Yes, they still do. I have no idea why, though.
This was last true in about 1901. There’s hasn’t been a stigma against relief pitchers in nearly a century. True, they’ve become much more commonplace in the last 15 years, but they weren’t an anomaly, even back in 1980.
They are handy for math classes, or any other class where you need to diagram operations while still looking at the class to check for questions/understanding. They are being replaced by “Smart Boards,” but still have a place in the classroom.
Doing math by pencil and paper. Learning multiplication tables. Square roots by paper.
Fax machines.
3 finger baseball gloves.
writing letters
Monday Night Football being an event
Cinemascope
My father taught us that poem when we were young. All three of us kids (26, 29 and 31) can probably all recite it still. Same with “The Night Before Christmas” - between the three of us, we can get the whole thing out!
Kids still use it, though often they use either the correction pensor roll-on correction tape. I used to use the pens to write my name and doodle on notebook and 3-ring binder covers in school.
My car has roll down windows, as well as no clock!
Re: overhead projectors: all my classes at university now still have them in the rooms as well as the camera-based projectors (which are better, IMHO). Sometimes the profs just have older material still on acetate, or they prefer to use it to show how things overlap or simply to post an example question while working out the solutions on paper using the camera projectors.
You don’t think people under 30 know how to do basic arithmetic with pencil and paper or were forced in elementary school to have quick memory of the products of single digits?
Actually I know this as a fact. In my state, the school districts teach times tables in 3rd grade. When I went there, we had to memorize up to 12X12 by first grade. Now, they do 1-4 in the first half of third grade and then 5-9 in the second half. This is a state-dictated curriculum, and all public schools in the state have to follow it.
Therefore, they don’t even teach 10-12 anymore.
That does not contradict anything I said. Besides, who care? They have to stop somewhere, and stopping at single digits makes a hell of a lot more sense than arbitrarily continuing to 12.
Maybe I should have said “make it longer into a game”. The 100-pitch guideline is certainly a more recent development. I’m 29, and I remember pitchers regularly pitching into the 7th or 8th inning, instead of the 5th or 6th, which is common today. Managers are less likely to let a pitcher work his way out of a jam. They are more likely to pull him and go to the bullpen the minute the starting pitcher gives up several hits in a row.
Yeah, that sounds about right. But that still makes it something that an under-30 understands (I’m 28 myself). Pitchers did used to go longer into games, but this practice didn’t stop until we were teenagers, meaning most people under 20 at least have some inkling of it in living memory.
[quote=“elmwood, post:172, topic:548101”]
i.e., Kracker Barrel restaurants.
Yeah, every day I look at that funny machine on the counter by the printer at work and wonder what it is. :rolleyes:
People even farther below 30 than I am must also know what a fax machine is, because I work at a university library and students often come in and ask if they can use our machine. (No, but they can pay to use the fax machines at the campus post office and the copy center.) I’m not sure if these students actually know how to operate fax machines, but they know what they are and occasionally have need of one.
I’d be amazed if anyone under the age of 70 recognised this, but following a washboard link, there was information about laundry “bluing”. I remember my Scottish-born grandmother washing clothes by hand in the kitchen sink, and using a few drops of what I thought was blue dye. When I asked, she told me that it was “a bit of blue, to make them white”. Very confusing to me!
As for what’s surprised me that an under-30 didn’t recognise–it was Bruce Springsteen. (I’d just bought concert tickets, and mentioned how excited I was to a young co-worker.) Sadness on my part ensued, and she asked in all innocence: “Who’s Bruce Springsteen?”
What really just rendered me speechless for a few seconds the first time I realized it is the fact that, at this moment, we are farther away from the time of our youth (for people who grew up in the 70s and 80s) than I was from the beginnings of rock and roll when I was born in 1971. And all of those “oldies” that my mom liked so much and were so much ancient history to me, were closer to that time than the Thompson Twins “Hold Me Now” is to now.
I’m a long way short of 70 but my mother used blue bags for laundry when we were growing up.
They were just small bags of some blue chemical- and extremely useful for treating bee stings.
Junk Food edition:
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The Pepsi Challenge
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Non-aluminum soft drink cans
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When soft drinks were the most expensive thing (by weight) at the fast food place, and there was no such thing as free refills.
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When real sugar was the norm, not the exception.
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When sugar came from cane.
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Non-franchised fast food places.
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A small fries, a regular hamburger, and a 12 oz drink was a full meal.
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Hamburger University, the training center for Ronald McDonald clown actors.
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When FDA requirements allowed paper hats to be adequate for holding hair.
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The best elementary school birthday parties were hosted at McDonalds.
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“Espresso” was synonymous with “France,” not “Starbucks.”
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Gumball machines that actually held candy.
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Video-game inspired food, like Pac Man candy or Donkey Kong Cereal.
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Cracker Jacks contained real plastic toys, and you had to rip open the box with your teeth.
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When straw technology was inferior to juice box technology, and undamaged juice box straws were traded in the schoolyard like cigarettes in prison.
And, before that, the Los Angeles Angels 
Hamburger U still exists, and was never a training center for Ronald McDonald impersonators; it’s McDonald’s corporate training center.
I’m 25. I recognized everything but Telex (but I was close. I just didn’t realize they used punch cards) and Tipp-Ex (although I’ve actually used a knock off brand). Oh, and the those blue chemicals you talk about for laundry–I honestly had no idea they ever did that, but it makes sense, since American white cotton is actually blue tinted. But I’m sure my mom at 50 would.
Things I’ve never actually used is a much longer list. But some of these seem quite contemporary. I can imagine the under 20 set not knowing about them, but not the under 30.
Apparently a lot of these people just never talk to their elders.
I got a 50" Hi-def 16:9 ratio rear projection set in 2001 or 2002. I was considered an “early adapter”.