And the checkers had to manually enter the price of every item to ring up your sale! I can’t imagine how long that took, compared to using the scanner.
One thing that kind of gets me is that the houses in my childhood neighborhood were built in the 60s and they all had these little doors built in them so the milkman could put the milk in there and then you could open the little door from the inside to get the milk. I always thought about that because they just had no idea that in just a few years people like me would be utterly perplexed by the whole notion of someone stashing milk right in the side of the house with its own special door and everything. It makes me feel weird to think about someone building a whole house with this idea that they take for granted will be a useful feature and then poof, in a few years it’s so out there that the kids don’t even believe the explanation.
My parents generation grew up when any space missions, even unmanned probe launches, were new and exciting. Launches were broadcast on TV! About six or seven years ago, when she was in high school, my sister did a summer internship for some branch of NASA. She helped to design some weather satellite, and the only really notable thing about it was that she was lucky to get the internship, not that she was designing something that would be launched into space.
I can’t begin to understand how society functioned without computers, to say nothing of the internet. My family first got AOL back in…1993 or 94, when I was six or seven. I almost never used hardcopy encyclopedias in elementary school, because we always had Microsoft Encarta. I’ve used a typewriter, but my god they’re awkward! If I want to look something up, I just open my browser and Google it, and there it is. When I was in Europe, I could use my American ATM card and get local currency, withdrawing it from a small local bank in NJ. For that matter, I can check my balance/transfer money/any number of things pretty much whenever, wherever, as long as I’ve got my mobile phone on me. For the majority of jobs I’ve worked I’ve never gotten an actual paper paycheck, and the one job where I did, it’s a huge annoyance.
How on earth did large stores (ie, supermarkets) keep track of inventory before computers and barcodes/RFID? Did they just go through and count everything by hand at the end of every day?
Translation anything. I can’t wrap my head around how unbearably tedious and labour-intensive it must have been to research terminology before the Internet and other such media. Translators kept huge card catalogues with painstakingly prepared terminology fiches. Now, if I can’t Google a term in thirty seconds or find it in the big online terminology banks, I grumble at the irritation.
I grew up in the 80’s, and my dad worked for the cable company. I tell ya, that was sweet!
One thing I can’t believe now is that you used to be able to smoke in your hospital bed! I did it, in 1988, in a hospital in Rock Hill, South Carolina. You could also grocery shop while enjoying a cigarette.
OK, I’m a geezer that didn’t have a TV in the house until age 15. (They were for “rich people”) so,
The whole freakin’ computer/internet thing. It’s just magic. There’s no other explanation.
Cell phones. Missed communications were such a problem. Planning was required to avoid tragedy. Nowadays you lose somebody, you just mash a button on the cel.
There’s so much wealth around! Almost everybody can have computers, multiple cars per family, lengthy vacations and expensive trinkets with minimal hardship.
I’ll stop now, but check out the sig line. 
What’s to wonder? Mom put the empty milk bottle in there (to return it) and a ticket (for fresh milk), and the milkman did his job. Pure convenience! And us kids had a “secret access” to the house when we locked ourselves out. Of course, I guess that it does seem bizarre if you grew up at a time when “milkmen” were something from “the olden days.”
NinjaChick’s post reminded me…I well remember when any space mission was major news. In fact, I remember that my mother and I watched Alan Shepard’s first manned American space flight, all those years ago. And those of the other Mercury astronauts as well. But even after, I remember my school basically shutting down to watch Gemini and Apollo spacecraft take off and splash down, on one black-and-white TV in the school library. Any ancillary events–such as the astronauts driving a car on the Moon–were watched as well. And of course, Apollo 13 was a major deal; we were glued to the TVs at school for that one, and we all burst into applause when those astronauts made it home safely. Astronauts and space were big heroes and big news.
Then, at some point, they weren’t. Going up in space seemed to become as common as going to work. The TV coverage wasn’t there; or it was, but taped and replayed on the evening news, in between news of, say, a union strike and the President’s latest trip. The Challenger disaster was important (as was the Apollo I disaster in 1967), but except for that and the recent shuttle disaster (forgive me, but I cannot remember the name of the ship), space exploration news just doesn’t carry the importance that it did when I was a child. I was never a “space junkie,” but I’m still surprised that space exploration just isn’t the news it once was.
Not much longer, really. Checkers were very quick, and didn’t even have to take their eyes off the product as they punched in the price on the cash register.
Store didn’t need to take inventory every day. Once a month was more like it.
Once upon a time, young people did not require staring at a screen necessary to fill their free time. They went outside when the weather was good, and played, and had fun doing it. Imagine!
They kept more stock in the storeroom or warehouse as a buffer against fluctuating demand and uncertainty of current stock level.
I sometimes wonder how I managed without the Internet. If I’m writing a paper I can use it to look up articles whereas 20 years ago I would have had to go to the library and look through stacks of ancient dust-mite infested books and magazines. If I wake up in the middle of the night wanting to know what the mating call of the blue gray gnatcatcher is I don’t have to schedule a trip to the bird sanctuary, I can just look it up on the computer.
Recently I worked at a school and one thing that surprised me was that they had lockdown drills. When I was a kid we had fire drills and tornado drills but no one worried about psychos with guns getting into the school.
I tried this, but it’s broken - when you click on their faces, people’s profile information does not appear.
Some schools have even started to hold mass decontamination drills.
Yes, I can remember their fingers flying, now that you mention it, but it had to take longer than just sliding the product over the scanner. Not to mention that the checkers had to become proficient at it…I imagine for the first few weeks on the job, it would have been painful to watch.
Puh-lease.
I really hope you’re not being serious.
This may seem altruistic but I cannot fathom racial inequality as it existed in the 60s and earlier.
The idea of “whites only” anything blows my little mind. I see the documentaries, I read the articles, I hear the speeches. I just cannot put myself in the mindset that this sort of thing could have been possible because it just makes no sense.
I understand there is racial inequality today and racism but the “old” idea that blacks and whites are different classes of people is truly mind-boggling.
In a sense, I guess it’s good that I can feel this way - it means the people who did all of the work during the Civil Rights movement did a good job.
Yeah, there are a few bugs to work out. But the graphics are fuckin’ awesome!
Or they sat in their rooms, reading books. Like me.
This is Texas–it’s hot outside!
Ah yes, retail in the olden days. Yes, we keyed everything in by hand - dept no., SKU no., price - for each item, but you got proficient pretty quickly or the manager condemned you to wander the floor. There really wasn’t much of a delay in ringing stuff up; the slow bit was processing credit card sales, especially if our outside connection was down and we had to check MC/Visa-issued booklets of bad card numbers. (How many of you remember when running a charge through meant manual imprinting of a credit card slip?) Spot checks of inventory for the top sellers were done each week; full-scale inventory was done once a year by an outside company, usually overnight. Stuff that hadn’t sold was culled thereafter. On the flip side, the store manager had a fair amount of discretion in ordering product for the store, rather than leaving everything up to the warehouse to decide.
As for the movies - VHS releases killed the old second-run theatres, where you could go see a movie as much as a year after the original release for very cheap. Another movie thing that bit the dust was double features on the weekends. Oh, and another - on rainy days, us kids used to pay once to get into the neighborhood theatre (also gone now) and stay all day, watching movies over and over and no one ever kicked you out.
And Colophon, while IMHO the child abduction thing has been grossly exaggerated, a parent who lets their kid roam the neighborhood to play nowadays would be thought of as a bad parent, in the very least.