We had a landline until fairly recently,
We are very slow to adopt new technologies.
We prefer yestertech.
We also had 3G flip phones until very recently.
Feeling very regretful that we don’t have those phones anymore.
Sadly,yes, we no longer get any comment anymore about how our flip phones are so out of date.
Yes, we are dinosaurs.
I’m from New York, so the first time I heard of it was when my girlfriend got a job there, at the big one downtown. I bought a sweater from her one day just so I could. Summer of 1973.
Punch cards. Remember punch cards? That was for my first computer class.
It was recommended that after you get them all punched out and everything is in order (like a deck of cards) to take a shape knife and score the edge of this ‘deck’ at an oblique angle on the top edge.That way, if they get dropped or otherwise disorganized, you have at least a clue on how to get everything in order again. Kind of a cleaver idea really.
Anyone else ever had a little “baby calculator” like this one? It came with a little stylus. I used one all the time, back in the early 70s.
Aligning the heads on floppy drives…
What I barely remember at this point…is that you would hook an oscilloscope to the drive and put in a special disk and move the head back and forth ("carefully!) so that a figure eight would appear on the scope.
Otherwise you had written floppies that could only be read on the machine that wrote it.
I worked at a research lab and we had to align the drives on 20 PC’s at least once a quarter.
Task was to record statistics on one of the 20 PC’s–via floppy–and the floppies were then sent to an analyst to crunch the data. Except…sometimes the floppies could not be read by the analyst’s PC.
All that changed when a chip set came out to control the floppy drives rather than use an RCL circuit and move-able heads.
A magic marker works just as well, and that’s what my dad used to do.
I still have one of those in my desk. Even started a thread on it on another board.
Mine is the Arithma Addiator.
Turns out these were manufactured from 1920 to 1982.
When those came out, we were so happy that we could afford to own two whole disks, so we could back files up!
Two Bernoulli cartridges would have cost over $300 … for TEN MB (that’s 1% of a Gig, kids). So no spares for backups…
But who remembers… the dreaded Click O’ Death?
Zip disks would get scored by the arm that read them, and that disk (and often the whole drive) was suddenly useless.
There are still some in Switzerland, mostly older stock which hasn’t been sold to another country. Also the trains they use for destructive football fans have the older toilets.
Amen. Both my father-in-law and my husband loved Hypercard. My father-in-law used it until the last running computer died.
Shudders. No fun at all. Still waiting for a USB stick that goes in on the first try.
And I’d really like a Frango milkshake from Frederick & Nelson’s. Bon Marche was okay, but Macy’s will always be the evil corporation that bought out Bon Marche. Before then I accepted Macy’s, because it was only on the east coast.
Who remembers the paint program on the Amiga 1000s? Not Deluxe Paint- I believe that came later. I never used my Amiga to 1% of its capabilities, but I had fun with that program- using mirrors and strobing went well with herbal supplements. Are there any Windows programs that emulate that old paint program?
Remember when “I have a map of Africa” meant “It’s wrong” ?
Speaking of maps, remember only having a Rand McNally road map or fold out map and having to add up the individual mileage between towns to determine how far you were from your destination? And then make an estimated guess of how long it would take to get there and not knowing if there was a gas station open on route in the middle of the night. I’m thinking that most people under 35 don’t understand the level of skill needed to do that.
+1
We took a road trip for our honeymoon. Had a road atlas-- it was just a couple of years before the Garmin. Finding open gas stations wasn’t so hard, and we did have a cell phone in case something happened, but this was the period between the invention of mobile phones, and the development of the Smart phone.
We could at least Google probable mileage & time before we left. Wasn’t that same as real-time updates, but better than nothing.
In the Army, I did the ruler-&-scrap paper method of estimating distance & time.
We had dynamic map books to help with this. There was a wheel sandwiched between two pages. The wheel would turn to show a city name at the top, and then it would show the distance to other cities on the map. The distances would appear in little holes by the cities on the map. Not much more useful than a lookup table, but much more fun for a kid to play with on a road trip.
I have yet to drive a vehicle equipped with nav. And when we go to places like Fifteen Mile Creek (which probably has water in it, sometime other than when we have been there) on Pipestone Rd, off the secondary highway, nav is all but useless. Quite frankly, I really do like to exercise my geography muscle.
I still have a landline. I find nothing odd about that.
I’m with you.
When we did our round the country road trip two years ago we got fold out maps from AAA for everywhere we went. Still better (for the passenger) in that you get a good sense of how far you are from your next destination than you get from GPS. GPS is way better for finding your hotel or restaurant and when you get off track.
As for road trips, I remember driving with my parents from New York to DC before the interstate. We used Route 1, and it was quite a trek. When we went west the still new Pennsylvania Turnpike was very exciting.
Anyone used a MapsCo instead of (or in addition to) a fold-out map?
It was a map in book form, with a letter/number combo at the top, bottom, and edge that you follow, to some other page halfway through the book, to continue navigating.
Big, fat, spiral bound things. The best ones were always stuffed with Post-Its marking favorite locations.