quote:Originally posted by quidscribis: I think he's had too much salt n' vinegar chips.
*snort*
I think perhaps he's just made of salt and vinegar - forget the chips. But I say that in a good way, because you, PC, are one of my bright spots when I visit.
Long live salt and vinegar! (Okay, in all truth, I like sour cream & onion better, but whatever)
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Brinestone: Quid, if I, say, mailed you some salt & vinegar chips, would they get to you? How carefully is mail checked?
Also, what are the chances they'd get there in pieces bigger than crumbs?
Also, once we're inside, how I find you? And once I do, how do we escape?
*laughs* You're cute, brinestone. Yeah, they'd probably get to me - locals don't like potato chips. Only foreigners like 'em. But yeah, they'd likely end up squashed into crumbs. Which is sadness in its epitome.
So. Ya wanna come visit? Sure! Fly on over! We've got the room... Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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You had phone booths in your day? We had to climb up the telephone pole and tap out our messages in morse code.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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You kids have it so easy! When I was your age, we didn't have broadband modems, we didn't have dial-up modems, we didn't have modems at all! The only computers were on Star Trek, and they tended to spew smoke and sparks when too much was asked of them.
When I was your age, we understood that the reason we dial a phone is because phones had actual dials on them -- none of this namby-pamby push buttons you see nowadays. And if you had to call someone with a lot of 0's and 9's in their number, you might as well just sent them a letter, you'd have to wait so long for that dial to go back around again. That's why New Yorkers were so uppity -- they had the best area code of them all -- 212. New Jersey was stuck with 201, and they still haven't gotten past their inferiority complex.
When I was your age, we didn't have cable, we didn't have satellite, we had antennae on the roof. Big giant antennae, like you'd think we were trying to contact extra-terrestrials. Except back then, we called them Aliens. And if a windy storm came around, it would knock those antennae off kilter, so we'd have to climb back up on the roof to get reception again. And for what? For four lousy channels, all of them snowy. And what was on? Lawrence Welk. And none of these sleek flat-screen jobbies you kids have now. No sirree, Bub! Our televisions were big monstrous contraptions that sat on the floor. They had wooden cabinets and they looked like furniture. They even had these fake handles and knobs on fake drawers, so that you'd be tricked into believing that they really were furniture. But you could always tell that they weren't because they had a screen in the middle. And when you turned on or off the set, or changed the channel or the volume, you'd have to get up off your butt and do it by fiddling with these little buttons and knobs on the front of the TV. Remote controls? We didn't even know what they were! And when you turned off the set, the picture didn't just go dark. No. I got smaller and smaller until it was a tiny dot in the middle of the set that kind of lingered there, until it slowly faded away. It was like Lawrence Welk was being sucked into another dimension.
We didn't have VCR's, we didn't have DVD's, we didn't even have Betamax. If we wanted to see a movie, we had to go out to the cinema. Which had one screen and showed only one movie. And if you'd already seen it, well then, you were out of luck.
There was no World of Warcraft. There wasn't even Pac Man. We had video games -- five of them, all the same. Pong. Tennis. Table Tennis. Doubles Tennis. Handball. You hooked them up to your TV screen, and then they ruined your TV screen by burning the imprint of the Pong court onto the screen.
By the way, I'm not kidding about any of this. I really am that old.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Which was really annoying, because your skin was always dry from all the smoke and you smelled like smoke and you couldn't just pop down to the local Bath and Body Works and get scented moisturizer, oh no. These kids today are all spoiled.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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I live in Israel, that means that when I was a kid technology was very similar to Tante's descriptions.
Sure, there were people with remote controlled TVs and nice houses - rich Americans. I'm not kidding you; those were practically the only ones around the area I am.
Posts: 2978 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:Originally posted by quidscribis: I think he's had too much salt n' vinegar chips.
*snort*
I think perhaps he's just made of salt and vinegar - forget the chips. But I say that in a good way, because you, PC, are one of my bright spots when I visit.
Long live salt and vinegar! (Okay, in all truth, I like sour cream & onion better, but whatever)
I'm a bright spot? I've always thought of myself more as tarnished brass that just doesn't come clean.
PS: Spanks for the compliment.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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quote:When I was your age, we didn't have cable, we didn't have satellite, we had antennae on the roof.
And we didn't even have an antenna on the Roof. When we would go to the City to do Christmas shopping, Parent would leave us in Sears & Robuck's where they had a big cabinet TV with bleachers set arround. We would sit there all day and watch while she shopped. Then with stars in our eyes we would go home and dream of next years Howdy Doody dose.
Posts: 1167 | Registered: Oct 2005
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In my day, they hadn't invented the third dimension. We got around just as fine as you please in two dimensions, and if you couldn't go around something, you just had to wait until it moved. None of this new-fangled "stepping over" things that the kids are so wild about.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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"We got around just as fine as you please in two dimensions, and if you couldn't go around something, you just had to wait until it moved. None of this new-fangled "stepping over" things that the kids are so wild about."
Wait until things moved? Luxery. Least things MOVED in your day. When I was a lad, it was nothing but lines for arms and legs, and things just sat there. And if we were lucky, there would be a window occassionally that we could fantasize about what might be outside of it (even though we all knew it would be a blank square of white), and even that would be after consciousness was invented. Before that, it was pretty mundane.
Posts: 530 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Man, things were GOOD in your day, in MY day, we were just dots--none of this new fangled movement or lines. There was no communcation, because that would require more existance then the dots that we were!
Posts: 234 | Registered: Oct 2005
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Pssh, I went back in time and invented the concept of 0 just so you know your score when we play each other in Halo.
Posts: 530 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Hmph. In my day, we didn’t have any time travelers visiting us. They couldn’t. Time had been broken for years and the army was too busy creating the first breathable oxygen to bother fixing it. Old Leonard down at the shop rigged up some kind of whirligig and managed to jerry-rig a few hours for us so we could get things done. You should have seen us all running around. Then that contraption up and quit, but Leonard had gone and kicked the bucket during that few hours and nobody knew how to get the thing running again.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Although I am not nearly as old as Bob, I am a woman. Which means that my years count double in terms of maturity.
I have used slide rules and punch cards.
I owned an HP 35.
I had a passbook for my first bank account. When ever I put money in or took money out, the clerk would write the transaction down in the book by hand.
I had to type all my college reports by hand with a manual type writer.
When we cut and pasted text in something we were writing. We used real scissors and glue.
Not only did were there no remote controls for changing the channel. The pictures would sometimes start to scroll up the TV screen or they would be stretched into a trapezoidal shape. We had these three little knobs at the bottom of the set you could play with when this happened to try to get the picture back to being rectangular and in the middle of the screen.
There was no TV in the wee hours of the morning. At midnight, stations played the national anthem and went off the air until morning.
I was in my late twenties, before I discovered that OZ was in color. That was the first time I'd ever seen the movie on anything but a black and white TV.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Rabbit, did you ever play with the vertical hold so that the people's feet would be at the top of the screen and their heads at the bottom. You know, just for fun, 'cause there was nothing on but Lawrence Welk, anyway.
And just after the national anthem, and before the screen went blank, there was the "test pattern". How did you land up scoring on that test?
I had the passbook, too. I remember when the bank gave me the choice of continuing with the passbook, or going to some kind of suspicious "statement account".
Remember how your typewriter ribbon could come in two colors, so that you could type in red if you really wanted to. But, come on, who ever wanted to?
We had carbon paper to make carbon copies. But in school, we had mimeographs. The mimeographs were cranked out of the mimeograph machine with an actual crank! They were on white paper with purple writing. And there was no better smell than the smell of a fresh mimeograph, still warm off the machine. It was this funky solvent kind of smell, and when the teacher passed out the mimeographs to the class, every student would lift their sheet to their face and sniff deeply. You'd get a kind of buzz off of the fumes still clinging to the paper. Yes! We were huffing mimeographs every day! And all the while, the country kept wondering why SAT scores were falling.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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(My school had a mimeograph. The teachers got so many photocopies a year; after that they had to buy their own paper and pay for copies at Kinkos or use the mimeograph.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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But I think that may have been less a function of my age, and more a function of the fact that my school was poor. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I remember correction tape, which you put over your typo's, hit the key again, and if everything was lined up perfectly, covered up your typo with non-matching white stuff.
I remember mimeographs.
Mmmmm, mimeographs.
I remember slide shows with the beep. The slide projector had two slots for the slides, that ran perpendicular to the light. You pressed slid one in front of the light, and while the tape played, you took out the old slide and put in the new one in the second holder. At the beep you switched it over and repeated.
I sold TRS-80 Computers with a whopping 48K memory.
I remember playing computer games who's stunning award winning graphics consisted of <>!@#. I was the @.
I remember overhead projectors that were not connected to computers. Where colored pens helped us decipher division.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_raven: I remember playing computer games who's stunning award winning graphics consisted of <>!@#. I was the @.
Hack or Rogue?
Golly, I miss those games. I never did figure out how to overcome the Capital "O" on level 10. The action was spelled out at the bottom of the screen. "The Orc swings." "You swing." "The Orc hits." "You are wounded (-10 points from Health)." "You miss" ...
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I remember all that stuff. I also remember being at the forefront of the "Mac Revolution". Until I hit the real world, I thought Mac's were IT. Posts: 880 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I'm so glad that computers can fit into my luggage vs. the multi room behemoths of the old days. Or the giant stone slabs Bob used to chip (with his teeth) his IM chats.
Man I love the evolution of technology!
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Dec 2005
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Well, when I was a kid, I had a soda pop can art set, in which you crushed pop cans in the nifty can crusher and then decorated them with glue, sparkles, and other crafty goodies.
Pre-recycling days, y'know.
The person that figured out how to attach those can crushers to garage walls for crushing beer cans made a mint . . . Posts: 5609 | Registered: Jan 2003
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cans? We had to hold the soda in our outstretched hands and slurp it up. And it wasn't really SODA either. It was water that didn't fizz at all. Someone had to stand next to you making "fsssssss" noises.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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quote: The mimeographs were cranked out of the mimeograph machine with an actual crank! They were on white paper with purple writing. And there was no better smell than the smell of a fresh mimeograph, still warm off the machine.
Yuh huh! I loved the smell of fresh mimeographs.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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You guys are such whiners. Water? Psshh. We had to break open coconuts with our bare hands for something to drink... in Canada !!!
Posts: 697 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Holes?! You're lucky you had holes. In my day, everything was accomplished through osmosis, and boy were we grateful.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:cans? We had to hold the soda in our outstretched hands and slurp it up.
In all seriousness, when I was a kid soda pop came in tin cans that had to be opened with the pointed end of a bottle opener. Then they introduced the aluminum cans with the pull tabs. Then california banned the tabs because they ended up as litter all over the ground.
Most commonly, we bough pop in glass bottles that were reusable. You paid a deposit on them which was refunded when you took the bottle back to the store. Then the bottles got shipped back to the bottling company and refilled.
Has anyone noticed that on the east coast they call it "soda", in the west we call it "pop", and in the center of the country they call it "soda pop".
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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Hey! I remember glass bottled pop. We got pic-a-pop where you got a crate and could pick out whatever flavors you wanted (glass bottles) and there was a flat fee for the crate. Then when they were all gone, you took the bottles and the crate back. Ahhh the good ole days.
I have noticed the east coast, west coast and mid states thing too.
Posts: 697 | Registered: Nov 2005
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My only source of income in early grade school was finding the pop bottles and redeaming them for merchandise at the General Store. 2 cents for 6 oz bottles and 3 cents for the 8 oz. A trip around the perimeter of Myton was usually good for a small wagon load. The only drink offered in a can was evaporated milk.
Posts: 1167 | Registered: Oct 2005
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But I say that in a good way, because you, PC, are one of my bright spots when I visit.
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Which is sadness in its epitome. ![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)
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