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Friday Fun: Without Saying Your Age...

Darryl Lee

So, this is an oldie, but I like the excuse to be a crotchety old man:

Without saying your age, what is something you remember from your childhood that a younger person would not understand?

When I wanted to dial a BBS, I had to check if the number was a local call or not, otherwise I'd get in trouble. (I never got into learning how to hack free long distance calls.)

Comments

Linda Milne_Togetha Group_

that would be telling....

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Shouting at your sister to get off the 'phone because you wanted to use the internet

"I was using the internet before the web existed"

Still remembering your login to JANET

"What's a search engine?"

Suvradip Paul

Playing Super Mario 64. I loved the music. Reminds me transition to 3D gameplay.

Dharma Ramos

I don't like this game, lol =b

Kathy Hart

Renting a Video Disk machine from the Video Store.

Getting a stereo system that included an 8 track tape slot.

Dharma Ramos

I guess I'll play.

Kids today will never know the adrenaline rush of running to the bathroom during a commercial break and then hurd… | Tv commercials, Sarcastic humor, Funny pictures

Marjorie

Image result for Popular Toys From 1970s

this

Image result for 70s Stuff

and this

Image result for 70s Stuff

and this too

Marjorie

... and one of you became the remote control. Usually with a pair of pliers because the knob broke off the front of the tv.

See the source image

Monique vdB

Here is something I remember: logging into a local BBS that only 4 people could be on at once, with my very first modem, which I believe was 300 baud.

Monique vdB

(You would think it would be a straight line from the BBS to a career as a community manager but it definitely was not.)

Jimmy Seddon

Thank you @Marjorie! I was just going to mention that!

Jimmy Seddon

I'm going to go this route:

My Mom always wanted us to take more than one picture "just in case the first didn't turn out".

When would we find out? Not immediately, first we'd need to use the remaining pictures on one of these:

Then we'd need to take that or multiple of them into a specialize store to have the pictures "developed".

It could take weeks before you would see those pictures again.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

"knock the tab out to keep it"

Dave Rosenlund (Trundl)

While visiting my parent's house my then-8'ish-yr-old daughter asked if she could call her new best friend. My mother said, "Sure but please keep the call to 5 mins. or less."

It was a long-distance call.

A couple of minutes later my daughter came to find me and whispered "I don't think grammy's phone is working."

I went with her to the kitchen, picked up the handset, and heard a dial tone. I said, "I think it's working, honey."

Then, she started to move her finger around the dial pushing on the digits of her friend's phone number!

It was then I realized, she had only ever been exposed to rotary phones.

Oldphoneworks :: Antique Phones :: All :: Styleline - Wall mount - Rotary -Green

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

A very British one - when mum says "pop into Bejam for some frozen peas on your way back"?

John Funk

Registered for classes in college with these:

punch card.png

Dave Rosenlund (Trundl)

+1

Marjorie

@John Funk been there, done that too!

Marjorie

@Kathy Hart that was the life, wasn't it???

Monique vdB

And @Darryl Lee our BBS was local (phew, no long distance calls) but it did tie up our only phone line. We had local meetups, too, with quite an assortment of characters. One of them is my best friend to this day. One of them was a young kid who grew up to be a famous actor. One of them got rich buying up URLs before they were cool. Ah, memories....

Linda Milne_Togetha Group_

Or the kid that would always turn their head just as the picture was taken...

who me.jpg

Esther Strom

I have quite a few, but this is one that younger people seem flummoxed by.

Talktome-player

Linda Milne_Togetha Group_

fancy schmancy graphics tools

Bill Sheboy

My first laptop had 8 lines of text with 40 characters, a 300 baud acoustical modem, and 8K of RAM.

Bill Sheboy

Waiting in line for the card punch machine...before waiting in line to submit your batch job to run your project...before waiting in line to get your printout to check the results...repeat. :^)

Darryl Lee

Oooh, TRS-80 Model 100?

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100.jpg

We had the nifty NEC version the PC-8201:

No modem, but I much prefer the arrow-key layout. I actually think I have it in the house somewhere, but the battery pack got corroded out. I should really try to fix it. Loved that machine for hammering out plain text.

Prashant Sultania

When I was a kid, the snake 🐍 got stuck in bicycle back wheel. While taking out the snake my mother saw me and started beating me because she thought that I am playing with it😃😃

Fabian Lim

Commodore 128 was my game console.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Ah, it's nice to hear from the youth ;-)

Mine was a Vic 20 (then a C64, which lasted long enough that we skipped the C128 and the next one was an Amiga)

Huwen Arnone [Deiser/Devoteam]

*modem Internet connection sounds* & waiting.

Oh, wait, it's down... I need to connect again.

Jack Brickey

Enough said….

Brant Schroeder

Party line.

Mikael Sandberg

The payphone...

5577062926_a99de42b8f_m

Bill Sheboy

On the early VCRs, manually setting the little dials for the start and end times to program recording.

Tom Kakanowski_4k8aym

COBOL on punch cards, first modem was 150 Baud Anderson Jacobson audio coupled, I ran BBS's, I loved Omni and Games magazine, and on Sunday nights a radio show played that was just static to the uninitiated, but if you recorded it on cassette tape (and the stars were aligned), you could then load that recording into a PET/CBM and have some kind of useful game or utility. Lunar Lander was great! I hated when 10 digit phone numbers came out and we still had a rotary phone, 5 and 7 digit were working just fine! Never even heard of a school lockdown, and Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica rocked. Bugs, Scooby and Fred & Barney were the goto cartoons, and it was cool to smoke candy cigarettes. I remember being, like everyone, riveted for days to Saturn V launches and trips to the moon.

I hated that everything was closed on Sunday's, now I miss it, a down day would be appreciated.

On the other hand, I don't miss being afraid of Russia and nuclear bombs, rectal thermometers, mucking about with the TV antenna, being my Dad's personal TV Remote, waiting a week to get film developed, and I could have lived without Salvage 1 and that Star Wars Christmas Special.

2021-10-08 09_16_52-550986-lunar-lander-commodore-pet-cbm-screenshot-oops.png (PNG Image, 384 × 282 .png games-magazine-lot-issues-1980_1_99cc4d0f8c1b2b7389b76d115003e183.jpg

2021-10-08 09_21_53-1312.jpg (WEBP Image, 890 × 534 pixels) — Mozilla Firefox.png

Darryl Lee

Whoa, like this?
Vintage Philips N1500 video recorder VCR. Museum of old video recorders. Philips early video history.

I remember the blinking 12:00s you'd see everywhere...

Marjorie

Used the drive up version in Wisconsin in the snow storms to call home and let them know I was ok. See the source image

Darryl Lee

Was Salvage I the prototype for the Blue Origin ship New Shepard?

jeff bezos inspects blue origin new shepard rocket booster

Alex Koxaras -Relational-

I grew up using these:

The below was an everyday struggle:

download.jfif

Fabian Lim

Lmao!!

Vronik

Hola

Este libro es una leyenda ...

Saludos

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I call them "the laptop for my PHB"

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

The English still use these a lot.

In the nicer areas of the country, we've got mini-libraries, local produce shops, type 40's, coffee/cake/sandwich/salad shops, art galleries, bars, and even emergency medical centres (essentially a defibrillator and a, well, telephone)

Tom Kakanowski_4k8aym

Makes you think!

Tom Kakanowski_4k8aym

I had one of these later on, luxury, with Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics and WordPerfect, it was practically office productivity! I still prefer a CLI interface to this day

Vero Rivas

Hi @Darryl Lee

This is from my father-in-law and when my daughter saw it she was in "shock", she didn't even know what it was

Cheers

Bill Sheboy

I still catch myself typing the old Wordstar shortcut command patterns for block operations...every now and again...and wondering why the IDE isn't responding.

Tom Kakanowski_4k8aym

Can't tell the make/model from this pic, but these can take some fabulous photos. I have several that I've collected over the years, including a collapsible Zeiss Super Ikonta IV, it takes 120/220 film, so big negatives, pin sharp, portable, and scanned negatives yield 55 megapixel images. I don't have a full darkroom anymore, so I keep it to simply black and white chemistry and digital after the negative is developed, but there are still old die-hards like me who collect and use these. Proper large format cameras still operate with bellows systems like that to this day.

external-content.duckduckgo.com.jpg

Darryl Lee

I just read your post more carefully. Wow, recording programs off of RADIO to load into a your PET? That's something!

I mean, we had cassette "drives" for our TRS-80 and Apple ][, (our PETs were at school) but I didn't even think about the possibility of broadcasting a program. That's crazy cool. What kind of station was this, and where?

Oh right, audio couplers on modems. I reckon the one we had hooked up to our TRS-80 probably was only 150baud as well.

It was the coolest dang thing dialing up to what was probably UC Berkeley's mainframe in the 70s and printing my own copies of ASCII Snoopy, Charlie Brown, etc. instead of having to use the teletypes at the Lawrence Hall of Science where they'd charge you like 5¢ for every printout!

Of course our "printouts" were on silver thermal paper that probably faded out within a year:

Screen Shot 2021-10-08 at 4.07.57 PM.png

Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__

Amazing thread . I still remember my ICQ number... 217638214. And we were working on our school projects without internet... we had only books and imagination