My folks never got milk delivered that way, but some neighbors did so.
Here’s another one:
Buying margarine at the grocery and having to break the color capsule and knead it into the white mass to make it yellow. In some states it was illegal to sell yellow margarine because the “Dairy Lobby” felt it would make it difficult for folks to be sure what they were purchasing.
Besides the milkman, we had the egglady who delivered eggs to our house weekly. She was married to the eggman, but he had a different route, so we only saw him once, when his wife was sick. I always wondered if their kids were scrambled up.
We also had the pizzaman, and potato chipman, cruising up and down our street, vending their wares to hungry kids and parents.
And, of course, we had Good Humor, Jack & Jill, and Mr. Softee Viagra ice cream mobile vendors.
We didn’t have to go out for food, the food came to us.
My sibs and I were just talking about this the other day. If dad brought home a half gallon carton of ice cream, we had to eat whatever frozen food was in the itty bitty frost-laden freezer to make room.
Are you the Walrus? Goo Goo G’Joob!
We still have this here. Milk, eggs, butter, cream and yogurt delivered to our door in an insulated box.
But we get eggs most of the year from neighbors who keep chickens. There are at least 4 families in our neighborhood (of ~200 houses) that have eggs for sale on an IRREGULAR basis. And three places in town that have them on a more regular basis.
And this is within 20 miles of downtown Boston.
I had to learn to how to use a keypunch machine, but they were essentially obsolete by the time I was actually a fulltime programmer. We had (sharable) TSO terminals in the TSO room!
There was a remote printer that I occastionally had to “man” during the main operator’s lunch time, and it had a ratty deck of punch cards that had to be used to re-boot the printer if it went down.
One of the older guys I worked with would tell the story of the time he had a COBOL program on a big metal cart all on punched cards…and it accidentally fell over and spilled all the cards. The cards were not able to be sorted by machine. Uh oh.
Soda, not only Coca Cola, in a bottle.
Needing a can opener, the wedge type, to open a can of beer or soda. The other end was usually a bottle opener.
How special TV dinners were because you had to wait for them to be heated up in the oven, and the anguish of mashed potatoes still frozen solid in the middle.
When the President gave a televised speech, you may as well turn the TV off because it was on all three major channels (ABC, CBS, NBC).
Related to this was, for the U.S. NTSC (the U.S. TV standard) living up to it’s nickname, Never Twice the Same Color. Flip through the three channels and you’d the President in three shades ranging from green to purple.
Also related was TV shows being broadcast in color after episodes only in B/W!
Summer TV reruns.
Prime Time TV - ~6-10PM in the U.S. when the most popular TV shows and movies were aired. No such thing as timeshifting, either you saw it as it aired or waited for summer reruns. In general, the 6-8pm time was supposed family oriented, then after that it could be more adult oriented.
Which leads to T&A TV, especially Battle of the Network Stars where your favorite TV actresses wore skintight see-through swimsuits during Prime Time, in the interests of errrr…friendly competition…yeah, that’s it!
Weekday Soap Operas, that sometimes went on for decades.
Movie of the Week, with epic, 3+ hour movies shown over two consecutive nights.
Do variety shows with a mix of comedic skits, singing and dancing still exist in the U.S.?
Lawrence Welk and his champagne music. And a one and a two…
Hardcover Encyclopedia sets with annual updates and door to door Encyclopedia salespeople.
As I remember it: You lifted up the lid and put your 15¢ in the old chest type vending machines. You slid the bottle you wanted down a channel to the gate which was unlocked with the money. If you started to pull out the bottle, and it slipped, you could be out 15¢.
I never got good at it, but some of my friends could routinely pull out two bottles at once.
Using sexually derogatory words as a greeting to your buddies.
Or do guys still do that?
Becoming adept at using WordStar.
Being unbeatable at Electronic Quarterback and Head to Head Hockey.
Buddies and I taught ourselves how to breakdance.
Had machine that would cut and sand popsicle stocks, wood burning kit, lawn darts
Public school: had to sing God Save The Queen, Lord’s Prayer, hymns at assembly
Tuned in to get hockey tips from Howie Meeker
Depends on whether you count Saturday Night Live, or shows like America’s Got Talent. But as far as I know, the kind of prime-time variety show that was around when I was a kid is long since extinct.
Playing text computer games like Colossal cave Adventure.
“You are in a cave of twisty passages, all alike”
Okay, who remembers electric football? Not electronic—electricity made the game vibrate and the players move around.
In elementary school, when I went to my mom’s work I was warned not to play with the little box on the telex machine that held the dots. That and she used her Winchester drive as a footstool.
Rewatching The Muppet Show. I suspect 90%+ of the hosts are unknown today to the youths of America.
There still are four on the air today, some of them approaching their 60th season.
Raises hand.
Ahhh…the joy of never knowing where your players would go no matter how you tweaked the plastic tabs on the bottom.
Everyone drew a nice clear diagonal line across those cards, specifically to help out in cases like this. This either happened soon after he completed writing the program (so he didn’t yet have a chance to draw that line), or he was such an old-timer that this procedure was not yet common when the story occurred.
My guess is that you lived in the Central or Mountain Time Zone back then. In Eastern and Pacific, Prime Time was from 7-11 PM. I can still remember commercials that would advertise a certain show, and announce that it was on “Tuesday at 10:00; 9:00 Central.” I always felt bad for the small numbers of people who lived in Mountain Time, and how the broadcasters didn’t bother to be inclusive of them.
At some point in the 60’s, the first hour of Prime Time was taken from the networks and given to the local stations. That’s how the East Coast ended up with news from 7:00 to 7:30, and syndicated game shows from 7:30 to 8:00.
You got to sing a Sex Pistols song? Nice vwe only had Manilow.