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?
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
Jenny I've got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don't change your numberEight six seven five three oh nine
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.
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.
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!
It is now safe to turn off your computerOh 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.
I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
I 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.
You have awakened a distant memory I forgot I had.
Accidentally hard rebooting the PC with the tip of your shoe because you wanted to readjust your seating…
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..
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.
Haha, my father and I did that for Battle of Britain and... Mines of Titan, I think, was the other one.
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
It was anti-piracy; you had to have the physical manual to know the correct word.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
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.
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.
I did that back in 2008 when i get into college of another state, where gps device is expensive to me and i'm still using the now ancient phone. the first thing i did is go to the book store and bought one local map, study and memorise it, looking for nearby landmark and triangulate my position when i'm lost. Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
I remember teaching orienteering to my son's scout troop.
When they complained that would never need to know that because GPS, I handed them a GPS with almost dead batteries during a hike and told them to show me.
About 10 minutes later they became much more interested in the map and compass.
and help from strangers
And my father always refused to ask for help, so we got lost and then when he finally had to admit it, my mother asked someone and my father pretended it was all her fault ... (not so) good times.
I still play the role of navigator to this day…
My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren't on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.
And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
Cut a little square hole in the side of a 5.25" floppy to double its capacity.
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.
MTV only had music video
Video killed the radio star. Still remember watching Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.
MTV existed
It's a US thing, where the glory of SCART was unknown thus they had to continue using the antenna input of their TV to connect their consoles to, also, as far as I'm aware only NTSC has fixed frequency assignments. Elsewhere in the world you just programmed the TV to display the console's output on whatever number you wanted, or, if you had a proper input for non-antenna signals, switch the TV to "AV".
Actually things like the ZX Spectrum predated SCART plugs and their video signal came in instead via the antenna input.
(And this was everywhere, not just the US)
So the guy in the thread posted by the OP might just be older than you think.
We had an SNES hooked up to the antenna input for the simple reason that if you're a kid who wants a TV in the attic, away from adult interference, it's not going to be a brand-new model but a hand-me-down from the living room.
Still we programmed channel 1 to the SNES's frequency so we wouldn't have to switch channels after turning the thing on. On the console side though composite outputs quickly became ubiquitous as including them involves little more than bypassing the RF encoder. Speaking of the ZX Spectrum.
Thanks, as a GenZ i did never imagine such a thing
I would go to the video rental store to play video games.
God, renting games from blockbuster was amazing.
Played so many great GameCube games that way.
Blockbuster didn't exist when we were renting games for the Atari 2600. River Raid!
I spent years playing games on Commodore-64. Suddenly they release the NES, and the first game I saw for it... kinda didn't look super impressive compared to the games I was playing on the 64. My buddy says: "You can rent games now" and I shook my head in disbelief at the whole thing.
We had hopes for the future and internet connections made sounds.
Not if you disabled the sound so you could sneakily get online at night without your parents noticing! I was so happy when I figured that out and could quit nervously smothering the modem in pillows when connecting.
I don't know if that always worked. I didn't figure it out until we were on a 56k modem. Maybe it didn't work with older modems.
ATL0 I think.
I did not know you could do that! My trick was to connect while parents were hussy, then distracting them from the phone the whole evening.
I miss having hope.
I wonder if the Internet would still make sounds if the communication devices were connected to speakers
Sticking my finger into the coin return of every pay phone, and if there was a dime, checking the date on it because silver coins were still floating around in circulation.
Same thing every time one of us got our hands on a quarter. If it was silver, we'd all fight over it.
I don't remember any of us ever cashing one in. If we found one, it would just go into a shoebox, ultimately getting lost to time.
You could only program like 9 phone numbers on your phone because it only had 10 buttons for it and one of them was reserved for 911. All other numbers you either memorized, wrote down in a book or on cards, or dialed 411 to talk to a stranger whose job was to provide you with the contact information of people and businesses.
I utilized my skills of tiny writing from cheatsheets to fit every phone number I knew only a folded sticky note that lived in my wallet for probably 20 years before I realized it was long past being useful.
I had that on a particularly study business card. I used one of those fine-tip pens and got about 40 numbers on it. Now I talk to strangers on the internet, and the points don't matter.
My father literally had a digital rolodex device for keeping his phone numbers in for his early cellphones.
Also, calling a number to get the exact time when you needed to set your clocks.
Or calling the movie theater and listening through the entire recorded message listing the films playing and all the times they're playing at.
Ah yes, the holy book of phone numbers that was mostly written in pencil... Except for the few that were written in pen and then erased until a whole was worn through the paper, and then scratched out and a different number was written really small over 1 end of the scratched out number.
Phones with buttons?
Yeah, that's weird. This is a telephone:
A wire coat hanger shoved into the back of the TV to get it working
Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it
Being hyper aware of the current status of the street lights in summer evenings
Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it
Sprinting to the kitchen yelling "don't pick up the phone!" when it starts ringing, for the same reason.
OMG, yes!
When I was like 11 or so, we had a company called EarthLink for Internet, and when we tried to cancel one month because we were broke, they gave us 3 months free. After the third time of that happening we realized we didn't have to pay for Internet anymore, and spent the money on a second phone line instead.
It. Was. Glorious.
CRT TV shitty DIY antenna
AOL
Playing outside pre-smartphone era. (Rule was still around for Zillennials & Gen Z.)Come on, you can do better.
To refuel your car, first flip down the license plate.
I expected most of the things is this thread to be typical Gen X or Millennial stuff, but some of these post read to me as if I’m talking to someone from the late 19th century
9600, 8-N-1
Com port settings?
ya
- 9600 baud (signal changes per second)
- 8 data bits per packet (as opposed to 7)
- no parity bit (no error check)
- 1 stop bit per packet (packet ends here)
If internal, don't forget whether to use 3F8, 2F8, 3E8, or 2E8 and an unused IRQ. Any questions? Hit me up on ICQ
Uh Oh!
In my line of work I still do that. Not for modems, though. Usually for receiving serial data from gyros and gps.
ATS0=1
.. or something..
ATDT *70,1234567890
Unless using Kermit and then 7E1 was standard.
I was a beta tester for AOL, so they’d send me all of those dumb discs. None of the actual software ever changed or improved. All they did was change the graphics around the guts of it. Their whole strategy was essentially fooling people via appearances. I liked collecting the discs though.
My first internet before AOL was Prodigy. I was in a DOS terminal when I was a kid.
Sometimes you'd go to pick up the phone to call someone but you couldn't because your neighbor was busy talking, so you'd have to put the receiver down gently in hopes they didn't hear it and think you were eavesdropping on them.
This was called a "party line". But it was never a party!
A librarian I knew used to tell us about the old couple she shared a party line with growing up. She said she occasionally tried to eavesdrop but the conversations were always too boring.
I saw an episode of I love Lucy where she can't use the phone because the neighbor was talking and didn't understand why.
There was a video game console that used clear colored plastic that you would stick onto the tv to show different colored areas on the screen. It also came packaged with dice and paper money.
Magnavox Odyssey. I grew up playing that beast.
For a moment I thought you were referring to the genlock anti piracy device. That was a fresnal lens you held up to the screen to decode a key to continue the game.
Nah. Those were interesting but I much preferred the code wheels and charts, because they were easier to read.
To watch different channels, you may have needed to turn a rotor to turn the roof antenna because the stations were in a different physical direction.
Oh man, I remember changing the channel from something like G15 to F2 and that change (G to F) of category (?) took longer because you had to wait for the satellite to align.
The sounds your computer would make if it was connecting to dialup Internet, or the sound you would hear if someone was using said dialup and you picked up the phone.
PC speakers and how they differed from regular speakers, or the fact that you needed a sound card if you wanted sound that wasn't just beeps.
pulling over at a gas station to ask for directions
& optimizing emm386 & himem.sys
Coffee and cigarettes, indoors, at a cafe, on lunch break in highschool.
Don't forget you could smoke on public transit, Greyhound and airline flights.
We had a smokers’ wall in high school: a corner of the break yard next to the cafeteria that was designated by a yellow stripe painted on the ground. It was always full-to-bursting at every break, and if you had even a toe over it whilst smoking, it was immediate detention.
I was recently at a party with a SNES connected to a noisy channel-3 RF modulator because the TV couldn't switch to its composite input via the front panel buttons, and they didn't have the remote. I wandered the house until I found a universal remote, then programmed AUX to match the TV and switched inputs. Just things you learn in the '90s.
Let’s go one deeper… you couldn’t play games without sliding a switch
Somehow I just knew how to get to places. Idk how that stopped.
not getting an answer to a question for days or more
Computer and console games came exclusively on CD before the switch to DVD. When you bought a triple AAA title for console,you didn't have to spend 3 days waiting for day 1 patches to install. You could probably fit the entire game library of your favorite console back in the day on a thumb drive nowadays.
Or 4..
Or 4. And every time you're setting your console up on a different TV, you're not sure if you're on the wrong channel, or if the coax cable is loose
Or if you didn't blow on the cartridge just right.
I caught 4, maybe 5 channels with a coax cable taped to the wall, in just the right position
Me at the zoo
GenZ here I know what it means.
First YouTube video.
Come on that's easy.
Video games involved putting a sheet of acetate over the b&w tv screen and then drawing with a wax pencil where the dashed line appears (Winky Dink ruled - and don’t forget to put the acetate on the screen or Dad will get mad).
I had a couple of magazine CDs that I got from a trial subscription.
https://archive.org/details/launchcdmagazine
AOL zines were pretty neat.
Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)
Blowing the cartridge may or may not work.
Don't spit in my cartridges, thanks.
Only way to make them last is to use rubbing alcohol and q-tips.
"You have mail"
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
Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.
Channel 3 or 4 I believe. They're set such that woukd allow you to choose if one or the other was selected for something like a vcr. This was the precursor to different inputs on tvs.
Let me just call someone if they're still at home on this payphone to look it up in the encyclopedia that was printed 20 years ago
I still dream in black and white.
I used to dial POP-CORN to get the time.
My childhood was filled with clear plastic, I kinda hate those cause half of em were of questionable quality.
VIC-20, yes. But dad’s tantalizing work computer, nah. We used to make time to type things and wait together. Like, we would have dinner together and then King’s Quest would have eventually loaded and we would all have walked into a River accidentally together, as a family.
I stood on a sawhorse and touched the light bulb's base. My brother stood on the ground, touched the light bulb base, and shocked himself silly. It hung from the ceiling, just the way it was.
Tamagotchi and a Walkman with skip protection
0181 811 81 81
Or 081 811 8181
01 811 8055
I just have missed this when I was younger...
This is the first reference I've seen here that I didn't immediately understand. Curious.
yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:
Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.
Watch out, there's a Humphrey about!
I remember being able to turn off the computer by just flipping the power switch for it. I also remember not being able to do that because it would take 30 minutes to do a memory check.
PO Box 963, New York City, New York State 10108
sys 2048
When I was a kid a single gold coin minted from the empire of Ashoka could buy you a house, a servant, a couple acres of land, some cows, a couple pigs, chickens, and a horse
Lights on mean going home
Mouse & keyboard and controller because they only know what tablets are.
There was no world wide web.
The excitement of being able to go to Shop-Ko to buy a telephone for the first time.
3 or 4; most RF switches had a toggle on the box that let you select which of the two channels you preferred to use
BHO
Being subscribed to a service that brought about a dozen magazines every week that we would rent including Donald duck, gossip magazines, etc. Sometimes getting to sneak the 'adult' one to the bathroom and spend some quality time there.
to watch a movie, you need to turn to channel 4.
You'll have to wait until Monday to be able to take out some cash.
MonsterKing is young enough that he doesn't know you could push the slider and it would work on channel 4.
