(N/A) Things that have gone by the wayside

kyleb said:
All of the telephone stuff reminds me of another thing long gone.

Prank calls. The advent of caller ID pretty much put an end to "Hi, is your refrigerator running?" calls and a ton more.
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I equate spam calls with spoofed IDs worse than prank calls.
 
mscard88 said:
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Drove by a van the other day and the company name was A1 Plumbing and thought..."wonder if that naming strategy is still a useful thing with the demise of the phone book?"
 
Can’t believe no one mentioned Beta and VHS yet!

And cassette tapes?

Milk delivery?

Docs making house calls, and their little black bag?

Slide rules.
 
Ryanb said:
I haven’t used 411 since I got a smartphone. I forgot that even existed!
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I only dial 811, and I get people to come to the house for free!
asicer said:
Vacuum tubes? Is that what they used to use before Swiffer cleaners?
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They are what I use in my three Vox guitar amplifiers, to heat the music room in winter.
 
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I did much of my early programming (in high school) on these and stored them on paper tape.
 
UL3-1212 also worked in Michigan to get the time. Random thought: phone numbers with 8s, 9s, or 0s took waaaay longer to dial than 1s, 2s, or 3s. If you called a number with lots of 9s, and got a busy signal, you would wear out your finger dialing that number over again. You could also dial a number by simply quickly/repeatedly hitting the hang-up bar the number of times equal to the number for each digit in the phone number.

Tube testers were also at Kmart. Every time the tv went on the fritz, dad would take out all the tubes and take them to Kmart. Another random thought: Kmart also sold lumber then.

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair, that I saved up and bought out of the back of a Popular Science magazine. When my mom saw it, she laughed and said she knew for a fact that computers will NEVER catch on, and no one will ever have one (especially her). My mom has 2 desk tops, 2 lap tops, and a smart phone now (although she still can't figure out the smart phone).

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Walboy said:
I learned programming using these:

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A long trek in the snow (uphill both ways) to a card reader, then a 20 minute wait for the output...on paper. Woe to the student who needed to ask the professor for more time ($$$$) on his account.

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Thanks for the memories.

Most of my computer courses used teletype machines, but CoBOL of all things was on punch-cards. Large decks, since CoBOL is a very wordy language, supposedly self-documenting. And the card punch machine was in the math & science building. And the card reader was located with the mainframe in the admin building a quarter mile away. And I took the class over a January accelerated term.

So yes, quite literally long treks in the snow.

And after slipping on ice once and scattering my deck of cards, I learned to number the $#%@ things.
 
Also one of these, complete with magnetic card reader:

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SkyHog said:
Anyone remember zip and jazz drives?
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How about the Bernoulli?

And it was a big deal when we moved from RK05 (2.5 MB) to the RK07 (28 MB). There might have even been a few RL02s in there, somewhere.

 
FastEddieB said:
Camper AND home!

And...

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YEP! Haven't used it in years, however.
I should clarify that my percolator is gas heated ... I always scratch my head on the RV boards when the question pops up "How big an inverter do I need to power my coffee maker when I can't run the generator?"
 
SkyHog said:
Anyone remember zip and jazz drives?
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I cleaned out my office closet a while back ... boxed up the zip drive and disks, along with 3.5" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 8" floppies, 9 track tapes, and other assorted "really important and/or expensive at the time" stuff that is now just trash.
 
Heathkits and Dynakits. My dad built himself quite the home audio system (monaural) with Dynakit components in the '50s and '60s.

The first "computer" I ever dealt with was a Heathkit "Educational Analog Computer", like the one below. My junior high school bought one, and I was on the team of five guys who put it together and demonstrated it. One of the other guys on the team went on to become an engineering supervisor at Texas Instruments with 29 patents for automotive sensors.

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Anybody remember what was the first Heath kit? An airplane! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_Parasol
 
Bill Jennings said:
Also one of these, complete with magnetic card reader:

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That's the TI59, isn't it? I had the 58; same functions but no magnetic reader. After I got out of college and started working, the 58 began to have keyboard problems so I replaced it with an HP15C. That HP is still going strong and is sitting here on my desk right now.
 
Once upon a time you didn't need newfangled doohickeys to navigate. a 200-400 KC receiver and a chart and you were good to go. An A on one side of the range with an N on the other side coupled to give you a solid tone when centered on course. Slip off to one side or the other and the A or the N would be heard, faintly superimposed over the tone.
Didn't cost an arm or a leg either. By the way, when did local charts become TACs ??
 
Walboy said:
I learned programming using these:

View attachment 67282

A long trek in the snow (uphill both ways) to a card reader, then a 20 minute wait for the output...on paper. Woe to the student who needed to ask the professor for more time ($$$$) on his account.

View attachment 67284
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I graduated to those once I got to college, along with the joys of waiting for the job to run... I learned the "insert" function on the keypunch by duplicating the card up to a point, then holding the source card from advancing while I typed the new stuff, then duplicating the rest. I learned to number cards after seeing someone else dropping a dec. And the profanity that followed...

John
 
jkaduk said:
And Oregon. When I was in South Korea in '03 they the station attendant was dressed like that.
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I remember going to the full serve gas station where gas was 19.9 cents per gallon, and if you got more than 8 gallons you'd get a drinking glass. In my case emblazoned with the (old text-on-a-helmet) logo of the Cincinnati Bengals. We had a collection of many, many of these glasses when I was growing up.
 

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Walboy said:
I have a HP-41CV on my desk right now that I use daily. It's about 40 years old. I have the card reader for it as well.

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Those used to be adored by hackers. A dorm neighbor had one when I was at Ga Tech. He was heavy into synthetic programming, and he also modified it with a switch so he could clock the processor faster. IIRC, there were a few functions that couldn't run at the higher rate (probably limited by memory access time) so he'd have to switch it to the slower speed if he needed to run one.
 
Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia. They sold them in grocery stores, and you would pick up a new volume every week until you had a complete set. I still have and use my set.
 
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