Heh! I snapped up one of those too. It’s in my kitchen, as a Post-It note-board. I also still have a reel of magnetic tape. I threw away my last box of punch-cards a long time ago. Never used punched paper tape. Did use ZIP drive and disks, but they’re all long gone now.
I still have a lot of WordPerfect files…which MS Word is polite enough to be able to open. Something MS did right, for once.
oneupmanship: I have my dad’s wire recorder out in the garage. His old high-end Nakamichi cassette decks are sitting on top of the box. Those were damn fine decks – I played a tape of classical music he recorded off the local NPR station and my friend could not believe that that was recorded off the radio.
Wow, you win! That’s really cool!
(Now, where did I put my cuneiform tablets…) 
I inherited my grandmother’s sewing machine (the kind in a table, with a bench), and most of the contents of her sewing room, which included several towers of plastic drawers full of patterns that I kept even though some went back to the 1950s. Tons of needles, thread, scraps of fabric-- I’m set for life on that. She apparently also liked to listen to music while she sewed, because one drawer was full of 8-tracks.
I still have them. Don’t know why I kept them. I don’t have a player.
I do, though, have a collection of 78 records, and a record player you don’t plug in, you just wind. Had it for years-- since about 1989. Once, in this building I lived in, where everyone was young (it was a cold water walk-up, with common bathrooms), and we used to get together to do stuff all the time, there was a power failure, and I brought my wind-up record player and 78s into the hall, and everyone came out to listen.
Yes, someone could have brought a battery-powered boom box and cassettes, but this was more fun.
Who remembers:
…that the only time that television broadcast after the nightly station shut-off was once a year during the Labor Day Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. My parents would let my brother and I put sleeping bags in front of the TV and we would try and stay up all night.
Ahhh…you’re a young 'un!
Those were certainly the days of only 3 networks, but I remember watching TV until the wee hours of summer nights until there was no more programming for the day. All three stations would stop around 2:30AM and either show a flag with the Star Spangled Banner or just show “snow.” Then the new day would start around 4:30AM
And this was in the bustling heart of San Diego county, too. I remember wondering if Los Angeles had more TV programming because they had more people to watch a greater variety of shows.
–G!
Yeah, well, some stations would sign off with the national anthem, but one of our local stations like to run this thing at the empennage of the evening.
I’m a bit young for 10-base2 coax ethernet, at least to use. I did pull a shitload of old coax cable out of the ceilings and out from under the raised floor of our data center at my first job though.
The JCL thing made me laugh; in college our assembly language course was IBM 360 assembly, and it was done on WYLBUR, which was/is a punch card emulator, and it used all the same JCL commands as the older punched cards did. Anyway, my dad popped out with some sort of programming class stuff he had taken in college; turned out he had to take FORTRAN on the same IBM 360 type computer that I did. And the kicker was that his 1960s era stuff had a little piece on JCL in it- including a priority field that we (the assembly people in 1993) didn’t know existed. So we upped our priority, and like magic all our jobs started completing first- in a matter of a few minutes, instead of anywhere from five minutes to an hour or more, depending on the load (we had to submit our jobs and then wait on the printouts of the results), which was composed of all the FORTRAN, COBOL and assembly classes, plus whatever actual useful computing was being done at the time.
As far as computing antiquities go, I work for a large city, and our IT department has a sort of diorama or display set up on a cubicle end cap with all the really old-ass shit people have found- 8" floppies, an old mainframe disk pack, tapes, a full Windows 3.1 set of 5.25" floppies, etc… .
When I was in HS, the teacher wanted us to compose our code on cards so that we would not be using time on the mainframe. They were not punch cards but hollerith mark sense cards that you were supposed to fill in in pencil. Or one could sit at the terminal on local and type up a tape. The card reader had to be run manually, a card at a time – it had an auto-feed mode but the ASR was on a 110baud line, so the reader overran it by the third card.
The mainframe ran BASIC. There was Fortran, which could have been a useful learning experience, but it was in the form of an emulator written in BASIC, so it was dog slow. As an alternative to that system, we had a Burroughs E4000 right there in the classroom. It was actually kind of fund to use, despite its severe limitations.
That started I beleive in the mid to late sixties. Before then we had the Indian Head test pattern.
The indian head was for black and white. After TV stations started broadcasting in colour, they switched to the colour test patterns like:
In either case, there would have been a national anthem or weird thing like @eschereal saw. after that, an annoying hum would be played for a while to wake up whoever fell asleep during the late movie followed by snow. The test pattern would be shown for a half hour or so before programming began in the morning.
Also, the typewriter. It had that classic rough metal finish (there has to be a name for that) and there was no “1” key: we had to use lower-case L, and an exclamation point was “period-backspace-apostrophes”. I remember, as a lad, playing around with hitting two keys at once to get the hammers to stick together, knocking them back and doing it again. Much better entertainment than World of Warcraft or setting my toy jeep on fire.
Wrinkle paint finish.
In Houston in the latter half of the 1970s and in the 1980s, we usually got the national anthem played over some sort of video montage. Apollo moon landing footage was really popular (it was Houston), but I recall several that were USAF airplanes and a few with ICBM/SLBM test launches.
One thing I recall from my extreme youth was vending machines that you opened up and took a bottle of Coke from. IIRC, they were just like a refrigerator with a locking door- you put your money in, and it let you open it up. For that matter, newspaper machines work that way still, if you can find one.
Does anyone else remember typesetting with “bell codes”? There was a “BELL” key on the keyboard, and you’d type, say, “bell P” followed by two digits for the point size, or “bell L” followed by four digits for the line length, measured in picas and points. We could do some remarkably complex coding with bell codes.
Yes, I remember that. At the end of the shift, someone would announce “Bell G.O.”, i.e., time to go home.
EPROMs. Not EEPROMs, but EPROMs. Non-electrically erasable programmable read-only memory.
I had a little box containing a UV light that you put the device in to erase. The chip’s package had a little window on top to let the light in.
I had a setup that I used with my Commodore 64. I’d burn common programs (games, to be honest) onto a cartridge, which made them much faster than loading them from a drive.
Oh, wow. You reminded me of when there were cigarette vending machines. I never wanted a pack of cigarettes from them, but I used to mess with them when I was a kid, because about 1 time out of five, pulling on the different dispensers would get a stuck quarter to drop down. They were a lot better than phones or candy machines as far as getting loose change.
My parents never said a word, even though they were non-smokers who presumedly didn’t want me smoking.
Once, a pack of cigarettes fell out of one I was messing with, and it made me jump about three feet in the air.
Indiana passed an 18-year-old smoking law before the national one some time in the 90s, and all the machines disappeared, except for the ones in bars, where anyone was already 21 anyway. Then when the national 18-year-old smoking age passed, part of that law was that cigarette machines went away, so now they are no more.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
(Bastards still won’t forgive me for leaving an empty milk carton in the fridge…)
Here’s one that people only over a certain age will remember.
Coffee vending machines. Not ones that sell cans or bottles of cold-brew, but literal machines that would pop out a little cup and then spew forth coffee, cream and sugar syrup into the cup based on what you chose on the little control panel.
We had one of those in one of the basement computer science labs- there was a distinct sort of howl other students would emit at about 2 am when it either ran out of cups and just shot your coffee straight down the drain, or if the cup somehow wasn’t centered or fell out and the coffee didn’t end up in the cup.
I think the soda-in-a-cup machines were before my time, but here’s a video that illustrates with a soda machine exactly what the coffee machines sometimes did.
