The sparks look bad but it’s the correct amount when plugging the tube into the control knob. You can see it hasn’t even blipped the KE GAG-imeter.
Yes, when the tube is too big to fit into any of the sockets, you should plug it into the control knob. Back in the day, everyone knew that. The hard part was reading those hieroglyphics on the KE GAG meter.
Another blast from the past: in the 50s and 60s, before parking sensors, some cars were equipped with Curb Feelers…
A springy metal whisker bolted to the fender. Get too close and scrrraape!—instant curb alert and a spark-show for the sidewalk crowd.
I would call those things “child catchers”, like cow catchers on old train engines. Especially with the granny manically laughing while scaring the kids.
We used to have those. No sparks at all.
The wands weren’t solid. They were tight spirals made of flat metal strips, so that the sound would transmit easily. And ours, at least, came in pairs. You could hear the difference between ‘close enough’ and ‘getting too close’.
Those static trips that hung from rear bumpers
Some were still around at least to the late 1970s, probably the early 1980s. Long enough for me to have a strong memory of them, and I was born in 1972. The one at my local Revco was probably within 20 feet of the L’eggs spinner rack.
Not just scaring them. Notice that she actually set the comic book the youngest kid is holding on fire.
I’m pretty sure that any device that sets nearby children on fire would have a tough time passing a consumer safety test in 2025.
I bet kids these days wouldn’t recognize this:
We built our house 8 years ago.
Builder asked where we wanted the phone lines.
Luckily he was happy enough to run cat 5 instead.
I am 60
I managed a few campus computer labs for 25 years, and cleaned a LOT of mouse balls. When systems were replaced, the keyboards and mice were recycled - except they wouldn’t accept mice with balls. So I have a bucket of several hundred matching balls in my garage, awaiting some arcane reuse……
We showed a picture of a Sony Walkman to one of the younger coworkers - born after 2000. Because of the headphones she could figure out it made sound, but she had never seen one and wasn’t familiar with it at all.
Thank ogs we don’t have to print PowerPoint slides on clear film anymore and can project our laptops straight to the screen.
In training, we still have use for a document projector, handy for real-time demos straight to the screen.
A telephone story:
I saw a cute clip on youtube recently. A young couple bought their first house (built in the 1970’s) and took their 2 children ages 8 and 12 to see it . (The purpose of the video was to show the joy and excitement on the kids’ faces.)
But the funny part of the clip was when the 12 year old stepped into the kitchen, and said “What’s this?”…pointing at an old telephone mounted on the wall. Her mother told the girl to dial her cell phone, The girl did so, no problem, pushing the buttons for all 10 digits. But then the funny thing happened: the girl got confused after the last digit. She held her finger extended, hovering over the keys, looking for a “send” key.
Suddenly the mom’s cell phone started ringing, and the girl said “how did that happen? I haven’t finished yet.”
Did the mice give their consent?
Note that the post you replied to was two years old. Since that time, projection boards have gone a lot further of the way out.
They’re effectively non-verbal, but did roll over on their backs….
Traditionally, an ink drawing on tracing paper could be used to print multiple blue prints, for distribution. The ink drawing might have been traced (by a person) from a drawing on paper, or might have been drawn as an original on tracing paper. The line color is usually described as “white”, but the only physical blue-prints I’ve seen, in an old print drawer, were yellow on blue: I don’t know if that was a different process, or if yellow is what they mean by “white”, or if it was an effect of ageing.
The replacement process, printing from tracing paper, blue lines on white, we called “azo”. The process was opaque to me 
I fed a tracing in, and got a print out. All gone now… It was a misjudged archaic academic process even then: we should have been doing early CAD, but the Mech Eng dept was wedded to the past.
I found an old coin purse the other day, and realized that, full of dimes, it would have held $50-$60 worth of buying power today, in equivalent value,