TV Guide used to run weekly issues. I don’t know what their frequency is now.
I do know that the magazine stopped giving listings of what shows were being broadcast. (They have a website that still gives listings.) They rebranded themselves as a magazine about television shows and celebrities.
I came of programming age in the 1970s, so I witnessed the rise and fade of those chonky portable-TV-type home computers and mainframe monitors. There was one on every desk in the first couple jobs I worked. (Oh, and floppy disks.)
Does OJ Simpson count?
I can see a case for that, but the OP is more looking for things.
I’m presuming you are saying this in jest.
You must be a decade or so younger than me. When I worked at a department store in the mid/late 1980s and then at a regional drugstore chain, we used these books. At the department store for all cards. At the drugstore for just Amex, Discover and Diners Club. The diners club book was tiny, the Amex one was probably 200 pages, tiny print.
Even when we used the electronic terminal (not connected to the cash register) we still had to use the imprinting machine and fill out and get a signature on the charge sheet.
If you got a stolen or canceled card, we were supposed to retain the card and you could get a $25/$50/$100. Considering the starting hourly wage for a cashier was $3.35 in 1987, this was an amount a cashier might be willing to risk a physical altercation for.
1-900 numbers. Became all the rage for a period in the 90’s and early 2000s. Now vanished.
I used Unix workstations, including Sun SparcStations (which is such a cool name!) as an engineering student in college. I did technical computing on the Unix workstations, and prepared lab reports and wrote term papers on the Macs at the time which ran what is now referred to classic MacOS.
Now of course the Mac (and Apple iPhone, for that matter) that I currently use is many orders of magnitude more powerful than those Sun workstations of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Even a bit earlier than that (1980s). In the 1990s, FTC regulations started to take the wind out of their sails by the early '90s, but they were basically a sort of proto-internet (1-900 numbers offered information, and/or chats), and the rise of the internet, which provided the same sorts of things, doomed them.
In my lifetime VHS has got to be the absolute zenith example.
Very true, and I was there for all of it. When I was at Bell Labs I was the first manager to buy Sun workstations for my group, and I became very popular after AT&T invested in Sun. Software and EE groups were 100% Sun. Then I moved to Sun, but before I retired, after Oracle bought us, we used laptops running emulators that let us log into compute servers to do useful Solaris work. They emulated the thin client SunRays that we had moved to away from actual workstations before.
I saw a car bra today, on a newish Nissan. I’m not sure what model it was.
That was an interesting article. There was a Japanese version of the 1-900 numbers, but I only remember it being used for sex chats. Apparently, some people did get a lot of money running operations out of small apartment but that also went away.
I’ve got one: the charity telethon or pledge drive. Back when there were only 3 channels + PBS and random UHF stations, two or three times a year one of these events would take over a channel for hours and they would literally hold the “real” entertainment hostage until they got enough donations or pledges to return to normal programming. Entirely replaced by GoFundMe, direct donations, and other streams today, because the old leverage is gone. People now would just watch or do something else.
My local PBS and NPR stations absolutely still do on-air perodic pledge drives, but they do them a little differently now than they did decades ago: they intersperse regular programming with hosted breaks to beg for financial support.
The PBS station tends to also run “stunt” programming — classic rock concerts, old Ken Burns documentaries — during their pledge drives, which they don’t usually run during non-pledge periods, no doubt to attract eyeballs and possible donors.
Same here. 2-3 times a year is my guess.
I remember them from when I was a child. I don’t know when they became commonplace, but the OP is looking for things that weren’t there when you were a child and then became ubiquitous.
This thread isn’t for things that have simply gone away.
Democracy.
I thought at first that this post was going to be about the Jerry Lewis telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which used to be held every Labor Day weekend. It’s actually a good candidate for this thread. For something like 21 hours, Jerry Lewis and Ed McMahon would host a big telethon in Las Vegas, which was broadcast on seemingly every channel (pre-empting all my favorite cartoons!) to raise money for the MDA. It featured performances by a lot of big-name entertainers, most of whom a kid like me had never heard of.
Wikipedia tells me that the first such telethon was broadcast in 1966, which is the year before I was born. But it also says that 1970 was the first year in which the broadcast was seen coast-to-coast, and 1976 was when it reached its peak of being shown on 213 stations, so I think that counts as “becoming ubiquitous” during my life.
Lewis left as host after the 2010 version (it’s unclear whether he stepped down voluntarily or was fired), and the telethon slowly petered out, having been getting shorter and being shown on fewer and fewer stations for awhile before that. Even by that time, it seemed like a dinosaur, a relic of an earlier age. I can’t say I really miss it, but it was kind of shock the first time I realized that they didn’t do it anymore.
What year did it become ubiquitous?