I still remember when:
Many homes lacked phones (my grandmother got calls for her next door neighbor). If you had a phone, it was probably in the kitchen–no extensions and, of course, no cordless phones.
Many ordinary people didn’t have cars (we got our first when I was in HS).
On the other hand, public transit was good (when not on strike). I started taking trolleys and buses myself by the time I was ten.
We were banned from swimming in the summer for fear of polio.
Color film was expensive and slow.
Virtually no one had home or car air conditioning.
As kids, we played outside after school and all summer with no adult supervisions. Mostly on the streets.
People died of infectious diseases (antibiotics were brand new).
No one had a TV (although there were experimental broadcasts).
Records were 10" and played for three minutes. There was no low-priced way to record music.
There was one radio for the whole house.
A computer was a human being doing computations with a pencil and paper.
A washer was a machine that agitated the water and clothes and then you squeezed water out through a “wringer”, something like a giant pasta maker and hung them on a clothes line, in the basement in the winter, outside the rest of the year.
Our heating system operated on coal and every night, we would add a couple of shovelfuls of coal and remove a shovelful of ashes and bank the fire so it didn’t go out during the night. And ash collection was a major production (and lifting the ashes out of the basement was hard work). And that was burning anthracite–soft coal would have been much worse.
Fresh fruits and vegetables were available only in the summer. They did sold boxes containing red cardboard spheres that were called “tomatoes”, but believe me they weren’t.
There were no frozen food and the small fridge we owned had a freezing compartment large enough only for a couple ice cube trays. (Actually, I can just barely recall my grandmother’s ice box and the ice men who came to deliver the ice.)
Milk was delivered by milkmen using horse-drawn trucks (the horse learned the route and followed the milkman who would deliver to several houses in a row).
During the summer there were horse-drawn trucks on the street selling fresh produce and, on Fridays, fish.
In HS, I learned to use a slide rule.
Transistors were unknown and all electronic equipment used vacuum tubes that glowed in the dark and regularly burnt out. Many drug stores had tube testers and sold replacements.
