I remember when...

[wmenorr67]

I remember when Betamax and 8 tracks were it.

[Monkeyleg]

My parents (ages 89 and 90) still have an 8 track player as well as tapes.

[Paddy]

My parents (ages 89 and 90) still have an 8 track player as well as tapes.

Up until a couple years ago, Ihad an 8 track player and tapes.  Elton John tapes.  I bought them in the 70's.

[Monkeyleg]

Riley, the last 8 track player I had was stolen out of my '67 Buick LeSabre in 1972. I wasn't as mad about the player as I was about the other two things the thieves took: a tape of my all-time favorite recording, the Stone's "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out;" and an ounce of really good pot.

[S. Williamson]

I remember $.57/gal gasoline.

Laserdiscs.

Cassette tapes.

Being amazed that our brand new laptop had 128MB of hard disk space.

Toy guns that weren't frowned upon, and potato guns that merely initiated a little eye-rolling from my parents.

Making my own weaponry from old farm equipment and saplings.

Legos that were actually all blocks, except for the people.

Lucky Strikes could actually be found in regular gas stations, and the mall had Beeman's Pepsin Gum if you took the time to find it.

Super Nintendo, and playing F-Zero against my brother.

TI-95 calculators being far too advanced for any one junior high student to posess.

[wmenorr67]

I remember going roller skating;

when nothing could replace a cassette tape;

when the drinking age in some states for beer was 18;

bubble gum in machines at a store as just a penny;

taking a pocket knife to school and no one freaking out about it;

drinking water from a garden hose and not thinking twice about it;

when cars could be worked on at your own house with just a few tools;

when you could pour the oil from your oil change that you did yourself along the fence line to kill weeds.

[Balog]

I remember when old guys would get all nostalgic and gushy about how great the insignificant little crap from their younger days was. Oh wait......

[ilbob]

I remember being in a JROTC unit in high school.

No one thought a thing of a group of 30 or 40 high school students taking M14s out to the driver ed range for drill with no adults present. The M14s did have the firing pins and select fire levers removed.

[Moondoggie]

I remember...

No ZIP codes

Cops used a stopwatch to figure out if you were speeding,

Our phone number began with "Glendale" or "GL" instead of digits..don't ask my why it was "GL" instead of "GD".

No area codes.  Long distance was station-to-station or person-to-person and the operator did it for you.

Telegrams were still common.

Getting a "Phosphate" in whatever flavor mixed by the soda jerk or sometimes even the druggist at the corner drug store.

Popsickles were a nickel...then 7 cents.

My first job at McDonald's in 1968 involved pouring syrup for the soda from glass jugs into the top of the machine.

You could buy used motor oil in glass quarts at the service station.  My first car, a 59 Belaire got about 30 miles to a gallon.....of oil.  I carried 4 gallon jugs in the trunk.  When the oil light came on, I'd just dump another gallon in the top of the 230 inline 6 and fog my way on down the road.

A brand new Honda 125cc bike was about $110.

[armchair warrior]

cell phones weighed ~5lbs and came in a bag or had to be installed in the car

Aside from weighing 5 lbs., I wish that would make a comeback.

[Perd Hapley]

I remember when you couldn't call for help or stay in touch with people because cell phones didn't exist, were prohibitively expensive, or were attached to a car. 

[Monkeyleg]

I remember when my family didn't have a car, much less a phone attached to it.

And my father was an engineer, so it wasn't as though we were poor.

[lee n. field]

"If you were really educated you might have a slide rule."

I actually have 3 here.  A Pickett that I actually used in college.  A Post that I picked up in the late 1970s, somewhere, and a circular slide rule that I found a couple years ago (that they still make in Japan -- I found the manufacturer's web site, how's that for anachronism?).

[Manedwolf]

TI-95 calculators being far too advanced for any one junior high student to posess.

I was spoiled. My parents got me an HP-48X dotmatrix-display graphing caculator.

I used to play Super Tetris and casino games on it in class, and also used it as a stealth remote control (it had an IR port) to mess with the classroom TVs. 

And did homework on a Leading Edge 486. I think they were a subsidiary of Daewoo or something.

I remember kindergarten and first grade pounding away on Apple IIes that were already getting pretty old, along with a few TRS-80 Model IIIs...that everyone hated, boring B&W things. We wanted the color games!

Then at home, we played with a greybox NES. Ikari Warriors and Contra with two players, yelling at each other.

I also remember when every middle school birthday party had a long dotmatrix banner with clipart and text, produced by Broderbund's The Print Shop software. Everyone had it! You'd wait half an hour for the banner to finish, only to realize you'd misspelled the last word...and usually that was the name of the person that the banner was for. 


A yellow cardboard box with sleeved floppies in it. Did anyone not have this?

[Leatherneck]

I remember when the TV went public and the neighbors got one,
when the laser was invented,
when the family car first had no running boards,
when the phone was a party line, before the new-fangled dial-it-yourself,
when gas went up from 26.9 to 28.9 a gallon,
when the first commercial jet flew,
and when it was unusual to find a business open on Sunday.

Good times...

TC

[Turkey Creek]

I remember
1- gas at 19 cents a gallon and the attendent pumped it for me
2- no TV at all and being thoroughly entertained by radio
3- 5 cents bought a wad of bubble gum and 5 baseball cards
4- the coal and milk deliveries were brought by horse drawn wagons and this in Detroit
5- knowing the COP on foot patrol by name
6- being turned loose as a kid with no one looking out for me and only having to be home when the street lights came on

[Desertdog]

3- 5 cents bought a wad of bubble gum and 5 baseball cards

Don't we wish we had kept those cards in pristine condition until the last few years, instead of using a clothes pin to attach them to our bikes where they would be hit by the spokes as a noise maker.

[Perd Hapley]

6- being turned loose as a kid with no one looking out for me and only having to be home when the street lights came on

You had street lights?  And they came on by themselves?  Whippersnapper.   

I grew up in the boonies, and there were no street lights at all.  But that was the eighties, and there are still no street lights. 

[Stetson]

My dad worked for Texas Instruments in the 70's so I remember -

All TI prototype calculators, at one time or another, laid out on the dining room table.  My dad doing tests and writing down the results in his green notebook.

Getting to test the Speak and Spell and play with the voice chip knobs on the layout boards

The first programmable calculator that had a magnetic strip that you ran through the calculator that would change the functions of the keys.

Commodore 64s that stored data on casette tapes

Going to work with my dad and being shown the new silica wafers that they were going to try putting IC chips on.

Going to work with my dad and getting to play with liquid nitrogen.  Frozen snickers bars, tennis balls and frogs are fun ti play with, just dont break them and have the pieces go under a filing cabinet that it too heavy to move.

[Manedwolf]

Benny Benassi uses a speak n spell vox in his mixes. Lots of other mix artists and DJs do, too. Neat retro sound.
Taking apart old electronic toys to use their unique sounds in new music is called "circuit bending". People take the vox chips out of thirty year old toys and rig them into new midi-controlled stations and such.

Here's one rigged for recording or live performance use in a club:


These DJ/engineers know what they're doing with electronics, too, so it's not a lost field!



http://www.casperelectronics.com/

[Balog]

Abe Simpson: "My car gets fourty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"

[Stetson]

Benny Benassi uses a speak n spell vox in his mixes. Lots of other mix artists and DJs do, too. Neat retro sound.
Taking apart old electronic toys to use their unique sounds in new music is called "circuit bending". People take the vox chips out of thirty year old toys and rig them into new midi-controlled stations and such.

These DJ/engineers know what they're doing with electronics, too, so it's not a lost field!



http://www.casperelectronics.com/

He still has one of the 3'x4' test system.  We still 'play' with it.  He also still has all of the old 4 function calculators he helped design.
We still have 3 storage buildings full of boxes to go through though, so there is more Im sure.

[grampster]

Penny candy.  The movies for .06¢.  Saturday matinee' had two main movies with Pathe World News in between.  Several previews cartoons and serials before each movie.  Nickel cokes. Popcorn for .02¢.   

No Mc Donalds. 

Saturday morning radio; "I'm Buster Brown and I live in a shoe.  My dog's name is Tighe and he lives in here too."  "Plunk yer magic twanger Froggy...boooiiiing..."Hiya kids, hiya, hiya.    Listening to the serials on radio at night; The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, The Creaking Door.

Only one TV in the neighborhood that we all gathered to watch after potluck on Saturday night.

Splits and lakers.

Standing on the corner of the main intersection on Saturday and not seeing a car for 5 minutes.

No organized sports for kids.  We did all that ourselves in vacant lots, ponds and streets.  Playing kick the can till 11 PM in summer.

Steam engines and knowing all the engineers, and crews.

Not keeping the baseball cards and comic books that I had that would be worth enough money to buy Kentucky.

Being limber, fast and strong.

Public dumps where one could shoot rats with pellet guns and .22's.

Taking my shotgun to school to hunt small game after school.

building rafts on the creek and river.

Dip netting for suckers and carp.

[Barbara]

Mechurochrome.

[MechAg94]

I remember when Star Wars made it's TV debut and it was 3 hours long since they included all sorts of interview cuts from the stars at each commercial break.  It was a real big deal.

I remember when the Houston Oilers won the Super Bowl!!!.................oh wait...nevermind.