I used to be a whiz at working the old mechanical cash register - even the older folks couldn’t remember how to use it. I wonder what junk heap it ended up in.
While I still use what I learned in my advertising layout artist internship, nobody understand when I talk about blue lines or Velux or how the art-a-graph was history. Funnily enough, I was the person who convinced the manager to send a cohort to an Apple graphics seminar. She became the newsroom graphics whiz. I became an instructional designer.
Ah, but did you ever hang the extra-wide Log-Log-Duplex-Deci-Trig slide rule off your belt? Kept all those annoying girls away in “junior high”.
I sometimes miss the old Lack of Tech. After long days of using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, I’m drawing Art by hand (great therapy). So I’m plowing through old boxes in the basement, looking for my old crow quill pens and french curves.
Okay, I double dare anyone else to find the tin output of Albania in EITHER 1986 or 2012 just using google, going through the results in the order they are provided, and tell me how long it takes, while JohnT, or anyone else who cares to volunteer, goes through the results selectively.
I find google perfectly useless when I am looking for specific facts like that.
I was in the first group of people never to learn to use a slide rule. I still think they are wicked cool.
I suspect they are also significantly faster than my computers, if the time necessary for my computer and the necessary application to open are included.
And while I can not rebuild a carburetor, I know what one is, and how to clean it.
And how to disable a car with one to prevent it from being stolen.
And how to get a car to start in rainy weather with certain kinds of hair spray. (Aqua Net was always the best.)
I excelled at writing command shortcuts and do-able programs in XyWrite in the early 1990s, running in a DOS environment with the command line permanently seared into the monochrome monitor because editors didn’t have any other programs to run.
I learned television repair in high school vocational class in the early 1980s. What we were being taught was already obsolete, as tv technology had already left the tube era behind (excluding the CRT, which hung around for another 20 years or so.) The curriculum didn’t include solid state devices such as transistors, IC’s, op-amps, etc. It did, however, include diodes (the glowy kind, not the silicon / germanium kind), triodes, pentodes, etc.
it might have been obsolete as of what was just hitting the market back then, but there were still a heck of a lot of tube-based TVs extant. In the timeframe you mention (early 1980s) I clearly remember the neighborhood drugstores having vacuum tube tester consoles by the entrance.
Adding on to the graphic artist change-ups, but with a specific twist. I used to make newspaper ads. For MOVIES. For Warner Bros. And 20th Century Fox. And Miramax (remember them?). Lot’s of others. Worked on almost everything Warner Bros did for almost 30 years. And these ads would appear in NEWSPAPERS (remember them?) And people would go out and buy these newspapers, and an ad that I may have produced would tell them the exact showtimes of every movie they might want to see. It was a good gig. AND THEN…? The rest of this song has already been sung.
As a side note, why did drugstores devote that much space to those? Their profits from selling the occasional tube couldn’t have justified it – some of those machines were massive (here’s one smaller than our neighborhood pharmacist had).
You know, when I typed that, I had absolutely no idea even if Albania has a tin industry (nor, really, do I know if Billboard released a chart for the week of 2-5-1967. It could just as easily be for the week of 2-6-1967, 2-4-1967, whatever). It was just a silly example and to be challenged on such a thing… well, it was bizarre.
Yeah, but you ride, right? Motorcycles were using carbs as recently as five years ago for some models. Heck, some models may still be using them - don’t they still sell the Honda Rebel?
My obsolete skill? I was darned good with Trumpet Windsock scripts, back in the day!
Telephone Modems have gone the way of dinosaurs, and I knew all the modem commands to call out, hang up, change settings, etc. It came in very handy when I did telephone support for people in the field who were trying to dial in by modem and were having trouble. Today, not so much.
