So incidentally, I did two things yesterday. I went for a walk, and I took my car ('22 Subaru Crosstrek) in for a wash.
On the walk I saw one of those wheel balancing weights in the gutter. This made me think of my childhood (mid 90s) and my thought at the time was that these weren’t as ubiquitous as they used to be.
While checking my car after its wash for any remaining dirt, I looked closely at the rims. There were small square weights adhered to the inside of the rim, mostly out of view. They were very much like the ones in the link below:
Perhaps they’ve supplanted the old clamp-on style.
I still have an 8-track cassette. Sound track of Star Wars. It was bought years after I no longer had a player, though. Thought it would make a good specimen for the format. I think I also still have at least one CED. And I have a reel-to-reel tape that belonged to my grandmother.
If this counts as an “item”, white dog poop. Growing up I took it for granted that dried dog droppings were chalky white. It wasn’t until maybe a couple of years ago (maybe learned here) that the white actually came from bone meal in dog food, whic apparently isn’t used now, and apparently your general dried dog poo is no longer chalky and white.
In my neighbourhood, after fibre-optic internet was rolled out the phone company actually removed the copper phone lines. Anyone who still wanted a “landline” telephone was moved over to a VoIP service. So you can still have a wired telephone, only now it’s wired to your internet router instead of a phone jack in the wall.
You can’t use the clamp-on weights on cast or forged aluminum wheels which virtually all passenger vehicles are sold with today, and the adhesively bonded weights have turned out to be more reliable. Practically the only road-going vehicles that still use steel wheels are semi-trucks and trailers.
That’s the thing with the older technologies. They were just fun to play with, because you could see what they were doing. Like with the punch cards posted above, my dad’s office used to have those, and when he took us to work when we had the day off school, it was just fun to use the punch card writer, and watch the cards as they got sucked in, written on, and then pushed out.
You don’t get that physicality feeling anymore, it’s all just a glowing box, and everything interesting happens at a microscopic level.
I took auto shop classes in the late 90’s and motor oil came in either gallon jugs or, much more commonly, plastic quart bottles. I was helping my dad with his car maintenance as far back as the mid 1980’s and I’ve never seen motor oil sold in metal cans.
The balancing weight, however, are still in common use and I shouldve recognized it immediately.
They were if you read the Edmunds Scientific catalog.
I recognize everything in the pictures, except maybe the jumping discs. Without looking it up, I think you pushed it down, left it on a flat surface it would and flip in the air.
That might’ve been the approximate cut-off point. I remember starting to see motor oil sold in plastic containers with screw-on caps around that time and thinking it was a much better idea.
Or possibly to a base station that’s effectively a cell phone bolted to the wall. That’s what my mom has, now that the local phone company isn’t supporting copper any more.
I just saw several of those two days ago. Any event at my church that serves coffee (so,almost all of them), it’s served from those big steel cylinder percolators. They might not be as common any more, but I expect that my parish is probably far from alone in still using them.
Electric pencil sharpeners. typewriters, word processors, Dymo label makers, the embossing ones. “No batteries required”
About 7 years ago, I was sitting at my desk and heard a familiar, yet strange sound. Took me a while to realize it was the electric pencil sharpener with have in the storeroom!
Edit: Cell phone antennas, retractable, short (3/4" - 1") and stubby.(1/4" - 1/2") Less common, but a thing in the late 90’s, early 00’s were light up antennas, single color at first, then multi-color later. One of my customer’s girlfriend was deaf and made a cellphone practical for her.
A lot of teens and 20-somethings have seen the large 20 cup type percolators and would probably know what that was. I’m pretty sure my kids would know it.
