Chronos coined a new word for that Monty Python “one-upping” spiel: “Yorkshiring.” It’s already getting traction.
True, but I’ve never seen the punch card freezing up thing before. I bet we can convince some kids who have never even seen a punch card it happened.
Freak ‘em out even more by telling them about that building in DC that resembles a punch card (I can’t remember the name).
Tell them it’s the Punch Card House of Worship. 
Both. That’s why you see abandoned cars alongside the highway.*
*Stolen from Jerry Seinfeld.
Most of the PTT users I ever knew were work users, where they’d use them as a sort of party line for the work gang to talk to each other on simultaneously. And most of them were using it to duplicate the functionality of older CB-style radio communications. I don’t know how it worked exactly, but both the flower shop I worked for (huge wholesale/retail outfit in Houston) and the engineering/surveying company used the same thing- they basically had their own dedicated radio channel and every truck tuned in and could talk to each other. This was the early 90s, so pre-cell phones.
At some point, the surveying guys did get cell phones by my last summer and used the PTT stuff in exactly the same way.
10 Speed bicycles with skinny tires. Somehow they went away and were replaced by mountain bikes with the fat tires.
Road bikes with skinny tires still exist. I have one in addition to my mountain bike. The mountain bike excels on trails and unpaved bike paths. The road bike excels on paved surfaces.
If I need a bike that will handle both paved and unpaved surfaces, I take my mountain bike—like when I went to Maine last week. But on a long road trip, it takes a lot more work than the road bike, especially on uphill climbs.
I agree, they haven’t gone away, so much as they are now, mostly, in a particular niche: for people who primarily ride on roads, and especially for those who are interested in speed, and who may own more than one bike.
Decades ago, “skinny tire” ten-speeds were pretty commonly what adult cyclists rode. But, for the casual bicyclist now, cruisers, mountain bikes and such are more the norm.
Road bikes have evolved substantially. More and more cogs on the corncob, and first two, then three, and now one chain rings up front. You can still have a “10-speed”, but it’ll more than likely be a 1x up front and 10 in the back. And tires went from moderately skinny to super skinny to kinda porky. All for road, not even talking about gravel or dirt or mountain.
Right—my mountain bike has three gears up front and six in the back, making it an 18-speed.
And my road bike has two gears up front, and eleven in the back, making it a 22-speed. 
The tire is slightly wider as well than a standard road bike, being designed for cobble roads.
I have a 3 X 9 gears bike, been riding it for five years, though I do not ride all that much.
I can’t tell if 1 & 9 is a higher gear than 2 & 5, for example, but definitely higher than 2 & 3.
How attuned to the bike do you need to be to distinguish all 27 combinations?
Even if some gear ratios are not duplicated exactly (a few of them might be), can you really distinguish, say, 2.61 from 2.63? However that is a trick question, since no one would make that shift anyway, with the caveat that maybe you would, e.g., drop to a smaller front chainring and then shift the back to compensate— not as a pattern of making an infinitesimal gear change, though.
Right, it’s similar to the way sedans have been largely replaced by SUVs and pickup trucks. People envision themselves as going boldly into the wilderness and on rugged off-road trails, even if they spend most (or all) of their time on paved surfaces.
The rise of bike-share programs in cities, with ruggedly built bikes designed to withstand repeated use and abuse, may have also helped cement in the average person’s mind what a “normal” bike should look like.
That could be a factor. But if you go into a bike shop (not a big-box store), you will typically find mountain bikes (mid-range to high-end), road bikes (typically high-end to very high-end), and a whole lot of in-between hybrids at various price points.
The market for road bikes has shifted so high-end that most people would not consider one for casual use. I wanted one a few years ago, and the cheapest one I could find was about $1K. (And ultimately I spent quite a bit more than that.)
Big box stores like Walmart generally carry low-end hybrids and mountain bikes, and no road bikes to speak of.
I don’t know how it is in the US, but here in Germany where bikes as normal and regular means of transportation are much more common, people often have two or even three bikes for different purposes: a city bike for everyday use, for commuting to work, grocery shopping or generally moving in the city, a road bike for sports and recreation, and maybe a mountain bike for doing off-road tours.
You have your fixed-gear bicycles, which became ubiquitous in the 19th Century, but have more recently come back as city bicycles (as opposed to the track), but maybe gone away again? (The Premium Rush movie appeared way back in 2012.) Though, I still see them all the time, every day.
In large cities, fixed gear bikes were the transportation mode of choice for bike messengers. I read a story about them in some cycling publication (Bicycling, perhaps?), and the messengers had two main reasons for riding fixies. First, since fixies are hard to ride if you’re not used to them, they don’t get stolen so the messengers didn’t have to lock them up when they went into office buildings to get or deliver their packages. Even if somebody tried to steal it, they’d typically abandon it within a few feet once the bike bucked them off. Second, there’s a coolness factor to riding a bike that you have to pedal all the time and on which you have no brakes.
Just a quick Google search gave me an article talking about the death of the humble 10 speed bike with the drop handlebars…written in 2010. I’m sure pretty much everything in this thread can still be found if you look hard enough, but for all intents and purposes “went away”.
I was issued a Nextel PTT for my job around 2001-2, before I had a cell/mobile of my own. It was pretty handy for our crew of field service techs, it’s like an intercom. If I wanted to get a message to a colleague, I’d scroll through & find contacts and give the PTT a brief press which would beep their device and display my name, like a missed call. If they were driving, or with a customer, or dirty hands, it might be a few minutes but usually they’d beep back right away when it would continue in the usual two-way radio simplex fashion. In other words, it’s not as immediate as a ringing call.
Today, we’d just send a text message.