'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter (theatlantic.com) 546
Alexis C. Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic: There's a question going around on Twitter, courtesy of the writer Matt Whitlock: "Without revealing your actual age, what's something you remember that if you told a younger person they wouldn't understand?" This simple query has received, at this date, 18,000 responses. Here is just a tiny selection: A/S/L, pagers, manual car windows, "be kind, please rewind", "Waiting by the radio for my song to come on so I could record it on a cassette tape", floppy disks, the smell of purple mimeograph ink, WordPerfect, busy signals, paper maps, Winamp, smoking in the hospital, the card catalogue. Our favorite response, "The remote to change the channel on the TV was attached to a box that was attached to the TV", which elicited a response, "What about the remote that was really a clicker... In that it clicked like a frog toy",
first (Score:5, Funny)
Remember when calling 'first' was cool?
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And hitting rewind on the cassette and playing back he messages.
Re:first (Score:5, Insightful)
Winamp really whips the llama's ass. I'll be using it until it stops doing its job.
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Foobar2000 is the best music player out there, by a huge margin.
The irony, it BURNS! (Score:3)
Luckilly, Archive.Org is on the case [archive.org]!
What's going on here? (Score:3)
What is this, the yearbook?
Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?
Re:What's going on here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?
On a geological time scale, we're all about to die momentarily.
Re:What's going on here? (Score:5, Funny)
It could be worse. We could be all about to die permanently.
Re:What's going on here? (Score:5, Funny)
What is this, the yearbook?
Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?
You are dead. All humans at dead. You think you're remembering this crap because we're doing brain dumps from the parts we found.
We're trying to figure out what went wrong with the design.
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How about next time you put a bit of redundancy in the vital organs. And leave out the stupid appendix.
Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Pagers: doctors and first responders still use them. Some work via satellite, meaning there are no network dead spots.
Pretty sure I've been in a car with manual windows (and manual transmission, even!) in the last year.
Busy signals? Pretty common when calling a business -- once there's a call on call waiting and one on the line, 3rd caller gets a busy.
Paper maps -- maybe road maps aren't as common, but any hiker typically gets a paper maps of a park, and maps of buildings like museums are often given out.
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once there's a call on call waiting and one on the line, 3rd caller gets a busy.
Multiple lines and a PBX are cheap these days. It's almost a rounding error among the other typical expenses.
You can even do VoIP with a virtual PBX to avoid an upfront capex.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Its not that a PBX would be too costly... its "why bother"? Its not even on their radar as a 'problem' that needs 'fixing'.
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That's just to keep the American tourists from stealing them.
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If you learn to drive and pass your test in an automatic, you are not eligible to drive manual in UK. Only those who have to have automatic (usually medical reasons, but there are those who deliberately choose it) learn in a car that has it.
Re: Really? (Score:3)
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I bought it so that my son could learn to drive one, but he's a lazy so-and-so and won't learn.
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Pretty sure I've been in a car with manual windows (and manual transmission, even!) in the last year.
Been in one? Hell, I bought one earlier this year.
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Pretty sure I've been in a car with manual windows (and manual transmission, even!) in the last year.
In Europe most car are sold with manual. In Italy you are required to make the driving exam.
Anyway small cars like the Fiat 126 [wikipedia.org] with an engine ripped from an underpowered motorbike have to use a manual to have a decent torque. Actualy the first model of 126 and the older 500 and 600 have an unsyncronized manual gear. yuo had to do "Double clutching". Anyway I have always had manuals, becaue I haved had small or compact cars, made by Fiat or Renault.
Busy signals? Pretty common when calling a business -- once there's a call on call waiting and one on the line, 3rd caller gets a busy.
Paper maps -- maybe road maps aren't as common, but any hiker typically gets a paper maps of a park, and maps of buildings like museums are often given out.
I have a VoIP landline with unlimited national calls on ot
Flying without passport? (Score:5, Insightful)
Technology my tail! What about things changed by our caring, loving, and omniscient government? When traveling — by air or train — without registering with authorities was possible? When being mistreated at the airport would cause the mistreater to be disciplined, rather than the victim — arrested [copblock.org]?
When one could buy health insurance for about $140/month (just over $200 in today's money)? Remember?..
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Pretty easy to take the train without ID in the US -- just buy Amtrak tickets using a pre-paid credit card. If you go up to the window, they might ask for ID -- last time, I pulled out an expired university ID just to fuck with the guy and he grunted something and sold me the ticket. I've never been asked for ID on the train itself.
Commuter trains never ask for ID, nor would it really be possible for them to do so due to time constraints.
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I have. Conductors do not have to ask for it, but may choose to — at their sole discretion. And you must comply or they can call police and kick you off the train at the next stop.
Just [cnn.com] you [motherjones.com] wait [buses.org].
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And yet, Amtrak (itself a government agency) continues to ask your name, and to assert the right to check your ID at any time. They constantly remind passengers about it on the stations too.
More to the point, the commuter rail, buses, etc. aren't safe either. You can be asked to identify yourself — on pain of being denied boarding or worse. The dreaded "papers please" has materialized and history wi
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Bush signed the law creating TSA [wikipedia.org], I'll grant you that. But it was meant to merely transfer airport security from private firms to government employees (a Fascist streak so common to all people in government [ronpaulinstitute.org]).
Obama not only didn't roll it back, he presided over the Agency asserting a role much wider than imagined 10 years earlier. The agency smugly reminded [nytimes.com] us all, that it is in charge of all transportation — n
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There's other things that can be done.
Drugs are often fantastically expensive in the US because there's not much effective pressure limiting them. Other countries generally negotiate prices for sales inside their borders. This is also complicated by FDA testing requirements that can be unduly expensive.
Since there is no national health insurance or care policy, a lot of care happens
Rotary dial on a party line... (Score:3)
Oh yea, I lived that one. It was one step up from the crank, talk to the switchboard operator thing...
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"Number please....."
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Re:Rotary dial on a party line... (Score:4, Informative)
I've used a manual phone as recently as the late 1990s. It didn't have a crank -- you picked it up and waited for the operator to go on the line. It looked like a normal 1970s desk phone with no dial.
Granted, this was in a rural part of Eastern Europe, not North America.
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Believe it or not (Score:2, Troll)
There was a time when a President of the USA accepting money from foreign governments was serious enough that he'd at least try to hide it.
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There was a time when a President of the USA accepting money from foreign governments was serious enough that he'd at least try to hide it.
So do you have evidence of a US President accepting money from a foreign government?
Reel to reel magnetic tape (Score:3)
At a previous job, we used to get NOAA ocean data on tape. Along with the tape came a piece of paper telling you what the header and record sizes were on that tape because none of it was standardized - the (FORTRAN) program I'd written to read the tape had to be tweaked each time.
My life was those... (Score:2)
BananaCom, ICQ, Powwow, The Palace, Tsunami, connecting to BBSs after midnight to download .mod songs, Dr. Sbaitso, Fantavision.... I could go on and on
Tube checker at the drug store (Score:2)
Every month or two, it seemed, when the TV started having problems, my Dad and I would take all of its glass tubes out of their sockets and take them down to the drug store or hardware store to test them. Usually, we found one that was weak or bad, and bought a replacement on the spot. My Dad preferred RCA tubes, but I liked the look of the Philips boxes better. We took them all home and put them back into the TV. It always worked after we did that. A couple of times, while I was still in grade school, I wa
Paying a toll in person... (Score:2)
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Communities will only eliminate the cash option if they want to totally discourage tourism by automobile.
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Well, we're already doing this by Draconian border rules for tourists to the US.
This being said, availability of cash payment options is one of the benefits of illegal immigration in the US. As long as there's an "unbanked" population, cash won't entirely disappear, especially not in areas that have a large such population.
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What are you on about? I've travelled all over the world without worrying about crap like "cash" at a toll machine and never once considered the fact that I don't need to carry around useless local currency as a discouragement.
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So you have bought the transponder for a dozen different municipalities, or have you just not gone anywhere that only accepts pre-payment by those transponders. You apparently had some vending machine to stick your card into?
There are systems around the USA where if you cross a bridge or drive on a toll road without a transponder, they will photo your license plate and fine you for toll evasion.
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A wad of local currency can come in handy. Once in Poland I had left my passport at the hotel, but I found this out on the train to Warsaw. I got off at the next stop and attempted to purchase a ticket back to the town of the hotel from the woman behind the glass at the station and promptly handed her my credit card. No good, I try a second card. Nope. A third card, nope. I didn't speak Polish and she didn't speak English. After much English and Polish back and forth, when I finally cottoned on she couldn't
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Here's the problem with this: rental cars.
They send the RENTAL CAR COMPANY the bill, which then deducts the toll amount with a $10 processing fee for each toll from your credit card.
You can use the rental car company's toll tag, but that usually comes with an extra fee as well. The way around it is to get your own pre-paid toll tag.
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Here they made it difficult to pre-pay rather than allow automatic billing... you had to putz around on the website and read a long document to figure out how. Also, if you pre-pay and your account runs dry, they fine you more than they would charge a pay-by-plate driver who never entered the system, which is bullshit.
I think they have a cash option even still, but what they really want and try to get is the ability to draw money directly out of your account. After all, what could possibly go wrong? ....
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my god (Score:2)
My parents' remote control (Score:5, Informative)
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Two knobs. One for UHF Chanel's (2-13+VHS) and VHS (14-72?) you would switch the knob to the correct channel and then there a dial behind the know to adjust the analog single to get optimal strength. If you played with the dial enough sometimes you can pick up channels outside your normal viewing range, they will be fuzzy but you can get some sound and image.
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>VHS (14-72?)
At one point it went into the 80s. Later on the high channels got reassigned to 60 (In Toronto, CITY-TV started out as 79 and was later moved to 57). I'm not sure if that was due to problems with interference or simply a re-purposing of the frequency range.
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Whichever of us kids was closest to the TV.
Also, voice-child-interface-latency aside, TV channel changes where *INSTANT*.
None of that waiting a second in case you're typing a multi-digit channel number; which was bad enough...
And none of that taking for f-u-c-k-i-n-g E-V-A-H HDMI/HDCP/whatever-it-is negotiation/hand-shaking.
Bloody modern technology! Back in my day... etc... we may have only had three TV channels to choose, and even those only transmitted during the day... but we was happy then!
Lawn etc etc.
Punchcards and dial-up (Score:2)
(1) Programming was done on a typewriter (a what?) like device that punched holes into paper cards, one line per card, or a paper tape, that you fed into another machine, etc ... (Note: I still have an actual, regular, typewriter at home.)
(2) The term "dial-up" meant you manually dialed the phone -- on a phone with an actual dial -- then put the receiver into a device when you heard the wobble tone. (Pro Tip: You could also dial the phone by quickly pressing/releasing the hook: 5 times for 5, pause, 3 t
finally news (Score:2)
Re: finally news (Score:2)
Natalee Portman's Hot Grits (Score:2)
TV antennas (Score:2)
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TVs still have antennas if you have over-the-air HDTV. I pay for a very basic Internet package, so I don't have a cable box. I have an HDTV antenna used to pick up signals -- gets the basics like CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, and PBS.
I watch maybe an hour of TV per week, so dropping $60/mo+ on a cable package doesn't make sense to me.
There was once a time when ... (Score:2)
There were no home computers, no Internet, no cell phones (of any kind), no CD/DVDs, no (home) videotape, no cable TV, only 4 television channels: ABC, CBS, NBC (on VHF) and PBS (on UHF) that you received via an antenna on a television set with actual (and only) knobs to change the channels.
And I'm just talking about the early 1970s - when I was 10.
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And if you woke up too early, there was nothing on. Not that there were no interesting programmes, there was literally no show available to watch; just test patterns or static.
2 minute wax cylinder records (Score:3)
to play on my Edison Standard Model B player.
Static. (Score:2)
Most new TV for the Past 20 years or so, don't show static. They just give you the blue screen. Back in the old days if the channel wasn't available you get static visually and audio. Often very jarring noise as there isn't anything limiting the volume.
The AAA guidebook (Score:2)
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Hollerith Code and Punch Cards anyone? (Score:2)
Oh...and using the Univac CP-642B from my first duty station...the one with the Front panel of Control registers where we entered the boot strap sequence in assembly code so it could go out and access the 7-track tape unit with the System Control Program(SCP) tape and load up the OS we used at the time.
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist... [ed-thelen.org]
Good Times...Good Times...
What I Miss Most? Life Before The Internet Age (Score:5, Insightful)
I also miss being able to go completely off the grid. If you wanted to get away from everything (and everyone) you actually could. Now days there's really no easy way to do that. You're always under surveillance and you're always tethered to 'the system' somehow (your phone, your credit cards, etc.).
The last thing I really miss is having conversations with random people. Yeah that seems strange to say, but 'Back in the day' when you were waiting in a line or at a bus stop or something, you'd generally make friendly conversation with the person next to you, if just to pass the time. Today no one actually talks to each other anymore, everyone has their face down in a phone (I'm guilty of it myself) or have their headphones on. We're losing the art of human interaction. Hell, I've been with a group of friends who were actually texting each other rather than talking even though we were all right there. It was both eye opening and sad. Those days are gone I suppose.
It's official.... (Score:2)
Slashdot has become Facebook.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this question/meme on my FB newsfeed.
And yes, I can count, I was a math major waaaay back when before I became a CS major.
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> And yes, I can count, I was a math major waaaay back when
So was I, yet decimal places are my mortal enemies...
Re:It's official.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot has become Facebook.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this question/meme on my FB newsfeed.
And yes, I can count, I was a math major waaaay back when before I became a CS major.
It's not Facebook or anything in particular.
South Park sort of nailed it on the head with their Memberberries [wikia.com] episodes.
There's been a huge wave of nostalgia going on in the last few years. Remakes, reboots, alternate universe settings, etc.
We got remakes, reboots or sequels for Star Wars, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, Jumanji, etc.
We got classic videogame consoles from Nintendo and others.
I think Agent Smith was sort of telling the truth in The Matrix when he said the peak of human evolution was around the mid 1990's.
After that, we had businesses, marketing and governments take over everything, so everything is depressing and sucks, thus the urge to recall the "simpler modern times" is very strong... and businesses are marketing the hell out of it while the government is making notes of who's eating memberberries.
P-box kits from Radioshack (Score:2)
Heathkit
CB Radio
8mm video cassettes
MiniDisc audio recorders
Cameras that used film.
Netware (Score:2)
My first job.. (Score:2)
manual car windows (Score:2)
My current car has manual car windows and I would be willing to pay a premium for that feature in the future. Electric windows fail often.
Guns for kids (Score:2)
When I was a kid we'd play army with realistic looking plastic guns or Daisy BB guns. Almost every kid I knew had a BB gun (except me... dad: "you'll shoot your eye out kid!", because he almost did when he was a kid). Older kids were getting 22 rifles. Schools had rifle clubs and you could bring your gun to school. Plinking after school wasn't a big deal. And mass shootings were extremely rare (no 24 hour news cycle to beat you over the head with it either).
A casset recorder ... (Score:2)
... from Radio Shack to store/recall BASICA programs (using the Kansas City method of mod/demod) fot the TRS-80.
With really long load times (Score:2)
I think on the Model I they ran something like 300 baud. I remember playing a TRS-80 game that came on a cassette. It came with a flyer with step-by-step instructions on how to load the game and a quip at the end that said something like "loading will take awhile. Go make a sandwich."
Hollerith cards (Score:2)
Oh the fun we had carefully typing each card, one mistake and you had to go to a new one. You fed your cards into the reader and listened to the musical whirrr as it zipped through the cards. Then you carefully took them out and put them into your box because if you got one card misplaced, your program wouldn't work. Then about an hour later, your output would magically appear in a folder deposited by some computer gnome. Scan the oversized output which included a listing of your program and its output (if
Watching scrambled porn ... (Score:3)
Station Wagons (Score:3)
Clicker? (Score:4, Funny)
When I was a child I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!!
Try explaining BBSes to kids (Score:5, Funny)
"It's like the internet, only local"
"Why? Couldn't you connect to a BBS across the country?"
"Well, you could, but you'd be hit with long distance charges like you wouldn't believe"
"Long distance charges?"
"Damn it, get off my lawn"
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"Well, you could, but you'd be hit with long distance charges like you wouldn't believe"
Clearly, you weren't doing it correctly ;^) There were "numbers" you could dial get around that... ;^)
My partial list (Score:4)
Keying in the bootloader on your minicomputer using front panel switches
Taking your card deck to the "computer center", then waiting a few hours to go get your printout
Turning off the TV and seeing the picture collapse to a little bright dot that slowly fades away
Mylar punch tape for those programs you either couldn't afford to lose or that you loaded over and over and over again
Wall-mounted punch tape rewinders
Computers with a vast array of front-panel light/buttons representing registers, which you could alter by pressing them
Calculators that had stations wired to a base unit via half-inch-thick cables, and that cost more than your car
Guys who'd come to your house with dairy products and leave them on your doorstep
Drive-in movie theaters
Space Exploration (Score:3)
So many of the comments here talk about technologies from the 80's an later that I have to give my story.
I remember back in 1969 sitting in front of the television in July watching the news on the first Apollo moon landing. When the space ship was returning to Earth I recall the anticipation of where it would actually splash down in the Pacific but not totally sure where.
Then in 1981 I watched as the Columbia space shuttle launched from Florida and 2 days later landed exactly on target in California.
And sadly in 2003 I watched the same shuttle burn up.
And then watched as the shuttle program was shutdown.
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Until a few years ago, my parents were still using a 16" CRT TV with a built in VCR player. Really looked quite Space 1999'ish with the square 4:3 aspect ratio. Still have a memory of seeing those monochrome globe TV sets along with a sphere chair and thinking that would be so cool for my room.
(Apparently, the fibreglass chipped really easily so they broke quickly)
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini... [pinimg.com]
http://modculture.typepad.com/... [typepad.com]
https://media.fds.fi/product_i... [media.fds.fi]
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The deluxe TV sets the 60s-70s kept a small bit of electricity going to the TV tube. That way, they were instant-on. Plus, they had a lot of manual adjustements (vertical hold, etc.)
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Walk your doggie and ride your bicycle. Everything else is banned.
Oh, and "leaded or unleaded."
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Re:Atari 2600 Expert Here (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember when there was no TSA, I remember when there wasn't even a metal detector.
I remember in high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in the racks behind their seats of their pickup trucks IN the school parking lot, because they had been hunting before classes started.....
I remember kids (myself) playing freely in the neighborhood and beyond 100% unsupervised ...which was the norm for all kids.
I remember being able to feel quite safe going for day trips across the MX border in Nogales and such places, and not fearing a drug killing might get you, at worst, you might drink too much tequila and come home with a black velvet Elvis picture.
I remember when you used to say "Thank You" to someone, they would replay with "You're Welcome"...instead of "no problem".
I remember when you used to buy something in the US, and it didn't take you 15 fucking minutes to find the "English" version of the instructions.
I remember growing up, and in games, there were winners and losers....and ONLY the winners got the trophy.
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Hell, my friends and I used to goof around in the airport when we were bored. We'd even walk down the airport jetways late at night...and sometimes there would be a plane sitting there, open and completely empty.
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No one called it a CRT TV, It was just the TV, or sometime Tube
CRT TV at the time was almost a redundant statement.
Actually the Idea of having your TV hooked up to your computer as its monitor was a thing, then monitors were a separate thing, then today we hook them back to our computers again. However if you were a kid of the 1990's seeing a computer, with an embedded keyboard, hooked up to a TV. Was considered old tech.
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LOADING...
LOAD 8,1
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Remember when you could click the channel up or down button on the remote, and the channel would change INSTANTLY?
As far as I remember, the TV never came on instantly... if the TV was not too bungled by crapware to do so, it was old enough to be a CRT and need to warm up.
I do remember our first remote remote that had only one button. It would turn the physical knob on the TV one click clockwise. If you missed your channel, you had to go all the way around the dial. You had to get up and go over to the set to turn the TV on or off or change bands between UHF and VHF.
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I have fond memories of lawn darts.
And the funerals for my three brothers. They never did figure out that there was no need to play defence. :)
I far prefer being an only child anyway.