I was born in England in 1955 and my first home was a post-war prefab. I haven't seen one since childhood, although I gather that there may be a few left, all at risk of demolition. When we moved out, we became the first occupants of a brand new council house with all mod cons. Those didn't include central heating, telephone or refrigerator.
We did have a b&w television (remember those?) but I subsequently spent over ten years of my childhood and teen years in countries without TV broadcasts, and eventually witnessed the first TV broadcasts in those countries. We had a coal fire but I haven't seen one of those in use for many years. Sometimes our beds were warmed with rubber hot water bottles (remember those?) but I remember that I was often shiveringly cold in bed. The prayer with "If I should die before I wake" made sense to children in those days. We often heard of acquaintances, mainly elderly, dying of pneumonia. When I awoke, there were sometimes pretty patterns on the windows that were said to be painted by Jack Frost. I haven't seen those since I was a child, no doubt thanks to central heating, although I keep the house as cold as I dare (the heating is on to protect the plumbing, not me). Instead of a regrigerator, we put foods and drinks on a stone slab in the pantry to keep cool. I didn't see my first home refrigerator until we moved to what is now part of Yemen when I was between 7 and 8. We got our first telephone when I was 13 and it was a dialled one (remember those?).
Our permanent homes had indoor toilets and modern baths but we had to use outside toilets when visiting relatives. I still occasionally see what used to be outside toilets but they are no longer in use. When visiting an aunt, and while renting a home while on holiday from Arabia, we had to use tin baths into which water had to be poured.
The toys children played with when I was small included marbles, yo-yos, hula hoops and whipping tops. I haven't seen modern children playing with them. Skill with yo-yos, hula hoops and whipping tops always eluded me. Those toys all depend on the physical law of conservation of angular momentum, so I have a theory that I generate a force field that prevents that law from working in my immediate vicinity. Bicycles also use that law to maintain balance and for good reason, I wouldn't let my father take the training wheels off until I was seven and even then I was very wobbly. Boomerangs use the same law. My grandmother brought me one after visiting Australia. It didn't come back when I threw it, of course, but I did find it and now it is just an ornament. I now try not to use anything that depends on the conservation of angular momentum.
My father sometimes received telegrams but I haven't encountered them for a very long time.
Instead of choosing VHS, my family's first videotape player was Sony Betamax. I can't remember when I last saw a Betamax tape.
I bought my first cassette audiotape (remember those?) in 1969. It was Swan Lake on one side and The Nutcracker on the other (I still have it somewhere). My brother complained that if I played that kind of music, it would ruin our Hi-Fi. My mother thought that I needed to become more normal so, still in 1969, and to my brother's disgust, she bought ME the Beatles Red and Blue albums, in good old fashioned vinyl. I did enjoy them and I still have them too, although they became more scratched and worn from my brother playing them than by me. I haven't bought vinyl records since the 1980s.
I haven't been to a drive-in movie, or a drive-in roadhouse where you would dine in your car, for many years. I don't think that they ever existed in Britain, anyway.
I haven't used a cloth handkerchief for many years.
The computing tools I use have changed over the years. When I first learned to program, I had to learn how to interpret and punch punched cards but I never used them professionally. I also had to use COBOL coding forms when using the IBM System 360 mainframe. Are any mainframes still in use anywhere? I last worked on one in the year 2000. Computer rooms used to have to be air conditioned to keep the beasts cool. Floppy disks existed when I started but they were floppy and disk shaped, not stiff and square as they later became. We had to use them when using Radio Shack TRS80s as they didn't have hard drives. I haven't used a manual flowchart template for many years but I'm sorry I mislaid my IBM one, as I regarded it as the symbol of my profession, like a doctor's stethoscope.
I programmed professionally in languages that I think are no longer used, e.g. COBOL, Fortran, Datashare and Natural. The good old days, when we wrote very long programs using a very small number of different instructions, instead of this object oriented nonsense using a large number of different instructions to write shorter programs. The old way suited the way my mind works. I didn't have a degree but finding work was easy in those days, as applicants with computer science degrees often failed the aptitude tests (lucky beggars, as they then became highly paid consultants). I never programmed professionally with assembly language, sadly, although I wanted to, so that I could do things at the level of the operating systems. I asked one of my managers whether the computer had an assembler and she replied "Yes and if you use it, you're fired!" (O ye of little faith, I couldn't have done all that much damage
.) I haven't heard of anyone programming with assembly language for many years.
