I Remember When

[trekgeezer]

I remember when a nickel over & above the minimum wage was actually worth it, & $4.00 an hour was pretty darned good.

I remember when you could buy a modest, but decent house for $30k.

When I was 17 I worked 10 hours a day in grocery warehouse for a $1.65!! I thought i was uptown when I joined the Navy and they paid me $388 a month.

[Raffine]

I remember on The Price is Right when they gave away a really expensive car, they'd add a "1" to the beginning of the price, and the audience would gasp.

[Jack]

I remember when people would literally scoff at the notion that gas would ever reach $1.00 a gallon.

I remember when it was unheard of for someone to check your ID when buying cigarettes. 

I remember when driving drunk was perfectly legal.

I remember when CD's came out, people predicted that true music lovers would never use them because they lacked that "natural" sound of an album.

I remember every winter, people would take the regular tires off their car and put the snow tires on.

I remember those Polaroid cameras where you'd take a picture, then wait 1 minute and peel the paper off, and like magic, there would be your photograph!

I remember party lines, where you shared your phone service with another house, and had to wait until they got done talking before you could make your call.

[LilCerberus]

Longtime readers should know my feelings about football, so please excuse me if I'm recallecting this all wrong, but...

It seems I can remember a time when the SuperBowl was, well, a football game... And it was the Rose Bowl that was overhyped.

[AndyC]

Computer technology would be an interesting topic on which to compare notes, since it has changed so much. My recollections (those listed here) span about an eight-year period.

I remember when:

Computers stored information on magnetic tape.

You could get books of computer games, and type them in.

It seemed hard to believe someone could fill 16k of RAM, and a machine with 48k was a monster.

Computers appeared that offered graphics in several colours.

People could sit for hours navigating video games that were little more than a few blocky shapes on a screen.

A modem had two cups that fit a 'standard' telephone handset, and operated at 300bps.

Companies and institutions had multiple workstations that shared a single computer.

There was one guy on my street who owned a computer.

It was a big deal for a school to own a single TRS-80 Model 1, and a sizeable computer club could be organized around it.

A hard drive was a large external box that cost several thousand dollars (more than the business PC it attached to, which was, itself, a few grand).

Isaac Asimov endorsed Tandy word processing software.

Home computers all ran BASIC from ROM on startup, but each brand used a slightly different version.

You could produce a fascinating half-hour weekly TV show of a guy sitting in a room with a computer, giving demonstrations of word processing and BASIC programming, and visiting the occasional BBS using that 300-baud acoustic coupler I mentioned earlier.

[odinn7]

Holy crap Andy....I was just talking to someone about most of those points just yesterday morning. We were talking about how things have changed and I was going on about computers...my Vic-20...LOL!

I also mentioned phones...When I was a kid, phones had dials. As I got older, they started having buttons. Portable phones had metal antennas that you had to extend. Cell phones were in a big freakin bag.

Anyone remember the clock radios with the numbers that would flip over? They were mounted on some kind of card and if you listened, you could hear the time change...then they started making LCD clocks.

Remember VCR's? The first ones? Wired remote with a slider on it: "Pause"-"Play"...LOL! They were like $800 and blank tapes were over $20 each....and to buy a movie? Forget it!

[CheezeFlixz]

Remember VCR's? The first ones? Wired remote with a slider on it: "Pause"-"Play"...LOL! They were like $800 and blank tapes were over $20 each....and to buy a movie? Forget it!

In the attic somewhere I still have a very old VCR with a WIRED REMOTE! The wire was only about 12' long so in a large room it wouldn't reach the chair.

Also out early remote control on the TV were 'tone' remotes, thus earning them the name of the "clicker" and a motor in the TV would turn the dial as they would only change 1 channel at a time, good thing we only had 4 channels. Most were on those console TV's that were made to look like a big cabinet and they weighed a ton.

[Jack]

Most were on those console TV's that were made to look like a big cabinet and they weighed a ton.

Yup, we had one of those.  It was at least five feet wide, with a phonograph in one side and a stereo in the other.  And we put the 8 track player on top. 

[Yaddo 42]

The High School Stuff:

Knives, lots of them.

Guns in gun racks were allowed in the parking lots until the last year or two I was there. Then guys started carrying bats, clubs, and axe handles instead.

No smoking or dipping allowed, but plenty still tried.

It was a huge deal when the cafeteria had a differents menu on each side, there were two lines. One side was mostly burgers, that's what I went for since I loved the fries and the line was quicker. We also had a salad bar.

Prayers at the football games are still done here, I covered nine football games in three counties as a stringer this year, they prayed before every game.

Kids were allowed to drive to the trade school up the road rather than ride the bus at my school. Until a guy in my class nearly got himself and another kid killed in a wreck due to his hot rod driving. Following those cars out at lunch was a clever way to cut class, everyone expected to see kids leaving en masse at that time of day.

The only politics or religion I got in my public high school was from a conservative history teacher (and retired military officer) and one fundamentalist biology teacher. The history teacher was also a voter registrar in the small town and would sign up the 18 year old students to vote, he used to joke he would only register Republicans, until a town official got on his case about it.

The biology teacher told us he didn't agree with evolution section of the book and only taught us as much as he had to, and made sure to point out his creationist beliefs and that he was a Young Earth believer. There was a blowup one year over certain text books being too secular, including the Home Ec. book in the class I was in that year. It was really just the state legislature posturing and fighting with the AEA, but about half the chapters in our book were disallowed from the final exam.

About half the school and teachers missed class to attend the funeral of the town character, "Happy" Simpson. He was a mostly friendly drunk who knew the whole town, and at one time or another had been in almost every organization possible. I was told at one time he was the only person who was a known member of the Band Boosters and the local chapter of the KKK.

We had cowchip bingo as part of the homecoming festivities. For spring fling the husband of the Spanish teacher, who owned a junkyard, provided a car with teachers' names written on for the students to pay to hit with a sledgehammer. You really found out who was the most hated on campus that day.

[asimpson2006]

Remember VCR's? The first ones? Wired remote with a slider on it: "Pause"-"Play"...LOL! They were like $800 and blank tapes were over $20 each....and to buy a movie? Forget it!

I sorta remember VCR's with the Wired remotes.  I think I was just a toddler or very young like 4 or 5 I was at my aunts apartment that was near where I lived.  I remembered playing the wired VCR remote.

[RCMerchant]

Most were on those console TV's that were made to look like a big cabinet and they weighed a ton.

Yup, we had one of those.  It was at least five feet wide, with a phonograph in one side and a stereo in the other.  And we put the 8 track player on top. 

And to watch Walt Disneys Wonderful World of CO LO R !!! OoooooooHHHH! 

[Killer Bees]

The biggest problem we had growing up in high school was teenage pregnancies.  And I didn't know anyone who that happened to.

Also, smoking behind the bike sheds at school was considered cool and dangerous.

I always brought a knife to school to peel my fruit at lunch time.

Teachers used to throw chalk, rulers, t-squares etc at kids who misbehaved.  If they connected, there were no consequences to the school or the teacher.  Most times, kids didn't say anything to their parents for fear of copping worse abuse at home.

My male (and nice looking) maths teacher used to stare at the girls' legs while they were crossed and us girls considered it high praise.  Most of us deliberately crossed our legs in the aisles to get his attention.

In 8th grade (at 13 years of age), my best friend lived with her divorced mother.  They were both attractive and her mother used to date guys in their 20s.  I think her mother was in her early to mid 30s at the time.  I remember Tanya, my friend telling me of her sexual exploits with her mother's many boyfriends and their friends while the mother was out (this included oral sex and various other forms of sex that I didn't even know existed).  Nothing happened about this rampant paedophilia.  I actually thought Tanya was really cool because older guys thought she was hot.

A VCR was the height of technology and Space Invaders was awesome indeed.

Smoking was allowed everywhere, including public transport and they used to advertise it on television and in magazines.

A female PE teacher used to cheat on her husband with the 12th grade guys all the time.  They would come in and brag how they managed to nail her.  She didn't lose her job or her husband or her freedom and nobody ended up in therapy because of it.

A male PE teacher lost his drivers license from drunk driving but he didn't lose his job.  He just ended up riding his pushbike to work until they gave his license back.  Most of us didn't understand what the fuss was about.  My stepdad used to drive under the influence with us kids in the back and none of us wore seatbelts ever.  And nothing ever happened to any of us.

[AndyC]

Around 1980, my best friend's dad was really into gadgets. He had a portable video camera. Basically, it was a top-loading vcr split in two, with the tape machine in one piece and the TV tuner and modulator in the other. They connected with a cable as thick as your thumb, using a connector that screwed together. When you wanted to take your camera out, you unscrewed the tuner cable from the tape unit, and attached the shoulder strap. You then screwed in the cable from the video camera (there might also have been a separate battery pack, but I don't recall precisely) and walked out the door with a VCR hanging from your shoulder, a big battery on your belt, and a camera in your hand roughly the size and shape of a large electric drill, connected by a big, honking cable. To watch your video, repeat the process. State of the art.

And do you remember the VCRs with a few individual channel buttons, that could be tuned with a little plastic screwdriver? Or VCRs with a pair of channel dials like a TV? My school had a Beta machine the size of a suitcase, top loading, with channel dials and buttons like piano keys.

On the subject of phones, my uncle used to have a phone in his truck. It looked just like a household phone, except that the handset sat on a simple box with a couple of big buttons on top. To make a call, you had to first signal the mobile operator, give your call sign and the city where you're registered, then tell the operator the number you want to call so she can connect you.

My parents had one rotary wall phone with mechanical bell. We rented it from the phone company, and it was hard-wired into the house. They kept that thing well into the 90s, even after adding other phones around the house. When I convinced them to let me install a display phone, the phone company actually required them to return the old phone! Imagine, they'd been paying rent on this thing for almost 30 years. Not only didn't the phone company at least upgrade it, they insisted on throwing it in the trash themselves years after it was obsolete.

As a side note, I remember when a standard line was rotary, and touch tone cost extra. Now it's the other way around.

And does anybody else remember the cool, futuristic phones with a rotary dial right in the handset?

[indianasmith]

How about 8-TRACK TAPES!!!!! Remember when they would change programs in the middle of the song?  Here you are trying to sing along, and in the middle of an awesome guitar riff or long solo not "GRRRZZZ-KERCHUNK-POP!"  I was SO glad to upgrade to cassettes . . . and I just went to CD's about three years ago!


BTW, what exactly is an IPOD, anyway?

[AndyC]

How about 8-TRACK TAPES!!!!! Remember when they would change programs in the middle of the song?  Here you are trying to sing along, and in the middle of an awesome guitar riff or long solo not "GRRRZZZ-KERCHUNK-POP!"  I was SO glad to upgrade to cassettes . . . and I just went to CD's about three years ago!

Fascinating technology though, how they get the thing to run on an endless loop like that. Of course, that was what bugged me the most - listening through a quarter of the album to hear the same song again.

I still remember when my dad put an 8-track in the Suburban. My parents kept a shoebox full of cartridges, by such great artists as Glen Campbell, John Denver, Charley Pride and miscellaneous bagpipe music.