The "Back in my day" Thread

I just had a X-10 signal bridge removed from my circuit panel. It was already mostly obsolete when I had it installed 21 years ago.
 
Daleandee said:
Did anyone mention the best place to take a date?

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Just took my kids to their first drive-in movie a few weeks back. Put a Queen-size air mattress in the back of the Excursion with blankets and pillows with the JL Audio sound system going. Wife and kids made it through the first movie (Nightmare Before Christmas) but crashed halfway through the second feature (Hocus Pocus). Apparently the blankets and bed were a little too comfy, lol.
 
the first drive-in movie I remember was Patton…my parents used to go to drive-ins for date night, probably because they could pack my brothers and me along and not have to pay a babysitter.

Chevy Vega station wagon, orange. ;)
 
Mahneuvers said:
I just had a X-10 signal bridge removed from my circuit panel. It was already mostly obsolete when I had it installed 21 years ago.
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There's probably still one installed at the house I lived in in Virginia for 23 years. I never took it out. Amusingly, we moved out and left the house vacant for a couple of weeks while I got the thing ready to go on the market. What I started to find as I was cleaning up was every tape measure that I had lost over the previous 23 years. I had over a dozen of them lined up on the window sill. I took them over to the new house and they immediately scurried off to find new hiding places.
 
flyingron said:
There's probably still one installed at the house I lived in in Virginia for 23 years. I never took it out. Amusingly, we moved out and left the house vacant for a couple of weeks while I got the thing ready to go on the market. What I started to find as I was cleaning up was every tape measure that I had lost over the previous 23 years. I had over a dozen of them lined up on the window sill. I took them over to the new house and they immediately scurried off to find new hiding places.
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At least you didn’t drywall them in during a bathroom remodel…:rolleyes:

I’m still not sure how many tools I lost in that wall.
 
wanttaja said:
That's the upside to vacuum-tube radios. They have a working voltage of 100V, vs. 12v in your modern radio. Could get a LOT more volume fed to the earphones....

Ron Wanttaja
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The Safeway grocery store near FAI had a self-serve vacuum tube tester, so you'd know if you needed to buy one. (And yes, they sold 'em.)
 
MauleSkinner said:
the first drive-in movie I remember was Patton…my parents used to go to drive-ins for date night, probably because they could pack my brothers and me along and not have to pay a babysitter.

Chevy Vega station wagon, orange. ;)
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The one I remember the most was a dusk-to-dawn Clint Eastwood marathon. Me and a buddy had early Willys Jeeps, we took the tops down and folded the windshield flat to the hood to improve the view.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Dana said:
Hah! Just a year ago I bought a brand new Jeep with hand cranked windows, didn't know that was even possible.

Toy guns without orange plastic tipped barrels... greenie stickum caps... or roll caps (perforated or not?)... plastic army men to shoot at with your BB gun... bicycles converted to a motorbike with a B&S lawnmower engine... Cox models with gas engines... Estes model rockets... TV Guide magazine with a special "C" symbol to indicate a color program (which later became a special symbol to indicate a B&W program)... TV, period.
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Two channels, ABC and a combined CBS-NBC . . . or was that CBS and ABC-NBC . . . or . . ..
 
WDD said:
Green stamps, and yellow stamps.

Free drinking glass in a box of powdered laundry detergent.
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Going to the S&H in Ypsilanti with my mom after collecting books of 'em from shoping at the A&P.

And getting "free" plates or encyclopedias, let's see we have four As. three Bs Cs and Ds, two Es and Fs, and a N, a Q, and an XYZ.
 
Grandpa predicting that people would never pay $1 for a gallon of regular (leaded) gas.
 
JackL-3J said:
Grandpa predicting that people would never pay $1 for a gallon of regular (leaded) gas.
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Yep ... and believing everyone would quit smoking when cigarettes got to a buck a pack! :eek:
 
Half Fast said:
Back in the day, the malls always had some activity happening to draw in customers. A local orchestra or a choir doing Christmas music, a weekend car show, an arts & crafts fair, tasting parties by local restaurants, celebrity autographs, book signings, pet shows, etc., etc. None of the local (and dying) malls do that sort of thing anymore.
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Why would they if it don’t work anymore. There was a time when ‘the mall’ in itself didn’t need to be ‘sold.’ Where would they sell it. Internet hadn’t even been invented yet. But malls were the demise of Downtown.
 
Drive-ins, bench seats, and scary movies. Guaranteed to bring her close.
 
Somewhere kicking around here is a book about the introduction of this new thing called a VOR written in the 50s or so. It was gifted to me because one of the shots was an installation in Navion. Of course, the book was boldly stating that pilots wouldn't be getting lost anymore.
 
wanttaja said:
... Speaking of timers, my original one just set the on/off times, which I had to adjust every month or so due to the length of the day changing. My current one just needs me to set the current time, the on-off times, and my house's latitude. Adjusts the on-off time each day accordingly. Needs a watch battery every five years or so, at which point I have to dig out the manual and figure out how to set it, again.
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I want one! Where did you get the timer?

I too have exterior LEDs but they are on 24/7/365 unless we lose power. They last a very, very long time. Certainly many times longer than incandescents. However, internal LEDs, same bulbs, that frequently get switched on and off--not so much. Yes, they out live incandescents, but not nearly by as much as the 24/7/365s. What I find aggravating is, it's not the actual Light-Emitting Diodes. It's the electronics adjusting the 110V house current to the whatever the LEDs need. Given the massive premium on LEDs over incandescents, I am not sure they save money. But the thing I like most about LEDs is I can choose the color, i.e., degrees Kelvin.
 
Super elastic bubble plastic from Wham-o

I can still remember that slight high you would get from breathing in from the straw.

 
Domenick said:
I want one! Where did you get the timer?
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Lowes. Intermatic Model ST01 Self-Adjusting Wall Switch Timer. They're $56 on Amazon. It's kind of complicated to set up, but works fine.

Refreshing myself on the instructions, I see one didn't have to enter the actual latitude...just specify, within a broad range, whether one is in the northern, central, or southern part of the US. Or enter your actual rise/set times for the date, and it takes it from there.
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Ron Wanttaja
 
General Milton Hershey.
The bad 'ol days.
But, CNAV is going to make a comeback. You can't spoof the sun and stars!
 
bbchien said:
General Milton Hershey.
The bad 'ol days.
But, CNAV is going to make a comeback. You can't spoof the sun and stars!
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The E-3 has a sextant port right behind the cockpit entrance. We got bored over Afghanistan one night and learned you could peel a hard boiled egg and eject it into the atmosphere through that port.
 
Domenick said:
… bench seats…. Guaranteed to bring her close.
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C.O.D. turns!
TCABM said:
The E-3 has a sextant port right behind the cockpit entrance. We got bored over Afghanistan one night and learned you could peel a hard boiled egg and eject it into the atmosphere through that port.
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You could probably eject the egg without peeling it. ;)
 
sansoneservices said:
Yeah I remember a strong solvent smell. Ambroid model glue also got to my head one day while building a plane, I started to feel way too happy
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I miss Ambroid... the smell, and peeling it off my fingers the next day in class.
 
wanttaja said:
Conversely, I see more *tail lights* out, these days. Curious. They're LED as well.
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Wiring, maybe? My wife's car has a taillight out, but it's the part of the taillight that's on the tailgate. Every time I go to fix it, by the time I get the interior bits off so I can look at the wire, it starts working again. Nothing visibly wrong, and of course it always refuses to fail again when I'm working on it. So, I patch it up, and wait a couple of weeks/months for it to go out again... Grrrrr.
Domenick said:
I too have exterior LEDs but they are on 24/7/365 unless we lose power. They last a very, very long time. Certainly many times longer than incandescents. However, internal LEDs, same bulbs, that frequently get switched on and off--not so much. Yes, they out live incandescents, but not nearly by as much as the 24/7/365s. What I find aggravating is, it's not the actual Light-Emitting Diodes. It's the electronics adjusting the 110V house current to the whatever the LEDs need.
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This!!! Every LED bulb I've had fail has been in the power section. Unfortunately, the way they build them now the whole base is usually filled with potting material so they're exceedingly difficult to fix and I've kinda given up and just chuck 'em now. Used to be able to break out the soldering iron and fix them.

FWIW, the Home Depot house brand, EcoSmart, is absolute garbage. 50% of mine failed in less than a year. I've had much better luck with others.
 
I replaced all the incandescent lights in my house about 9 years ago. For the first year or two I was having more LED failures than I ever had with incandescents. But I just replaced them as they failed. I'm pretty sure I replaced a few bulbs in the same fixture more than once. Eventually, I got to where they were pretty stable and I haven't had to replace any for a few years now. I suspect that almost half of them were defective and quickly failed. Also, some of the new ones were also defective in that they only lasted a short while. But every time I replaced one it seemed to have better than a 50% chance of surviving so eventually I got rid of all the problem lights.

edit to add: LEDs seemed to have a bigger effect on lowering my energy bills than the new air conditioner or new hurricane rated, insulated impact windows. I was amazed at how much of my electric went to lighting.
 
Barrett50 said:
Don't start. If you know what these are.

it was cold - it was dark - and it will last the rest of your life.
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Love me some bus & tag connectors. I once got to teach a week long class on IBM channel operations to a crew at Floating Point Systems. Fun times.

Side note - wish I’d stockpiled a couple tons of those connectors and terminators when people would pay you to haul them away. Lots of gold in those.
 
In 1976, my dad had a mild heart attack (two pack a day smoker, no exercise, short temper, Type II diabetes even though he didn’t have an ounce of fat on him). He was in the hospital for two weeks and then sent home on bed rest for a month. When he was allowed to resume activity, the exercise program consisted of jumping jacks and pushups, and light stretching.

A few months ago a relative had a mild heart attack. They put a stent in and he was home the following evening. He was soon back at work on the farm and as strong as ever.

Knee replacements are now practically an outpatient procedure. A friend got a knee in the morning and was home in time for dinner.

Modern medicine is absolutely amazing. Just like with so many other things, the good old days are right now.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
FWIW, the Home Depot house brand, EcoSmart, is absolute garbage. 50% of mine failed in less than a year. I've had much better luck with others.
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Hey, I'm glad it's not just me!
What's your go-to brand nowadays?
 
I remember when one of my college roommates found this crazy 'website' thing where you could order textbooks for way cheaper than at the on or off-campus bookstores. It was called Amazon.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
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.
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My dad was 'the computer guy' at the factory where he worked. As such, he got a second phone line pulled to the house so he could 'dial in' when a print job failed, etc. overnight and not tie up the main house phone line when working on weekends. When he wasn't using the line, I hosted a Wildcat BBS. With full-bore ANSI graphics splash screen. I think I called it 'The Throne'... no idea where that name came from.
 
Chip Sylverne said:
I put mine up on a bookshelf next to my pinewood derby car.
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Little wooden cars? Pfffftttt.....
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Similar to the Pinewood Derby, scouts would take a block of balsa and carve a "rocket," with a rubber-band-powered propeller that drove the device along a guide wire.
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Now, I've been many things, but never a Boy Scout. Had never heard of the Space Derby, until I found the above hand-made plaque at an antique store in Astoria, Oregon. Having retired after forty years in the space industry, the plaque just tickled my funnybone. Kinda described my career.

Writing on the back was the final bit that made me buy it: Someone wrote on the back with a magic marker, "Pack 323 Nov 20 1976." That date is just three days prior to my being commissioned in the Air Force. At which point, my 40-year hitch in the space industry got started....

Ron Wanttaja
 
CJones said:
My dad was 'the computer guy' at the factory where he worked. As such, he got a second phone line pulled to the house so he could 'dial in' when a print job failed, etc. overnight and not tie up the main house phone line when working on weekends. When he wasn't using the line, I hosted a Wildcat BBS. With full-bore ANSI graphics splash screen. I think I called it 'The Throne'... no idea where that name came from.
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I never hosted a BBS, but we did get a second phone line at some point. I want to say it was somewhere in the late 90s where the use increased, so my mom finally gave up on a single phone line.

Oh, the single phone line. We had call waiting, which disconected the internet whenever someone called. I eventually figured out the phone number prefix to disable it for the call, which annoyed my mom since people would call and get a busy signal (at that time, we got more actual phone calls than spam, unlike now). I think that's what convinced her to give up and pay for a second phone line.

But I do then also remember that phone line getting used for multiplayer games via dial-up. Unreal Tournament and Warcraft 2 come to mind, those were the main games I played with friends. Unlike today where you just end up having that work through your existing internet connection, in those days it was dialing up the other computer and having a direct connection. At least, that's how we did it.

I also remember my school's computer lab - when I was in kindergarten it was all Apple IIEs, which were later replaced with Mac LCIIs. We bought an LCII as my first computer with a blazing 16 MHz Motorola 68030 processor, 4 MB RAM, and an 80 MB HD. Fun fact: I later worked on a turbine engine that had a 68040 as the processor on the FADEC. They're still flying today - when I was at the company we had to do a lifetime buy on however many we expected to need as Motorola was finally going to permanently close down the production line. This was somewhere in the first half of the 2010s.

Anyway, in the computer lab we had a serial network on all the computers, which was primarily so we could use a networked printer. Standard 4-wire phone lines daisy chained between all the computers. But sometimes the computer teacher would let us all play a group game of Warcraft 2 on Fridays or before holidays.

I remember thinking it was pretty cool when I got an orange 5.25" floppy for the old Apple IIEs.
 
Baked Potato said:
Hey, I'm glad it's not just me!
What's your go-to brand nowadays?
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Also agreed on the EcoSmart stuff, specifically the LED recessed lighting wafers. They aren't expensive (box of 4 is like $12). A year might be generous. The HALO and Commercial Electric brands have been much better.
 
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