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.”
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
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?
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.
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
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.
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.
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 ;-)
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
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?
wheel that came with monkey island
http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate
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.
It is now safe to turn off your computerI edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
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
I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
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.
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
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”
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you’d copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
Lol I had one like that - I made a copy for a friend, but it wasn’t just one code word, it could be any one of about a hundred - but he was dedicated, he figured it out somehow over the course of a few weeks.
IIRC, it was Greg Norman’s Shark Attack that had a thing where it would give you a small pixel art picture of the top-down view of a golf course, and you had to go through the game manual and enter in what page that golf course picture appeared on… so we just got a photocopy version of the manual
I miss manuals.
Used to rip open the shrink wrap with my teeth and pour over the manual in the backseat of the car on the way home when I was a kid.
You could copy the manual on a xerox machine. Of course some publishers were smart and printed the manual in such a way it any copies came out as an illegibly dark mess.
So naturally you took a legitimate manual, manually transcribed it, and made copies of the copy.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
- Receiving junk mail Internet CDs
- Waiting patiently to record a song you liked
- Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
- The planet Pluto
- Wax lips and candy cigarettes
- Tang
- Translucent electronics
- Cheat Code books
- 1(800) COLLECT & “00 it’s magic!”
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
Snow. It used to last the whole winter and not just 2 days here and there.
I keep being told that the canals used to freeze over and people would skate on them.
God damn our local lake used to freeze over and people would drive cars on it.
Yuuup good times. Going places you could only access by car if you crossed a frozen lake or river. Some of my fondest memories as a child. I would never in a million years attempt this today.
Yes! That just made me remember a time in highschool over 20 years ago now… We got off the bus and looked over at the bay that was completely frozen and decided to walk over to an island we would always see but never knew what was there. I took a big rock and kept throwing it in front of us to see if the ice cracked
Tons of bird bones. So many bones… Lol
Huh! Bird bone island! Sounds nice! Kinda like my backyard by the end of summer.
My cat likes to leave me mountains of bodies and bones. 🥰
Not all that long ago, either …… early in my career I worked in downtown Boston, and one of the guys claimed to commute by ice skating down the Charles River. Ok, I’m old for online but not that old
Of course the amount of insects drastically reduced, but for the windscreen there is another thing to take into account: Cars today are extremely aerodynamic. Even new Jeeps and the F150s are aerodynamic. Because of this, the insects are pushed away from your windscreen instead of against it, which is one of the main reasons why your windscreen isn’t full of insects anymore.
The only real exception to this is the Mercedes G-Class, but I doubt that a lot of us will ever sit in one
Edit: apparently I’m wrong: https://feddit.de/comment/8318194
This is a myth and has been debunked.
The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.
The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.
This is so sad.
It realy is.
I see this kind of realy devastating change in many areas in nature. There used to be frogs in our garden when I grew up, I would listen to them every evening right outside my bedroom window. Now they are gone.
I see it in the Forests, where huge swats of trees have died over the last couple of years. There are areas in our forests now, that look like war zones, because drouth followed by to much rain in combination with invasive bugs have killed or weakens them so much.
Going back another generation, my brother, who is 16 years older, told be about field hamsters who where so plentyfull in the fields, that the local kids would earn money by hunting them and turning their corpses in for money in the village center. In the 16 years between my bother and me the European field hamster has, consequently, gone almost extinct. I never have seen one in my life.
And while all this is by its nature very anecdotal, these are areas where climate change and the way we treat nature as something alien realy feels close to me. And to be honest: It fucking scares me.
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.
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
You could also just have put tape over the hole…
Yeah gross.
We’d put tape over the holes, I remember recording Death Metal albums over my parents old exercise cassettes, for example.
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.
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.
Party lines! You’d share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You’d hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
Can you elaborate? What would happen?
You’d hear a distinct repetitive buzzing sound in the speakers right before the phone rang.
Hmmm that’s interesting. What’s the physics behind that?
Everything is an antenna.
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…
Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
My family always went on holiday to Ireland so they had a map for it. When I was little I used to love opening that thing and picturing all the places we could go.
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.
I still play the role of navigator to this day…
My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
