This is one of those tangent posts because history – post WWII American social history – is one of my favorite subjects. I was at a friend’s family dinner at a restaurant. There were about ten folks there including a funny young man about 12 years old. This got me to thinking. What are the things he will never see that were common when I was 12 years old?
Some are obvious:
- Cassettes/LPs
- Rotary dial phone
- Public telephones
- Roadside assistance call boxes on the interstate highways
- Lots of litter in the streets
- Pull tab beverage cans
- Smoking indoors
Some are not so obvious:
- Seven digit phone dialing
- Pagers
- Music CDs
- CRT monitors and televisions
- Paper boys (I used to be one)
- Rusty cars
- Fax machines
So, I throw this out to my astute and brilliant readers. What are the things that were common in our youth and that kids simply won’t see now?
Le Bar du Comments is open.
NMH
/ October 1, 2011Conversation with an attractive yet modest, non self-absorbed woman.
*sigh*
*clicks on favorite porn fetish site*
wingman
/ October 1, 2011Not sure I ever remember that.
Odds
/ October 1, 2011Even in my mid-twenties, I volunteer with kids around 10-12, so I’ve seen their confusion when I mentioned things I remember. The Internet dial-up tone, floppy disks (actual floppies, and the hard 3.5′s), computer mouses with balls (so much joke fodder, gone forever…), and lawn darts come to mind.
M.A.W. Blogger
/ October 1, 2011Overhead projectors in class
Dot-matrix/ribbon computer printers
Public cigarette vending machines
Scrambled “porn” on cable
Dial-up modems that hogged a phone line
Answering machines that used cassette tapes and mini-cassettes
deti
/ October 1, 2011Card catalogues in public libraries
Encyclopedias
Books with actual paper pages, hard binding and dust covers (not completely gone but will become less common)
Chalkboards in classrooms
DVD video cameras
just visiting
/ October 1, 2011Children playing unsupervised in parks
riding bikes with out helmets
being able to buy smokes for my parents
big wheels
just visiting
/ October 1, 2011baby walkers
cloth diapers with safety pins
daring someone to eat pop rocks and soda
jack
/ October 1, 2011Female chastity.
Iowa Jim
/ October 1, 2011Cameras that use film
Will S.
/ October 1, 2011Typewriters
Communism
Will S.
/ October 1, 2011Duck-and-Cover
Nuclear war fears (because we fear other things now more, not because the threat is actually any less)
Arch
/ October 1, 2011Rotary dial phones
Phones with cords!
“Blind dialing” a phone number without an LCD to tell you which number you got wrong
BBSing
Cars: Plymouth, Mercury, Pontiac, Saturn
Arcades
wingman
/ October 1, 2011Black lights
Boeing 707′s
Billie Jean King
Blizzard of ’78 in Boston
Buying alcohol at 18
Drinking with teachers
Having sex with teachers
Will S.
/ October 1, 2011“Having sex with teachers” – that still happens, at least, we keep hearing about female teachers and male students in the news… Probably the reverse still happens too, occasionally, yet that never gets as much attention, because they tend to hide the identity of the female students – but they’re not as reticent to hide that of male students sexually exploited by female teachers. Double standard, strikes again…
Athol Kay: Married Man Sex Life
/ October 2, 2011I grew up with two TV channels. If something happened on TV the night before *everyone* was talking about it the next day.
sestamibi
/ October 2, 2011Beer/soda cans with pull tabs?? Hell, I remember “church keys”!
Bb
/ October 2, 2011- Kids riding in the front seat of cars with their parents (one of my favorite memories) and nobody wearing seat belts
- VCRs
- purple inked pages in schools (from “ditto” machines)
- film development stores (like Kodak huts with the yellow roofs)
- full service gas stations (an attendant coming out, pumping your gas, checking the oil, and wiping down our windshield)
- toys not made in china
P Ray
/ October 2, 2011Printed shareware software catalogs
Jester
/ October 14, 2011Wind-up watches
Old Coke that became “New” Coke… Which sucked so they made Coke Classic
Oakley wrap arounds and Chip N Pepper clothes (Who remembers hyper-color shirts? lol)
Televisions that had no remotes
Manual windows in a car
Going to the grocery store and the prices were on each package and all wrung-in manually by a cashier
Credit card imprint devices/Those books the CC company used to send out weekly with all the stolen credit card #’s before we could just swipe a card.
Colecovision and Atari 2600… Games on cartridges
Playing outside
When I was in College, I could smoke in class lol
Non twist off beer caps/Stubbie bottles/glass pop/soda bottles
Candy stores =)
Pinball machines… Do these even exist anymore?
Arcade games that cost $0.25
Dot matrix and daisy-wheel printers
BNC network connectors
Magazines that had all the code of a small program or game that you had to manually copy into your computer
Cell phones that were only portable because they were installed in your car lol
Bars of flash bulbs/cubes
Saturday morning cartoons that didn’t suck!
Bob
/ October 16, 2011The punchlines/end shot of RoadRunner cartoons!
Susan Walsh
/ October 16, 2011There’s a great song about this by The Killers. Read My Mind. Here are the relevant excerpts:
Andrew
/ October 17, 2011“Card catalogues in public libraries”
How about libraries in general??
Or…
- Bookshelves (I give them 25 years tops)
- Photo albums
- Passports (ok, maybe it will be another 50 years, but eventually…)
- File cabinets
- MP3 players
- Shopping malls, or clothes stores in general (3D imaging will make trying things on unnecessary)
johnnymilfquest
/ October 17, 2011God I really hope that fax machines die out eventually.
I did some temporary work for a company only last year that wanted their employees to fax time sheets in to the office.
WTF?
AnonymousDog
/ October 17, 2011Private Man,
I don’t think I am all that much older than you, but I can remember 4 digit phone dialling and party lines. I can also remember 8-track tapes, manual transmissions, (column shifts , no less) tube radios and televisions, console stereos, wah-wah pedals, and Album Oriented Rock radio stations.
Hamster Tamer
/ April 12, 2012A Navy with battleships, and a NASA that got us to the moon with zero Political Correctness.