Hang onto it!
I just got a turntable and am dragging LPs out of the basement and seeing how they play. Could not find my Discwasher, and looked them up online. They haven’t made them in decades, and vintage ones are going for a pretty penny.
(I was about to buy a knockoff when I unearthed an old metal lunchbox with The Spirit on the side. And something inside… and there was my old Discwasher from the '70s!)
Oh yeah, the old square of waxed paper in the Crisco can for greasing baking tins.
How about traveling overseas with American Express Travelers’ Checks? Safeguarded like rubies because if you lost them it was a major deal to replace them.
First funded fellowship in a foreign country, mid-90s, got paid in a local-bank equivalent of travelers’ checks that you had to stand in line at the bank to cash.
Paper driver’s license with no picture (that was well before the mid-90s).
The 1970s energy-crisis-driven woodburning-stove craze! The other kids at school complained that we smelled like bacon.
High-end teddy bears and other furry stuffed toys that were scratchy (that mohair plush stuff, none of this silky soft polyester minky business!).
go ahead, blind me with science!
American Express Travelers’ Checks? Ahhhh…yes. I was taking a train from Montreal to Vancouver in 1974 and so I bought a few of those in Canadian dollars to use on the train. (I’m from the US.) The steward would not accept them because he had never seen ones denominated in Canadian dollars. I had to use some of my precious US dollar checks in order to be able to eat.
What’ll you do? What will you do?
Q. Why did the farmer name his shovel “American Express?”
A. He never heaves loam without it.
I don’t understand. Were you collecting newspaper subscription fees?
At the gym: What’s a wipe-down towel?
When I used to work out at UCLA’s John Wooden Center, circa 1990 - 1993, nobody carried around one of those little towels to wipe down the benches and machines, before and after using them. Evidently people just accepted that there was going to be some sweat exchange happening; after all, weren’t you going to shower immediately after?
Today you wouldn’t think of working out in a public gym without your towel, and if it’s a cheap gym that doesn’t provide towels, you’d best turn around and go home, or to a nearby store and buy yourself an emergency towel.
Oddly, I don’t remember doing anything like that in the late '70s at UCSD, but I can’t say absolutely that means it never happened. I remember choosing courses from the schedule, and I’m sure there was a form, or forms, for that but don’t recall the details. There was some primitive computerization; my student ID card was always cut out of a standard 80-column IBM card. I can only imagine that after I submitted my registration form, some keypunch operator must have put that all down on IBM cards, along with everyone else’s, and that data would be run through the computer. If the class I wanted was full, somebody would have told me. I don’t remember that ever happening. One reason might be that I was taking all required courses when I first got there, so they just assigned the sections. The same thing happened when I got to UCLA for grad school.
That too, apparently.
At least it’s true kids don’t walk to and from school as much as they used to.
How about using book as a verb, as in to leave quickly? It was common back in the day. Does anybody still say that?
For example, while smoking pot with your friends, somebody spots an approaching patrol car: “Cops, book!”
It’s not in the Cambridge dictionary, so I guess it’s limited to U.S. slang. Last entry in Merriam Webster.
The War Game is available at The Internet Archive, for anyone interested: The War Game : Peter Watkins : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
WIWAK parents said “Go outside and get some color on ya! It’s good for you!” Some kids (mostly high-school girls, IIRC) actually rubbed themselves down with baby oil when sunbathing to expedite the burning/tanning process. Full-time lifeguards might have used maybe an SPF 4 sunscreen if they were being super-cautious.
If it was anything like the VCR head cleaners, it was a regular cartridge that contained a strip of cloth instead of magnetic tape. As the machine attempted to play it, the cloth tape would wipe any debris off of the heads. And yes, there were audiophile/videophile discussions of whether this harmed the machines.
I had a VCR head clearing cartridge from Radio Shack. It came with a bottle of clearing fluid that was supposed to be dripped into a hole in the cartridge - wetting the tape. There was enough fluid for about fifteen cleanings. The instructions stated that when the bottle was empty, the entire cartridge should be trashed.
Full time lifeguards used a thick layer of zinc oxide on their nose, and that’s it. There was no SPF rated sunscreen.
Good news: They are still making Discwashers. https://www.amazon.com/Discwasher-Vinyl-Record-Care-System/dp/B077GZ3RYD?th=1
Bad News: They ain’t what they usedta be. Lighter wood for the handle, handle no longer hollow for fluid/brush storage, microfiber cloth instead of that unidirectional velvet.
Which is why, as you say, the vintage ones are going for surprisingly high prices.
Milk man and his horse and cart.
Bread door.
Yep. It was a pretty complex job for a 14 year-old. You were essentially putting in orders with the publisher on how many papers you needed each day, kept track of who you delivered to, collected money (retail price) from your customers at the end of each week for papers delivered, then paid back the publisher (cost) for your weeks worth of orders.
If your customer decided to pay you by check they made it out to the newspaper company and you could use that as part of your payment back to the publisher.
People are talking about Discwashers- how about the Zerostat gun? They were coveted by all my audiophile friends back in the 80s.
The Staticmaster was my jam when I worked as a DJ and a radio station engineer. If we have Discwashers to the rest of the on-air crew, they’d either get stolen or the cap would get left off the fluid bottle and the juice would be everywhere. The DJs has just enough respect for the polonium in the Staticmaster that they rarely dissapeared.
I don’t know if “the exact same thing that exists now, but cheaper” is really that that mindblowing?
Dialup internet for sure. After soccer practice, using the payphone to call collect and say my name was “come pick me up” because there were no cell phones. Looking up television schedules in the newspaper.