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.
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?
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
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.
there was a time without cell phones? no way!
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 ;-)
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
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.
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?
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.
IRQ 5, DMA 1
BLESSED THE DAY PLUG AND PLAY WAS INVENTED
I don’t know what exactly that means but I know there was no sound without it. Guess I’m slightly younger.
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.
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.
wheel that came with monkey island
http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate
Using pencils to manually rewind cassette tapes.
Actually, just having to rewind things at all.
LOL I am just 17 but I still have did that.
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
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…
But… we maximized profits for rich shareholders at the expense of everyone else. Isn’t that also great?
Alternately: I remember when everyone on a flight could smoke. The cabin filled with a blueish unbreathable haze. Nobody had personal electronics, and in-flight entertainment was rare, so every child on the plane was continuously crying, whining, or yelling.
No I’m flight entertainment?
They had movies. And like 13 “radio stations” that repeated like every hour, you had to listen to with those weird non-electric head phones they would hand out.
Ohhhh yeahhh… those headphones that were just tubes the sound traveled down, into your ears. I was too little to understand how they worked then. Thanks for reminding me!
I got so bored once, I put my ear next to the arm rest where the plug was, and realized I could hear the audio. So those headphones were basically like a stethoscope.
Flight wings? What does that mean? A search only shows pictures of airplanes.
They would give kids a look at the cockpit and you would meet the pilots and give you a plastic aviator pin to wear.
I wanna build a bot we can call to post a collage of the top 4 image results for a given term:
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
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.
I feel like even the concept of a tv station is a bit outdated despite technically still existing.
“Entertainment companies used to decide what shows were playing at 5pm”
It is now safe to turn off your computerI edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
Also:
And then there was the worst sight in the world…
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.”
Glad you didn’t embed the worst site in the world.
“Scars from Ogrish run deep“, the kids wouldn’t know
I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
I’m not old enough to know this one.
Old computers wouldn’t turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).
When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don’t really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is “off”.
The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn’t cause any damage to the system.
I’m not young enough to know what “cap” and “no cap” mean
Same
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.
“Mom I’m playing Starcraft don’t pick up the phone!”
Most of the army is halluc
I think I see boobs!
And then, every so often, when the moon was in the right phase and the stars aligned, it would come in perfectly clearly for a few glorious seconds.
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.
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.
Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.
MTV only had music video
Video killed the radio star. Still remember watching Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.
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 :-)
Chewing up a piece of paper and shove the goo into the holes of a casette you didn’t like so you could record on it
We’d put tape over the holes, I remember recording Death Metal albums over my parents old exercise cassettes, for example.
You could also just have put tape over the hole…
Yeah gross.
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
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.
