Old things youngins might like to know

[Julia1996]

Actually, if memory serves... She threw it out the car window on the freeway... 😀

She threw his severed wiener out the car window on the highway??? OMG, that is HILARIOUS! 

[Cassi]

She threw his severed wiener out the car window on the highway??? OMG, that is HILARIOUS!

You do know that she was from South America and was slightly crazy?

[TonyaW]

Yeah, I was smoking and drinking when I was 14.  I don't think there was any restriction on buying cigarettes although I was 16 before I looked old enough I could buy alcohol without an ID.  Before that we just found random people and paid them to buy it for us.

Think it was 16 for cigarettes in Wisconsin back then, so it was legal for a lot of high schoolers, though always against school rules at mine. That didn't stop a group of hard cores smokers that went out (even in winter) at lunch and sat around a tree and lit up.  I didn't smoke so never went out there. 

Drinking age was 18 and I was as tall then as I am now (6'2") so rarely got carded from 16 on. Most weekends you could find a decent chunk of the senior class at the bars near Marquette university, half of them not 18 yet. 

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[Dena]

I googled transistors and know what they are though I still don't really know how they work. They had a long technical explanation I didn't read. Technical stuff is totally boring, but I know they replaced vacuum tubes. Ok, those vacuum tubes look huge. Electronics must have been really big to use those big things. No wonder old time tvs were so big and clunky looking. Ugh.

Transistor were invented in 1947 but it took a while to get the frequency and power levels up to the point where they were practical for TVs and Radios. You are carrying around millions of them in your cell phone as they are the heart of the integrated circuit. What is an IC? On day somebody had the bright idea they could reduce the size of the transistor even more if they put two of them on the same die. From then on it was a race to see who could get the most functioning devices on a single chip. I admit they sometimes cheated and made the die bigger but they could only make it so big.

This is why the early remotes were so primitive. The hand device was nothing more than a air operated ultrasonic device (no batteries) and the TV needed a couple of tubes to receive the signal and operate the motor. By the way, order to reduce the size of the TV, they would put up to 3 tubes in a single glass envelop. This concept greatly reduced the size of the early vacuum tube computers.

[Dena]

While there wasn't much visible smoking in my high school, One time I had to go into the teacher lounge and I really regretted it. There was a cloud of smoke starting at about 4 feet of the floor and extending to the celling. You didn't need to light up in that room, all that was required was standing up and inhaling.

[Sarah_P]

Dress rules at school didn't allow boys to wear jeans or girls to wear pants of any kind.  Girls had to wear skirts, even when the temperature was -20!  Eventually, the school board was convinced that that was stupid, so they allowed girls to wear pants to and from school, but they had to change into skirts during classes.

Sadly Japan is only starting to realize these things in the last year or so....

[Julia1996]

You do know that she was from South America and was slightly crazy?

Oh. Well slightly crazy people are funny. Look at Roll. Lol.

[tgirlamg]

When I was in 8th grade... The kids who smoked had a "sit down strike" blocking the school parking lot entrance for a bigger and better smoking area!

[Roll]

Oh. Well slightly crazy people are funny. Look at Roll. Lol.

I'm even from south America! ... You know, with a lowercase s. The south part of America the country!

(This is where a group of elderly British gentlemen with handlebar mustaches and top hats tell me what a great spot of wit that twas.)

[Julia1996]

When I was in 8th grade... The kids who smoked had a "sit down strike" blocking the school parking lot entrance for a bigger and better smoking area!

A smoking area at school for the students. That's just so crazy! At my school there was no smoking anyplace on school grounds for anyone, including teachers and staff.

[Julia1996]

I'm even from south America! ... You know, with a lowercase s. The south part of America the country!

(This is where a group of elderly British gentlemen with handlebar mustaches and top hats tell me what a great spot of wit that twas.)

You are so funny! Lol

[KathyLauren]

A smoking area at school for the students. That's just so crazy! At my school there was no smoking anyplace on school grounds for anyone, including teachers and staff.

Yup, me too.

When I started high school, there was no smoking in school, except for the staff room.  But then the students petitioned the administration to allow smoking in a designated room, and they did.  That was when I was in grade 11, I think.  I guess they had it right originally.

[Julia1996]

Back when my dad still smoked he and another cop had escorted an ambulance to the ER and my dad was standing in the parking lot smoking a cigarette.  He said this older nurse, actually my dad called her an old battleaxe nurse, came out and yelled at him and told him there was no smoking on hospital grounds. So he went to the curb of the parking lot. Before she got all the way back to the doors she looked back at him and she turned around and rushed back down there and told him he was still on hospital grounds.  He asked her if she wanted him to stand in the street and she told him " if you have to smoke that nasty thing you can just cross the street Mr. Man!" My dad was really irritated telling me about it but I couldn't help laughing. The thought of an old lady terrorizing him was too funny!

[Kendra]

My obaachan (grandmother in Japan) owned the neighborhood convenience store.  I visited every other summer starting in 1969.  In the evening I'd hear clickity-clack while she did the store's accounting on an abacus.  A mechanical calculator made from wood. 

Grandpa would build a wood fire in the ofuro-house, a tiny shed out back with a wooden tub heated by a wood stove, no electricity involved.  That was the only hot water anywhere, other than a tiny heated thing next to the kitchen sink.  This wasn't out in the bamboo sticks - we were in a major city, Sendai.

In 1973 on my third visit I was thrilled to discover they upgraded to a flush toilet.  What a luxury!  I had totally hated using their bathroom, it contained a pit toilet without a seat.  Nobody in the area had enough land for an outhouse - this was all located inside a tiny house.  When a truck stopped through to pump out all the sewage it was best to just leave that part of town.  Some of the trains running before mid 1970s had bathrooms with pretty simple plumbing.  Lift the lid and you're looking at the ground.  This is why I have never been interested in walking on railroad tracks. 

[Jessica_Rose]

Today whenever you buy something at a store they just wave it over a scanner or point a little 'gun' at it to scan the UPC (Universal Product Code) and record the price. Before the use of UPC every item had a price tag on it, like a tiny post-it note. The cashier had to manually enter the price for each and every item you were buying. If there was no price tag the cashier would have to call for a price check. Needless to say checkout time was substantially longer back then.

Using the bathroom at my grandparents house at night required shoes and a flashlight. It was a wooden structure over a small pit in the backyard. Out of toilet paper? Well that was another use for the old Sears catalogs. Taking a bath usually meant a #3 washtub and cold water on the back porch. There were no neighbors around, so we were not worried about peepers.

I remember before the age of 10 I would walk by myself down to a forested creek and hike around for hours. I would just tell my parents that I was going to the creek. My parents could not see me from the house, and there were no cell phones in those days so they really had no way to find me or contact me if an emergency came up.

We never had adult supervision. In the winter we would sled down ice covered roads with traffic, on the 4th of July we would play with small explosive devices (throwing them at each other on many occasions), even using small caliber firearms (.22 caliber) in remote areas. I guess this was Darwin's Theory at work. If you were too stupid you did not survive long enough to pass your genes on to the next generation. Maybe that explains a few things today...

[Deborah]

When I lived in Korea my wife was staying in a small one room apartment near our Army Camp.  It was heated with a chunk of charcoal that heated the air under the floor.  The bathroom was a pit adjacent to a cow stall.  While it smelled really bad you always had the cow for company.  The water came from a hand pump next to the street.  One night she made me get naked and squat under the pump right there on the street while she hand pumped cold water to give me a makeshift shower.  I guess I smelled bad that day, LOL. 


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[Cassi]

Today whenever you buy something at a store they just wave it over a scanner or point a little 'gun' at it to scan the UPC (Universal Product Code) and record the price. Before the use of UPC every item had a price tag on it, like a tiny post-it note. The cashier had to manually enter the price for each and every item you were buying. If there was no price tag the cashier would have to call for a price check. Needless to say checkout time was substantially longer back then.

Using the bathroom at my grandparents house at night required shoes and a flashlight. It was a wooden structure over a small pit in the backyard. Out of toilet paper? Well that was another use for the old Sears catalogs. Taking a bath usually meant a #3 washtub and cold water on the back porch. There were no neighbors around, so we were not worried about peepers.

I remember before the age of 10 I would walk by myself down to a forested creek and hike around for hours. I would just tell my parents that I was going to the creek. My parents could not see me from the house, and there were no cell phones in those days so they really had no way to find me or contact me if an emergency came up.

We never had adult supervision. In the winter we would sled down ice covered roads with traffic, on the 4th of July we would play with small explosive devices (throwing them at each other on many occasions), even using small caliber firearms (.22 caliber) in remote areas. I guess this was Darwin's Theory at work. If you were too stupid you did not survive long enough to pass your genes on to the next generation. Maybe that explains a few things today...

While I don't remember any common or out-houses, I have heard that up until the 50's, they weren't that uncommon and even longer or later in the UK and other areas of the world.

[Siobhan Amanda]

😂 I can't think of anything, unless Star Wars counts..
I wonder whether people will still be talking about the bobbit incident in a thousand years, I really hope so🙄

[Julia1996]

Today whenever you buy something at a store they just wave it over a scanner or point a little 'gun' at it to scan the UPC (Universal Product Code) and record the price. Before the use of UPC every item had a price tag on it, like a tiny post-it note. The cashier had to manually enter the price for each and every item you were buying. If there was no price tag the cashier would have to call for a price check. Needless to say checkout time was substantially longer back then.

Using the bathroom at my grandparents house at night required shoes and a flashlight. It was a wooden structure over a small pit in the backyard. Out of toilet paper? Well that was another use for the old Sears catalogs. Taking a bath usually meant a #3 washtub and cold water on the back porch. There were no neighbors around, so we were not worried about peepers.

I remember before the age of 10 I would walk by myself down to a forested creek and hike around for hours. I would just tell my parents that I was going to the creek. My parents could not see me from the house, and there were no cell phones in those days so they really had no way to find me or contact me if an emergency came up.

We never had adult supervision. In the winter we would sled down ice covered roads with traffic, on the 4th of July we would play with small explosive devices (throwing them at each other on many occasions), even using small caliber firearms (.22 caliber) in remote areas. I guess this was Darwin's Theory at work. If you were too stupid you did not survive long enough to pass your genes on to the next generation. Maybe that explains a few things today...

The entered all the prices manually? ? How did they deduct coupons without a scanner? Oh, did they have coupons then? How did they know if something was on sale?  Someone had to remember everything that was on sale? That's awful! Grocery shopping must have taken forever!  And washing in a tub of cold water every day. That's so sad! Outhouses are like ports potties, right? Having to go outside to potty is just...nuts! What's a sears catalog? Like newspaper inserts or something? It must have felt great wiping with that. Ewww!

[Cassi]

The entered all the prices manually? ? How did they deduct coupons without a scanner? Oh, did they have coupons then? How did they know if something was on sale?  Someone had to remember everything that was on sale? That's awful! Grocery shopping must have taken forever!  And washing in a tub of cold water every day. That's so sad! Outhouses are like ports potties, right? Having to go outside to potty is just...nuts! What's a sears catalog? Like newspaper inserts or something? It must have felt great wiping with that. Ewww!

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