Tell me what it means
Tell me what it means
826 comments
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Once a person left the house, you couldn't reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
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I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
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My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn't be long distance (oh yeah here's one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren't calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you're going through their city. It's like, "Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper."
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For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?
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And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
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Jenny I've got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don't change your numberEight six seven five three oh nine
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That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
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Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you're calling locally. The phone system will just assume you're calling the local area code if you don't dial one. In my area, it's pretty easy because the only people who don't have the local area code (there's only one even though it's far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.
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My grandmother still had the list of her friends’ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. You’d pick up and wait for the operator – no dialing – and then say ‘Midland 4119’ or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
By the time I was young, they’d replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadn’t taken down her cheat sheet yet.
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It is now safe to turn off your computer-
Oh man, I still remember when Windows finally powered your computer off when you shut down. My poor Nana spent half an hour trying to turn off my uncle's computer because she kept hitting the power button just after that showed up (as was tradition) but after the computer transitioned to power off, so it just kept turning on.
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I edited the file to change 'now' to 'not' just for grins.
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I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
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I'm not old enough to know this one.
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Old computers wouldn't turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).
When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don't really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is "off".
The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn't cause any damage to the system.
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You have awakened a distant memory I forgot I had.
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Accidentally hard rebooting the PC with the tip of your shoe because you wanted to readjust your seating…
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Flying being a really fun and nice experience.
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..
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To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
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But you need this special plastic lense to record the word, but you only get that one.
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I remember the wheel that came with monkey island and test drive 3. I disassembled that shit and made xerox copies, then gave them to my friends.
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Haha, my father and I did that for Battle of Britain and... Mines of Titan, I think, was the other one.
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Huh? What does this mean?
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Old anti piracy measure.
Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you'd have the manual. If you're just playing a copy you wouldn't. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
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It was anti-piracy; you had to have the physical manual to know the correct word.
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wheel that came with monkey island
http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate
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My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
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Internet you could hear, literally.
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Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I did that back in 2008 when i get into college of another state, where gps device is expensive to me and i'm still using the now ancient phone. the first thing i did is go to the book store and bought one local map, study and memorise it, looking for nearby landmark and triangulate my position when i'm lost. Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
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Young people should try doing this if possible, it's a good exercise on navigation skill.
I remember teaching orienteering to my son's scout troop.
When they complained that would never need to know that because GPS, I handed them a GPS with almost dead batteries during a hike and told them to show me.
About 10 minutes later they became much more interested in the map and compass.
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and help from strangers
And my father always refused to ask for help, so we got lost and then when he finally had to admit it, my mother asked someone and my father pretended it was all her fault ... (not so) good times.
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I still play the role of navigator to this day…
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My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
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You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
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I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren't on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.
And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.
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Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
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Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
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Cut a little square hole in the side of a 5.25" floppy to double its capacity.
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Or, as my lazy ass would do sometimes, move the slider and grab a magnet so maybe my "homework" wouldn't load and I'd get another day.
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MTV only had music video
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Video killed the radio star. Still remember watching Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.
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MTV existed
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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".
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Thanks, as a GenZ i did never imagine such a thing
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I would go to the video rental store to play video games.
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God, renting games from blockbuster was amazing.
Played so many great GameCube games that way.
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Blockbuster didn't exist when we were renting games for the Atari 2600. River Raid!
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I spent years playing games on Commodore-64. Suddenly they release the NES, and the first game I saw for it... kinda didn't look super impressive compared to the games I was playing on the 64. My buddy says: "You can rent games now" and I shook my head in disbelief at the whole thing.
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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.
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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.
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I utilized my skills of tiny writing from cheatsheets to fit every phone number I knew only a folded sticky note that lived in my wallet for probably 20 years before I realized it was long past being useful.
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I had that on a particularly study business card. I used one of those fine-tip pens and got about 40 numbers on it. Now I talk to strangers on the internet, and the points don't matter.
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Also, calling a number to get the exact time when you needed to set your clocks.
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Or calling the movie theater and listening through the entire recorded message listing the films playing and all the times they're playing at.
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My father literally had a digital rolodex device for keeping his phone numbers in for his early cellphones.
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Phones with buttons?
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Yeah, that's weird. This is a telephone:
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A wire coat hanger shoved into the back of the TV to get it working
Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it
Being hyper aware of the current status of the street lights in summer evenings
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Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it
Sprinting to the kitchen yelling "don't pick up the phone!" when it starts ringing, for the same reason.
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OMG, yes!
When I was like 11 or so, we had a company called EarthLink for Internet, and when we tried to cancel one month because we were broke, they gave us 3 months free. After the third time of that happening we realized we didn't have to pay for Internet anymore, and spent the money on a second phone line instead.
It. Was. Glorious.
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CRT TV shitty DIY antenna
\ AOL
\ Playing outside pre-smartphone era. (Rule was still around for Zillennials & Gen Z.)Come on, you can do better.
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To refuel your car, first flip down the license plate.
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I expected most of the things is this thread to be typical Gen X or Millennial stuff, but some of these post read to me as if I’m talking to someone from the late 19th century
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9600, 8-N-1
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Com port settings?
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ya
- 9600 baud (signal changes per second)
- 8 data bits per packet (as opposed to 7)
- no parity bit (no error check)
- 1 stop bit per packet (packet ends here)
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If internal, don't forget whether to use 3F8, 2F8, 3E8, or 2E8 and an unused IRQ. Any questions? Hit me up on ICQ
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Uh Oh!
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In my line of work I still do that. Not for modems, though. Usually for receiving serial data from gyros and gps.
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ATS0=1
.. or something..
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ATDT *70,1234567890
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Unless using Kermit and then 7E1 was standard.
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826 comments