The "Back in my day" Thread

Paying to get a right seat flying job.

I didn't do it, but I remember for 9000 bucks a person could get 100 hours of Navajo right seat time.

For something like 23,000 bucks a person could get 150 hours of right seat Metro time.
 
Dan Thomas was making $24 a day, and dual in a 172 was $24, so a days pay per hour. 1973.

DaleB, Army E3, $360 a month, 1979.

Me, army E2, $80 a month. Flying lessons in a Piper J3 were $10 per half hour. Bought 4 half hour lessons, half of my months pay. 1957

1952, graduated from High School, worked in a cherry cannery for 67.5 CENTS an hour, the minimum wage was .75, but they were exempt. 12 hour days, 7 days a week, until the crop ended at 6 weeks.

Draft status A1, nobody would hire, as the Veterans were entitled to come bask, whether needed or not, and have time in grade for promotion as if the had worked the military time.

E4 with overseas pay, net pay was $112 per month.

My current retirement pay from 2+2+2 active, active reserve, and inactive reserve, much less than a dollar a month. 69 cents last time I checked, about 10 years ago.
 
I remember Marlboro Miles, Saturday morning cartoons, huge satellite dishes in the rich people's backyards, first car with disc brakes all around, gas hitting $1 a gallon, . Being in tech, huge floppy drives, smaller floppy drives, dot matrix printers, green bar paper, crt monitors, word processors, microfiche and overhead projectors.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
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.
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charheep said:
Being in tech, huge floppy drives, smaller floppy drives, dot matrix printers, green bar paper, crt monitors, word processors, microfiche and overhead projectors.
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Sounds luxurious. In my first programming courses we used IBM keypunch machines, then ran the deck through the card hopper. Then one huddled around the printer to see what the answer was after your job queued up, ran, and printed.

If you dropped your card deck, you were not a happy camper. Senior year we got CRT displays, but they were just dumb terminals. Still used “cards”, they were just now electronically stored.

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Dana said:
Takes a true geek to have the rocket equation tattooed on his arm. :D
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My wife is one of two band directors at her school. The other one is newly hired, and he's got a harmonic series waveform tattooed on his arm. I think I scored some points by instantly recognizing it when I met him!
Checkout_my_Six said:
I use to use MaxQ as an moniker back in the day.....but most won't know what that is. ;)
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I do!
Dan Thomas said:
Odors. Every time I see a package of Crayola crayons I pick it up and sniff it. Takes me all the way back to pre-school childhood.
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One of the things that I really liked about getting into aviation was smelling leaded fuel again. Took me back to childhood too...
Bill said:
Long before string trimmers were common, mom had one of thse and would send us outside to trim the grass along the sidewalk, driveway, and street. It took forever, on your hands and knees trimming.

View attachment 135384
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I still have one, for trimming grass around the kids' playset. Don't want to damage it with a weed whacker. It definitely takes patience.

When I was growing up, I had to use the manual equivalent, which was something like a set of scissors with a 90º twist. Your hands and the squeezing motion were vertical, but the blades were horizontal.

Ted said:
However my grandmother had her phones all set to "pulse" (the sounds a rotary phone made) instead of touch tone because she was convinced the phone company charged extra if you used touch tone. I don't know if that was true or not, but I'm doubting it (this was the 90s).
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Probably wasn't true any more by the 90s, but that was definitely a thing in the early 80s.
Ted said:
Pay phones - my kids are still sort of wowed by the concept that those existed, or even the concept of a landline. Or cell phones that were, literally, just phones.
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And you didn't know who was calling, and you were attached to the wall, and if someone called while you weren't home you wouldn't even know it.
Ted said:
- Dial-up modems (didn't see those listed). My first connection to the internet was a 2400 bps modem, that had no volume control that I could find for the speaker. And it was LOUD for reasons I can't comprehend. After that was a 14.4k modem, a 28.8, and finally a 56k. I still have the 28.8 with the serial connection cable on the back. I forget which version of AOL I had when I first got online, I want to say 2.1? Downloads of everything took forever and a day. And you had to pay by the hour.
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You must have me blocked. :rofl:

We really lacked entertainment back in the day. I remember dialing up BBSes and being able to whistle the right pitch to get them to think I was a modem.
Ted said:
- AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy. If you had internet in the 90s, you probably had at least one of those. Who remembers Apple's spin-off of eWorld?
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I do! That sure didn't last long though.

FWIW, AvWeb was founded by people who met in the old AvSig on CompuServe.
Zeldman said:
Paying to get a right seat flying job.

I didn't do it, but I remember for 9000 bucks a person could get 100 hours of Navajo right seat time.

For something like 23,000 bucks a person could get 150 hours of right seat Metro time.
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Someone at the Dept. of Labor or somewhere decided that it wasn't kosher to have to pay someone to work for them. -$90/hr is well below minimum wage. :rofl:

I do remember someone tried to get around it by charging you an up-front chunk that was something like $30/hr and then paid you back minimum wage, but that didn't last long either.
 
Bill said:
Sounds luxurious. In my first programming courses we used IBM keypunch machines, then ran the deck through the card hopper. Then one huddled around the printer to see what the answer was after your job queued up, ran, and printed.

If you dropped your card deck, you were not a happy camper. Senior year we got CRT displays, but they were just dumb terminals. Still used “cards”, they were just now electronically stored.
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I remember when I was a kid my dad, who was a professor of Dairy Science, had his normal office on the fourth floor and his "computer office" down in the basement, where there was a gigantic IBM mainframe in a big room with a false floor with offices surrounding it on the perimeter. I remember the punch card reader being about the size of a dining room table only taller.

That computer now lives in the Boston Computer Museum IIRC.

I also remember when I first got a job at the data center at my university in the early 90s they still had a big mainframe taking up half the data center that was still being used for registration and grading. It had massive externally belt driven hard drives, 440V liquid-cooled processors, just a behemoth of a computer.
 
Bill said:
Long before string trimmers were common, mom had one of thse and would send us outside to trim the grass along the sidewalk, driveway, and street. It took forever, on your hands and knees trimming.

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This lady is smiling, probably because she just started. Give it a few hours, that smile will be upside down!

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You had grass?! Aren’t you fancy.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Someone at the Dept. of Labor or somewhere decided that it wasn't kosher to have to pay someone to work for them. -$90/hr is well below minimum wage. :rofl:

I do remember someone tried to get around it by charging you an up-front chunk that was something like $30/hr and then paid you back minimum wage, but that didn't last long either.
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Thank goodness that was stopped. Over the years I have met a number of pilots that paid in for that first job.
 
My first online forays were with an old Teletype 43; it had a built in 300 Baud modem and used 12” roll paper. I used it to dial into Compuserve. That was … ‘85, ‘86ish. By ‘88 I was operating a 2400 BBS out of my basement (remember Tradewars?), and in ‘94 or so spun up a dialup ISP.

But I’m feeling much better now.

Edit: my high school had a Teletype 33 with a paper tape reader/punch. You’d use the rotary dial to connect to the mainframe at the university at 110 baud, and you could run your BASIC programs. I, not being in any advanced math classes, was not permitted anywhere near it, officially. Unofficially, we’d go in early in the morning or well after school and use it.
 
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Jack horkenheimer….

I had a note book by the couch for when he came on and a set of surplus “ field glasses” from the Korean War era (they looked like a big binoculars but while still having a bit lower level of magnification were made to see in low light conditions like a primitive form of night vision). I can still tell direction to within a few degrees on a clear or patchy cloud night by looking at the stars and constellations thanks to him..”keep looking at the stars..”
 
One time I was hankerin’ for an Atomic Fireball at a convenience store. They were 15¢ each. I commented to the young lady behind the counter, “Wow! I can remember when these were a penny apiece!” I got a look, followed by “I’m sure that was a long time ago, mister.”

Yes, I guess it was.
 
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FastEddieB said:
“Wow! I can remember when these were a penny apiece!”
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Yeah, penny candy! We’d visit our grandmother and she’d give us each a quarter and we’d walk down the road to the country store. Imagine, 25 pieces of candy for a quarter, those were the days!
 
Tin can phone, had a lot of fun as kids using cans or dixie cups and strings to make phones. Now kids text ‍

Little did I know that later in life I’d again use sound powered phones.

en.wikipedia.org

Tin can telephone - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Bill said:
Yeah, penny candy! We’d visit our grandmother and she’d give us each a quarter and we’d walk down the road to the country store. Imagine, 25 pieces of candy for a quarter, those were the days!
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I can even top that! At summer camp, I could buy a whole box of 100 Atomic Fireballs for something like 88¢.

But that was a long time ago, mister.

Here’s what we get them for now:


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When kids hair cuts got up to $.25. Dad bought a set of clippers. We had crew cuts for quite a while after that.
 
Mikey52 said:
When kids hair cuts got up to $.25. Dad bought a set of clippers. We had crew cuts for quite a while after that.
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I remember been "clipped" as a kid. One low pass down the middle of the head & then he would ask ... "how do you want it cut?" :rofl:
 
Bill said:
Yeah, penny candy! We’d visit our grandmother and she’d give us each a quarter and we’d walk down the road to the country store. Imagine, 25 pieces of candy for a quarter, those were the days!
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We usually only got a couple of pennies, or perhaps a nickel. I loaded up on the two-fer-a-penny candy.
 
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