dialed a rotary telephone before! Anyone else?
My mom got me started on this last night after she said to me, "I'm so old I've forgotten more than most people remember"! Thought it would be a fun thread to start.
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dialed a rotary telephone before! Anyone else?
My mom got me started on this last night after she said to me, "I'm so old I've forgotten more than most people remember"! Thought it would be a fun thread to start.
I'm so old i can hear a milkman joke, and get it!
I'm so old I've... when working for attorney's I did many, many, many legal documents (wills, deeds, divorces, etc) on a typewriter - letter by letter, word by word. Each one EVERY word had to be typed and no mistakes if possible, if so the old white out was used. So great when we got word processors, then computers, to have all that boilerplate language already there after only putting it in once and just change the new info!
Shalom Poet you must remember using carbon copies then? I never realized my aging until I brought up the need to use carbon copies at a job one day and the high school student I was working with didn't have a clue what I was talking about.....gee I'm only 52.
I'm so old....that I remember going to the local convenience store to check tubes of my B&W TV, so old that my first computer program used punchcards to create a ASCII playboy bunny calendar, so old that I remember the bootstrap load address for a DEC PDP-8.
Peace
I remember using one of those hairdryers that had a plastic cap you put on your head. It had a hose that was connected to a case. I must be very old. Does anyone else remember those?
My goodness, I'm only 31 and I remember using a rotary phone. My parents had one until I was well into high school.
I remember when vehicles had carburetors, floor vents, and push button radios, and automatic transmissions were a luxury. I still will only drive a manual :)
Funny thread! I'm only 28 and remember rotary phones. And phone booths. My teenage niece had no idea what my sister and I were talking about--she'd not seen one. She was like...ummm....why wouldn't someone just use a cell phone? LOL
Yeah, rotary phones aren't that ancient. I remember typewriters and carbon paper, but that was more as toys - long before my working life started.
I remember when I could fill up my gas tank for $15 and you could buy gumballs from a machine with a penny.
I'm so old I had to learn to type to get a job--AFTER getting a 4-year college degree.
I'm so old my mother would give me a dime to put in my bra in case I needed to call her when out with a date or friends.
I'm so old that I would go to a neighbor's to see the Wonderful World of Disney because he was the only one on the block with a color TV. For that reason, I never got the full impact of Dorothy stepping out into MunchkinLand until I was an adult and saw the color for the first time.
I'm so old that I remember when the TARDIS really WAS a police box and they were on street corners everywhere! Nowadays there are still 2 or 3 in the centre of Edinburgh that work as coffee/sandwich stalls!
I'm so old I remember flying in military aircraft that still had propellers - and let me tell you flying from the UK to Singapore on troop carriers was no joke!
I'm so old I still remember 'old' money - ie pounds, shillings and pence (pre-decimalisation). I am also still more comfortable with British Imperial measurements rather than metric.
I remember when Christmas Day was only a half day holiday for workers in Scotland. Our big celebration was and is Hogmanay.
Hope this isn't another foot-in-mouth moment from being away, but where's Lizii? Bet she'd have some terrific "I'm so old" moments.
Personally, I'm so old that I remember typing school papers on a manual (no electricity) typewriter. I'm so old I remember when there was no such thing as "faxing" or microwave ovens or watching a movie unless it was being shown by a public entity like tv or a theatre. I'm so old I remember when phone numbers were referred to with names - like ours was Pioneer-1-7443. I'm so old I remember riding on a wooden escalator. I'm so old I remember shopping with my Mom at a butcher, baker and cheese store as part of the regular grocery shopping. I'm so old I remember when there was no such thing as a can you could open without a church key or other device. I'm so old I remember "sanitary belts", and panty girdles being a staple reality of adult female underclothing. I'm so old I remember not having a clothes dryer - not as an environmental statement, just a reality. I'm so old I remember having a milkman ... er, I mean employing a dairy product service. :~)
This won't mean anything to most of you, but I remember when the Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall had an ice skating rink in the middle of it.
I remember the terms "short pants", "ash can" and "ice box".
I'm so old that I remember rotary phones AND manual typewriters, spray tan that left orange streaks, girls bikes were blue and boys bikes were red, country schools grades 1-8, cell phones the size of a bread box, one furnace register that everyone stood around to keep warm, our phone number was 77J4, Mercurochrome on was the only first aid for cuts (ouch), reel to reel tape recorders were the best in recording devices, computer punch cards and the list could go on and on.
Remember the typewriter ERASERS? They had the white eraser on one end and that stiff plastic brush on the other end to brush away the crumbs from the easer on your paper. ;-)Quote:
Originally Posted by Shalom_Poet
I learned how to type in 1982 (7th grade) on a manual typewriter. It stuck and so I pounded. I STILL pound when I'm typing to this day!
In my office (freight forwarder/customs broker), we still have one of the big old electronic typewriters. Probably ca.1995 or so. I wish all the companies, US Customs, etc., that wanted forms filled out - and NOT handwritten - had them all in writeable PDF files! We still have to type some forms. I've had to show young coworkers how to use the thing. And some not-so-young coworkers who simply have forgotten. I happily type away on it - and at a speed that mystifies my coworkers! I miss typewriters *sometimes*. I LOVED the IBM Selectrics I used while working in various university offices when I was an undergrad from 1987-1991. The young coworkers have never HEARD of manual typewriters, lol!
I'm also so old to have used computers on my college paper that needed boot disks - TWO for each computer. These were huge 5" floppy disks that had a hole in the middle and the magnetic tape (looked like a thick strip of the same sort of tape used for cassettes) around it. The computers were ancient when my college paper got them - maybe made late 1970s. They were likely hand-me-downs from the local paper. Anyway, the computers sometimes didn't boot up. So you pulled the disk out, put your finger on the magnetic tape surrounding the middle hold and moved it around several times. That always worked to get it to the point where the computers would boot.
I also remember the inky smell of mimeographs. I often ran off exams when I worked in a couple of departments when I was in college. AND sometimes typing the exams out. Was there some special paper/carbon to type on for the mimeo machines? I don't remember!
I miss the card catalogs in libraries! I think the part I miss the most was when you would go to the subject cards and find all sorts of neat books. It never seems to me that the library catalog computers work quite right when you're searching by subject!
I remember when it was a BIG deal - maybe sometime in the 80s when you could order something from a catalog via phone with a credit card, rather than having to send away a check and seemingly wait forever.
My first car in 1991 had manual-opening car windows. I miss those. Do they even still make vehicles with them?
And trying to set a station present on an analog radio in a car - remember those big "piano" type black plastic keys sticking out from the radio? And radios that ONLY had AM.
I remember being a kid and my mom having a wipe-off board - avocaco green, again! - next to the phone in the kitchen. She had numbers written down such as AV3-XXXX and referred to them that way for years.
OTOH, I don't remember NOT having a/c at home! An uncle was a HVAC guy and so A/C was put in sometime in the early 70s.
YES! My mom had one! I used it more than once as a kid, just for fun. She also had one that was similar to the ones at the beauty salon - it sat on the kitchen table and it had the hard plastic hood you sat under. I'm laughing - I'd totally forgotten about it! And for some reason I think it was avocado green, too! :PQuote:
Originally Posted by libby
FYI...I was born in 1969.
Ours was sort of aqua-turquoise with a pink tube and hood. And when I was very little, we really used it, not just as a joke but to be "party pretty". I also had a hand me down blow dryer from my grandmother that had a wooden handle and one of those old round plugs. Fool that I am I got rid of it in high school in favor of some plastic piece of crap, it was still going strong after ?? 50 years. Memory lane, here it is.
http://www.oobject.com/vintage-haird...ir-dryer/7997/
I'm so old that I remember that when you needed a copy of something, you had to take it to a photoshop, where they would photograph it, and you would get back what was called a "photostat" of your birth certificate or whatever important paper you needed a copy of, and the background would be black and the lettering white, a reverse of whatever the original was, and on heavy photo paper. Getting a copy of an important paper was a big deal and cost several dollars as I remember, which would be like paying twenty bucks to get a copy of something now.
If you were creating a document that you wanted a copy of, you could use carbon paper to make several copies (had to remember to hit those manual typewriter keys HARD if you were making more than one or two copies), OR you could type what was called a "stencil" that you then stretched over a drum of a ditto or mimeograph machine and used a handle to revolve the drum of the machine to end up with a purple (if it was a ditto machine), or a black ink (if a mimeograph) copy of your typed stencil.
Oh, and I'm also old enough to have lived in Washington D.C. when there was literally NO air conditioning anywhere, except in a few "refrigerated" movie theaters, which was what the signs said out front "REFRIGERATED".........
Have I mentioned that I love my computer, my internet connection, my cell phone, my scanner/copier/printer, etc.? I'm definitely one who thinks that the "good old days" were only the "good old days" so long as we engage only in selective memory.........
I'm so old I downloaded Netscape 0.9 from a Gopher site that I used Veronica to find.
ok, so not that old....
I grew up on a party line. Each house had a different code of rings. Got in trouble a lot for listening to the old farm ladies gossip. We had one and one half channels on the TV. Three in the tree manual transmissions in the trucks and it was o.k. to drive to town at age 12 if you were on farm business.
The water truck delivered our water once ever few weeks and I was always afraid I'd fall into the well. Dad would pick up hobos at lunch time and let them eat at our picnic table under the big oak tree and I'd watch them from the window wondering where they'd been and where they were going and if anyone in the world loved them.
I remember the first car we got that had air conditioning - we went for a long drive that hot summer day.
The IGA and the 5&Dime and the library still had hitchin' posts. TG&Y came to town and that was a big thing and then Wal-mart (who both also added hitchin' posts).
...I remember riding in a car without seatbelts. The back seat of our boat-size green Buick Apollo had no seatbelts, and no one thought anything of it. :) All the better for squishing 4 kids back there to drive to the beach for the day, circa 1979, Orange County, Calif.
Kara
I agree with you 100%, LC!! And I have the same recall of that old office equipment. I went to Katharine Gibbs for a six-week "Entree" program for women who graduated from college but somehow still needed skills to get a job. If we made more than 3 mistakes, we had to rip the letter out of the typewriter and start over. We had VERY strict standards on how many lines to start the inside address on, and we had to estimate how long the letter was, so that it would be perfectly centered on the page.Quote:
Originally Posted by loosechickens
When I got a job at NBC at 30 Rock in 1974, the only "fax" machine was in the News Dept. and it was called a "Dex" machine. Imagine a company like NBC only having one fax machine!!!
And then I remember being at Union Carbide when the Wang Word Processor came out and I had to teach the executive secretary how to use it. She was about the age I am now back then (59), and she was HOPELESS!! Couldn't even get the concept of putting the cursor where you want to add a word. She kept saying "If I were typing this, I would have had it done a half hour ago!!" The way I felt teaching her is probably how my kids feel teaching me other stuff, although I really think I'm pretty good for an older working girl.
Oh, and I also remember staying after school for hours when I was responsible for making the playbill for our drama club play--those mimeograph machines were so cumbersome and MESSY. And when you made a mistake on that special paper you had to use a razor blade to scrape off the mistake and then retype.
I remember Maypo, and weiner whistles, and mom enjoying a cold beer as she drove home from the grocery store. Of course she smoked while shopping. I remember walking home from school and if someone, anyone offered us a ride we would hop right in. Didn't matter if we knew them.
portable record players, remember? For all the little 45 rpms we bought.
Oh, you guys have come up with such good ones!!! Looks like I bombed on the rotary phone one huh? My way of thinking was, I know rotary telephones haven't been absent from our lives for decades and decades or anything, but, I'd be willing to bet my bottom dollar on the premise that few of today's younger generation have dialed or used one before. :) So even if that doesn't make me old, it still makes me old enough! :)
Anyhow, I'm so old I've done laundry in a wringer washing machine! How's that one? :)
Libby. I sure do! Mom would drag us to the beauty salon every so often and there all the women would be, all lined up in a row, sitting under those big plastic balloon bonnets, smoking cigarettes and talking.
Will touch on more entries as I have time. Talk about a fun thread!
I'm so old that my DW and I saved and lived on Vienna sausages and saltines for what seemed like forever for a 20% down payment on our first house. We never thought a thing about and actually had fun doing it.
We are so old that we both burnt holes in our t-shirts from seeds while smoking grass and listening to Neil Young and sitting in a circle with our friends so we could pass a joint.
We are so old that we both can remember taking a quart coke bottle (glass) back for a 25 cent refund. We are so old that I remember pulling cokes (little cokes) and looking on the bottom of the bottle to see the city of origin.
We are so old that we remember when toilet paper came in single roles.
We are so old that we remember when bumper were made out of "Steel".
Peace
I started my IRS career in Alaska pre computers. We had to use microfilm records and paper and pencil to figure out accounts. For years we were able to use a calculator to do all audit reports.
Not so now. All computerized since it is so overwhelmingly complex.
One day (probably in the late 80s, early 90s) when we STILL had a rotary phone (it was cheaper than touch-tone), one of my kids' friends came in the house and asked if he could call his mother. I said, "Sure, Chris, the phone's in the kitchen." He was in there for a while, but I didn't hear anything. So when he was on his way out the door, I asked, "Did you get your mom?" and he said, "No, I couldn't figure out how to work your phone."Quote:
Originally Posted by Mrs-M
I remember when cars had those triangular vent windows that you could open at just the right angle to get the air to blow in your face. I'm so old that when I was a kid, I rode in the front seat, or climbed over to the back seat, or lay down on the seat if I felt like it. And the glove compartment door when opened made a little tray with an indentation for a cup, and my job was to pour coffee for my mom from the thermos.
I remember when finding out that somebody was divorced, or another kid's parents were divorced, was kind of shocking and scandalous.
That was me. My father was alcoholic, I was in Catholic school (7th grade), and God knows divorce doesn't go over well with the Catholics--esp in 1964. I was mortified because my mother's remarriage announcement was in the paper and my schoolmate called me out on it. Her reaction was probably the same as yours was, Kathy. I was the only person I knew that had divorced parents (never mind remarried excommunicated parents), until I met one other guy in high school. Of course, I fell madly in love with him (unrequited--turns out he's now gay).Quote:
Originally Posted by Kathy WI
So, some memories are fun, others are quite painful.
I remember my mom buying one of the first pairs of pantyhose. And some of the first disposable diapers. Both in the same year, if I recall correctly.
Remember the old car seats that had a little steering wheel to entertain the kid and which just hooked over the back of the seat? Often the front seat? And car beds--my parents had a red plaid vinyl car bed for the babies to sleep in. It folded down flat. It was used as a portable crib when we went to visit the grandparents.
I remember the fight to allow girls to wear pants to high school.
We had a car without seat belts. And when we did finally get a car with seat belts, they didn't retract, but stayed out and got all tangled up. When we drove the 8 hours to visit family, my parents would put all the back seats down flat in the station wagon and make a big bed there with blankets and coats. They'd leave at night, and we'd sleep in the way back for most of the trip.
This post had good timing--just a few days ago, I astounded my 13 year old nephew by admitting that I had never, ever sent an text (he sends over 1,000 a month), and by telling him that cell phones did not exist when I was a kid, nor did home computers, the internet, email, video games or CDs, let alone iPods. I told him how his dad used to record songs off the radio on a cassette tape player, but I don't think he believed me.
No microwaves growing up. Not even a toaster oven.
Got you guys beat!
I remember using a sickle mower, hay loader, dump rake to put loose hay in the barn. Milk was cooled in large cans in the well house, chickens were living above the dairy barn. I wore rubber boots for almost everything. Grain was cut and stacked in stooks of sheaves with the local threshing machine coming to our place in turn to thresh the grain for the grain bin.
My parents gave me a portable typewriter as a graduation present and I used it through university for essays - got quite good at typing.
Shoes, appliances, radios, clothing, etc., lasted forever and could be repaired rather than today's built-in obsolescence and disposal.
I was just saying to DD2 that as a 67 year-old woman, I have had the most wonderful life - had a healthy family life and successful career, lots of travel, diverse adventures, seen how the old life was doable and thoroughly enjoying the new technology as well.
I am loving this thread!!
I'm so old I remember pink/blue/green Kleenex and toilet paper! Also the white ones with the pink flowers on it...like, who needs flowers when you wipe? Its not as if they were scented.
I'm so old I had a Walkman with cassettes inside.
I'm so old in grade school we would watch movies on those big projectors. Our teachers would invariably not be able to thread the film through and after a frustrating 15 minutes ALWAYS called the custodian to come in and do it for her! Loved the slap slap sound the film made when the movie was over the the finally bit of film was wrapping around the holder-thingy
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mighty Frugal
I was just thinking about colored toilet paper the other day!
I'm so old ..... that I remember all the things you guys are talking about!
I'm so old, I remember wearing "shoe boots" as a kid, the kind of snow boots that go on over your shoes.
I'm so old, all my grandparents were born in the 1800's.
Me too! Including floor mounted dimmer switches in cars, outhouses, collecting water from a pump in the yard, heating with a coal stove, going to a two room country school with two teachers, one for the 1st through 4th grades and another for the 5th through 8th grades, picking cotton by hand and putting it in a 9 ft long cotton sack, Lucy & Desi when they were still married, Jack Benny/Marilyn Monroe/Dwight D. Eisenhower/Twiggy/Tiny Tim, being Mod, Nehru jackets, watching Lee Harvey Oswald as he was shot on live TV, The Twilight Zone, Queen For A Day, Amos & Andy, and hundreds of other things that most people nowdays have never heard of.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shalom_Poet
I'm so old that I remember when McDonald's hamburgers were 15 cents; and I remember the Helms Bakery truck and the K Bus that came around with food and candy, etc.
I'm so old on these boards that when I saw "Chickadee" post, I thought it was Chick from Canada who is definately not high maintenance and wouldn't wear high fashion. Little does the current Chickadee know that there was a long long long term poster named Chickadee on the old boards.
Well, if I retire from these board nobody better take my moniker! Not even Lily Iris! ha ha
ohmigod, Alan......I'd forgotten about Queen for a Day....... when I was a very young houswife, with a tiny black and white TV, I would get all my work done and then sit down to watch Queen for A Day. I would cry at all the terrible things that had happened to those ladies and feel so badly for them, and today, looking back, find it inexplicable that somehow I thought that getting a new washer and dryer would somehow help with their troubles........but I was always SO happy for the one that won and got all those new appliances, etc. What could I have been thinking?
but that was the period when I made Minute Rice, and what my family called "African Chow Mein", for some reason, which was hamburger browned in a skillet with a chopped onion, Minute Rice and a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup.....makes me gag to think of that now........
Holy smokes! They just keep coming! Good one after good one! I've said it before and I'll say it again, you guys are the best!!! Have to say I'm even a little jealous over all the good ones you all thought of and I didn't! :laff: :~)
I'm so old I remember 8 mm family movies! No sound! Can you imagine a kid of today sitting down and watching those?