Back in my day...

[Molten]

This thread is all about completing that statement. Tell the truth, an exaggeration, or whatever you like. It can be FIRST related, but doesn't necessarily have to be. I'll start.

Back in my day, Inventor used a numbering system rather then years. I learned on Inventor 10.

Note: This thread was inspired by an elderly gentlemen at a Mcdonald's. Apparently they used to have 5 items on the menu when he first went to one.

[Akash Rastogi]

Back in my day Cartoon Network used to be entertaining....

Back in my day...we had Toonami

Back in the day we used to have Saturday morning cartoons!!!

[EricH]

Back in my day, we didn't have bumpers, we traveled uphill both ways in the snow to the event, and if your robot broke, it was your own fault! None of these here thick rulebooks, we had a thick Q&A printout! And we LIKED it!

[~Cory~]

Back in my day... oh wait. everything is modern. ah well this thread isn't for me ...

[DonRotolo]

Goodness, where do I start?

Gas was 32.9 cents a gallon. Cars routinely got less than 10 MPG. You could fit 6 people in the trunk - 8 if they were cut up

Computers... well, nobody had one at home. My first home PC had 1 kB RAM (A Timex-Sinclair 1000, cost $99), my next one has 1024 kB (a whole Meg! But to address it required QEMM) and a 20 MB HDD (Double-height). Once I bought 4 MB of RAM for my 486 and I paid $525...and that was a bargain. Of course, DOS wasn't a memory hog either. I used Norton Commander for file structure navigation, what a godsend over the >DIR/W command! Oh, and I can use Windows 3.1 without a mouse...

Cars didn't have seat belts. No such thing as a child car seat either.

A mobile phone was actually a serious HF radio setup, 50 pounds in a suitcase.

Cartoon network? Didn't exist, nor did Cable. But here in the NYC area, with a dozen over-the-air channels, 3 or 4 stations had cartoons Saturday morning. Sunday all we got was Davey & Goliath...

I'd leave the house after school to play in the neighborhood, and wouldn't return until after dark. And nobody worried about it.

Vacuum Tubes were still quite common, the TV guy came to the house to fix it at least once a year, or we'd take all the tubes to Lafayette radio Electronics and use their tube tester. We had an RCA Model 4. In color!

No e-mail, no fax. Teletype was used in business, otherwise mail was as good as it got. No FedEx either.

The Boeing 727 was a new aircraft, quite remarkable for its day. I flew "Wings Wonderful" out of Newark (that was Eastern Airlines). I also flew on a Yellowbird (That was on Northeast Airlines - Google it).

Large-Scale-Integration (LSI) ICs hadn't come out yet; the biggest you could get retail was a Hex Inverter in the 7400 series. [EDIT]OK, we had a Signetics SE567 PLL chip too...

OK, enough...

[MrForbes]

Back in my day....

We could only dream of buying a Tektronix scope, so we built our own (all tube) oscilloscope from surplus parts. It worked.

We wanted Color Television, so Dad bought a Heathkit, and we built it.

When anything at home broke, we took it apart and figured out how it worked. About half the time we could get it working again.

About half the cars I drove had a three speed manual shift transmission...with the shifter on the steering column.

Our friends had air conditioning in their car.

[Koko Ed]

Back in my day the M in MTV stood for MUSIC (I don't know what it stands for nowadays. Mental I suppose).

[ebarker]

Recently I took some team members to my homeown and explained to them how my version of 'google' worked back in the day,, here goes:

So when I was young I'm sitting around and something comes to mind and I'd say - what is the answer to 'X'. So I'd jump on the bike, ride down pine street 1/2 mile, turn left, go 2 blocks to laurel street, turn right, ride about 8 blocks, turn left into the library. Run up the steps, through the door, then left to the card catalog. The catalog was the way we would do a 'search'. I'd look up the topic in a card catalog, which was a bunch of drawers of index cards, find the ISBN number, run upstairs to the stacks, and hopefully no one had the book removed from the shelf. Next query - repeat. Did this daily.

Every time we drove by this place the team would say "there's google" !!

[JaneYoung]

Back in my day, Walt Disney was magical.

And I was blonde...

[IndySam]

Math was done without calculators and papers were written without spell check.

Principles had paddles, playgrounds were asphalt and the teachers lounge was always filled with smoke.

You had three choices at McDonals, hamburgers, cheeseburgers and fillet O' fish, you needed a bottle opener to have a coke, and everyone knew what a church key was,

[GaryVoshol]

Back in my day ...

There were only 2 TV channels, until we got a 3rd one. And a lot of the shows were B&W - which didn't matter because a lot of the sets were B&W. My mom's cousin had a color set - it was a big deal to go over there and see football players in red uniforms.

We got an Instamatic camera - it had flash cubes.

We learned to use a slide rule in 9th grade algebra.

In 11th grade physics, we actually had a programmable computer - it could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and input and store about 4 numbers. It was about 16" square, and 5 or 6 inches thick.

[Karibou]

-It was big deal for my family when my mom got a cell phone. I was probably 7 or 8 years old.
-Very few people had cell phones until high school
-iPod shuffles were more than an inch long
-AOL CDs everywhere. Enough said.
-Playgrounds had merry-go-rounds
-There were only 151 Pokemon, and they weren't obnoxious, bright colors.
-My family's first computer was an IBM machine, and we used Juno for email.
-Little kids wore clothing that their mom's bought from a catalog.

[ebarker]

To get music you had to go to the record store and the storekeeper would play it for you if you wanted to hear what was on it.

They came in two sizes:

• big records with little holes in the middle
• little records with big holes in the middle.

To get ice cream you went to the drug store. ( Now you go to the drugstore to get motor oil and to the grocery store to get drugs. )

A 7-11 opened at 7am and closed at 11pm because no one was out at any other time.

When a new independent gas station came to town the other gas stations tried to run it out of business. It started a "GAS WAR" and prices dropped to about 17 cents a gallon for a while. When is the last time you bought gas in a price war ??

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by IndySam

and everyone knew what a church key was,

Yes indeed, and in fact that absolutely was the key to "our" little church...

AM Radio was huge (NYC market again), FM wasn't big yet because no cars had FM radios yet. Cousin Brucie was alive (um...he still is!).

A 4 function calculator with LED digits was about $150, and sure beat that slip-stick.

Originally Posted by squirrel

When anything at home broke, we took it apart and figured out how it worked. About half the time we could get it working again.

We still do that.

[sanddrag]

You guys have better stories than mine but I'll post anyhow. Back in my day kids rode bikes after school and on weekends. Cell phones were mainly just expensive options in cars, then we got motorola flip phones.

We had Apple IIe computers at school with 5 1/4" floppy drives on which we played Oregon Trail and fun math games. I had a IIc+ at home. After a short while, as mentioned above, AOL CDs were everywhere. I remember at school when we got PowerPC Macs they were the most remarkable thing. I remember when my 6th grade classroom got one that we would take turns using. Alta Vista was the best search engine on the web. Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice. There was no such thing as Google. I remember reading in the newspaper about how telephone lines would "soon be able to transmit data at much faster speeds of 56 kbps." I remember at that time we had a 14.4 modem at home, that made all sorts of silly noises. Web pages loaded about a 1/2 inch at a time, down the screen. The internet was not full of ads and spam and hobbyists and individuals put great effort into making web pages with quality information that was often quite interesting. Animated GIFs were the hot ticket for making a web page fancy.

I miss the early days of the internet.

The other day I found a receipt for a Pentium MMX 233MHz computer we bought from CompUSA in 1997. It came in just under $2000.

When eBay came to be, it was individuals, in the United States, selling their unique used stuff. You would pay for it with a money order in the mail. People paid insane amounts of money for Pogs and beanie babies. Radio Shack had the best RC cars around, and actually sold radio equipment...

Middle school had classes like Wood Shop and Drafting. Students knew how to respect their teachers, and could pay attention and read books, without having to constantly be entertained.

In high school, I got one of the first color cell phones for about $400.

FIRST Robots were programmed in PBASIC, were powered by drill motors, and you could only buy parts from the Small Parts catalog or a small list of approved materials.

That's about all I remember. Sometimes I want those days back.