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.
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)
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.
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.
That’s fair. I was younger when the change happened and fully unaware of it’s scope.
Jenny I’ve got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don’t change your numberEight six seven five three oh nine
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.
Where I live now, area codes have been subdivided several times, then they went to overlays because there are just too many numbers. There are several area codes your neighbors might be, even if they have a local number.
I’m trying to always keep mine because a good 20 years ago they stopped giving it out altogether, so now it’s “rare”
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 ;-)
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!
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…
I think I see boobs!
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.
Haha, my father and I did that for Battle of Britain and… Mines of Titan, I think, was the other one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 still play the role of navigator to this day…
My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
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 :-)
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
Cut a little square hole in the side of a 5.25" floppy to double its capacity.
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.
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.
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.
Jem!!!
Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.
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.
Party lines! You’d share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You’d hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
- 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
- 1(800) COLLECT & “00 it’s magic!”
I’m confused by your inclusion of Tang. I mean, in some places it’s still sold and consumed everywhere. Honey Lemon Tang is the bomb, btw.
That’s likely more from personal preference and not having looked for it at the grocery store. I was more remembering the old monkey(?) commercials and everyone talking about it because it was from “NASA.”
Never knew Tang still existed. I only knew it during my childhood
My crazy friends and I used to mix a tang packet into a 600ml of jolt soda, which was just cola with extra caffeine… We spent a lot of time vibrating with energy after drinking it.
- The planet Pluto
What do you mean? It’s only been googles… 18 years… since… whoa…
Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
And then the #&@)#% sportsball game before your show ran long, so your recording cut off before the end of the show because the tape ran out…
Ugh yesss. I forgot that was even a possibility.
When I was 2 or 3 year old our Family had a VCR. I still remember watching Popeye using VCR.
Popeye was one of my favorite shows I remember watching over and over and over again. Singing and acting it out. I also had recordings of the Pink Panther and I think one of, if not the first animated Superman movies or cartoons.
That’s also an old memory you unlocked of a home video of myself maybe 3-4 ish “playing Popeye” singing “Popeye the sailor man, toot toot!” and I would take a drink from my Dad’s cup pretending it was spinach and acting like my biceps popped out and then promptly sneezing in my Dad’s face.
Good times.
I remember VCRs being mind-blowingly cool new tech. Only rich people had them. And colour TV. Who can afford that?
I remember my dad surprising us one night with a pizza and a rented VCR.
I remember hearing about color TVs, even seeing a few in stores but no way we could afford one …
Then my Dad signed up for a remote class through DeVry Institue of Technology (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_%26_Howell) where the final project was to build a color TV!
— I don’t remember what term we used for “online classes” before there was an online
Bro, Tang actually still exists!
MTV only had music video
Video killed the radio star. Still remember watching Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.
MTV existed
