Oh, yes, indeed – every TV had rabbit ears, and little me became expert at manipulating them to receive distant non-local stations that would normally require an outdoor antenna. An outdoor antenna was absolutely out of the question because my mother, among her other unusual traits, had a pathological fear of lightning and anything that might “attract” it. So my whining and pleading was confined to the subject of cable TV.
Guess what showed up in our mailbox today? Yep, a telephone book. Of course the first thing I did was to look up my name. Of course I’m not in it, but it was a big deal to see your name in print.
Outdoor antennas might be a good addition to the thread. I remember seeing them on every house in suburbia and now they’re gone.
The car I traded in in 2024 had WBUR and WGBH stickers on it and I was a member of the local public radio and tv stations for almost 30 years.
Things change. When I predict what’s going to go out, I look at what 25 year olds are doing now compared with what I was doing at that age mumble-something years ago.
I looked up some statistics and FM listenership has started to drop. This article agrees with you, but I’m not sure the statistics quoted agree with the editorial.
Best years of my 20’s-30’s were at discos. We had a couple of spectacular ones, SO MUCH fun. Get dressed up, go out in any kind of weather, dance, meet people, have fun. (I don’t know what they do now if anything. Hook ups for humping? Twerking contests?). I miss those days. I still love the music of the 80’s (some of the 70’s). The strange thing is it all ended just. like. that. Those huge dance emporiums were left to rot for decades, emptied out of anything valuable but the fixtures and the furniture just left in there. It was ghastly.
cigarette lighters in cars
We still have nightclubs here in the UK and Europe; they are basically discos with somewhat different music. What is the equivalent in the US?
The thing about young people is that they eventually become older – and wiser! 
I do love my CBC Radio. Almost any time I go out for a drive of any significant distance, I learn something new. And it’s fully funded through public money, so no annoying commercials – except at election time, when each party is offered equal time to make their case, which the CBC considers to be their civic responsibility.
Not completely gone. What’s gone are the old yagi-style antennas designed for VHF signals, the huge kind that look like they’re intended to hang wet laundry for drying. With the changeover to high-definition digital broadcasting, most stations broadcast in the UHF range and antennas are much smaller, many of them using “bowtie” elements backed by a reflector grid. They’re small enough that they can even be used indoors, mounted in a window or in the attic. Granted, one no longer sees a forest of rooftop antennas as in the old days, but I do see the occasional UHF rooftop antenna. I have one myself, set up in the upstairs guest bedroom, and no one minds because, like, the vast majority of the time no one is there! Broadcast television is still alive and well!
True, but the sockets are still there, they’ve just been renamed, and are extremely useful – for instance, to power my GPS and, in an emergency with a slow tire leak, my air compressor
Certainly those were already ubiquitous within your lifetime.
Not just renamed but had the latching mechanism removed. If you find an auto cigarette lighter somewhere – a junkyard maybe or steal one at a concours show – you’d have to hold it in until it was hot enough.
For that matter, ashtrays in autos. I remember one from my childhood that had in the center of the bench(!) front seat an ashtray that you could pull open with a lighter on the side.
For that matter, ashtray fires. The driver would get busy in the middle of stubbing out a cigarette and the still-hot butt would set the other butts in the ashtray to smouldering. If they had filters, it would stink.
Wow! I guess school systems are trying to save money however they can (I can remember teachers harping on us back in elementary school about the importance of taking care of the textbooks because they were so pricey), but I remember some of my math teachers. 
My high school Calculus teacher bragged about never taking the plastic wrap off of his Calculus book when he was taking whatever class he needed for certification; my class’s AP exam scores definitely reflected this.
That’s the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam. Tabco’s explanation is very good. I took it once back when it was open book; there were people lined up with Rubbermaid totes crammed full of books on dollies. I don’t know how they had time to make use of all that stuff.
Now that’s absolutely brutal.
Is it still the TI-89? I remember reading an article years ago about how they had a near monopoly on classrooms. I didn’t have one until college, when I realized my old Casio (color!) graphing calculator didn’t have quite enough functions.
It was around here until very recently when Mini Mouse was taking AP Calc BC.
The US still has nightclubs (with a disco dance floor) as well as ballrooms (tango, waltz, foxtrot, …)
Did their growth in popularity occur in your lifetime?
I would say yes, for me. In my childhood, televisions themselves were only starting to become widespread, and rooftop antennas flourished like weeds only shortly thereafter, with cable providers not becoming well established until decades later, with cable-only channels like CNN giving them a big boost – but CNN didn’t become established until the summer of 1980. Lots of other cable-only channels began to enter the mainstream, and the rest is history.
There are an awful lot of things that I saw become common and then rare, or just plain gone. Shopping malls were mentioned above and seem to be the most striking example. Something so big and so filled with customers and people whose livelihoods depended on them ! We saw them evolve from “shopping centers,” and then, one by one, drop nearly out of existence. Wow!
Somewhat less striking, but still nostalgic: stand-alone video game parlors. Yes, there are still limited video game arcades in movie theaters and party venues, but once upon a time a friend and I would walk to Captain Video and spend a pleasant hour parting with quarters, then walk home gabbing about the games and our scores. Ah, for the pursuits of our youth !
Video rental stores
Drive-In movie theaters. There were thousands of them. They flourished from the 1950s into the early 80s, with many of them open year-round, even in chillier climes. What happened?
Christmas 1985 was pivotal to the death of the drive-in. It was the year when (according to my sources) the VCR was the #1 family Christmas gift. People could stay home and watch movies! Drive-in attendance dropped like a rock in the summer of 1986 as a result, and for many, it was their swan song.
Sure, there are some still operating today, but they are very, very few. There’s one not far from me, in fact, that does quite well, but it’s the one remaining out of at least a dozen that were within driving distance at one time. The last movie we saw at a drive-in was “Purple Rain,” with “Police Academy” as the co-feature.
We need to distinguish here between outdoors antennas in general, and satellite dish antennas (parabolic reflectors). The latter pretty much emerged during my lifetime, after commercial satellites were launched. Other antennas (Yagi, etc.) were around long before I was.
I agree with both of these (even though the rise of the mall was a bit before my time), except that arcades have disappeared a lot more than malls. Although maybe all the malls have disappeared in your area since around 1/3 of them in my area have closed in the past couple of years and around 1/3 more of them have clearly seen their better days, and just a little more economic hardship might do some more of them in.
But earlier today I was in a thriving indoor mall that had around as many people as I’d expect for a non-holiday weekend.
But arcades have definitely almost disappeared outside of tourist areas, party venues, and a handful of Big Deal retro destination arcades / museums.