Things you're suprised under-30s don't recognize

[elmwood]

Somewhat off topic - a hilarious report from 1950 about what were then considered controversial self-service gas stations. Some quotes …

Also, assertions have been made that the driver, especially if elderly or if a woman (or if the weather is bad) will be unwilling to wipe the windshield and thus will fail to protect his own driving vision.

The chief advantage offered by the self-service station is an economic one — gasoline prices have been reduced in some areas from 4 to 5 cents per gallon, or about 20 percent.

Self-service stations tend to remain open 24 hours a day, partly because it is not feasible to move all items on display into a locked shelter. They frequently use female personnel — girl cashiers may be hired for less money than men and they attract customers. The American Federation of Labor Teamsters Union has launched a drive to organize self-service employees. According to contracts already signed, male employees will receive $260 per month for a 48 hour work week and female employees $240. Formerly, employees received $225 and $150 respectively.

There is no unanimity about the value of landscaping the area between the street and sidewalk or street and station. Some operators believe that this helps present an attractive picture to the motorist, particularly the woman motorist.

Although Portsmouth, Virginia, has laid down no specific self-serve regulations, the fire marshall requires that automatic nozzles be used and that no female be in charge of stations. The use of roller skates by station attendants is also prohibited.

[An_Gadai]

So you don’t have airmail anymore?

I sent a card by airmail (or par avion if you prefer) a couple of months back.

[chappachula]

car windows…
How many people (not just under thirties) have never rolled down a car window?
You know …by rotating a handle with a little round knob ? You could even do it on a hot day while waiting in the car with the engine TURNED OFF!.
Amazing, huh?

[Swallowed_My_Cellphone]

@An_Gadai

So you don’t have airmail anymore?

I sent a card by airmail (or par avion if you prefer) a couple of months back.

Most international mail is sent airmail now (as in “not by boat, train, or truck”). But the above posts are referring to the stuff sent in specific envelopes similar to aerogrammes.

Aerogrammes were sort of light weight paper that had lick-'em glue around the edges. They were white or lined on one side and on the other side there was the white and blue border. You’d write your letter on the blank side, fold the letter in half and stick the edges together. Your piece of paper was also the envelope. This made them lighter than normal letters (paper+envelope) so cheaper to send by air, but more private than a postcard. Enclosures were, of course, prohibited.

Airmail was (still is) sent in red and blue envelopes that are guaranteed to be sent by plane. Back before there was as much air traffic as there is now, regular mail might be sent by a plane if you were lucky and there happened to be room on a plane, but the red and blue edged envelopes would guarantee that your mail would go by plane and not by truck or across the sea by boat. You had a choice about how you wanted to send you letter. Kind of like FedEx offering 3-day delivery or next-day delivery (at a premium).

Nowadays, in North America pretty much all letter mail is airmail if it’s going far enough. But if I mail a package from Canada to the U.S. I get an option of “ground” or “air”, but letter mail is airmail by default when I send my Christmas cards across the border.

[JerseyMarine2092]

@bucketybuck

Some of these responses are surprising to say that least.

I am 29, from I guess a working class background. I can remember growing up with big clunky TV’s, black and whites, funky aerials and snowy, static pictures on the TV.

The thing is, when I was growing up with analogue TV’s, I am pretty sure that was just how TV’s were at the time. While we were manually tuning our TV’s, I doubt Fred and Wilma in New Jersey had a 52" Plasma on their wall. We may not have had the latest models, but we did have the industry standard.

So a 22 year old, who grew up in the 90’s, didnt know about erratic TV reception? What, she never had to thump the side of a TV to get the screen to clear? Your under 30 co-workers never had bad reception?

Even if they lived in areas with great reception, a TV would have to be tuned at least once. If they added a VCR that would have had to be tuned in?

I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone between 20 and 30 doesnt know the concept of trying to get reception on a TV. Teenagers now, yes, but not people my age.

Does anybody know what models of TV were prevelant in the 90’s?

I dunno, while I remember when we got cable I can see some whose families were early adopters or well to do going their whole lives with cable.

[Jophiel]

Being in the grocery store and going down the Generic aisle. Rather than stores having “house brands” of products and displaying them next to the “name brand” items, you had a separate aisle of white boxes and cans with stencil lettering saying “Green Beans” or “Beef Chili” or “Powdered Milk”.

Here’s an example. Now imagine a whole aisle full of this sort of thing.

[elmwood]

My family was an early adopter of cable, getting it in 1973. The living room set was the only one connected, though. Everything else was OTA.

One of my grandmothers had a rooftop antenna with a rotor. She got more channels than we did with cable; five channels from Buffalo, four from Rochester, four from Erie, four from Toronto, one from Hamilton, and a few others scattered around Southern Ontario. If the weather was right, at night she’d get stations from Syracuse and Kitchener. With cable, we just got the five local stations, two stations from Toronto, a public access station, and a few other stations with news crawlers, stock tickers, thermometers and clocks.

Network affiliates in my hometown were notorious for preempting for hockey, movies, local events like feelgood Spirit of Youth concerts, or lame telethons. The only solution was to rotate the antenna towards Rochester or Erie, and tune in to an affiliate in another city. Those with cable were out of luck until the 1980s, when preempted shows from a network affiliate in another city aired on the public access channel.

Here’s a cable experience I doubt many under 30 had - watching scrambled porn. You’d hear the sounds, and maybe make out a nipple among the squiggly lines, AND WE LIKED IT! If we were really lucky, the Playboy Channel would pop out into the clear for a few hours once every four or six months or so.

[JerseyMarine2092]

Wow, I responded to an older post. Sorry for re-derailing this.

Anyways, I work at a University Library these days and in my old position had to man the information desk from time to time. I once had to explain the concept of a pay phone to one of the kids, which then turned to explaining calling collect and calling cards.

[Justin_Bailey]

@chappachula

car windows…
How many people (not just under thirties) have never rolled down a car window?
You know …by rotating a handle with a little round knob ? You could even do it on a hot day while waiting in the car with the engine TURNED OFF!.
Amazing, huh?

You know that hand cranks were included in budget cars within the last 5-10 years, right?

[TruCelt]

For the current generation, a “small” soda has always been 22 oz or more. This is mind-boggling to me.

Also, they’ve never seen a grocery checker actually type in every price as it went by.

[An_Gadai]

@Justin_Bailey

@chappachula

car windows…
How many people (not just under thirties) have never rolled down a car window?
You know …by rotating a handle with a little round knob ? You could even do it on a hot day while waiting in the car with the engine TURNED OFF!.
Amazing, huh?

You know that hand cranks were included in budget cars within the last 5-10 years, right?

I’ve noticed in some cars, can’t recall the models, the back passenger door windows have hand cranks but the front windows have electric. I think it’s to stop children both messing with the buttons and potentially injuring themselves. Anyone else verify this?

[Swallowed_My_Cellphone]

@Justin_Bailey

You know that hand cranks were included in budget cars within the last 5-10 years, right?

My mom got her car last year… or the year before an it has hand cranks.

[Cat_Whisperer]

Yeah, my 2005 Corolla has power door locks, but manual windows. And I like it that way.

[scamartistry]

What about BBS (Bulletin Board System) that was way before internet became a household thing

[QuanSu]

Our family still has my grandmother’s woodburning stove. No, not the kind you keep in the cottage for warmth, I mean her big, white kitchen, cooking stove. The one she used to bake pie and cook dinner (a lot like this one but without the tall back part). No “low, medium, and high settings” it was all based on instinct and experience. There is a thermometer on the door of the oven, but i’ts not very accurate. It’s in perfect shape because she took really good care of it and swore that it was the best oven she ever used.

Wow, my next door neighbor has one of those in their kitchen! (Different color though.)

[Lamia]

@Jeff_Lichtman

This thread seems to have drifted from the original topic to things we don’t expect under-30s to recognize.

Other things that I wouldn’t expect the under-30 crowd to know about:

[ul]
[li]TV test patterns[/li][li]Door-to-door milk delivery[/li][li]PCs without hard drives[/li][li]Mimeographs[/li][li]Mechanical adding machines[/li][li]Reel-to-reel audio tape[/li][/ul]

I’m under 30 and I know about all of those. I personally remember three or four (not sure if I ever actually saw reel-to-reel audio tape or if it was just on TV or in movies), and know what the others are.

This list and a lot of the other examples people are giving strike me as things that children might not know about, but that’s because they have limited experience. I would expect an under-30 adult to have heard of milkmen before, despite the fact that AFAIK home milk delivery ended well before we were born.

@scamartistry

What about BBS (Bulletin Board System) that was way before internet became a household thing

I was an avid BBS user in the early-to-mid 1990s. Plenty of people my age or even older wouldn’t know about these though, because it just wasn’t a mainstream thing to do.

[Acantha]

@Superhal

Laser Disc: I usually explain that it’s a really, really big CD. (I used to say it was a CD as big as a phonograph, but I had to give that up about 10 years ago.)

Corduroy: it felt like felt but had stripes.

The Michael Jackson Jacket: not the black one from “Bad,” but the red one from Beat it or the V-top from Thriller.

Super Sentai: I don’t know why, but the only term people know is “Voltron,” but everybody knows the Voltron reference, and nobody knows the Super Sentai reference (which is the classification for all Japanese superheroes who were in groups of 5 or 3 and formed a giant robot at the end of the show.)

McDLT: for years it was the only fresh vegetable you could get from McD’s. (Yes, I know they sold salads before the McDLT. I said “fresh”.)

Busy signals: back in the day, only rich people had call waiting or answering machines.

One of my kids got a busy signal a while back and had no clue what it was. *Mom, I think there’s something wrong with their phone. * :smack:

Both of my children are flabbergasted at the idea of a life without DVRs, DVD players, or even VCRs, and can’t believe the first video games we played cost us a quarter in bars and pizza parlors or were on old low tech computers. The horror.

[JoelUpchurch]

@Mr.Excellent

You really wouldn’t expect us to recognize PCs without hard drives? My elementary school ran on Apple IIGS machines. Two floppy drives, no hard drive, and all the Oregon Trail you could play. (It’s educational! And you get to shoot things!)

The first computer I bought with my own money was a Apple II. It had Integer Basic in ROM. I had to load Floating Point Basic from a Cassette . That lasted a few months before I bought a floppy drive. The connectors on the floppy controller weren’t gold plated. I had to pull the board out every few months and run a pencil eraser over the connectors to clean them. The price of gold came down not too much later and they went back to gold plated connectors.

I had a hole punch I’d use to punch a notch in the floppy disks and flip them over and record on both sides. That turned out to be a stupid idea.

[Superhal]

Automobile edition:

1. The backseat ashtray built into the armrest.

2. Cars with manual brakes.

3. Driver’s licenses were mailed to you within 30 days. Until then, you had a carbon-paper temporary license.

4. It was considered polite to lean over and unlock the door for the passenger or the driver.

5. The only “power” option in the car was the engine. Everything else was powered by muscles.

6. Tire patches/plugs (outlawed here back in the 80’s)

7. Gas stations that didn’t serve food.

[Jophiel]

@JoelUpchurch

I had a hole punch I’d use to punch a notch in the floppy disks and flip them over and record on both sides. That turned out to be a stupid idea.

Really? I did that for years without incident. They always warned that the second side wasn’t quality tested but since all I was putting on there was C=64 games downloaded off BBS’s (at a lightning 300 baud), I wasn’t too worried. I think I only ever had one or two fail on me anyway.