I got a masters degree in 2003. None of my classmates ever used a slide rule.
Manual transmissions
Postage stamps
Pop in glass bottles
Rexall drug stores
Sears
The author has obviously forgotten it--or forgotten basic mathematics. The Apollo 11 moon landing was on July 20, 1969. That was 42 years ago.
steam shovels, steam rollers, steam ships
110 Film
Carbon paper
Print wheels
Eating canned sardines
vacuum tube test stations
Replacement headlights half the size of a cantaloup that needed to be aimed
Those who are as old as I and look at this list will find other things that come to mind and the list could become endless. Before credit cards, it didn’t matter if you forgot your check book, all merchants had blank universal checks. Might be interesting to see things that we have today that we didn’t have then - certainly the NSF acronym didn’t exist.
Slide rules are faster than calculators or computers. So is the abacus.
Oil can spouts
Skate key
Milk box at front door
Galoshes (sp?)
S & H Green Stamps
Just today I was manually unlocking the door on my 1984 BMW and thinking about what an old-school thing to do that was.
What’s with the rubber overshoes/galoshes disappearing? I thought people still used those. What has replaced them?
Excellence.
Xer Ping
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing
____________________________________________________
I would hope my grandchildren never know about this
The moon landing I will tell them about happened in 1969
42 years ago...
Is this The Onion ???
And it really seems retro to remember cashiers at the grocery store manually typing in the prices.
Strange to think that joysticks are a goner. I've never been able to work the new control pad things.
Vinyl albums I think will live on because they were the original medium that so much great music was recorded on, and because they sound great.
I'm amazed at how dated analog video looks now. You see a camcorder video from the 90s on YouTube and it looks ancient.
Carbon paper disappearing. That's a weird one. I guess those manual credit card things that went "ka-chunk!" are doomed too.
I can remember the smell of mimeographs from when I was a kid in school in the '80s. The teacher would hand out the quiz and it would have the purple writing and sometimes be slightly damp with mimeograph fluid.
Cars with metal bumpers and ash trays. In fact, homes and office buildings with ash trays. It used to be just normal for places to smell like cigarette smoke.
Phone booths and public phones.
Incandescent brake lights on cars.
Penny candy.
Real M-80’s.
Getting on the campus bus with a shotgun to go rabbit hunting.
A bubbler on the hose bib.
Leaving the house on summer mornings with your bat and mitt and not coming back until sunset.
Helping Hand in the window.
Ice cream truck.
Rotary dial phone.
Playing outside til the street light came on.
I have one.
Not knowing the sex of your baby until it was born. It seems amazing to me (and sort of missing something) that everyone knows what they are going to have in advance. That inital call from the recovery room - It’s a baby boy!
And people rushing in with little blue blankets they just ran out to buy to bring baby home in.
While working as a DJ we used reel-to-reel tape recorders to play commercials and promos.
Today, I suppose all of that is on CDs or something similar.
And BTW, we actually had live people running the station. Today, there are no announcers, just computers which play the music and commercial CDs and in the case of national talk radio, the entire process is automated as the local station’s computer turns the network on and off.
Sometimes it’s fun to say to people when this topic comes up “you know, isn’t it amazing that for a child today, there’s been only one Queen of England in their lifetime.”
It’s a good way to see if people are listening.