Once a person left the house, you couldn’t reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
But was anybody home?
No, he was there all alone.
he didn’t leave the building?
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.”
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?
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
Jenny I’ve got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don’t change your numberEight six seven five three oh nine
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.
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who’s got that kind of time when you’re using a rotary phone?
That’s wild. We did have an old antique rotary phone though! My sister and I would play with it like a toy unplugged but it was also perfectly functional. You just had to be fast because it seemed like in later years the ‘timeout’ between dialing numbers had gotten shorter. You’d have to dial two 9’s in a row and before you could finish the second 9, you’d get some kind of “I’m sorry, the number you have reached is not available” message.
This was around sporadically in the US Great Plains until maybe the 1990s. And calling outside your city but within the same area code was an eight-digit call:
1 + seven-digit local phone number
I still can’t quite believe it, especially when my city added a 6th area code a few years back.
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.
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.
there was a time without cell phones? no way!
Nonsense, you paged them and then they called you back from a pay-phone.
Sure, if you were wealthy enough to have a pager.
Pffff $10/month was cheaper then a phone line. Scraping together like $100 was a bit harder.
Being mistaken for a drug dealer… yeah, that never happened ;-)
It is now safe to turn off your computerAlso:
And then there was the worst sight in the world…
Oh no! I wonder what the numbers mean. Looks like a hex dump of a 32-bit integer, probably an error code given that the number is so small.
It means “your Mac is dead. Buy a new computer.”
Oh NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Glad you didn’t embed the worst site in the world.
“Scars from Ogrish run deep“, the kids wouldn’t know
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.
I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
I’m not old enough to know this one.
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.
I’m not young enough to know what “cap” and “no cap” mean
Same
I edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
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.
But you need this special plastic lense to record the word, but you only get that one.
Huh? What does this mean?
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.
wheel that came with monkey island
http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate
I think I see boobs!
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
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…
Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
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.
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.
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.
The good ol’ Road Atlas.
Also an excellent autism diagnosis tool.
No joke. My parents are convinced I’m autistic because I used to read the yellow pages (British phone book) to calm down when I was little.
I read the yellow pages to calm down one time when I was on acid.
Very Withnail and I
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
Cutting a notch in your floppy disk to write protect it…
Don’t forget the stickers to un-write protect it :-)
Chewing up a piece of paper and shove the goo into the holes of a casette you didn’t like so you could record on it
You could also just have put tape over the hole…
We’d put tape over the holes, I remember recording Death Metal albums over my parents old exercise cassettes, for example.
I prefer to believe they never noticed
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
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.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
I remember rushing home to catch The Flintstones.
I would rush home to watch GI Joe. If I got there quick enough I could catch the last few minutes of Jem.
If I got there quick enough I could catch the last few minutes of Jem.
Truly outrageous.
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.
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.
I would go to the video rental store to play video games.
God, renting games from blockbuster was amazing.
Played so many great GameCube games that way.
Blockbuster didn’t exist when we were renting games for the Atari 2600. River Raid!
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.
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”.
Actually things like the ZX Spectrum predated SCART plugs and their video signal came in instead via the antenna input.
(And this was everywhere, not just the US)
So the guy in the thread posted by the OP might just be older than you think.
We had an SNES hooked up to the antenna input for the simple reason that if you’re a kid who wants a TV in the attic, away from adult interference, it’s not going to be a brand-new model but a hand-me-down from the living room.
Still we programmed channel 1 to the SNES’s frequency so we wouldn’t have to switch channels after turning the thing on. On the console side though composite outputs quickly became ubiquitous as including them involves little more than bypassing the RF encoder. Speaking of the ZX Spectrum.
Are you sure about that? I thought the advice was to never trust a SCART.
you’re thinking of a shart. A scart is long piece of material you wrap around your neck to keep warm.
You could get cheap cables that don’t have all conductors and/or the shielding wasn’t up to spec but that stuff hasn’t changed a bit over the decades: USB, DisplayPort and HDMI have the exact same problem.
Thanks, as a GenZ i did never imagine such a thing
I was born in October 96 so gen z and I grew up with a mega drive and PS1 so scart cables were very familiar. The only TV we had for years was a CRT so I was more than familiar with red yellow and white connectors into the back as well.
You were born in 1996 and you don’t consider yourself Millennial as denoted by being born when the Millennium changed (2000)?
1996 is end millennial, and start gen z.
Though, usually if you got hand me downs as a child, you’d get the same experiences as the people born 3-6 years before you.
That said, I’ve that splitting people up and putting them into groups like this is a pseudo science over generalization.
I thought it was based on “became a teenager/young adult” at the turn of the millennium? (I know they’ve moved the definitions a few times though)
They’re Zillennial.
Sorry I replied to the wrong comment earlier.
Those are called composite, just so you know
There were composite and component cables for these consoles.
My mnemonic device for remembering which of the two that sucked was that: one is called component, and the other is compo-shite :)
As a gen Z I don’t even know what some of these words mean when used in this context
Yeah but SCART is just kinda fun to say.
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.
- 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
