Old things youngins might like to know

[KarynMcD]

And the phone thing was just sad. It would be awful having to stay in one spot to talk on the phone. And the phones didn't even do anything else. You could only use them for talking. Ugh. Lots of times I want to talk to someone without actually speaking to them. Without texting you couldn't even do that. And it would be so dangerous to leave home without a phone. What if something happened?  You couldn't even call for help. That's awful. I just really can't imagine how people got along without a phone.

It's amazing that humans have survived has long as we have.

You can't do ANYTHING without a phone, tablet or laptop. You couldn't look stuff up or anything. I don't know how people even learned anything back then. Very very sad.

There were these things called "books" and they were kept in a "library."  Millions of trees died so that these books could exist. You would go to the library and you would look through a huge index called a "card catalog" where you would flip through cardboard cards to search for the topic you were interested in. That card would tell you where in the library the book would be. You then walked to the location and take the book with you. Then you manually read through the book to learn about things. If you were lucky, there was a comprehensive index in the book to point you to the correct pages to read.
Most of the books you could take home for free to do your research. Some books had to stay in the library though. You had to read them there.

Well since those ginormas computers didn't have as much power as my iPhone what was the purpose of having them at all? I mean what could you even do with them?

You know they took us to the moon and you're iPhone was only released 11 1/2 years ago.
If you haven't seen the movie "Hidden Figures," watch it. It came out in 2016. It shows some of the original "computers" in it. I think HBO has the streaming rights to it.

She said she was PTX operator.

Nit pick: PBX or Private Branch Exchange.

Do you know what a "nit" is and why you would "pick" it?


Now let me tell you about a "phone book"....

[Anne Blake]

At Christmas time when we wanted to call grandma back east we would have to ring the operator, request the call, hang up and then wait for the operator to put it through when a line opened up. It would sometimes take half an hour.

My partner used the old crank phone and let the operator put through any call. But that was on the farm and they had the choice of using the outhouse or on really cold Iowa nights, the chamber pot. Bathing was in a galvanized tub in the kitchen with water heated on the wood burning stove.......and not a computer in the house.

Tia Anne

[tgirlamg]

Karyn!!!

Love the hair girl!!!... Killin' it!!!

Phone books are what we sat on as a kid if we were too low for a haircut... My Grandparents had a "party line" on their phone system where multiple households shared the same phone line... If the picked up the phone they could hear your conversation or you could hear theirs...

[tgirlamg]

At Christmas time when we wanted to call grandma back east we would have to ring the operator, request the call, hang up and then wait for the operator to put it through when a line opened up. It would sometimes take half an hour.

My partner used the old crank phone and let the operator put through any call. But that was on the farm and they had the choice of using the outhouse or on really cold Iowa nights, the chamber pot. Bathing was in a galvanized tub in the kitchen with water heated on the wood burning stove.......and not a computer in the house.

Tia Anne

And don't forget the fear of having to take out a loan if a long distance call went too long!!!

My dads side of the family was from Iowa too Tia Anne!... Galva in NW Iowa and I lived there in Ames for a couple years in the early 2000s

[Julia1996]

It's amazing that humans have survived has long as we have.

There were these things called "books" and they were kept in a "library."  Millions of trees died so that these books could exist. You would go to the library and you would look through a huge index called a "card catalog" where you would flip through cardboard cards to search for the topic you were interested in. That card would tell you where in the library the book would be. You then walked to the location and take the book with you. Then you manually read through the book to learn about things. If you were lucky, there was a comprehensive index in the book to point you to the correct pages to read.
Most of the books you could take home for free to do your research. Some books had to stay in the library though. You had to read them there.

You know they took us to the moon and you're iPhone was only released 11 1/2 years ago.
If you haven't seen the movie "Hidden Figures," watch it. It came out in 2016. It shows some of the original "computers" in it. I think HBO has the streaming rights to it.


Nit pick: PBX or Private Branch Exchange.

Do you know what a "nit" is and why you would "pick" it?


Now let me tell you about a "phone book"....

We have a phone book. They give us a new one every year even though they are obsolete now.

Yes I know about nits. I learned about those is cosmetology school. Ewww! Lice!

[Cassi]

And don't forget the fear of having to take out a loan if a long distance call went too long!!!

My dads side of the family was from Iowa too Tia Anne!... Galva in NW Iowa and I lived there in Ames for a couple years in the early 2000s

Party Lines - The original social media

The first phone my parents had was a "Party Line" which was four or five neighbors hooked up on the same phone and you'd have to take turns using it.  I remember my mom going sush, because she was eves dropping on the neighbor's phone call.

[Sarah_P]

What is really scary is that my modern day smart phone has about the same battery life than that box. And the call quality today is a lot worse than back then. Rarely had any dropped calls.

Might not have been all that healthy, I carried it in a backpack and it had 8W transmit power. You would literally get grilled while making a phone call

Oh, I SO would have rigged it to look like a Ghostbusters proton pack....

[Sarah_P]

Story wise is often the big one that drew/draws people to anime explicitly. Ever tried to watch an old US TV series? Even the dramas are almost to a last very episodic, with little to no continuity or overarching stories. They were designed to be viewed one episode at a time, and if you missed an episode, no big deal. Anime was overwhelmingly the opposite, and would usually feature robust and well developed storylines spanning the duration of an entire series. Certainly episodic comedies and shows in general existed, but they were largely the exceptions. In other words, it has always been more like western television is now. (Which because of on demand viewing, concerns about missing episodes has largely evaporated and TV execs became far more willing to green light such serial story telling.)

Bringing up our discussion in another thread, Babylon 5 was pretty much the first US series to do this. The creator / writer Straczynski was definitely inspired by anime storylines, too. He almost couldn't get any network or studio to pick it up, since they all thought the idea was crazy.

Today it continues to be popular because of the nerd cache it developed previously, coupled with that there are still many themes and genres that aren't considered marketable to western TV execs, but people still want to watch. (Giant robots for one.)

WOOOO!! Giant Robots!! Oh... sorry. 

Seriously though, if you want an idea of just how amazing anime can be, check out movies from Studio Ghibli. I personally recommend Laputa (Castle in the Sky).

[Roll]

Seriously though, if you want an idea of just how amazing anime can be, check out movies from Studio Ghibli. I personally recommend Laputa (Castle in the Sky).

My personal favorite Miyazaki work! (Well, except for maybe Castle of Cagliostro, but that is a very different beast than the Ghibli films.) Laputa always gets overlooked compared to the later films for some reason.

(For those who don't know, Miyazaki, the main guy at Studio Ghibli, is pretty much considered the greatest animation director of all time. Ask anybody at Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks/etc. and they will tell you that to a person.)

[sarah1972]

[Redlo]

I cut my nerd teeth on a coco like that!!! Also read a magazine that was devoted to it. You type in about 3 pages of code and got a really low quality program for all your hard work
~Patty

[Roll]

Chess and Skiing? Now I've seen everything.

[Laurie]

Oh yes the Trash 80

I waited until PCs came out and bought a Sperry Univac  8088 IBM PC clone made by Mitsubishi It cost me $2400.00 and that was a bargain because I worked for Sperry Univac. It came with 16k memory and two 5 1/4  floppy drives  disk, a keyboard and a green display. State of the art stuff back then. I bought more memory chips and a memory card to upgrade it to 64K. I later was able to add a full height 5 MB hard drive.
  Favorite text game at the time was text version Bards Tale. Mapping out the different level on desk blotter sized graph paper.

[tgirlamg]

I won't take long for the D-Wave Quantum Computer to be as antiquated as the TRS 80...

Onward we go...

[Julia1996]

I won't take long for the D-Wave Quantum Computer to be as antiquated as the TRS 80...

Onward we go...

I always find it weird how everything changes from decade to decade. Something state of the art quickly becomes obsolete. It's not just technology that changes it's style and even attitudes. I've seen a lot of my grandma's picture albums. I have to say the 1980s had the most hideous hair, clothes and makeup! One picture of my grandma comes to mind from the 80s. She's wearing this butt ugly puffy blouse with huge shoulder pads that make her look like a football player, her hair is kind of big and puffy and she's wearing these super huge square glasses with a small silver J on the corner of the lens. Wow! Talk about UGLY! I asked her why there was a J on the glasses and she said it was the initial of her first name. She said it was a thing for a brief period back then to have little silver or gold initials on your glasses.  Ok.........  Then I saw a picture of my dad as a teenager and didn't even recognize him. When I saw the picture I asked him who was that slob and he told me the slob was him. His clothes were ratty, he had a face full of scruff  and his hair was shaggy and looked like it had never been brushed. He looked like a homeless person. I asked him why he looked like that and he said it was called grunge and it was the thing at that time. That's crazy. I've never seen my dad with anything but buzzed or semi buzzed hair and clean shaven. As hideous as people looked in past decades 20 or 30 years from now someone will probably  look at a picture of me from 2018 and think I look stupid and awful.

[sarah1972]

OMG... Yes Laurie! I had one of those too... Green screen, two floppy drives... I splurged and had 256k of RAM... I had a friend working with computers and he got me an hold 10 MB hard drive after about a year. He also got me an old teletype machine as printer. It must have weight 100 lbs and had a built in keyboard. 7 needles and the printhead was the size of my fist. Raw mechanical power...

Oh yes the Trash 80

I waited until PCs came out and bought a Sperry Univac  8088 IBM PC clone made by Mitsubishi It cost me $2400.00 and that was a bargain because I worked for Sperry Univac. It came with 16k memory and two 5 1/4  floppy drives  disk, a keyboard and a green display. State of the art stuff back then. I bought more memory chips and a memory card to upgrade it to 64K. I later was able to add a full height 5 MB hard drive.
  Favorite text game at the time was text version Bards Tale. Mapping out the different level on desk blotter sized graph paper.

[Jessica_Rose]

I have been around for quite a while, and you (Julia) would have been considered beautiful in every decade. Some things are quickly destined for the dust bin of history, while other are timeless. Typically things that are simple (I am not calling you simple!) yet elegant will stand the test of time. Hairstyles, clothing, and makeup fads will change over the years, and many times they will come full circle - things that may be fading out now may came back in style 20 - 30 years from now. A simple pair of blue jeans has always been acceptable casual clothing in every decade, but mini skirts have come and gone several times over the last 50 years.

[Sarah_P]

  I waited until PCs came out and bought a Sperry Univac  8088 IBM PC clone made by Mitsubishi It cost me $2400.00 and that was a bargain because I worked for Sperry Univac. It came with 16k memory and two 5 1/4  floppy drives  disk, a keyboard and a green display. State of the art stuff back then. I bought more memory chips and a memory card to upgrade it to 64K. I later was able to add a full height 5 MB hard drive.
  Favorite text game at the time was text version Bards Tale. Mapping out the different level on desk blotter sized graph paper.

I worked with Apple II's at school in the 80s. Loved playing Hitchhiker's Guide, Zork, and Oregon Trail.
My first home computer was a 386 (cost around $1200 I think?), with a 32MB hard drive! I remember being amazed at how much storage space that was back then (I called it 'The Beast'). I didn't believe at the time that I'd ever manage to fill up the drive.    I also remember being amazed how incredibly fast a 2400 baud modem seemed.... 

[Julia1996]

I have been around for quite a while, and you (Julia) would have been considered beautiful in every decade. Some things are quickly destined for the dust bin of history, while other are timeless. Typically things that are simple (I am not calling you simple!) yet elegant will stand the test of time. Hairstyles, clothing, and makeup fads will change over the years, and many times they will come full circle - things that may be fading out now may came back in style 20 - 30 years from now. A simple pair of blue jeans has always been acceptable casual clothing in every decade, but mini skirts have come and gone several times over the last 50 years.

Thank you. That's very sweet to say.

[Dena]

I have to say the 1980s had the most hideous hair, clothes and makeup! One picture of my grandma comes to mind from the 80s. She's wearing this butt ugly puffy blouse with huge shoulder pads that make her look like a football player, her hair is kind of big and puffy and she's wearing these super huge square glasses with a small silver J on the corner of the lens.

Come on!!! My avatar was taken in the very early 90s with the style I was wearing in the 80s. In addition, those blouses where perfect for me. I would pull the shoulder pads out of any new blouse and the blouse would still fit perfectly. Now I have to be careful with a new blouse as there might not be enough room in the shoulder area. If I find one that has shoulder pads in it today, I shouldn't have fit issues.