The "Back in my day" Thread

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

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People under ~30 probably won't even know this was a thing.

How many people here picked up the phone only to hear "Do you wish to accept a collect call from: Dad come pick me up? Press 1 to accept"

Young people: we used to have to pay for the phones and if you were broke you could make a collect call which meant the person receiving the call would have to pay for the call.
So we would go out with friends and place a collect call to our parents and when the recording said state your name, we would insert a short message. Mom and dad would refuse the call so nobody had to pay for the call.

Anyone else here make or receive those to avoid paying for phone calls?


What else would young people have no idea was a thing that was perfectly normal when we were their age?



 
Typewriters and slide rules.

But on the pay phone side...

Getting married, wife is selling her house, I need to get some stuff over to the realtor. Hop onto my motor cycle, get about a mile, it dies. I reach down to turn the gas to "reserve" and, oops, already on reserve. No big deal, there is a gas station a couple blocks away I can push it to. Get there, it's closed. OK, I have enough change for one phone call. Some lady answers and I realize that I have dialed the wrong number. I talked her into calling my girlfriend and giving her a message telling her where I was and that she needed to come get the paperwork from me. It worked.
 
Explaining the concept of answering machines was fun. Of course, my voicemail message is now WAIT FO DA BEEP:

 
I remember gas as low at $0.69. Circa 1996ish. How low do you remember and roughly what year?
 
back in my day we had this candy called "pop rocks"*. mix those with coke (acola) and you either would or wouldn't explode and die. it was a coin flip. ask mikey. and the best part about them was our parents actually bought them for us. and the second best part about them, they were made with sugar.................and carbon dioxide. breakfast of champions.


*apparently you can still get them, and either explode, or not.
 
GeorgeC said:
Explaining the concept of answering machines was fun.
Click to expand...
Worked across the partition from a guy who kept his answering machine locked up in a cabinet with the volume cranked up. Apparently he had a string of ex's... One would call and rant for half an hour or so - calling him names - saying what a crappy father he was - etc. etc. etc.
 
flyingpreacher said:
I remember gas as low at $0.69. Circa 1996ish. How low do you remember and roughly what year?
Click to expand...
0.229 cents a gallon. 1968.

My dad pulled into the filling station (remember those?) in the 1959 Dodge pickup, shut off the engine. The gas was 0.249 cents a gallon, then my dad noticed the cheaper price across the street, 0.229 cents per gallon. So he cranked up the ol' truck, went across the street and got 10 gallons. I imagine that old truck used more gas to drive across the street than he saved on the price of gas.
 
Metal oil cans with the spout you'd have to shove in to cut a hole, and the "ding ding" when a car ran over an air hose to summon the gas pump jockey (me) to whom everybody bitched about the price of 67 cent gas.
 
I remember gas at 27.9 cents/gallon in Utah in 1972.
I also remember building a "Blue Box" and making free calls from pay phones. This too was in the 1970s.
en.wikipedia.org

Blue box - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
phreaking.fandom.com

Blue box

A Blue Box is an electronic device that generates "MF" tones, the same tones employed by a telephone operator's dialing console to switch long-distance calls. The Blue Box emerged in the 1960-70s; it allowed users to route their own calls by emulating the in-band signaling mechanism that then...
phreaking.fandom.com phreaking.fandom.com

TVs with no remote. Hell, B&W TVs and only 3 national channels and a handful of locals. Turning dials and fiddling with rabbit ears. Aluminum foil!
 
Chip Sylverne said:
Metal oil cans with the spout you'd have to shove in to cut a hole, and the "ding ding" when a car ran over an air hose to summon the gas pump jockey (me) to whom everybody bitched about the price of 67 cent gas.
Click to expand...

Oh, I remember the ding ding air hose It was before I could drive but full service gas stations were thing when I was a kid
 
We used to memorize everybody's phone number that we knew.
And if we didn't know your phone number we called information at 1411 and paid 25 cents. "Yeah I need the number for eman 1200 in such and such city and state....... Please hold for the number."
 
What about calling time and temperature. It actually still exists in Texas. You can dial 972-844 and any four digits. Dial it up that'll take you back although now it's sponsored with a bunch of ads before they give you the time and the temperature
 
There were only a few TV stations. In Cleveland where I grew up NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and independent. They stopped broadcasting around midnight.

There was no 24 hour store that I remember. No food, no gas. I think the first 7-Eleven I went to was in Houston in the 1980s. Was it called that because it was open from 7a to 11p? I can’t recall.
 
eman1200 said:
back in my day we had this candy called "pop rocks"*. mix those with coke (acola) and you either would or wouldn't explode and die. it was a coin flip. ask mikey. and the best part about them was our parents actually bought them for us. and the second best part about them, they were made with sugar.................and carbon dioxide. breakfast of champions.


*apparently you can still get them, and either explode, or not.
Click to expand...
I remember Mikey from Life cereal died from Pop Rocks and Coke! We believed it. Scary!
 
Voice pagers! Ughhhh. Useful as a defensive weapon considering the weight. In residency, when Charity Hospital invested in alphanumeric pagers, we though we were in high cotton. I also miss untangling the 30' coiled cord of the hall phone; how that cord could get retangled so quickly is one of the great unexplained mysteries of the universe.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
What about calling time and temperature. It actually still exists in Texas. You can dial 972-844 and any four digits. Dial it up that'll take you back although now it's sponsored with a bunch of ads before they give you the time and the temperature
Click to expand...

Frost Bank gets 20K calls a day to their San Antonio time & temp number at 210-226-3232
 
Domenick said:
TVs with no remote. Hell, B&W TVs and only 3 national channels and a handful of locals. Turning dials and fiddling with rabbit ears. Aluminum foil!
Click to expand...
B&W UHF was still a thing when I was a kid. Maybe the trailer filtered out the color signal. Also, all kitchens looked like this, except with rotary phones:
tippi.jpg
 
Remember before the internet there were urban legends and they were all true because there was no way to verify.
I recall being in my first apartment and my dad calling me to tell me me and my friends need to be careful when going to the clubs because there were reports of people waking up in an ice filled bathtub next to them, a note saying "Call 911" and missing a kidney.

Scared the hell out of me. We believed everything back then.
How many of us as kids thought we would drown if we got in the pool less than 30 minutes after eating? That doesn't even make a bit of sense.
 
MauleSkinner said:
Never. We had rotary phones and dealt with the operator.
Click to expand...
I still recall getting in trouble as a child because of the '0' (operator) on our rotary phone. I had asked my mother if I could do something, I do not recall what. Her response was to ask your father when he got home. I guess I was impatient so I dialed zero for the operator looking to speak to my father. You see, my father was a surgeon and anesthesiologist and spent most of his time in the operating room...and where else would the operator be located? Seemed logical to a 6 year old. Being a small town, the operator thought it was cute and called my dad and told him I was trying to reach him. It didn't go over well.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
We used to memorize everybody's phone number that we knew.
And if we didn't know your phone number we called information at 1411 and paid 25 cents. "Yeah I need the number for eman 1200 in such and such city and state....... Please hold for the number."
Click to expand...
Just found my school phone book from high school.

No area codes.

1) You only needed to use them for long distance calls.
2) Everyone had the same area code as there was only ONE for the entire state. Now there are 6 (Maryland).
 
Zeldman said:
My dad pulled into the filling station (remember those?) in the 1959 Dodge pickup, shut off the engine. The gas was 0.249 cents a gallon, then my dad noticed the cheaper price across the street, 0.229 cents per gallon. So he cranked up the ol' truck, went across the street and got 10 gallons. I imagine that old truck used more gas to drive across the street than he saved on the price of gas.
Click to expand...
Do the math. He saved 2 cents per gallon. 10 gallons means he saved 20 cents.

20 cents was 0.873 gallons.

I don't think he burned that much in starting and crossing the street. :D
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
What about calling time and temperature. It actually still exists in Texas. You can dial 972-844 and any four digits. Dial it up that'll take you back although now it's sponsored with a bunch of ads before they give you the time and the temperature
Click to expand...
Still works: 202-762-1401
 
Gas was .35 cents/gallon when I started driving in 1974. And it was and still is legal to drive at age 14 in Idaho! Daylight only, back then, couldn't drive after dark until age 16.

Party lines. Until I was in Jr. High, one had to pick up the phone and listen for a moment before dialing, because someone else may already be on the line.

We had ONE TV station in rural southern Idaho when I was growing up, but apparently in markets like that it was possible for a station to syndicate with multiple networks...so we actually got shows from NBC, CBS, and ABC all mixed in on that one channel.
 
Back in my day we were on a party line in a rural area.

That meant you had to count the number of short ring bursts to know if your number was being called. Our's was two rings. If you wanted to call a number on your party line, you dialed it and then hung up the receiver. The phone would then ring the other party's ring burst. IF the phone quit ringing, that meant they answered it and you lifted up the receiver to talk.

During phone calls it was common to have someone else pick up the number and listen in to your phone call. Kind of hard to talk to your girlfriend as a teenager with granny listening in.
 
Back in my day, no one wore headsets. You used a handheld microphone to talk with and there was a crackly speaker to listen over.

When I got back into flying after a long hiatus, the young Embry Riddle CFI checking me out asked where my headsets were. Huh? Headsets, what's that?
 
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