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Happened to me
- Thread Starter rick49
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Man I'm pretty young and I remember my brother and I being the remote control with only 5-6 channels.
There has been so much that has changed in technology over the last 50 years.
There has been so much that has changed in technology over the last 50 years.
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"and when she heard us cussin' we got the soap"
or
"when she saw the dip in my mouth she slapped it out"
or... you get the idea.
yeah my grandma was awesome. RIP
or
"when she saw the dip in my mouth she slapped it out"
or... you get the idea.
yeah my grandma was awesome. RIP
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I never really had the pleasure of a Grandma.
My dad's mom passed when he was a kid and my mom's mom passed when I was in high school. Really hits home when you have kids of your own.
My dad's mom passed when he was a kid and my mom's mom passed when I was in high school. Really hits home when you have kids of your own.
In 1953 or 4 the Grocery/gas/bar/casino, down at the crossroads, closed the bar, set up every chair in the region and we all came over. Ranchers, the road dept crew (my dad), the school teacher, state and county cops, just everybody! There was a strange box up on the bar, and when we all settled down, they turned it on.
It was magical! We were able to watch a snarling, hissing, sometimes silent, snowy Tarzan movie! Guy had to constantly fiddle with the rabbit ears just to get a kinda, sorta, image! I mean wow, this was only a mile or so from my home! My house was about 75yrds from the magnetic middle of nowhere.
One thing I still remember vividly, aside from the owner of "The Oasis" i.e. The bar, no one present, man, woman or child had ever seen tv before! It was the first time in my young life that I experienced an "electric spark" travel through a crowd! The next time I felt it was almost twenty years later at a Jimi Hendrix concert! And that my good friends is how television came to the barren wastes!
It was magical! We were able to watch a snarling, hissing, sometimes silent, snowy Tarzan movie! Guy had to constantly fiddle with the rabbit ears just to get a kinda, sorta, image! I mean wow, this was only a mile or so from my home! My house was about 75yrds from the magnetic middle of nowhere.
One thing I still remember vividly, aside from the owner of "The Oasis" i.e. The bar, no one present, man, woman or child had ever seen tv before! It was the first time in my young life that I experienced an "electric spark" travel through a crowd! The next time I felt it was almost twenty years later at a Jimi Hendrix concert! And that my good friends is how television came to the barren wastes!
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We lived out in the country, and had a party line phone for the first few years we lived in that house. Rotary dial phones, of course. Our first touch tone phone came when I was about 8 or 9. Had one phone for the whole house, and said phone started out with a 4 foot cord, and wound up with a 30 foot cord within a few years, so a person could take the phone (not just the handset but the whole shebang) from the hallway into the kitchen, or living room to speak instead of standing in the hall way to conduct a call.
We were using the "old school" no-remove TV's well into my late teens. We did have one set in the house at that time that had a remote. I think I was a senior in high school before my TV was the last in the house without a remote. And it wasn't push button - it had a knob with about 100 clicks - channels 1-99, the first or last click being "off" - we had a huge antennae array on the roof, I had UHF loop antenna on the back of the set, and you had to get the loop in just the right position, with just the right tension on the screws, or the picture went batty.
Of course DVD's were still new, and VHS was the standard. We had cabinets full of taped shows (when "taped" literally meant tape recorded not just recorded) and VHS home movies. A $1000 cam corder in the closet only slightly smaller than a professional TV camera. Batteries almost large enough to jump start a buick but that only lasted an hour if you were lucky.
Dial up internet at 2400 baud, and AOL. Then CompuServe. Our first desktop PC was running DOS and Windows 3.1 - later upgraded to 3.11 before making the leap to Windows 95 around about 1997. Best dialup we ever got was 26kbps - we were too far out, or the lines were just too poor to ever get a faster connection, despite using high end 56k modems and machines for the day.
We got our first cell phone when I was in middle school - it was the Zach Morris style brick phone with the huge antenna out the top. It was only taken with us on family road trips - otherwise it lived in a drawer. Talk minutes were expensive. No text messages on that phone. A few years later came flip phones. Then digital cameras.
Of course my son will grow up and probably never have practical experience with rotary dial phones, no hands on use of floppy discs, DOS will be studied in history books. I feel old now.
We were using the "old school" no-remove TV's well into my late teens. We did have one set in the house at that time that had a remote. I think I was a senior in high school before my TV was the last in the house without a remote. And it wasn't push button - it had a knob with about 100 clicks - channels 1-99, the first or last click being "off" - we had a huge antennae array on the roof, I had UHF loop antenna on the back of the set, and you had to get the loop in just the right position, with just the right tension on the screws, or the picture went batty.
Of course DVD's were still new, and VHS was the standard. We had cabinets full of taped shows (when "taped" literally meant tape recorded not just recorded) and VHS home movies. A $1000 cam corder in the closet only slightly smaller than a professional TV camera. Batteries almost large enough to jump start a buick but that only lasted an hour if you were lucky.
Dial up internet at 2400 baud, and AOL. Then CompuServe. Our first desktop PC was running DOS and Windows 3.1 - later upgraded to 3.11 before making the leap to Windows 95 around about 1997. Best dialup we ever got was 26kbps - we were too far out, or the lines were just too poor to ever get a faster connection, despite using high end 56k modems and machines for the day.
We got our first cell phone when I was in middle school - it was the Zach Morris style brick phone with the huge antenna out the top. It was only taken with us on family road trips - otherwise it lived in a drawer. Talk minutes were expensive. No text messages on that phone. A few years later came flip phones. Then digital cameras.
Of course my son will grow up and probably never have practical experience with rotary dial phones, no hands on use of floppy discs, DOS will be studied in history books. I feel old now.
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I remember the old remotes that were just tuning forks in a clicker box.
I'm under 50, but old enough to remember having B&W TV in the house, our first cable box, which had no remote, but a dial with about 25 channels (big jump from the 5 we had!!), and yes, messing with damn antennas to try and get a decent signal. I remember my parents buying a UHF antenna to see if we could coax one or two more channels (prior to cable). I also remember rotary phones very well and growing up as a kid and teen without the internet or cell phones. I remember having a lot of fun in those days, even without technology.
Heck, I even remember when MTV played actual music videos - all day, every day! I remember door to door encyclopedia salesmen, having a 'milk man' deliver our milk and stores not opening before 8am and closing by 8-9pm at the latest. I remember not taking pictures of every single mundane thing in your life such as what you ate for dinner, because film and processing cost money and you only used them for special occasions, and usually only photographed people - not yourself. I remember Fotomat stores. I remember saying the pledge of allegiance in school and being taught to respect the flag and our country.
All that said, I'm glad for changes and new technology, but I'm sorry for some of the things we've lost, such as respect for this country by its own citizens
Heck, I even remember when MTV played actual music videos - all day, every day! I remember door to door encyclopedia salesmen, having a 'milk man' deliver our milk and stores not opening before 8am and closing by 8-9pm at the latest. I remember not taking pictures of every single mundane thing in your life such as what you ate for dinner, because film and processing cost money and you only used them for special occasions, and usually only photographed people - not yourself. I remember Fotomat stores. I remember saying the pledge of allegiance in school and being taught to respect the flag and our country.
All that said, I'm glad for changes and new technology, but I'm sorry for some of the things we've lost, such as respect for this country by its own citizens
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Remember test patterns, having to wait for the TV to warm up, and taking tubes down
to the hardware store to use their tube tester?
to the hardware store to use their tube tester?
And TV stations going off the air for the evening.
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Yes! Sitting on the floor after Saturday night dinner with family friends over to watch Perry Mason, or Saturday Night Boxing. 3 channels, NBC, CBS, ABC and Public Broadcasting. "Turn it up, turn it down Mike!"
Grandma pretty much raised me as the folks worked 9-5 jobs, and she lived almost next door. Yeah, party line with grandma. Grandma was way old as mom was the baby of the family, and had had a bad car accident and had plates in her legs that made it so she couldn't bend her knees much. When I misbehaved she'd shout " Fetch me a switch so I can whip you you little snipe!" I never got the "Switch" and I could outrun her.
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I remember that old redneck telling me he'd never bother with a remote control for the TV.
He said, (and I quote):
He said, (and I quote):
In the Marine Corps I was a repairman for the Marine Tactical Data System (more or less a truck-based AWACS), back in 1968. That computer only used one kind of integrated circuit, a shift register. All the rest of the logic was implemented with discrete components - resistors, transistors and diodes. One 6x7 inch card had six AND gates. There was no computer language; you programmed it by putting in ones and zeros via switches and little lights in the main computer hut. There was no disk drive; the storage medium was a drum.
The MTDS was derived from the Navy's NTDS. If you want to read a fascinating story, this is one:
First-Hand:No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO - The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, NTDS - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (http://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_Tell_Me_What_to_DO_-_The_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System,_NTDS)
My first laptop was the Zenith Z181 (IIRC) with only two 720k floppy drives, running DOS of course. I think the main memory was 640k, and the CPU was an Intel 8088. Like this one:
z180pc (http://net2000plus.tripod.com/zenith181.htm)
Ran my home business on that thing...
My first modem was 300 baud, the kind you stuck a phone headset into. Amazing we could get work done at such slow rates. I used it in customer service for a computer company (Floating Point Systems in Beaverton, Oregon, a spin-off of Tektronix).
Later on, I designed an interface to something called an Ibis disk drive, the same drive used by the Cray 1 supercomputer at the time, the highest performing drive in the world. It was about the size of a small refrigerator and held 1.2 Gigabytes. The transfer rate was 10 or 12 megabytes per second.
Cray X-MP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP#I.2FO_subsystem)
I'm full of old tech stories...
There was no computer language; you programmed it by putting in ones and zeros via switches and little lights in the main computer hut. There was no disk drive; the storage medium was a drum. The MTDS was derived from the Navy's NTDS. If you want to read a fascinating story, this is one:
First-Hand:No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO - The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, NTDS - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (http://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_Tell_Me_What_to_DO_-_The_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System,_NTDS)
My first laptop was the Zenith Z181 (IIRC) with only two 720k floppy drives, running DOS of course. I think the main memory was 640k, and the CPU was an Intel 8088. Like this one:
z180pc (http://net2000plus.tripod.com/zenith181.htm)
Ran my home business on that thing...
My first modem was 300 baud, the kind you stuck a phone headset into. Amazing we could get work done at such slow rates. I used it in customer service for a computer company (Floating Point Systems in Beaverton, Oregon, a spin-off of Tektronix).
Later on, I designed an interface to something called an Ibis disk drive, the same drive used by the Cray 1 supercomputer at the time, the highest performing drive in the world. It was about the size of a small refrigerator and held 1.2 Gigabytes. The transfer rate was 10 or 12 megabytes per second.
Cray X-MP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP#I.2FO_subsystem)
I'm full of old tech stories...
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I remember visiting my grand grandmother's house in Estacada area as a kid. Old outhouses and peeing in coffee cans at night. No running water, wood fire cooking stove. No tv or phone or electricity. Old style washing and drying clothes. Man I'm old, this was during mid 60's. We did have the run of the farm with chickens, gooses, cattle. Loved it especially when it was time to kill chickens for dinner.
YOU WIN!!
A lot of had to do with the amount of money people had at the time too. Mom's family were dirt poor, raised their own food. When Grandma/grandpa moved their small four room "Shotgun" home to the place I knew it, they sat it on a foundation twice the size of the house. They bought a mining shack in Park City UT (about 40 miles away) for the wood and dissembled it and added on to the house to fit the foundation so it had a basement. That must have been in the '30s. I remember the old outhouse in the back yard. Not being used at that point in the early '60s though.
There was an old lady that live on our street and I used to visit her, she still had a beautiful wood/coal stove on the mud porch that was functional. Potato cellars are something a lot of people had too.
"Televisions" Friends though we were rich. Dad went to school for television repair, so we had like six TVs!
Did you borrow my grandparents? Dairy farmers in Wisconsin. They thought they were fortunate because the hand pump was out in the garage, rather than being outside. But at least they had a herd of cows, and a big garden. Didn't go hungry during the Depression. What they had was a real step up from their ancestors in Germany. Imagine owning 160 acres of productive land, when your parents were little better than serfs.
Outhouses are tough when it is 30 below zero. You probably don't sit and read too long.
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.................1860's?Unless I missed it....not one mention of Saturday morning "REAL" cartoons. "The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show" way before HR Puffinstuff, Land of the Lost and Speed Racer. On a side note, I think Speed Racer was the first computer generated cartoon on TV.
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Yeah, the "Real" cartoons! Those must be the ones that made us older than 50 guys so violent?....Aaahh, wait a minute??
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My grandpa told me that back in the days of antiquity EVERYTIME he went ANYWHERE that he always had to carry a 200lbs steamer-trunk on his back full of rocks uphill (there and back) on a rattlesnake infested dirt path with 3' of snow (even in July) before shoes were invented... while smoking two packs of Camel cigarettes a day since the age of 3.
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(235) Norma Unfired 300 RUM Primed Seconds
- Started by dmk_2003
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