You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.
My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.
In fact, before MBAs McKinsey'd the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant... Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can't tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it's normal..
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you'd copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
It's a US thing, where the glory of SCART was unknown thus they had to continue using the antenna input of their TV to connect their consoles to, also, as far as I'm aware only NTSC has fixed frequency assignments. Elsewhere in the world you just programmed the TV to display the console's output on whatever number you wanted, or, if you had a proper input for non-antenna signals, switch the TV to "AV".
A stack of 15 floppy disks for one program. Please insert the next disk to continue (I can't remember the exact wording). Command prompt to A:\ and having to see what the install program might be called. Bring amazed that CDs could autorun programs.
Failing at a pc game wasn't necessarily on you. It could also be on the dirt gathered by the ball inside your mouse. Later, of course, you realized it was on you all along.
Sticking my finger into the coin return of every pay phone, and if there was a dime, checking the date on it because silver coins were still floating around in circulation.
Same thing every time one of us got our hands on a quarter. If it was silver, we'd all fight over it.
I don't remember any of us ever cashing one in. If we found one, it would just go into a shoebox, ultimately getting lost to time.
You could only program like 9 phone numbers on your phone because it only had 10 buttons for it and one of them was reserved for 911. All other numbers you either memorized, wrote down in a book or on cards, or dialed 411 to talk to a stranger whose job was to provide you with the contact information of people and businesses.
I was a beta tester for AOL, so they’d send me all of those dumb discs. None of the actual software ever changed or improved. All they did was change the graphics around the guts of it. Their whole strategy was essentially fooling people via appearances. I liked collecting the discs though.
My first internet before AOL was Prodigy. I was in a DOS terminal when I was a kid.
Sometimes you'd go to pick up the phone to call someone but you couldn't because your neighbor was busy talking, so you'd have to put the receiver down gently in hopes they didn't hear it and think you were eavesdropping on them.
There was a video game console that used clear colored plastic that you would stick onto the tv to show different colored areas on the screen. It also came packaged with dice and paper money.
Picking up the phone to make a call, and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not checking for a dialtone before dialling. Alternatively, learning how to screw out the mouth piece (muting the handset) and pick up the receiver without making a noise so I could listen to the neighbour gossip.
How to test vacuum tubes to fix the TV. Or maybe just watching black and white TV and I was the remote. Being able to buy bottled pop out of a pop machine for 15 cents AND it had Near Beer in it.
The sounds your computer would make if it was connecting to dialup Internet, or the sound you would hear if someone was using said dialup and you picked up the phone.
PC speakers and how they differed from regular speakers, or the fact that you needed a sound card if you wanted sound that wasn't just beeps.
I still have a distinct memory of trying to get on the Internet and then hearing my dad's voice coming through the computer speakers. He'd been on the phone with someone.
I was recently at a party with a SNES connected to a noisy channel-3 RF modulator because the TV couldn't switch to its composite input via the front panel buttons, and they didn't have the remote. I wandered the house until I found a universal remote, then programmed AUX to match the TV and switched inputs. Just things you learn in the '90s.
"video games" were mechanical, and you interacted with targets by manipulating a metal spherical pixel using, hand eye coordination, timing and physics. You were rewarded with multiple "pixels" if you were good enough.
Computer and console games came exclusively on CD before the switch to DVD. When you bought a triple AAA title for console,you didn't have to spend 3 days waiting for day 1 patches to install. You could probably fit the entire game library of your favorite console back in the day on a thumb drive nowadays.
I actually know what this means, from getting my mom’s Atari to work on my grandmother’s TV
I think it was channel 2 for that one though, idk. We switched to using the flatscreen because of the annoying high pitched noise. (To the annoyance of all retro gamers who read this)
You used to have to print out a document and then scan it into another machine that would use landlines to send it to another printer so someone, somewhere else, could have the document.
Video games involved putting a sheet of acetate over the b&w tv screen and then drawing with a wax pencil where the dashed line appears (Winky Dink ruled - and don’t forget to put the acetate on the screen or Dad will get mad).
Let's listen to this radio station play an unholy noise for about 30 minutes, record it in a cassette tape, and play the game recorded in those BAUD BOIS
Channel 3 or 4 I believe. They're set such that woukd allow you to choose if one or the other was selected for something like a vcr. This was the precursor to different inputs on tvs.
Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)
The top dial on the TV had the VHF (lower number) stations. The bottom had the UHF( higher number) stations. In spite of all those channels being available, many places only had three, maybe four that had a station in range to be received intelligibly.
VIC-20, yes. But dad’s tantalizing work computer, nah. We used to make time to type things and wait together. Like, we would have dinner together and then King’s Quest would have eventually loaded and we would all have walked into a River accidentally together, as a family.
I stood on a sawhorse and touched the light bulb's base. My brother stood on the ground, touched the light bulb base, and shocked himself silly. It hung from the ceiling, just the way it was.
yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:
Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.
I remember being able to turn off the computer by just flipping the power switch for it. I also remember not being able to do that because it would take 30 minutes to do a memory check.
When I was a kid a single gold coin minted from the empire of Ashoka could buy you a house, a servant, a couple acres of land, some cows, a couple pigs, chickens, and a horse
♬ Step by step
Day by day
A fresh start over
A different hand to play
The deeper we fall
The stronger we stay
And we'll be better
The second time around ♬
Being subscribed to a service that brought about a dozen magazines every week that we would rent including Donald duck, gossip magazines, etc. Sometimes getting to sneak the 'adult' one to the bathroom and spend some quality time there.