The machines in stores where you could bring in all your television vacuum tubes and test each one to find the one that was screwing up your TV set.
Then you could buy a replacement and take it and all the other fifteen or so tubes back home with you and put them in the TV set’s innards and watch Bowling For Dollars, or whatever.
What’s a vacuum tube?
Don’t worry, at some rest stops there’s Roy Rogers 
Carbon Paper - Google shows me that it’s still for sale, but I haven’t seen it in use for years.
What killed the pay phone was when the phone companies sold them off to any yahoo who thought he could get rich off telecom deregulation.
Prior to my getting my first cell phone, I had taken several trips across Nebraska and Iowa during which there wasn’t a real-phone-company-maintained cell phone to be found.
Every one I tried using had a serious defect–you had to repeatedly push one of the numerals (usually “5”) to get that number to work, the sound quality was horrible–buzzing, clicking, fading in and out, etc., or the thing just ate the money.
All were owned by different companies with names you never heard of like Telestarz or B&B, which owned phones but did not repair or maintain them.
I was in a SuperWalmart and saw egg salad sandwiches in those plastic triangles. This was mid-August and they said “use or freeze by Sept 19”. :eek: The list of ingredients was way too long for an egg salad sandwich which I guess it what accounts for it being “fresh” for a month.
Mmm yeah, those were the days. In Illinois the restaurants were run by Fred Harvey of Harvey Girls fame. It wasn’t fine dining, but at least you knew you were on a trip instead of just schlepping to another McDonald’s.
For folks from the Northeast corridor of the U.S.A… particularly Baltimore, Philly, New York and Boston:
Pimple Balls.
Mystery sandwiches! They also showed up in the school cafeteria when I drew the late lunch slot. Everything would be gone but lettuce wedges, fruit cocktail, and the mysterious “egg salad” sandwiches - still appearing in SuperWalmart to this day!
Thought of one more thing that is gone, and that is the local family shoe store. Parents used to take their kids in to be fitted for leather shoes (I assume they were required as part of a school uniform). I remember those shoes, the foot-measuring thingy, and didn’t they used to have some kind of x-ray machine, too? :eek: The last one, downtown, closed about 10 years ago and the owner sounded quite bitter about chainstores and how no one wanted quality leather shoes and big white sneakers for everyone…wonder if it occurred to him NO ONE went shopping downtown anymore, quality leather shoes or not.
Oh gosh, yes. We wore corrective shoes when we were little and went where there was personal service and a line of them. In a way it was nice since there was a limited number of choices–which will it be this year? Blue saddle shoe or red mary jane?
Buster Brown shoes, with that creepy bulldog…Saddle shoes and ankle socks when I was VERY young. Oxblood red laceups.
There’s a Straight Dope column on those machines and the health concerns surrounding them here.
Carbon paper - still around and readily available at Office Depot and others. Mimeograph stencils however, are very elusive…
How about:
paper drinking straws
Foil tape around the edge of a window to trigger a glass-break alarm
Powdered hand soap in public bathrooms (I don’t miss that stuff, it was horrible!)
Person-to-person long distance call through the operator
Greenbar computer paper
Library card catalogue
Stereo AM (now that was short-lived)
Airline branded playing cards
And remember when you used to pull into the gas station and there was a little hose full of air that you drove over to make the bell ring? I used to love jumping on those when I was a kid, to hear the DING!
Young kids with paper routes.
Pretty common when I was young that if you wanted to make money and weren’t 16 yet you got a paper route. Took your load of papers on your bike every morning or afternoon (sun, rain, snow) and delivered to all the customers on your route. You had to personally keep track of which houses were on the route; new customers, dropped customers, customers on vacation, etc… You had to order how many papers you wanted each day to deliver and got billed for them each week. In order to make money you had to go door-to-door to “collect” from your customers the money they owed you. With this you paid back the newspaper company for the papers you bought and kept the rest.
Quite a complex little operation for a 14 year-old but that’s what we did.
Nowdays adults deliver papers by motor vehicle and people pay the newspaper company directly.
and in another 10 years, there may not BE paper routes. 
I’m sure it’s been mentioned before: Keys to open cans of sardines, spam, corned beef, etc.
The Beany and Cecil show. The clickers that came with each purchase of Buster Brown shoes. The “Indian Chief” head for signing-off on TV stations. Going shopping for new gloves and a hat to wear to church for Easter.
And my mis-spent youth.
I use it every day, all of our trial balances and reports use this 11x14 7/8". Is it going out of style?
Nearly all the kid songs from my youth. ‘one little two little three little indians’ has been replaced with something more politically correct. :smack:
The private library we belong to, Neilson Hays, still uses old-fashioned card catalogues. And it’s in a beautiful old 19th-century colonial building. It really makes me feel like I’ve gone back in time when I step inside. Costs 3300 baht (US$98.50) per year for the wife and me together.
I wasn’t aware airline playing cards were gone, but I stopped asking for them a long time ago. I think the last ones I got was on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok on Malaysia Airlines 10 years ago.
Man, I used to love jumping on those gas-station air-hose bells, too. What kid didn’t?