runn wrote:
Being nervous about calling a girl because her father might answer the phone.
Hahaha, this was true up until maybe 15 years ago. The current generation of high schoolers don't realize they have it so good.
Other phone-y stuff:
My teenaged sister in the 80s / 90s completely hogging the phone for hours.
Long distance calls (outside of area code to you youngsters) being a big deal, carefully planned out.
As someone else said, rotary phones - my grandmother had that in her house.
-I lived out in the country and missed the original run of The Empire Strikes Back in theaters. I think it was 10 years later when I finally saw it. Really good movies like Star Wars a New Hope weren't shown on TV for the longest time.
-Looking forward to watching the Charlie Brown and Rudolph holiday specials on network TV and being severely disappointed if I missed them.
-Riding the snowmobile on a frozen creek. Nobody around there owns snowmobiles anymore and the creek rarely freezes over. Same with ice skating and burning a tire on the pond bank for light while we skated.
-Rusty vehicles. Toyotas and Datsun/Nissan were notorious for rusting out.
-Motor oil came in a cylindrical cardboard can and you needed a separate spout
-Pizza and ice cream were special treats. Nobody ate Mexican food.
-Toys required a lot more imagination: tinker toys, lincoln logs, Big Jim, Johnny West, and GI Joe before any movie/TV tie-ins.
Hitchhiking was a kind of normal ordinary thing to do.
zephito wrote:
Wandering All Over The Place, Unwatched By Parents: I, and everyone else in the neighborhood, would go all over the place, into ditches and forest trails and whatnot. Not too far away but often a good mile of two from home.
Being only 5 yo I walked almost a mile to kindergarten and the same back home again.
Disneyworld. Period. No Epcot or anything else. Just Disneyworld.
Very racist cartoons. TNT would explode and the victim of the blast would end up in black face imitating a stereotypical rural southern sharecropper. There was also the cartoon of the two Mexican crows who were always being lazy.
Playing tic tac toe against a computer at the Boston museum of science. The computer took up a room that was about 8'x12'.
WWF
Hulk Hogan, Stone Cold, Undertaker, Heartbreak kid, Rick Flair, Undertaker, Big Show.
Precious Roy wrote:
Disneyworld. Period. No Epcot or anything else. Just Disneyworld.
Very racist cartoons. TNT would explode and the victim of the blast would end up in black face imitating a stereotypical rural southern sharecropper. There was also the cartoon of the two Mexican crows who were always being lazy.
Playing tic tac toe against a computer at the Boston museum of science. The computer took up a room that was about 8'x12'.
DisneyLAND. Period.
rigochacon wrote:
Rotary dial phones - I miss the cool sound they made, but don't miss the sore finger from dialing a lot.
Ha! My uncle's lake house had a party line. Any time you picked up the receiver to make a call one of his neighbors might be yakking on it.
I also remember when the first area codes were assigned. Prior to that you had to dial the local operator in order to make a long distance phone call.
The Sears Catalogs
Phonebooks
How about when you ordered something via a catalog back in the day, it could sometimes take 4-6 weeks for stuff to arrive. You'd send in your order and a check, it'd take a few days to arrive, then the check would have to clear, then they'd process the order....etc etc...Crazy.
Old Timey Guy wrote:
The Sears Catalogs
Phonebooks
How about when you ordered something via a catalog back in the day, it could sometimes take 4-6 weeks for stuff to arrive. You'd send in your order and a check, it'd take a few days to arrive, then the check would have to clear, then they'd process the order....etc etc...Crazy.
Soon it will be Sears, period. "Back in my day there was this place where you would buy refrigerators and underwear, maybe a tool set too, all the while getting new tires for your car along with an oil change...
Old Timey Guy wrote:
The Sears Catalogs
Phonebooks
How about when you ordered something via a catalog back in the day, it could sometimes take 4-6 weeks for stuff to arrive. You'd send in your order and a check, it'd take a few days to arrive, then the check would have to clear, then they'd process the order....etc etc...Crazy.
Christmas catalogs,use to pore over those wishing for freaking everything.
No backpacks for carrying schoolbooks home. I still remember how my class the valedictorian always had this large, precarious stack of books he'd haul back and forth to school.
Did anyone else's school have those crazy tall swings? We'd get kids way the heck up there. do schools even have merry-go-rounds anymore. We had a couple pretty gnarly falls off those. Seemed like a bit of a deathtrap.
Yep - going through the Sears catalog, longing for every NFL related item was a Christmas time tradition for me. I can still recall the smell and feel of the paper those catalogs were printed on.
zephito wrote:
Betamax / Atari / Laserdisc: Betamax was definitely on the way out, but I remember seeing beta tapes in a tiny section of the video store probably when I was 4 or 5 (video store will probably be another old-timey thing soon). Atari was pre-nintendo, with some of the worst games ever contrived by man. Laserdisc doesn't really belong here - 90's tech, too recent. It was like the DVD version of Betamax, with a CD looking thing the size of a dinner plate that you had to change maybe every 30 minutes.
There was actually a laserdisc precursor called Videodisc that was out the same time as VHS and Beta, if not slightly before. It was record-sized and had a hard plastic case. You would have to flip it half way through a movie. We would rent them from a place that later switched to VHS like a blockbuster, etc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_DiscAlso…. wrote:
Hitchhiking was a kind of normal ordinary thing to do.
And when you were a teen or early 20s you were obligated to pick that person up, with no worries about safety.
Long-forgotten (and for good reasons) car models such as the Chevy Vega and Corvair, Ford Pinto and Maverick, and the Yugo,
Al Bundy 4 touchdowns 1 game wrote:
4. Having race results mailed to you on a little post card 2-3 weeks later.
A lot of races would post the results immediately on the wall before the awards ceremony. I wish they still did that. Some of them take a couple days to post it on the internet for crying out loud.
- Rotary dial phones
- As a kid being allowed to just leave a note on the counter saying "at friend's house" and leave for the day
- Dial up internet w/ annoyingly loud aol connections
- Floppy disks
- Finding random pages of dirty magazines while exploring wooded areas
- Fixing cassette tapes with a pencil or pen
- Polaroid cameras
Having to go to a record store to get a new album.
When the DJ said a certain song was coming up you would drive around until you heard it.
Waiting by the stereo ready to hit the record button to tape a song off of the radio, especially American Top 40!
Being pissed when the DJ talked over the start of the song you were taping!
Dropping someone off at the airport and waiting at the gate with that person until they got on the plane.
The woman, who is still my wife, has always been extremely fastidious about getting to the airport two hours before a flight, even when there wasn't security. I remember just sitting ffooooorrrreeeevvvveeerr in the lounge at the San Jose Airport waiting with her, until the plane boarded. Nowadays, I get to drop her off at the curb and watch her drag her own bag to the concourse while I enjoy the taste of freedom, but in the old days, good boyfriends were expected to wait with their women. Don't miss that at all.
Retail stores were closed on Easter, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas & Sundays. In fact, most gas stations were closed on Sunday.
Milk being delivered to your house in bottles. left in a milk box, and leaving empty bottles in the box that the milk man took away.
A train being pulled by a steam locomotive, a real train, not a tourist attraction one.
A "rag man," a guy who went from house to house with a horse drawn wagon filled with rags he'd gotten from people that he sold to some place that made the rags into "new" material.
TV stations signing off at night with the national anthem and coming back on the same way.
Getting only one TV channel.
Heating the house with a coal furnace.
Doctors making house calls.