Auld Lang Syne, anyone?

[firecat]

Recycling an old post from Facebook:

"RT @ ThatEricAlper: Without revealing your actual age, what something you remember that if you told a younger person they wouldn't understand?"

Here’s my entry. I’ve heard that reading the time on an analog clock is no longer a universal skill. So I think some young people would find it hard to understand where the phrase “watch my six” comes from.

(This entry brought to you by Faith Hunter’s Shining Smith series, a post-apocalyptic story in which a woman infected by mesmerizing nanobots runs a junkyard with the help of a clowder of sentient, telepathic cats. She says it a lot in combat situations…not to the cats though.)

Comments

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

We had one phone and it was on the wall in the kitchen with an extra long cord which used to get tangled up a lot and you used to have to let it dangle and unwind itself. Uh, we had a living room that hardly ever got used. Atari with a joystick!

Edited to add. I don't any cat is going to watch your six. Ha!

[firecat]

We had a phone with the long cord, and a phone in the basement with a shorter cord but more privacy for those rambling teenager conversations.

She can see thru the cats’ eyes due to the telepathic connection between her and them, so if the cats are correctly positioned. she can watch her own six.

[ex_flameandsong751]

In my childhood we had rotary phones, and computers were these huge clunky things that used floppy disks.

I can tell time on an analog clock! Oh lord in 200 years people are going to wonder what Flavor Flav had on his neck.

[adrian_turtle]

About 5 years ago, I was sitting in a library and listening to some high school kids doing their math homework. They were having trouble figuring out that problem where you're supposed to find the angle between the hands of the clock at 8:20. These 14-year-olds were so confused because none of them knew how to tell time with analog clocks.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Brb, making my nursing home reservation. 😂😭🤣

[firecat]

No kidding, my nursing home better have analog clocks with REALLY BIG NUMBERS.

[greghousesgf]

I can specifically remember using a pencil to dial a rotary phone so I didn't screw up my nail polish.

[necturus]

I learned to dial a phone with just the hook switch: one tap for 1, two taps for 2, etc. Zero was ten taps.

Back in the day, it was common for large institutions to put locks on the dials of phones they didn't want you to use. The lock was always positioned so you could dial 1111 or 2222 and get campus security, but you couldn't get an outside line, unless you knew how to dial with the hook switch.

[firecat]

Yes I grew up in the transition from rotary to touch tone phones. We had to rent the phones from the phone company and pay extra for touch tone.

Floppy disks!

[adrian_turtle]

There are so many things! Some of it you can sort of know about from reading but not quite get the implications. Lots of phone stuff, like:
"I called yesterday and I would have left a message, but nobody was home."
Or the connotations of using a pencil to dial a phone, while people with short nails just use their fingertips.
Or needing to carry change for a payphone.
Or when having a "car phone" meant you were either rich or a traveling salesman.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Or needing to carry change for a payphone.

I used to always have change on me for this reason, and a $20 in case I needed a cab in an emergency. Cabs cost way more than that and Uber doesn't take cash...

[firecat]

I hoarded change for pay phones and laundromats…

[lilacsigil]

My dad's work car got a phone in it (he was a surveyor for the state road authority, so he was travelling a lot) and everyone in the street came over to look at it!

[firecat]

This reminds me of the Columbo episode where solving the crime relies on the fact that the killer had one of those new-fangled, super expensive digital watches.

[firecat]

Right, I forgot about using a pencil to dial a phone. I remember using pencils to repair cassette tapes though. A tool with so many uses!

[snippy]

My mother used to have to wear a blue dust-proof jacket when she worked in the computer room. (This was after the time I made a treetop angel from spoiled punch cards.)

[firecat]

I want to see a picture of the angel!

[snippy]

There is likely a photo in a box somewhere, but I'm sure you can imagine it. Spray-painted gold.

[lilacsigil]

Oh! Punch cards! I remember that I made a little Christmas tree out of some, they folded so neatly and were crisp enough to hold their shape!

[which_chick]

The phrase "dial a phone" is 100% legacy these days. Nobody does that anymore. Other dying things... dial tone, busy signal. That's just not how (non-landline) phones work anymore. Young people (and by "young" I mean "of an age where there have ALWAYS been smartphones", so people who were born later than about 1995) may well grow old and die before ever having a landline phone.

old-tyme travel

[adrian_turtle]

Changing the subject from technology, travel used to be so different back in the 20th century. Does anybody remember travel agents? They used to have offices all over the place. The first company I worked for had its own in-house travel agent to arrange business trips. When flights were delayed or canceled, sometimes people called the airline, sometimes they called a travel agent to help them get where they needed to go. They were replaced by online services like orbitz, but that couldn't happen until everyone was online. (I mean, "everyone" who could afford to fly.)

I never actually used travelers' checks, but I remember people talking about them. The first time I traveled overseas my mom wanted me to have one. She didn't quite believe I could just use my American credit card in France. And it was kind of nerve-wracking to take cash out of an ATM at the airport and buy francs.

Selling secondhand airplane tickets? (I don't mean used tickets. I mean a sign on a dorm bulletin board the week before Thanksgiving saying you had a ticket to Pittsburgh Thanksgiving morning, returning Saturday afternoon; anyone want to buy it?)

Or AAA Triptiks! I think those were uniquely American, but they were such great little maps. Long after they fell out of use because GPS was so common, I noticed the wordplay with "triptych."

Re: old-tyme travel

[firecat]

I was so glad when travel agents weren’t required any more. I could pore over schedules for hours instead of having to accept whatever the agent offered me (I was intimidated by them).

I used travelers’ checks when I was a teen and my parents sent me on a chaperoned tour. (This was in the late 70s.) Cashiers hated them and some wouldn’t accept them because they didn’t know what they were and as a teen I was in the “automatically suspect” category.

Triptik is now a web app: https://triptik.aaa.com/

Re: old-tyme travel

[necturus]

I took travelers checks with me to Europe in the summer of 1975. My high school graduation present was a trip with a student travel group to Scandinavia and the USSR. The high point was the week we spent in a youth camp in the Crimea, in a place called Gurzuf on the Black Sea.

[silveradept]

I remember a cable television channel (heck, I remember a time where television channels were represented by turning an analog dial and then adjusting the antenna's position to receive the signal cleanly) whose entire job was to scroll through all the possible channels and display what was on then and what was upcoming in the next hour or two. (I'd say I remember the TV Guide, but they still publish that, so kids might be somewhat familiar with it.)

[firecat]

Imagine that, shows being on only at a specific day and time. (I haven’t had cable in a long time…which means I got to re-experience rabbit ears this century, when I went to see if I could pull in any broadcast tv channels.)

[silveradept]

Rabbit ears are themselves an artifact of earlier generations - many antennae these days are flat squares to be hung near a window or similar. Thankfully most new televisions have the digital decoder and tuners already installed.

[deakat]

I've seen the name Faith Hunter before, but hadn't been motivated to read any of the books. It sounds like Shining Smith is exactly what I need right now. Thank you!

[firecat]

Excellent! I hope you enjoy her!

In the radio business, we talk of "cutting a spot" or "cutting a newscast"

[necturus]

That's an expression so old that even most people of my generation don't understand its origin; it dates back to a time when the only way to record sound was to use a record cutter.

Nowadays expressions such as "taping an interview" are becoming equally obscure; while I personally own a reel-to-reel tape recorder, they haven't been used commonly in at least twenty years.

Re: In the radio business, we talk of "cutting a spot" or "cutting a newscast"

[firecat]

Ooh, yeah, I didn't know the "cutting" reference!

I used to tape stuff from the TV by setting my shoebox-sized cassette recorder on a chair in front of it. [ETA: I was taping the audio only, pre-VCR.]