This station now concludes its broadcast day.
That’s right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.
When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.
Party lines! You’d share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You’d hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.
- Receiving junk mail Internet CDs
- Waiting patiently to record a song you liked
- Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
- The planet Pluto
- Wax lips and candy cigarettes
- Tang
- Translucent electronics
- Cheat Code books
- 1(800) COLLECT & “00 it’s magic!”
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
Can you elaborate? What would happen?
You’d hear a distinct repetitive buzzing sound in the speakers right before the phone rang.
Hmmm that’s interesting. What’s the physics behind that?
Everything is an antenna.
Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.
Using a hole punch to make 5 1/4" disks double sided! Saved a lot of money!
I finally found one I don’t understand!
5 1/4" floppy disk drives had little sensors that would detect a notch in the side of the rectangular disk sleeve (well outside of the round magnetic disk inside). Open notch meant “writeable”. Manufacturers would sell “one sided” disks cheaper with missing notch for the backside of the disk to prevent using it. You could use a hole punch to pierce the soft plastic sleeve and make a “writable” hole at the correct spot. The disks inside were identical on both sides, there never was a “one-sided floppy disk”, technically. This was during the “C64 and everybody got the games by exchanging floppy disks on the school yard” phase of home computing (ca 1985). Prices for floppy disks mattered a lot back then.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
My family always went on holiday to Ireland so they had a map for it. When I was little I used to love opening that thing and picturing all the places we could go.
And you stuck to the main, very large highways instead of trying the smaller routes. I always wonder if the Waze era of travel has helped or hurt smaller communities.
Great question.
One of the examples that comes to mind is from the SF Bay Area:
Los Gatos residents say Google’s Waze app causing gridlock, blocking only wildfire escape route
There has to be some coffee shop or antiques store somewhere that navigation apps have brought back from the brink though.
