I'm so old I've...

[IshbelRobertson]

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.

[kib]

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".

[goldensmom]

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.

[Tradd]

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!

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. ;-)

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.

[Tradd]

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?

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! :P

FYI...I was born in 1969.

[kib]

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/

[loosechickens]

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.........

[benhyr]

I'm so old I downloaded Netscape 0.9 from a Gopher site that I used Veronica to find.

ok, so not that old....

[Float On]

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).

[treehugger]

...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