Once a person left the house, you couldn’t reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
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?
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.
That’s fair. I was younger when the change happened and fully unaware of it’s scope.
Jenny I’ve got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don’t change your numberEight six seven five three oh nine
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 ;-)
there was a time without cell phones? no way!
It is now safe to turn off your computerAlso:
And then there was the worst sight in the world…
Glad you didn’t embed the worst site in the world.
“Scars from Ogrish run deep“, the kids wouldn’t know
Oh no! I wonder what the numbers mean. Looks like a hex dump of a 32-bit integer, probably an error code given that the number is so small.
It means “your Mac is dead. Buy a new computer.”
Oh man, I still remember when Windows finally powered your computer off when you shut down. My poor Nana spent half an hour trying to turn off my uncle’s computer because she kept hitting the power button just after that showed up (as was tradition) but after the computer transitioned to power off, so it just kept turning on.
I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
I edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
You have awakened a distant memory I forgot I had.
Flying 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.
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.
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.
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:
Los Gatos residents say Google’s Waze app causing gridlock, blocking only wildfire escape route
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I used to go out in the backyard in summer and catch a bunch of fireflies (we’d always let them go after). Now it’s a rarity to even see one
Seeing hundreds of fireflies in your own backyard, and nowadays maybe 1 or 2 an entire season IF YOU ARE LUCKY.
And when I point out the declining insect biomass to people, they’re all like ‘Good, less bugs’
And I’m like ‘You ignorant motherfucker…’
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
Cutting a notch in your floppy disk to write protect it…
Don’t forget the stickers to un-write protect it :-)
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
Cut a little square hole in the side of a 5.25" floppy to double its capacity.
Or, as my lazy ass would do sometimes, move the slider and grab a magnet so maybe my “homework” wouldn’t load and I’d get another day.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
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.
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.
Party lines! You’d share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You’d hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
- Receiving junk mail Internet CDs
- Waiting patiently to record a song you liked
- Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
- The planet Pluto
- Wax lips and candy cigarettes
- Tang
- Translucent electronics
- Cheat Code books
- 1(800) COLLECT & “00 it’s magic!”
“- Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR”
You just awakened a sad memory from 30 years ago… I wanted to record a movie I saw in the TV programme magazine but it started after midnight and I should have used the next day’s date :-(
Some VCR popular brands had the TV Guide™ feature. In the TV Guide little magazine near the checkout counter you lookup the show on a chart. And if it had a 5 or 6 digit number in bold next to it – punch that into the VCR. And it’ll program it to record it.
This technology partnership failed because it required people to have properly set the clock beforehand. If one could do that troddening thru the menus or instruction manual, then they probably won’t need to buy the magazine.
Holy shit TV Guide! I forgot about those! They’d just show up in the mail every week, I have no idea who was sending them or why but inevitably they’d be in the mailbox!
The first time I went to a friend’s house and they had a guide on the TV my mind was blown!
Oh and Tivo too! I learned about Tivo from a friend and had never even heard of DVR before that! The idea that you could just record TV at will was mind-blowing! I was like, “yeah but where do you put the cassette?”
You knew your favorite show had made it when it was on the cover of TV Guide. I know I was happy when Babylon 5 got a cover.
Actually I don’t even think ours had a date, only time, like a microwave or oven, so you have to set the timer for a time within 24 hours. I think I might have missed sorting once between I messed up the AM/PM.
I’m confused by your inclusion of Tang. I mean, in some places it’s still sold and consumed everywhere. Honey Lemon Tang is the bomb, btw.
That’s likely more from personal preference and not having looked for it at the grocery store. I was more remembering the old monkey(?) commercials and everyone talking about it because it was from “NASA.”
Never knew Tang still existed. I only knew it during my childhood
When I was 2 or 3 year old our Family had a VCR. I still remember watching Popeye using VCR.
Popeye was one of my favorite shows I remember watching over and over and over again. Singing and acting it out. I also had recordings of the Pink Panther and I think one of, if not the first animated Superman movies or cartoons.
That’s also an old memory you unlocked of a home video of myself maybe 3-4 ish “playing Popeye” singing “Popeye the sailor man, toot toot!” and I would take a drink from my Dad’s cup pretending it was spinach and acting like my biceps popped out and then promptly sneezing in my Dad’s face.
Good times.
Bro, Tang actually still exists!
