My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn't be long distance (oh yeah here's one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren't calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you're going through their city. It's like, "Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper."
For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who's got that kind of time when you're using a rotary phone?
This was around sporadically in the US Great Plains until maybe the 1990s. And calling outside your city but within the same area code was an eight-digit call:
1 + seven-digit local phone number
I still can’t quite believe it, especially when my city added a 6th area code a few years back.
That's wild. We did have an old antique rotary phone though! My sister and I would play with it like a toy unplugged but it was also perfectly functional. You just had to be fast because it seemed like in later years the 'timeout' between dialing numbers had gotten shorter. You'd have to dial two 9's in a row and before you could finish the second 9, you'd get some kind of "I'm sorry, the number you have reached is not available" message.
That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you're calling locally. The phone system will just assume you're calling the local area code if you don't dial one. In my area, it's pretty easy because the only people who don't have the local area code (there's only one even though it's far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.
Where I live now, area codes have been subdivided several times, then they went to overlays because there are just too many numbers. There are several area codes your neighbors might be, even if they have a local number.
I’m trying to always keep mine because a good 20 years ago they stopped giving it out altogether, so now it’s “rare”
My grandmother still had the list of her friends’ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. You’d pick up and wait for the operator – no dialing – and then say ‘Midland 4119’ or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
By the time I was young, they’d replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadn’t taken down her cheat sheet yet.
You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.
My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.
In fact, before MBAs McKinsey'd the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant... Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can't tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it's normal..
Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you'd have the manual. If you're just playing a copy you wouldn't. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
And you stuck to the main, very large highways instead of trying the smaller routes. I always wonder if the Waze era of travel has helped or hurt smaller communities.
My family always went on holiday to Ireland so they had a map for it. When I was little I used to love opening that thing and picturing all the places we could go.
I did that back in 2008 when i get into college of another state, where gps device is expensive to me and i'm still using the now ancient phone. the first thing i did is go to the book store and bought one local map, study and memorise it, looking for nearby landmark and triangulate my position when i'm lost. Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
I remember teaching orienteering to my son's scout troop.
When they complained that would never need to know that because GPS, I handed them a GPS with almost dead batteries during a hike and told them to show me.
About 10 minutes later they became much more interested in the map and compass.
And my father always refused to ask for help, so we got lost and then when he finally had to admit it, my mother asked someone and my father pretended it was all her fault ... (not so) good times.
I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren't on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.
And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you'd copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
It's a US thing, where the glory of SCART was unknown thus they had to continue using the antenna input of their TV to connect their consoles to, also, as far as I'm aware only NTSC has fixed frequency assignments. Elsewhere in the world you just programmed the TV to display the console's output on whatever number you wanted, or, if you had a proper input for non-antenna signals, switch the TV to "AV".
A stack of 15 floppy disks for one program. Please insert the next disk to continue (I can't remember the exact wording). Command prompt to A:\ and having to see what the install program might be called. Bring amazed that CDs could autorun programs.
I spent years playing games on Commodore-64. Suddenly they release the NES, and the first game I saw for it... kinda didn't look super impressive compared to the games I was playing on the 64. My buddy says: "You can rent games now" and I shook my head in disbelief at the whole thing.
Not if you disabled the sound so you could sneakily get online at night without your parents noticing! I was so happy when I figured that out and could quit nervously smothering the modem in pillows when connecting.
I don't know if that always worked. I didn't figure it out until we were on a 56k modem. Maybe it didn't work with older modems.
Failing at a pc game wasn't necessarily on you. It could also be on the dirt gathered by the ball inside your mouse. Later, of course, you realized it was on you all along.
Sticking my finger into the coin return of every pay phone, and if there was a dime, checking the date on it because silver coins were still floating around in circulation.
Same thing every time one of us got our hands on a quarter. If it was silver, we'd all fight over it.
I don't remember any of us ever cashing one in. If we found one, it would just go into a shoebox, ultimately getting lost to time.
You could only program like 9 phone numbers on your phone because it only had 10 buttons for it and one of them was reserved for 911. All other numbers you either memorized, wrote down in a book or on cards, or dialed 411 to talk to a stranger whose job was to provide you with the contact information of people and businesses.
I utilized my skills of tiny writing from cheatsheets to fit every phone number I knew only a folded sticky note that lived in my wallet for probably 20 years before I realized it was long past being useful.
I had that on a particularly study business card. I used one of those fine-tip pens and got about 40 numbers on it. Now I talk to strangers on the internet, and the points don't matter.
I never got to use speed dial, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would have. Or one of those things I would’ve meant to get around to setting up but never bothered to..
I expected most of the things is this thread to be typical Gen X or Millennial stuff, but some of these post read to me as if I’m talking to someone from the late 19th century
Mine appear to multiply every time I use them. I think I have more than 10 at this point. My RS232 is happily married to one of them.... At least, I think they're happy.
I carry a bunch of loose connectors in my Pelicase O'Spares - I mostly work with RS422, so I can solder any length I need to achieve less rack spaghetti.
My pelicase has a redicilous assortment of various things I might need, accumulated over a long period of time. Netqork cards, SFP transceivers, and a bunch of other stuff. There's also a Cisco router and three beers. The last two items are normally not there, but they were leftovers after wrapping up my work trip yesterday, so I took them with me.
I was a beta tester for AOL, so they’d send me all of those dumb discs. None of the actual software ever changed or improved. All they did was change the graphics around the guts of it. Their whole strategy was essentially fooling people via appearances. I liked collecting the discs though.
My first internet before AOL was Prodigy. I was in a DOS terminal when I was a kid.
Sometimes you'd go to pick up the phone to call someone but you couldn't because your neighbor was busy talking, so you'd have to put the receiver down gently in hopes they didn't hear it and think you were eavesdropping on them.
A librarian I knew used to tell us about the old couple she shared a party line with growing up. She said she occasionally tried to eavesdrop but the conversations were always too boring.
There was a video game console that used clear colored plastic that you would stick onto the tv to show different colored areas on the screen. It also came packaged with dice and paper money.
For a moment I thought you were referring to the genlock anti piracy device. That was a fresnal lens you held up to the screen to decode a key to continue the game.
Picking up the phone to make a call, and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not checking for a dialtone before dialling. Alternatively, learning how to screw out the mouth piece (muting the handset) and pick up the receiver without making a noise so I could listen to the neighbour gossip.
How to test vacuum tubes to fix the TV. Or maybe just watching black and white TV and I was the remote. Being able to buy bottled pop out of a pop machine for 15 cents AND it had Near Beer in it.
The sounds your computer would make if it was connecting to dialup Internet, or the sound you would hear if someone was using said dialup and you picked up the phone.
PC speakers and how they differed from regular speakers, or the fact that you needed a sound card if you wanted sound that wasn't just beeps.
I was recently at a party with a SNES connected to a noisy channel-3 RF modulator because the TV couldn't switch to its composite input via the front panel buttons, and they didn't have the remote. I wandered the house until I found a universal remote, then programmed AUX to match the TV and switched inputs. Just things you learn in the '90s.
I still have a distinct memory of trying to get on the Internet and then hearing my dad's voice coming through the computer speakers. He'd been on the phone with someone.
We had a smokers’ wall in high school: a corner of the break yard next to the cafeteria that was designated by a yellow stripe painted on the ground. It was always full-to-bursting at every break, and if you had even a toe over it whilst smoking, it was immediate detention.
"video games" were mechanical, and you interacted with targets by manipulating a metal spherical pixel using, hand eye coordination, timing and physics. You were rewarded with multiple "pixels" if you were good enough.
Computer and console games came exclusively on CD before the switch to DVD. When you bought a triple AAA title for console,you didn't have to spend 3 days waiting for day 1 patches to install. You could probably fit the entire game library of your favorite console back in the day on a thumb drive nowadays.
I actually know what this means, from getting my mom’s Atari to work on my grandmother’s TV
I think it was channel 2 for that one though, idk. We switched to using the flatscreen because of the annoying high pitched noise. (To the annoyance of all retro gamers who read this)
Video games involved putting a sheet of acetate over the b&w tv screen and then drawing with a wax pencil where the dashed line appears (Winky Dink ruled - and don’t forget to put the acetate on the screen or Dad will get mad).
Let's listen to this radio station play an unholy noise for about 30 minutes, record it in a cassette tape, and play the game recorded in those BAUD BOIS
You used to have to print out a document and then scan it into another machine that would use landlines to send it to another printer so someone, somewhere else, could have the document.
Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)
I like how Nintendo carts specifically said to not use alcohol (or benzene!)
Contact cleaner is best, it leaves a light oily coating to keep oxygen out. To this day, I can still pop in an NES cartridge and have it work on the first try.
Isopropyl alcohol (a.k.a rubbing alcohol) works fine on just about any electronics, I've cleaned out entire PC rigs with the stuff just fine. It's more likely they mean ethanol or alcohol meant for drinking.
Contact cleaner is best, but not everyone has that stuff lying around.
We also had lanterns and candles and shit, because the power was just that unstable and unreliable. 90% of the time we were ruffing it like the Amish; pumping our own water, shitting in the woods, the works. At one point we lost power for an entire year because of some sort of tragedy I can't remember the details of, and after nagging him that entire time, finally my step-father was like "fuck this shit, we're getting a generator". That was ~7-10 years worth of my child hood. 😅
The fucking bees & snakes and shit too. (⊙_◎)
Just that dirt poor deep country side experience.
You bet, I still got scars on my hands from hauling water & chopping fire word. Shit, one time I got bit by a non deadly venomous snake when I was ~7, boy did that ever hurt like hell. Had to get a rabies shot after handling some raccoons when I was about 12 too, I'm sure you know all about that shot. Got a bunch of burns from the furnace and sparks jumping from camp fires. Hauling coal is one hell of a chore too. 😅 And so much more.
Life in the city is childs play in comparison, all you gotta do is avoid trouble best you can and you'll be fine.
The top dial on the TV had the VHF (lower number) stations. The bottom had the UHF( higher number) stations. In spite of all those channels being available, many places only had three, maybe four that had a station in range to be received intelligibly.
I stood on a sawhorse and touched the light bulb's base. My brother stood on the ground, touched the light bulb base, and shocked himself silly. It hung from the ceiling, just the way it was.
VIC-20, yes. But dad’s tantalizing work computer, nah. We used to make time to type things and wait together. Like, we would have dinner together and then King’s Quest would have eventually loaded and we would all have walked into a River accidentally together, as a family.
yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:
Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.
When I was a kid a single gold coin minted from the empire of Ashoka could buy you a house, a servant, a couple acres of land, some cows, a couple pigs, chickens, and a horse
I remember being able to turn off the computer by just flipping the power switch for it. I also remember not being able to do that because it would take 30 minutes to do a memory check.
Being subscribed to a service that brought about a dozen magazines every week that we would rent including Donald duck, gossip magazines, etc. Sometimes getting to sneak the 'adult' one to the bathroom and spend some quality time there.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
But was anybody home?
No, he was there all alone.
he didn't leave the building?
Could he come to the phone?
My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn't be long distance (oh yeah here's one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren't calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you're going through their city. It's like, "Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper."
For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who's got that kind of time when you're using a rotary phone?
This was around sporadically in the US Great Plains until maybe the 1990s. And calling outside your city but within the same area code was an eight-digit call:
1 + seven-digit local phone number
I still can’t quite believe it, especially when my city added a 6th area code a few years back.
That's wild. We did have an old antique rotary phone though! My sister and I would play with it like a toy unplugged but it was also perfectly functional. You just had to be fast because it seemed like in later years the 'timeout' between dialing numbers had gotten shorter. You'd have to dial two 9's in a row and before you could finish the second 9, you'd get some kind of "I'm sorry, the number you have reached is not available" message.
Jenny I've got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don't change your number
Eight six seven five three oh nine
That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
That's fair. I was younger when the change happened and fully unaware of it's scope.
Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you're calling locally. The phone system will just assume you're calling the local area code if you don't dial one. In my area, it's pretty easy because the only people who don't have the local area code (there's only one even though it's far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.
Where I live now, area codes have been subdivided several times, then they went to overlays because there are just too many numbers. There are several area codes your neighbors might be, even if they have a local number.
I’m trying to always keep mine because a good 20 years ago they stopped giving it out altogether, so now it’s “rare”
Nonsense, you paged them and then they called you back from a pay-phone.
Sure, if you were wealthy enough to have a pager.
Pffff $10/month was cheaper then a phone line. Scraping together like $100 was a bit harder.
Being mistaken for a drug dealer… yeah, that never happened ;-)
My grandmother still had the list of her friends’ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. You’d pick up and wait for the operator – no dialing – and then say ‘Midland 4119’ or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
By the time I was young, they’d replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadn’t taken down her cheat sheet yet.
It is now safe to turn off your computerFlying being a really fun and nice experience.
You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.
My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.
In fact, before MBAs McKinsey'd the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant... Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can't tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it's normal..
I think I see boobs!
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
But you need this special plastic lense to record the word, but you only get that one.
I remember the wheel that came with monkey island and test drive 3. I disassembled that shit and made xerox copies, then gave them to my friends.
Haha, my father and I did that for Battle of Britain and... Mines of Titan, I think, was the other one.
Huh? What does this mean?
Old anti piracy measure.
Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you'd have the manual. If you're just playing a copy you wouldn't. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
It was anti-piracy; you had to have the physical manual to know the correct word.
http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate
This station now concludes its broadcast day.
That's right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
And you stuck to the main, very large highways instead of trying the smaller routes. I always wonder if the Waze era of travel has helped or hurt smaller communities.
Great question.
One of the examples that comes to mind is from the SF Bay Area:
There has to be some coffee shop or antiques store somewhere that navigation apps have brought back from the brink though.
My family always went on holiday to Ireland so they had a map for it. When I was little I used to love opening that thing and picturing all the places we could go.
I did that back in 2008 when i get into college of another state, where gps device is expensive to me and i'm still using the now ancient phone. the first thing i did is go to the book store and bought one local map, study and memorise it, looking for nearby landmark and triangulate my position when i'm lost. Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
I remember teaching orienteering to my son's scout troop.
When they complained that would never need to know that because GPS, I handed them a GPS with almost dead batteries during a hike and told them to show me.
About 10 minutes later they became much more interested in the map and compass.
The good ol' Road Atlas.
Also an excellent autism diagnosis tool.
No joke. My parents are convinced I'm autistic because I used to read the yellow pages (British phone book) to calm down when I was little.
I read the yellow pages to calm down one time when I was on acid.
Very Withnail and I
And my father always refused to ask for help, so we got lost and then when he finally had to admit it, my mother asked someone and my father pretended it was all her fault ... (not so) good times.
I still play the role of navigator to this day…
My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
I remember rushing home to catch The Flintstones.
I would rush home to watch GI Joe. If I got there quick enough I could catch the last few minutes of Jem.
Truly outrageous.
Jem!!!
I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren't on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.
And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you'd copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.
When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
MTV only had music video
Video killed the radio star. Still remember watching Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.
MTV existed
It's a US thing, where the glory of SCART was unknown thus they had to continue using the antenna input of their TV to connect their consoles to, also, as far as I'm aware only NTSC has fixed frequency assignments. Elsewhere in the world you just programmed the TV to display the console's output on whatever number you wanted, or, if you had a proper input for non-antenna signals, switch the TV to "AV".
A stack of 15 floppy disks for one program. Please insert the next disk to continue (I can't remember the exact wording). Command prompt to A:\ and having to see what the install program might be called. Bring amazed that CDs could autorun programs.
I would go to the video rental store to play video games.
God, renting games from blockbuster was amazing.
Played so many great GameCube games that way.
Blockbuster didn't exist when we were renting games for the Atari 2600. River Raid!
I spent years playing games on Commodore-64. Suddenly they release the NES, and the first game I saw for it... kinda didn't look super impressive compared to the games I was playing on the 64. My buddy says: "You can rent games now" and I shook my head in disbelief at the whole thing.
Want to kmow the weather, lottery results, TV channel program for the day and other info? Go to your TV and check the teletext
The random one that I remember and don't see anywhere, is the tv getting staticky whenever we ran the microwave
Not if you disabled the sound so you could sneakily get online at night without your parents noticing! I was so happy when I figured that out and could quit nervously smothering the modem in pillows when connecting.
I don't know if that always worked. I didn't figure it out until we were on a 56k modem. Maybe it didn't work with older modems.
ATL0 I think.
I miss having hope.
I wonder if the Internet would still make sounds if the communication devices were connected to speakers
Using a hole punch to make 5 1/4" disks double sided! Saved a lot of money!
Failing at a pc game wasn't necessarily on you. It could also be on the dirt gathered by the ball inside your mouse. Later, of course, you realized it was on you all along.
Smoking or non-smoking?
I remember summers without smoke.
screeches in dial up internet sound effects
Y'all remember the turbo button?
Sound blaster compatible, irq5, dma1
The magic config to make sound work in DOS games
LOAD "*",8,1
OTA TV stations used to have an end to their broadcast day, and they'd play the national anthem before going to color bars until morning.
"At the tone, it will be 8:45 exactly." Beep
Sticking my finger into the coin return of every pay phone, and if there was a dime, checking the date on it because silver coins were still floating around in circulation.
Same thing every time one of us got our hands on a quarter. If it was silver, we'd all fight over it.
I don't remember any of us ever cashing one in. If we found one, it would just go into a shoebox, ultimately getting lost to time.
1-800-CALLCOLLECT "imatthemallatboscospickmeup" and then get your dime back
Game consoles didn't come with a storage card, so you had to keep the game running or restart every time.
Oh man… I said “box art” the other day and my buddies daughter pointedly asked what I was talking about :-)
You could only program like 9 phone numbers on your phone because it only had 10 buttons for it and one of them was reserved for 911. All other numbers you either memorized, wrote down in a book or on cards, or dialed 411 to talk to a stranger whose job was to provide you with the contact information of people and businesses.
I utilized my skills of tiny writing from cheatsheets to fit every phone number I knew only a folded sticky note that lived in my wallet for probably 20 years before I realized it was long past being useful.
I had that on a particularly study business card. I used one of those fine-tip pens and got about 40 numbers on it. Now I talk to strangers on the internet, and the points don't matter.
Speed dial... Completely forgot about that one.
I never got to use speed dial, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would have. Or one of those things I would’ve meant to get around to setting up but never bothered to..
My grandma's phone is still just 5 in my mind
My father literally had a digital rolodex device for keeping his phone numbers in for his early cellphones.
Also, calling a number to get the exact time when you needed to set your clocks.
Or calling the movie theater and listening through the entire recorded message listing the films playing and all the times they're playing at.
Phones with buttons?
Yeah, that's weird. This is a telephone:
Most of "The Anarchist's Cookbook" wouldn't work today because of the Internet and electronic receipts.
A wire coat hanger shoved into the back of the TV to get it working
Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it
Being hyper aware of the current status of the street lights in summer evenings
Sprinting to the kitchen yelling "don't pick up the phone!" when it starts ringing, for the same reason.
Could you please explain the one with the street lights for me?
Be kind rewind
Hold on, I got to flip the tape over.
A cassette and a pencil.
Watching the Challenger burn up.
Nuclear war drills hiding under my desk.
Game related - monochrome monitors
To refuel your car, first flip down the license plate.
I expected most of the things is this thread to be typical Gen X or Millennial stuff, but some of these post read to me as if I’m talking to someone from the late 19th century
Disk 13 of 18
"Sorry I missed your call: I was getting my emails"
Needing to memorize the home phone numbers of all my friends
TV had an end. After a last program or movie that ended after midnight, broadcast stopped and it only showed the test card.
9600, 8-N-1
Com port settings?
ya
If internal, don't forget whether to use 3F8, 2F8, 3E8, or 2E8 and an unused IRQ. Any questions? Hit me up on ICQ
Uh Oh!
In my line of work I still do that. Not for modems, though. Usually for receiving serial data from gyros and gps.
Same.
Using a nice blue cable that says "Cisco" on the connector.
I have something similar. DE9-RJ45 for talking to switches.
Hello fellow Cisco blue cable user.
Mine appear to multiply every time I use them. I think I have more than 10 at this point. My RS232 is happily married to one of them.... At least, I think they're happy.
For me it's displays and audio systems, but I do use RS232 on a daily basis.
Yesterday I had to manually make a null modem cable cause I lost my final little orange dongle.
I carry a bunch of loose connectors in my Pelicase O'Spares - I mostly work with RS422, so I can solder any length I need to achieve less rack spaghetti.
My pelicase has a redicilous assortment of various things I might need, accumulated over a long period of time. Netqork cards, SFP transceivers, and a bunch of other stuff. There's also a Cisco router and three beers. The last two items are normally not there, but they were leftovers after wrapping up my work trip yesterday, so I took them with me.
ATS0=1
.. or something..
ATDT *70,1234567890
Unless using Kermit and then 7E1 was standard.
I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.
Jogging sucked because my music would stutter with every step.
I was a beta tester for AOL, so they’d send me all of those dumb discs. None of the actual software ever changed or improved. All they did was change the graphics around the guts of it. Their whole strategy was essentially fooling people via appearances. I liked collecting the discs though.
My first internet before AOL was Prodigy. I was in a DOS terminal when I was a kid.
When you bought a thing you owned it.
You couldn't just listen to the same music track on repeat - you had to rewind at the end before you could listen to it again.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
Retry
Abort, Retry, Fail?
Retry
I could never be your woman.
Sometimes you'd go to pick up the phone to call someone but you couldn't because your neighbor was busy talking, so you'd have to put the receiver down gently in hopes they didn't hear it and think you were eavesdropping on them.
This was called a "party line". But it was never a party!
A librarian I knew used to tell us about the old couple she shared a party line with growing up. She said she occasionally tried to eavesdrop but the conversations were always too boring.
I saw an episode of I love Lucy where she can't use the phone because the neighbor was talking and didn't understand why.
Adjusting the rabbit ears when you change channels.
There was a video game console that used clear colored plastic that you would stick onto the tv to show different colored areas on the screen. It also came packaged with dice and paper money.
Magnavox Odyssey. I grew up playing that beast.
For a moment I thought you were referring to the genlock anti piracy device. That was a fresnal lens you held up to the screen to decode a key to continue the game.
Nah. Those were interesting but I much preferred the code wheels and charts, because they were easier to read.
What console was that?
The Magnavox Odyssey
I can't believe I didn't know about that! Heading down a rabbit hole to read about it now. Thank you, friend.
Standing in line in the basement of the CS building at UofM to get access to a card punch machine and type up my Fortran 4 program.
You had to pay 25 cents to text.
Having to pay a dime to use the toilet in a store.
Welcome to Germany today.
TIL Dime = Euro
/s
So, do the Germans have an equivalent to the old washroom toilet stall poem that goes:
And the Netherlands. More than a dime, though.
25 cents per text.
Channel 3 was an actual channel in my area, so we used the dip switch to select channel 4 instead.
Picking up the phone to make a call, and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not checking for a dialtone before dialling. Alternatively, learning how to screw out the mouth piece (muting the handset) and pick up the receiver without making a noise so I could listen to the neighbour gossip.
Having to wait for the television to warm up after turning it on
Address 220 irq 7 interrupt 1 V42bis modem
Be kind. Rewind.
How to test vacuum tubes to fix the TV. Or maybe just watching black and white TV and I was the remote. Being able to buy bottled pop out of a pop machine for 15 cents AND it had Near Beer in it.
To watch different channels, you may have needed to turn a rotor to turn the roof antenna because the stations were in a different physical direction.
You could get kicked off the internet if someone picked up the phone.
Connecting to the internet was loud and took a few minutes at best.
It also had a switch to make it work on channel 4 if you, for some bizarre reason, were a weirdo and needed that.
I remember when printers would print without being sassy & extortionate.
The sounds your computer would make if it was connecting to dialup Internet, or the sound you would hear if someone was using said dialup and you picked up the phone.
PC speakers and how they differed from regular speakers, or the fact that you needed a sound card if you wanted sound that wasn't just beeps.
Buying the car kit so I could connect my CD Walkman (with 15 second ESP) to the cigarette lighter and cassette deck in my first car.
Loading CD-ROMs into a cartridge before putting them in the computer
VHF goes CLIC CLIC CLIC, UHF is CRRRRRRRRRRRKK.
Sundays were awesome because you got to read comics!
"I know accounting needs this on the 2nd Floor but that pile of papers is too big to fit in the tubes in one go"
My first game controller only had one button.
pulling over at a gas station to ask for directions
& optimizing emm386 & himem.sys
I was recently at a party with a SNES connected to a noisy channel-3 RF modulator because the TV couldn't switch to its composite input via the front panel buttons, and they didn't have the remote. I wandered the house until I found a universal remote, then programmed AUX to match the TV and switched inputs. Just things you learn in the '90s.
Loading games from audio cassette.
I still have a distinct memory of trying to get on the Internet and then hearing my dad's voice coming through the computer speakers. He'd been on the phone with someone.
Drive-thru bank pneumatic box slot
Edit: ok so apparently everyone except me is somehow stuck in the 1980s. And presumably buying betmax players so they can watch Robocop
Coffee and cigarettes, indoors, at a cafe, on lunch break in highschool.
Don't forget you could smoke on public transit, Greyhound and airline flights.
We had a smokers’ wall in high school: a corner of the break yard next to the cafeteria that was designated by a yellow stripe painted on the ground. It was always full-to-bursting at every break, and if you had even a toe over it whilst smoking, it was immediate detention.
Let’s go one deeper… you couldn’t play games without sliding a switch
The best selling video game was all text with zero graphics; Zork.
Somehow I just knew how to get to places. Idk how that stopped.
Using floppy disks in grade 2, then dvd+r in grade 4 and finally flash drives in 6+
Jumping between radio channels trying to find one that's playing the new hit song
I experienced the ashes of Mount St Helens
Type
LOAD "", press RETURN, press PLAY on the cassette player, wait 5-10 minutes, enjoy."Mom I'm playing Starcraft don't pick up the phone!"
not getting an answer to a question for days or more
Renting the never ending story so many times the store just gave it to us after a while.
"Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!"
"video games" were mechanical, and you interacted with targets by manipulating a metal spherical pixel using, hand eye coordination, timing and physics. You were rewarded with multiple "pixels" if you were good enough.
They cost 20c to play and you only got 3 lives.
Computer and console games came exclusively on CD before the switch to DVD. When you bought a triple AAA title for console,you didn't have to spend 3 days waiting for day 1 patches to install. You could probably fit the entire game library of your favorite console back in the day on a thumb drive nowadays.
Using pencils to manually rewind cassette tapes.
"Slave drive" maybe.
I mean, they'll think it means something totally different.
I'm older than that, but it's definitely something a zoomer wouldn't understand immediately.
I had a game destroyed because the recorder ate the tape.
Or 4. And every time you're setting your console up on a different TV, you're not sure if you're on the wrong channel, or if the coax cable is loose
Or 4..
dot matrix with stereo sound
There were red pages in the phone book that had a number you could call and enter a four-digit code to hear movie showtimes or the Joke of the Day.
I saw "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" on TV.
Poke 53281,4
Oh, you have satellite tv? Let's see what's on...
Channel 113, 114, 115, 116, 116West, ...
The 19ft 📡 in backyard: wrrrrrrr rrrr...
...117, 118...
IRQ 5, DMA 1
Load “*” ,8,1
I caught 4, maybe 5 channels with a coax cable taped to the wall, in just the right position
I had (and still have) a Teddy Ruxpin.
I actually know what this means, from getting my mom’s Atari to work on my grandmother’s TV
I think it was channel 2 for that one though, idk. We switched to using the flatscreen because of the annoying high pitched noise. (To the annoyance of all retro gamers who read this)
Yeah I remember getting all excited the day we had a TV with a RCA/AV jack and thought, damn I'm going all kinds of hi-def now!
Me at the zoo
Having to hook up my consoles to a VCR.
You had to empty the bit bucket once in a while.
I had to fast forward or rewind a cassette tape to a specific time to play a game in the computer.
Video games involved putting a sheet of acetate over the b&w tv screen and then drawing with a wax pencil where the dashed line appears (Winky Dink ruled - and don’t forget to put the acetate on the screen or Dad will get mad).
Let's listen to this radio station play an unholy noise for about 30 minutes, record it in a cassette tape, and play the game recorded in those BAUD BOIS
You used to have to print out a document and then scan it into another machine that would use landlines to send it to another printer so someone, somewhere else, could have the document.
Let me just call someone if they're still at home on this payphone to look it up in the encyclopedia that was printed 20 years ago
I had a couple of magazine CDs that I got from a trial subscription.
https://archive.org/details/launchcdmagazine
AOL zines were pretty neat.
https://medium.com/s/requiem-for-an-internet/how-aols-tween-zine-scene-pioneered-the-digital-self-9f2e261a6d2a
Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)
"You have mail"
Blowing the cartridge may or may not work.
Don't spit in my cartridges, thanks.
Only way to make them last is to use rubbing alcohol and q-tips.
I like how Nintendo carts specifically said to not use alcohol (or benzene!)
Contact cleaner is best, it leaves a light oily coating to keep oxygen out. To this day, I can still pop in an NES cartridge and have it work on the first try.
Isopropyl alcohol (a.k.a rubbing alcohol) works fine on just about any electronics, I've cleaned out entire PC rigs with the stuff just fine. It's more likely they mean ethanol or alcohol meant for drinking.
Contact cleaner is best, but not everyone has that stuff lying around.
C:\park.exe
Bullshit they could work on channel 4 too; the NES and the SNES both had a switch in the back for that, I assume the Genesis and TurboGrafx16 did too
I still dream in black and white.
Please insert disk 10/12
Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.
That's called living deep in the country.
Smallest gust of wind and the power lines are out for a week. (ノT＿T)ノ︵┻━┻
We also had lanterns and candles and shit, because the power was just that unstable and unreliable. 90% of the time we were ruffing it like the Amish; pumping our own water, shitting in the woods, the works. At one point we lost power for an entire year because of some sort of tragedy I can't remember the details of, and after nagging him that entire time, finally my step-father was like "fuck this shit, we're getting a generator". That was ~7-10 years worth of my child hood. 😅 The fucking bees & snakes and shit too. (⊙_◎) Just that dirt poor deep country side experience.
You bet, I still got scars on my hands from hauling water & chopping fire word. Shit, one time I got bit by a non deadly venomous snake when I was ~7, boy did that ever hurt like hell. Had to get a rabies shot after handling some raccoons when I was about 12 too, I'm sure you know all about that shot. Got a bunch of burns from the furnace and sparks jumping from camp fires. Hauling coal is one hell of a chore too. 😅 And so much more. Life in the city is childs play in comparison, all you gotta do is avoid trouble best you can and you'll be fine.
Can someone explain this to me pls?
Lawn darts.
If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.
The top dial on the TV had the VHF (lower number) stations. The bottom had the UHF( higher number) stations. In spite of all those channels being available, many places only had three, maybe four that had a station in range to be received intelligibly.
My childhood was filled with clear plastic, I kinda hate those cause half of em were of questionable quality.
My first console was the Nintendo DS. My first PC was a Windows XP one. We still used VHS, CDs and DVDs at my parents place
If you got one question wrong in Bamboozle, you had to start all the way from the beginning.
Looking up a showview code in a tv listing mag to program the vhs recorder.
I stood on a sawhorse and touched the light bulb's base. My brother stood on the ground, touched the light bulb base, and shocked himself silly. It hung from the ceiling, just the way it was.
VIC-20, yes. But dad’s tantalizing work computer, nah. We used to make time to type things and wait together. Like, we would have dinner together and then King’s Quest would have eventually loaded and we would all have walked into a River accidentally together, as a family.
I used to dial POP-CORN to get the time.
1060 West Addison.
0181 811 81 81
Or 081 811 8181
01 811 8055
I just have missed this when I was younger...
This is the first reference I've seen here that I didn't immediately understand. Curious.
It's likely you're not from the right country.
Here's any that's very likely as geographic as it is from a specific time.
Daddy or chips?
The terms "daddy" and "chips" are not related in my vocabulary.
https://youtu.be/aHA4-5N5AzA?si=Oh5YhDnwrfoOyMqy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNPyQ-OOp0
I would probably be old enough to get this line if I had grown up in the place where video games worked on channel 3...
yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:
Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.
When you turned the TV on you had to wait a minute for it to 'warm up'. The black and white image would slowly emerge out of the darkness.
Tamagotchi and a Walkman with skip protection
sys 2048
oh so you broadcast your games on VHF?
Watch out, there's a Humphrey about!
Lights on mean going home
When I was a kid a single gold coin minted from the empire of Ashoka could buy you a house, a servant, a couple acres of land, some cows, a couple pigs, chickens, and a horse
PO Box 963, New York City, New York State 10108
Inhad two tv stations in black and white as a kid
I remember being able to turn off the computer by just flipping the power switch for it. I also remember not being able to do that because it would take 30 minutes to do a memory check.
I referred to Jennifer Connolly as Stifler's mom and this zoomer gave me a blank stare.
Why is this repost still reaching the top of my feed.
There was no world wide web.
Tying up a landline to connect to the internet
I want rounded corners and shadows on my website so I'm going to use a 9 slice.
Mouse & keyboard and controller because they only know what tablets are.
You'll have to wait until Monday to be able to take out some cash.
Being subscribed to a service that brought about a dozen magazines every week that we would rent including Donald duck, gossip magazines, etc. Sometimes getting to sneak the 'adult' one to the bathroom and spend some quality time there.
BHO
Blow in the cartridge if it doesn’t work. 💪
The excitement of being able to go to Shop-Ko to buy a telephone for the first time.
MonsterKing is young enough that he doesn't know you could push the slider and it would work on channel 4.
3 or 4; most RF switches had a toggle on the box that let you select which of the two channels you preferred to use
Macdonalds and burger king Pokemon toys were actually of decent quality