of months ago. There were a wide selection available.

[marshmallow]

The idea that using the shiny new graphing calculator is cheating.

Pagers, jokes about being a drug dealer.

Blowing into video game cartridges.

There was a black and white device called a newspaper that would be delivered to your house, sometimes by a child on a bicycle. It had all sorts of stuff smashed together, like news, stock prices, lame comics, sports stats, advice columns, political editorials, crossword puzzles and advertisements/coupons, etc.

I remember when pog mania was a thing. I still have a hundred or so in tubes and plastic sleeve books.

Tamagotchi eggs you carried around and fiddled with during class.

Movie piracy meant renting the movie from a brick and mortar store and recording it onto another VHS tape and keeping the copy. This required two VHS players and it wasn’t as simple as just copy pasting. You actually had to play the movie and record the entire thing start to finish in real time.

Speaking of video rental, it was some time before I realized what my parents were doing when they went into the back of the store behind the curtain and rented those nondescript beige boxes with no title or artwork. No clue what I thought they were doing at the time – boring grownup stuff, I guess.

And speaking of which, many guys had a physical porn stash that was more hidden than the bat cave. With actual tapes and magazines. The lazy guys just kept the mags under their mattress. Guys would commiserate when their girlfriends found it against all odds.

The first time a guy brought a titty mag to show the group was an epochal event, like Moses bringing down the 10 commandments. Nowadays kids don’t have to work for their smut. It’s way too easy and they probably don’t appreciate it like we did. Up hill, both ways, in the snow, etc.

[Catamount]

@Folacin

For some period time (mid to late 1970’s), one of the chain stations (I think Conoco) had pumps with a selector dial where you could get 5 or maybe 6 different octanes. I assume it was just mixing the high/low octane gas - I imagine it didn’t last long because how many people knew exactly which octane their car would run the best on?

There’s one of those pumps in today’s XKCD comic. I wouldn’t have known what that dial was on the pump if I hadn’t been reading this thread.

[burpo_the_wonder_mutt]

The pet rock.

[DChord568]

I believe tape cassettes and cassette recorders/players were mentioned somewhere upthread.

What about reel-to-reel tape recorders? They were a big part of my youth. I started on a cheap 3-inch reel Japanese model with a crystal microphone (good for recording pre-adolescent screwing around, ragging on your brothers, etc. — I still have some of those tapes). I then graduated to a Voice of Music model that took 5-inch reels.

I recorded tons of stuff off of the radio with that one. I took the back off of a 1940s-vintage Zenith table radio and attached a patch cord with alligator clips to the speaker terminals, then ran that into the mic input of the recorder. Worked great…fantastic quality without the room noise I would have got with a mic.

I began a career in radio in the early 70s that lasted through most of the 80s. Although tape “carts” were used for commercials, breakers, etc. (and for music as well by many stations), reel-to-reel was still used for tape-delayed newscasts, commercial production, pre-recorded local shows, syndicated longer-form programming, and airchecks. I have a bunch of the latter from my years in the biz.

Anyway, I’m thinking the whole reel-to-reel process would be quite foreign to the youth of today. Instead of just pointing and clicking, you actually had to hunt for the beginning of something you recorded by trial and error (unless you could defeat the tape lifters or had a meter with numbers that turned).

And just like records, reel tapes had a Side 1 and Side 2.

[Justin_Bailey]

@marshmallow

There was a black and white device called a newspaper that would be delivered to your house, sometimes by a child on a bicycle. It had all sorts of stuff smashed together, like news, stock prices, lame comics, sports stats, advice columns, political editorials, crossword puzzles and advertisements/coupons, etc.

I’d wager that few people under 29 have seen teenagers delivering newspapers on a bike.

[Catamount]

@Justin_Bailey

I’d wager that few people under 29 have seen teenagers delivering newspapers on a bike.

I’m in my mid-30s and I’ve never seen it. But I grew up out in the sticks, too.

[Justin_Bailey]

@SpazCat

I’m in my mid-30s and I’ve never seen it. But I grew up out in the sticks, too.

A friend of mine was one of the last teenagers to do it where I am but the paper switched to adults-only delivery almost 20 years ago, so some of today’s adults weren’t even born when it went away.

[Tremblay]

I browsed the thread-- and sorry if I missed this one- but people who bagged at the grocery stores that were not cashiers. I’m not sure if any grocery stores have people who bag anymore!

I’m not that old yet (under 30), and I was trying to explain to the young cashier at my local grocery store how there was a person besides the cashier who bagged groceries. He was amazed there was such a job.