I collected Kool-aid envelopes for prizes, one was a really nice camera (not one of those cheezy “spy cameras”) that one of my dad’s co-workers wanted to buy from me because his pix never looked as good from his fancy-shmancy camera (translation: he was a bad photog).
I wish one of those prizes had been a set of molars.
But they wouldn’t have been electronic.
I’m old enough to have understood almost everything on this thread, but I’m stumped here. More info, please? Is “ruby” a nickname for something, or actual red jewels? Tell me more!
We did drafting in shop class in high school. T-squares and triangles and protractors. If you were lucky, you got to use one of the handful of desks that had a mechanical drafting machine.. One of the first projects in the shop was making a sandpaper drafting pencil sharpener so you could put a proper point on your (wooden) pencil.
My sister and BIL bought our grandma’s house. It has a hardwired pink telephone on the side of one of the kitchen cabinets. They kept it as a conversation piece. We were trying to show my 11 yo grandson how it worked. He couldn’t figure out that when he dialed, he had to dial all the way around to the little metal stop thingy.
Right. A washer or dryer or fridge would be simple electrical/mechanical (and maybe gas-powered) devices
Am I correct that the distinction between electric and electronic lies in the presence of at least one transistor (or vacuum tube)?
There’s a distinction between electric and electronic?
So, I google this and by god there is. Another reason I visit this site, I learn things.
I never had to make my own tools, but yes, we used a variety of pencils…not all wooden in my case. We also used a drafting table as you linked too and regular drafting tools for all our mechanical drawings. I remember doing cut-away mechanical drawings of jet engines as being one of the more difficult and often tedious projects, though any mechanical break-out and elevation could be a trial. The college I went to had a desk for each student, but you had to buy your own tools (and slide rules), though materials (various drafting paper and other media) were provided by the cost of the class.
I think this is just one of the joys of how things were that the kids today will never know. 
That is really interesting – because my father was a doctor in the 1950’s and 1960’s (as well as before and briefly after); and if this had been available to him I’m sure he’d have done it. We had one hardwired phone, on the wall in the kitchen, and it wasn’t following anybody anywhere.
He did try to install a second phone outside the house, so he’d be able to get to it faster if he was out in the yard, but the phone company found out about it and took it away again (I think if he’d paid for a second line and had the phone company do the installation, they’d have been fine with that, but I think that then there would have been two phone numbers and the first one still wouldn’t have rung or been answerable outside.)
Maybe it depended on where you were?
We still have some around here.
I started my career in 1980 hand painting geomorphic maps. Oil on canvas. Brush size 0 (1/32"). Very, very detailed paint by number basically. Every time before you reloaded your brush, you had to blot the previous area to make it soak in and get consistency in color. If you got 20 square inches done in a shift, you where doing good, or had a simple map. These maps where custom ordered and very expensive. They could take days or weeks to produce.
Was kind of a cool job, I could make my own hours. But my god did it turn out to be boring. But it was a stepping stone to another job in mapping. Lot’s and lots of Leroy lettering in that and a few others.
It did turn into a very lucrative GIS career though. I’m still in GIS.
Still have an HP-41CX on my desk that I use all the time. Guys at work ask if they can borrow my calculator - the reverse polish notation tears 'em up every time 
I didn’t understand Reverse Polish when I was a younger people!
Oh god yes, Leroy lettering. And Rapidographs.
And I see they still make Rubylith.
I remember when my dad, who was produce manager at a supermarket would do his inventory at home. He would bring one of those old time adding machines.
Like this one, complete with crank.
My dad had one of those adding machines in his office too! Only a different model. I used to love subtracting 5 from 3 and watching it come up with 999,998.
I wonder… If I show this picture to my grandkids, will they ask where the zero is?.. Gotta try it out…
The machine that funded “The Naked Lunch”! (William S. Burroughs was the grandson of the Burroughs who founded Burroughs Adding Machines)
Rubylith, as mentioned in post 212.
I forgot about amberlith.
You absolutely can get positive/transparency/color film developed at professional photo labs. Now whether you can still get them encased as slides, I don’t know. (ETA: Looks like the local lab does offer mounting services, so yes.) I’ve always had my 35mm transparencies developed and just cut into the normal strips of 5 or 6, and I would put my favorites into the slide holders manually. You can still buy those slide mounts at a place like B&H. I wouldn’t be surprised if some developing services still do it for you, but you can at least get the film developed and mount it yourself.
This…I didn’t understand why American soldiers were firing on people that looked like me.
Related, having to sign up for the draft to potentially fight in another war…ummm…police action that you didn’t understand or agree with.