The "Back in my day" Thread

Rotary phones. Our house was upscale; if you pulled up on one of the buttons on the cradle (or lifted up on the hook) we had intercom so Mom didn’t have to yell at everyone for dinner.

Earliest gas price I remember was .299, I had to have Dad explain what “gas war” meant.

Getting wooden melon and orange crates from the grocery store and hauling them home in the Radio Flyer wagon so we could build a fort…

Exploring the mysteries of the tube radio/record player that I got to move to my room when somebody got a newer one.

My oldest sister getting a spherical TV… which still had tubes! Sony? Panasonic? I don’t remember.

Leaving the house with NO ONE being able to contact you, at all, until you got back. And it was normal and OK. THAT was nice. I’d love to have that again.

R/C planes with radios on 27 mHz… one trucker with a cheap linear amp could wreak havoc on a flying field.

When I was I high school, a gallon of gas or a pack of smokes… $.48, take your pick.
 
I remember when TVs (and electronics in general) came with the full electrical schematic as a fold out page in the manual.
 
Ashara Keliyn said:
I remember when TVs (and electronics in general) came with the full electrical schematic as a fold out page in the manual.
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And the original IBM PC, and the Apple ][. I used to work on IBM mainframes… a rack or two of volumes with detailed schematics of every single component, and complete microcode listings as well. Everything you needed to repair or replicate the entire system.
 
aterry1067 said:
A friend and I were just talking about this the other day. I remember describing the starting procedure for any carbureted vehicle, or asking for the procedure if I hadn't driven that vehicle. My dad's truck, which I learned to drive in, was choke out, one full pump of the gas, turn the key, push the choke half way in when it fired and pat the gas to keep it running. My Chevelle was key on, 2 full pumps, key to start and pump it until it fired. It seemed like every carbureted vehicle had it's own unique starting procedure; kinda like piston airplanes.
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My '46 Willys Jeep (and the '51 that followed) had a manual choke, manual throttle, and both the starter button and the dimmer switch on the floor.

North Dakota winters were a pain. Had to put de-icer in the fuel tank or it'd rattle and bang. Had a hard time starting it, too (no heater in the car, so *why*?). Used starter fluid sprayed down the carburetor throat.

One spring we pulled the engine out of the Jeep and found one piston was basically melted down one side. A wee *too* much starter fluid....

Ron Wanttaja
 
Dad had this phone dialer that would save numbers and dial via holding its speaker against a phone microphone to play the tones. When he tired of it, I played with it and told kids at school it was a mobile phone.

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flyingpreacher said:
I remember gas as low at $0.69. Circa 1996ish. How low do you remember and roughly what year?
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$.45 for regular, $.50 for premium. And this was in Canada, where our Imperial gallon was a fifth bigger than the US gallon. 1970. A quart of oil was maybe $.80, but I don't remember that so well.
 
DaleB said:
Leaving the house with NO ONE being able to contact you, at all, until you got back. And it was normal and OK. THAT was nice. I’d love to have that again.
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Yeah, in summer we were out of the house by 8am, and had to be home when the street lights came on.

We rode our bikes without helmets and in traffic, threw rocks at each other, played smear the queer, played around construction sites, played with fireworks including bottle rocket fights, we pet stray dogs, ran with scissors, talked to strangers, drank water from garden hoses and came home from school to a empty house.

We saw assassinations, a space race, men walking on the moon, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights marches, segregation, integration, Bomb Shelters, duck for cover drills, never wore sun screen, breathed second hand smoke and rode in cars without seat belts. If mom or dad had to stop short they would just fling an arm in front of you.

If it was raining we played inside. Simple card games would be boring so we played harder and got noisier which really bothered mom. Finally she would have enough and utter those 7 words, the words all kids feared most ...''Just wait until your father gets home.!!''
 
I had one of these in the living room when I was at the college. It worked. We'd have students over, and they'd ask what it was and how it worked.

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We also discovered that pay phones could be dialed for free just by working the hangup cradle lever. For a 3, you pulled it down 3 times, rapidly. Pause then dial the next number the same way. The coin drop just switched the dial on so you could use it, and that dial simply worked a switch that cut the circuit at the rate of about ten times per second. The cradle also switches the circuit off.
 
Bad thing about those old phones was that you couldn't disable the ringer, nor unplug the phone from the wall. Girl I dated used to put her phone in the refrigerator to keep it quiet when she didn't want calls (night shift nurse, slept in daytime).
 
I restored a 1951 International pickup. It had vacuum-operated wipers, run off the intake manifold. I remember my Dad's vehicles in the 1950s having them. Had to modulate the gas pedal in heavy rain. Manifold pressure is a thing, see?


My students thought it was hilarious. They were also startled when I shifted the three-on-the-tree from first to second. "What did you just do??" they said. They thought I'd gone from D to R.
 
Broadsheet printed newspapers. As a young kid, I recall grabbing the intl section of a newspaper one morning. I learned what went on in a place called 'New Delhi' that the prime minister was a woman! After that I consumed newspapers for years. I miss it.
 
I'm reminded of a conversation I had when my dad... would have been in the late 90s and I would have been around 17. I asked if I could have $20 to go to a nearby town and do stuff with my friends. He grumbled and said he and his friends used to be able to have fun and all they needed was a quarter. I asked him what they used to do for a quarter. He said they'd pile into an old farm truck, go into town, see a movie, and have a sandwich then go home. I informed him that's exactly what we were going to do but now that costs $20.

What does it cost now probably $50?
 
Dynamite being sold in small town hardware stores for farmers to blast rocks and stumps
 
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Barrett50 said:
Ashtray in every room of every building. Including most hospitals.:cool:
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And in every seat of every commercial flight.
Last "smoking" flight I was on was back in 1999, Aeroflot New York to Moscow. As a smoker I chose the section in the back where it was allowed. Yeah, bad idea. Out of boredom finished about 2 packs and arrived with nicotine poisoning and worst stomach pain ever.
 
wanttaja said:
Heck, check out the early remotes. Had tuned bars in them like a doorbell (only ultrasonic). That's where the remote got the nickname "clicker," back then, when you pressed the "Channel Change" button, it actually clicked as it struck the bar,

Sometimes, you could get the channel to change by rattling your keys.....

Ron Wanttaja
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Whenever the dog scratched her head and rattled the tags on her collar, the TV channel changed.
 
Walboy said:
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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One of the 3 Tomahawks at the flight school didn't have headset jacks, so I always tried to avoid that one.
 
I used to go watch the Dodgers in the early 1960s for 50 cents, kids ticket. I think Dad was $1.50 in General Admission, which was the upper deck at Dodger Stadium. Reserved was $2.50. Once in a while, Dad would splurge and we got to sit closer. Gas was around .22 per gallon, although I vaguely recall seeing it for 19.9 cents before I started driving.
 
Oh my. This thread is sure bringing back some memories!

In stereo where available.

Freedom! As a GenX kid I had very little supervision. And yes, I drank from the hose and all that stuff too. I rode my bike on fairly busy highways to get places with friends... I did not live in town so put a lot of miles on my bikes over the years too.

My parents talking about how much money to take out of the bank on Friday so they'd have enough for the weekend... Followed by the "Tyme Machine" ATMs that were in their own small standalone buildings. Checks were the norm, credit cards involved hauling out the big "chunk-chunk" machine that made an image of the card on the multi-layer carbon copy receipt.

Laundry being hung on the clothesline to save energy, even though we had a dryer.

Rotary phones, plugged into the wall via a round plug with four pins. Hating people with zeros in their phone number. Actually being excited when the phone rang, and answering it, on purpose, even without Caller ID! Listening in on siblings and teasing them for things they said on the phone.

300/1200 baud modems. Connecting to BBSes and arguing with people, as one does. Later on, connecting to AOL for $5/hr. Being able to mess things up by picking up the phone.

"Mimeograph" purple copies of everything in school. Getting to go to the library to use one of the three computers the school had (Apple ][+, Apple ][e, Commodore Vic 20 with a cassette tape drive!) because I was in the "gifted and talented" program. Learning BASIC by typing in programs from the back of Byte magazine and seeing what they did.

] RUN

Atari 2600 Pac-Man. Pac-Man, Galaga, and Pole Position at the arcade. Hot Sam pretzels in the mall (I still like hot pretzels today). Radio Shack.

BTW, if you ever end up in Springfield, MO, there's a place there called "1984" where you pay about 10 bucks and you can play unlimited old school video games. They even have period TVs playing old MTV, cassette tape players, and other stuff. And the owners (brothers) are pilots.

Catalogs as entertainment. I remember reading all about lawn tractors, boats, and other stuff and dreaming about owning them when I grew up. Also had the Estes model rocket catalog and Tower Hobbies catalog to spend my money with.

flyingpreacher said:
I remember gas as low at $0.69. Circa 1996ish. How low do you remember and roughly what year?
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$0.899, 2020. :D Just kidding - I do remember it being newsworthy in the 80s when gas dropped back below $1/gal, and I remember it going down as low as $0.69.

Regular and Unleaded being the only grades of gas... And the gas station also having mechanics.

Stick shift cars being the norm. Hand cranked windows. No AC.

Sitting backwards in the back of the Volvo station wagon for thousands and thousands of miles. Emergency phones on the side of the road. Cars with CB radios.
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!
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I remember my family's first TV. It was a 13" Teknika, encased in "Genuine Imitation Woodgrain". :rofl:

It had 12 channel buttons, that all had their own analog tuning dials behind a door. We started with 4: PBS, CBS, ABC, and NBC. Fox came to town in the late 80s.

NBC Friday Nights in 1985. Now THAT was Must See TV! Knight Rider at 7, The Misfits of Science at 8, and Miami Vice at 9.

Trips to the video rental place on Saturday afternoon, taking 45 minutes to agree on something, watching it with the family surrounding a big bowl of popcorn cooked in bacon grease in a pan or later with a hot air popper, topped with real butter.
WDD said:
“Eat everything I put on your plate, because there are people starving in China.”
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I still have about 100 pounds of "clean your plate, son" around my middle. It's very hard for me to stop eating when I'm full instead of when the plate is empty.
 
I always thought it was interesting when my dad started working FSS back in the 70s, everyone at work wore slacks, a collared shirt and tie. Seemed like they all smoked too. When he retired in 98, the dress code was pretty much shorts and tshirt and hardly any of them smoked.
 
Xennial here. Bikes, garden hose, no cell phone until around 2002 when I was in college. Plenty of cars with roll up windows still (my parents '89 Jeep Cherokee for one). After school every day we played some sort of pick up football, baseball, street hockey (remember roller blades?), etc. Summer nights consisted of Ghosts in The Graveyard or Freeze Tag once the sun went down. Spent hours running around in the creek behind my house, swinging like Tarzan from the lianas which draped from the trees. Built ramps and clubhouses using scrap lumber before we were in middle school.

Waiting around with your finger over the record button on the stereo so you could make a tape of the new hit song without getting the DJ's voice or a commercial in the mix. CDs and projection "big screen" televisions. Lawn Boy push mowers belching out blue smoke from the ashless 2-stroke oil. Casting a line with a simple Zebco 33 while running around the lake in a boat pushed by a 90HP Johnson outboard.

By middle school we had a "custom built" computer with a Pentium 133 and Windows 3.1, it had a "Turbo" button on the case which I doubt did anything. Next computer had Windows 95 and a CD-ROM drive with Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia. No more having to look something up in the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore. AOL Online, and we were fortunate enough that my father ran a small mortgage financing company out of the house which we had a 2nd phone line for, which meant no getting internet interrupted when a call came through on the house line.

Life before 2000s was simple. Everything went downhill after T9 text, as the smartphone took over the world.
 
Under dash stuff. Had a used old Dodge pickup in highschool. FM converter and Radio Shack cassette player mounted under the dash, I couldn’t afford to replace the AM radio with a real head unit.
 
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