Back in my day....

[BlueHouse]

Everybody drove woodies (wood-paneled station wagons).  SUVs did not exist.
I remember when my parents bought a new station wagon (our only car, so my dad drove it to work every day).  The glass was tinted with a blue tint on the upper third of the windshield.  I think the Antenna was even inside the windshield on that car - so you didn't have to pull the antenna up when you got in the car and push it down when you parked. 

The radio in cars used to have 5 push buttons.  And they were hard to push - you couldn't do it with long fingernails. 

My first video game was colleco football (electronic x and o on a screen the size of a stick of gum).  I used to love to play Simon (electronic memory game).  Other than a handful of games, if you wanted to play videos, you went to the arcade.  And just 5 years previous to that, arcade meant skee-ball on the boardwalk!

Cigarettes used to be sold in vending machines. 

[golden1]

I was born in 1973.

I had two jobs in high school and college that no longer exist.  I was a clerk at Blockbuster video, and a clerk at Fotomat. 

My parents had some money so I was lucky enough to have my own computer in elementary school - a Commodore 64.  Sadly, I mostly played games on it.  We also had an Apple 2E.  Me and my step-brother were one of the very few kids in the 80's to have a computer. 

I remember losing a summer to cable tv when it first came out.  A crystal clear picture, no static, and 20 whole channels!!!! 

The cold war was a real concern.  It seems insane but two countries were threatening each other with nukes and building huge amounts of them.   

[fishnfool]

  Minimum wage jobs were done by High School kids and we even earned School credits for working.

[dude]

In the town where I grew up, you could dial just the last 5 digits of a phone number to reach other phones on the same exchange, which was every phone in town.

Damn, I forgot about this!!!  Hell yeah, we had the same deal in my town!

Grandmother had a party line, and it always tripped me out, even then!

[Shamantha]

Commodore 64 computer with storage on a cassette deck. And no money to buy games. The solution: books with coded games, you just had to type in 30 pages of 4 digit numbers and then you had a game.  Checksum after every page but if you made an error, you could start over on that page!

Phone in a student house: one corded phone with a very, very long cord so it could reach all the rooms. With an automated units counter next to it, and a notebook where everyone wrote the start number, the units used, and the end number, with their name. If you called local, one minute was one unit, but if you called outside of the city, one minute could go up to 5 or 6 units. When a housemate called his family abroad, we would always know because the counter ticked like crazy. End of the month the phone bill was divided as per the usage.

[Beridian]

I was born in 1959 and grew up in the Detroit area. 

I was an adult living in my own apartment before I had color TV, air conditioning, or cable.  Our family home had one black and white TV for many years.  Adults sat on the furniture and children sprawled on the carpet.  Children were the remote controls that adults used to adjust the TV.  The house I grew up in had only one single rotary phone on the kitchen wall.  It was a well made phone, you could slam the receiver down angrily into the cradle, use it to assault siblings, or even occasionally rip the phone off the wall and it would still work (we learned how to hook up the wires and re mount it).  The phone company charged extra for an extension line (a second phone) and this was thought of as a great extravagance. 

There were also these things on about every third street corner called pay phones.  They were glass and aluminum booths with a phone inside.  If your big brother or some other kid was trying to beat you up, a phone booth provided a good defense because you could brace your back against the wall and put your feet on the door to repel attacks.   You fed pay phones dimes and quarters when you wanted to talk to someone while away from home.  As kids you never passed a payphone without checking the coin return for the occasional overlooked coin.  When I explain this to my kids they look at me like I am from another planet.

As teens we all had these tiny little transistor radios, the higher number of transistors the better, they were advertised as six transistor, eight transistor, ten transistor.  We listened to AM radio stations like CKLW across the river in Windsor Ontario, its signal was so strong you almost didn't need a battery in your radio.

Up until my forties almost all cars had cranks that you used to lower and raise the window.  If you wanted to unlock the passenger door to let someone in you reached across the seat and pulled up this little knob.  My 1972 Dodge Dart had a rubber bulb (like a turkey baster) on the floor that you stepped on to squirt washer fluid on the windshield.  If you forgot to ad antifreeze to the washer fluid in the winter the bulb would freeze hard as a rock.   The switch for the bright light dimmer was also on the floor, you stepped on it with your foot. 

Now I lay awake at night and try to figure out which gadget is making that intermittent beeping noise, that and how many passwords I have to let me into all the crap that I own that needs a password.

[dude]

Cigarettes used to be sold in vending machines.

And people could fucking smoke them EVERYWHERE -- on planes, in grocery and department stores, in high school (in the designated smoking area!), in restaurants, in stadiums and arenas.  Fuck, I'm jealous of the kids born in the last 20 years who've never known the indignities of eating second-hand smoke day after day.  They are probably going to outlive my generation by a decade.

[Beridian]

Cigarettes used to be sold in vending machines.

And people could fucking smoke them EVERYWHERE -- on planes, in grocery and department stores, in high school (in the designated smoking area!), in restaurants, in stadiums and arenas.  Fuck, I'm jealous of the kids born in the last 20 years who've never known the indignities of eating second-hand smoke day after day.  They are probably going to outlive my generation by a decade.

No lie!  You could even smoke in hospitals!   I remember visiting relatives who were admitted into the hospital and seeing them smoke in their hospital beds.

I remember DDT (the now banned insecticide).  When we were kids they would drive these big trucks through our neighborhoods spraying the trees with DDT, the mist would settle on all the kids playing outside.   Those were the days!

[Fishindude]

My brother recently got hold of one of those old console stereo's in the big 6' long wood cabinet with speakers on each end, AM FM tuner, turntable and an eight track player.  Everything works great and he found some old eight track tapes to play also.   Pretty neat conversation piece. 

[dude]

Cigarettes used to be sold in vending machines.

And people could fucking smoke them EVERYWHERE -- on planes, in grocery and department stores, in high school (in the designated smoking area!), in restaurants, in stadiums and arenas.  Fuck, I'm jealous of the kids born in the last 20 years who've never known the indignities of eating second-hand smoke day after day.  They are probably going to outlive my generation by a decade.

No lie!  You could even smoke in hospitals!   I remember visiting relatives who were admitted into the hospital and seeing them smoke in their hospital beds.

I remember DDT (the now banned insecticide).  When we were kids they would drive these big trucks through our neighborhoods spraying the trees with DDT, the mist would settle on all the kids playing outside.   Those were the days!

They still do that with malathion (sp?) in some places!

[GuitarStv]

Cigarettes used to be sold in vending machines.

And people could fucking smoke them EVERYWHERE -- on planes, in grocery and department stores, in high school (in the designated smoking area!), in restaurants, in stadiums and arenas.  Fuck, I'm jealous of the kids born in the last 20 years who've never known the indignities of eating second-hand smoke day after day.  They are probably going to outlive my generation by a decade.

No lie!  You could even smoke in hospitals!   I remember visiting relatives who were admitted into the hospital and seeing them smoke in their hospital beds.

I remember DDT (the now banned insecticide).  When we were kids they would drive these big trucks through our neighborhoods spraying the trees with DDT, the mist would settle on all the kids playing outside.   Those were the days!

They still do that with malathion (sp?) in some places!

My dad told me that when he was a kid in the 60s, a pesticide salesmen went in front of a group of farmers and drank a glass of DDT to prove that there were no health risks using it.

[o2bfree]

I was a computer tech in the 80s when the first "portable" computer was on the market: the Osborne, weighing in at 23.5 pounds, which is more "luggable" than "portable".  It had a 5-inch monochrome screen, 2 floppy drives, 64 kB memory, and cost nearly $1,800!

At the time, IBM was king of the PC world. Their PC XT desktop model had a 10 MB hard disk. Customers were told "you'll never fill that up"!

[crazy jane]

Our car didn't even have seat belts. My mom would stick her hand out and hold us if she stopped quickly. Adults didn't wear them when they became standard. The line was the steering wheel will protect me so I don't have to wear it.

[BlueHouse]

Up until my forties almost all cars had cranks that you used to lower and raise the window.  If you wanted to unlock the passenger door to let someone in you reached across the seat and pulled up this little knob. 

Beridian, these were great. 
Also: 
Girls used to be rated on whether they were "high maintenance" based on whether they leaned over to unlock the driver's door after our dates put us in the car.  I sound so old saying this, but Yes, that's right, gentlemen used to open car doors for ladies.  I guess this doesn't exist anymore with keyless remotes. 

[Uturn]

We used to have to stomp a button on the floor to turn on the bright headlights.  (who the hell thought that was the best solution?)

When we got our first COLOR television.  Damn those tubes took a while to warm up

The metal spout that you had to jam into an oil can.  They had a sharp triangle part that would pierce the can to allow the oil to flow out. 

[Capsu78]

I was a computer tech in the 80s when the first "portable" computer was on the market: the Osborne, weighing in at 23.5 pounds, which is more "luggable" than "portable".  It had a 5-inch monochrome screen, 2 floppy drives, 64 kB memory, and cost nearly $1,800!

At the time, IBM was king of the PC world. Their PC XT desktop model had a 10 MB hard disk. Customers were told "you'll never fill that up"!

My then  apartment mate was a sales rep for a major connector manufacturer who engineered some of the connectors for the Osborne 1.  He had major problems getting his own companies credit department to approve his orders for Osborne that were blowing up in his hands.  They had never heard of the guy! 

[Beridian]

Up until my forties almost all cars had cranks that you used to lower and raise the window.  If you wanted to unlock the passenger door to let someone in you reached across the seat and pulled up this little knob. 

Beridian, these were great. 
Also: 
Girls used to be rated on whether they were "high maintenance" based on whether they leaned over to unlock the driver's door after our dates put us in the car.  I sound so old saying this, but Yes, that's right, gentlemen used to open car doors for ladies.  I guess this doesn't exist anymore with keyless remotes.

I opened the car door for my dates (at least at first).  It was a skill to graciously slip the key in the lock and pull the door open in one smooth movement.  Now they don't even put key holes on the passenger doors.  To me a high maintenance date was a girl who stayed at the door of the restaurant waiting for me to pull the car up.  The regular gals at least walked to the car with you.

[AvisJinx]

When I was in college I had a job at a commercial photo lab where I retouched photos. I would sit at an easel all day removing dust spots and negative damage with a goose neck magnifier, dyes and very fine sable brushes. Some of the more complicated stuff I did included removing flash flairs on eyeglasses and smoothing out blemishes and wrinkles.  Not only did you have to have a good eye, you had to be fast, too.  Gotta love digital photography and Photoshop. 

[shelivesthedream]

My parents sat down and watch the nine o'clock news every night. Now my Dad's on Twitter all day.

[Noodle]

I didn't regularly wear a seatbelt until I started driver's ed (seatbelt laws and child seat laws were fairly new then, as in lots of public service campaigns to get people to comply). I remember the first time I saw a toddler seat how startled I was, and thought of the parents as very overprotective.

We did have cable fairly early on, because we lived in a rural area with almost no reception. But my parents were certainly not going to pay for any of those premium channels, like FOX or MTV. I thought I was terribly abused because I didn't get to watch Beverly Hills 90210 or music videos. At college, in the early 1990s, there was no cable TV in the dorms. A few people had small antenna TVs in their rooms, but the reception was so-so. Only a few of the dorms had air-conditioning (none of mine) but the college did a big technology push so that every dorm had a computer lab, and every room had its own phone! (My freshman year, we still had hall phones as the new room phones were being installed. For some weird reason, my little section of women was attached to a hall of guys, and the phone we used was in their area. So any time anybody called, one of the guys would answer and then bellow up the stairs for whoever to come answer. Getting messages was a gamble because the phone answerer would have to walk up the stairs to leave a message.

[MandalayVA]

I remember when Walkmans came out.  I was a freshman in high school and all the cool kids were walking around with little foam headphones on their heads plugged to small boxes attached to the waistband of their jeans.  It was a wonder--you could play whatever tape you wanted.  I scored a Sears brand the next year for Christmas, and I still remember the first song I played on it, the Go-Gos' "Vacation."

Not going back that far, but this was my first MP3 player, the Intel Pocket Concert:



It was considered state of the art in 2001.  It held a whopping TWENTY-SEVEN SONGS.  I felt quite cool and high tech.  :D

[asauer]

These are the things I miss:
1. being kicked out of the house after breakfast and told to go play until lunch
2. riding my bike all over hell's half acre
3. going to the library and having to sign the little tagboard cards in the pockets
4. drinking out of the hose
5. Learning shorthand in high school- this STILL comes in handy!

[Christof]

When I was a kid we had a radio, no computer, no TV, no phone, not even a vacuum cleaner. And the washing machine doubled as a heater for sausages. Later in school I was the only one printing homework and even had a small scanner (around 92), everyone else was still handwriting and using scissor and glue for pictures. But printing.... it took so long. 20 minutes a page in triple-LQ quality, meaning every line was printed many times.

[RetiredAt63]

Dot matrix?  I remember the programming students programming pictures using various letters/symbols.  Interesting watching a Mona Lisa come out of the printer.

But printing.... it took so long. 20 minutes a page in triple-LQ quality, meaning every line was printed many times.

[Cassie]

I was born in 1954. When you were job hunting someone had to stay home from 8-5 to answer the phone since there was no way to leave a message.  I can remember being very excited when answering machines came out.  You had to walk home at lunch time because there was no lunch program. If your Mom worked she had to get a neighbor to feed your kid.  When I was 39 I went to grad school and asked the librarian where the index cards were. I was doing research for a term paper. She pointed to the computers. I went home and got my 12 yo to show me how to use it:))

[Christof]

Dot matrix?

Yep, first nine pins, later 24. Every time the printer head moved back and kind of banged against the barrier it would be slightly off its previous position. So printing the same content three times in a row could fill the empty space left by round pins. Then advance paper by 1/216th inch and repeat and repeat and repeat, then print next line.

[GuitarStv]

https://youtu.be/Ht96HJ01SE4

If you've ever used a dot matrix printer, this is worth a watch.

[The Fake Cheap]

I was went to high school in the early 90's.  I was one of the first kids at my school to have internet access.

Kid at school:  "What did you do last night?"
Me: "I went on the internet."
Kid: *blank stares*

This went on for a year or two before having the net became the norm.

[Macrolide]

Commodore 64 computer with storage on a cassette deck. And no money to buy games. The solution: books with coded games, you just had to type in 30 pages of 4 digit numbers and then you had a game.  Checksum after every page but if you made an error, you could start over on that page!

Winner! That's so rad.

We had some weird dating game for our Apple II in the 80s. I wish I could remember what it was called. It was all text so you had to use your imagination and you had to ask this girl the right questions and respond with the right answers to her questions. Of course we only asked her the most perverse things an eight-year-old could think of and a ten-year-old could spell, and only got pre-programmed confused or offended responses but it was so fun.

High school in the 90's we had AOL instant messenger. Everybody had a contact list with like 50 kids on it and we would all sign on after dinner and chat the shit out of that thing. It was the original internet social network. I credit my best friend with having the first internet hook-up. He invited a classmate over to join him in the shower which she did and he played with her boobs. Lol! (<<that's when this started too!). I still try to bring that up regularly when we're in a group setting. Also, the shower girl now works with me at the hospital and it's the only thing I can think about when we pass in the cafeteria. I'm sure she knows that. (side note: working in a hospital feels so much like high school).

[goatmom]

 I had a baby and was never offered a single ultrasound.  1987. 
Drinking age was 18.  We had a cash bar at the high school prom.
My parents thought hitchhiking was a fine way to get from point A to point B.
We didn't have a credit card.  We would go to the grocery store and have to put things back if the total was more than cash on hand.  My kids would die of humiliation.
Rich families used disposable diapers.  Poor folk used cloth diapers.
My mother made her own baby formula out of evaporated milk.
My parents never owned a car seat but had a house full of kids.
We used to ride in the front seat!  Dad would let us sit on his lap and drive.
Nobody used sunscreen.  People didn't walk around with water bottles.  How did we not die of dehydration? 

[lukebuz]

Cars used to have an engine rebuild at 100K miles.  Now, 100K is hardly even broken in.

[Primm]

Cigarettes used to be sold in vending machines.

And people could fucking smoke them EVERYWHERE -- on planes, in grocery and department stores, in high school (in the designated smoking area!), in restaurants, in stadiums and arenas.  Fuck, I'm jealous of the kids born in the last 20 years who've never known the indignities of eating second-hand smoke day after day.  They are probably going to outlive my generation by a decade.

No lie!  You could even smoke in hospitals!  I remember visiting relatives who were admitted into the hospital and seeing them smoke in their hospital beds.

I remember DDT (the now banned insecticide).  When we were kids they would drive these big trucks through our neighborhoods spraying the trees with DDT, the mist would settle on all the kids playing outside.   Those were the days!

When I started working as an RN we used to have an ashtray on the nurses desk so you could smoke while doing your paperwork...

[Squirrel away]

People didn't walk around with water bottles.  How did we not die of dehydration?

Haha, yes, true, but we had water fountains.

[Erica]

Please share your stories about how things were done when you were coming up.  Youngsters, it is interesting for us oldsters to hear your descriptions too, particularly when we don't realize how much normal everyday life has changed from when we were young.

Back in my day...
I learned to type on a 35-pound manual typewriter with individual keys.  Each key stroke had to have enough force to propel the key forward to strike a cloth ribbon saturated with ink and leave a dark mark on a piece of paper behind it.  We always used two pieces of paper to cushion the strike of the keys on the paper because otherwise, the letter key would slice through a single piece of paper when it struck the paper against the platens.
When I made a typo, I used an eraser or even a razor blade to shave off the top fibers of the paper, then I matched the paper up to the exact spot for typing, then retyped the letter I wanted.  White-out was invented when I was in 6th or 7th grade, but we weren't allowed to use it for term papers. 
If I wanted a copy of my work, I had to plan in advance, and instead of inserting a single page of paper, I inserted two, separate by a thin sheet coated in ink called “carbon paper”.

That's funny. You described my Typing Class in 1984. At the same time, I took a computer class typing on an Apple Computer learning DOS. So you know the typing class was already outdated. But we had no typing programs yet for DOS

[Erica]

I used to buy cigarettes from the gas station vending machines from ages age 10-12 (about 1980-81)

They were $1.25 /5 quarters back then for Marlboro 100's. You had to insert all coins back then.

Or...use  one hand to hold the plastic door at the bottom....then the other hand to grab underneath to reach the bottom row

Sometimes they'd put Camels on the bottom row. *cough*

Some kids went to the corner store with a forged note from their Mommy to buy them. Sadly there were enough valid notes they never asked

[Erica]

When someone got a DUI ticket, they truly were driving while intoxicated

[Monkey Uncle]

I was born in 1954. When you were job hunting someone had to stay home from 8-5 to answer the phone since there was no way to leave a message.  I can remember being very excited when answering machines came out.  You had to walk home at lunch time because there was no lunch program. If your Mom worked she had to get a neighbor to feed your kid.  When I was 39 I went to grad school and asked the librarian where the index cards were. I was doing research for a term paper. She pointed to the computers. I went home and got my 12 yo to show me how to use it:))

I actually didn't get an answering machine until I started looking for a new job in 2001.  I figured if someone wanted to talk to me badly enough, they'd call back.

[Astatine]

I was born in the early 70s, started high school in the mid 80s.

In early primary school, instead of photocopiers, we had the copies with purple ink which smelled a bit weird. Mimeographs I think? (I can smell it now just thinking about it, and that was nearly 40 years ago, lol).

I remember a friend in primary school had the first home computer I'd ever seen. It ran on cassette tapes. 

I'm good at Windows keyboard shortcuts (and still navigate documents with the numeric pad with numberlock switched off) thanks to writing school reports at home on the very early versions of Microsoft products.

We had a rotary dial phone, still in use when I left home in the early 90s. At the same time, I remember a friend at university being the first to get a mobile phone. It was the size and shape of a brick. She was the only one who had one for years.

At university in the early 90s, I remember spending days in the library working out how to look up papers using the volumes and volumes of Chemical Abstracts. I learnt very basic Unix so I could use email in the early 90s (Pine, anyone?). I remember one of my lab mates being very excited about downloading a "webpage" which didn't make any sense to me at the time. I remember using Telnet.

I had to laugh about the car ones with winding up windows, using keys to unlock the car. My current car is only 15 years old and doesn't have remote locking, and you have to manually wind the windows up and down. The car stereo is a tape player (now broken) and a radio with push buttons.

[shelivesthedream]

Is there anyone who was born, say, pre-1990 who remembers NOT being allowed to run all over to play as long as they were back by dinner time? I was barely allowed to the shops down the road by myself before I was 12.

[Fishindude]

Kids took guns to school for show and tell, and in high school we kept them in our cars to go hunting with buddies after school.
A game at the county fair where you put a dime on a colored square.  They spun a big horizontal wheel (like wheel of fortune) and released a rat on the wheel.  If he went in the hole on square same color your dime was on, you won a pack of cigarettes, regardless of age.
Church before school everyday at the catholic school.
Returnable, refillable pop & beer bottles.
If you were lucky enough to go to the lake with somebody that had a boat, water skiing was your only option, no jet skis, no wake boards, no knee boards, no tubing, etc.
Getting a checkup to play sports in school and the doc comes in to check you out smoking a cigarette.
Having to go through the operator to make a long distance call out of your area code.

[RetiredAt63]

My first printer was a dot matrix (I forget #pins).  So slow if you wanted nice output.  But sooo much better than typing, no whiteout, no finding a typo after the page was out of the  typewriter and trying to realign it to fix it.

Dot matrix?

Yep, first nine pins, later 24. Every time the printer head moved back and kind of banged against the barrier it would be slightly off its previous position. So printing the same content three times in a row could fill the empty space left by round pins. Then advance paper by 1/216th inch and repeat and repeat and repeat, then print next line.

[MandalayVA]

High school in the 90's we had AOL instant messenger. Everybody had a contact list with like 50 kids on it and we would all sign on after dinner and chat the shit out of that thing. It was the original internet social network.

CompuServe and Q-Link would both like a word with you.  :D

[RetiredAt63]

@shelivesthedream - When I was a kid we were on a street that got busy at rush hour.  So we could run around before it got busy, and after dinner, but not at rush hour.  In summer we rode our bikes to the local park several blocks away.  In winter the snow clearing was a snowblower, not a plow, and there were huge mounds on the lawns.  We tunneled all through them.  Now people would worry about them collapsing, but they were rock-hard.  We moved when I turned 13, and in HS we were on a quiet street, typical street hockey, hide and seek, etc., until dark in summer.  We had family street parties, the town workers brought barriers so we could block off the street to cars.  In winter?  Too much homework.

@astatine - Bioabstracts for me, so much work.  When I see students doing tiny reference lists when they have online abstracts, it irks me, so lazy.  Purple copies were alcohol stencils, I ran off more than my fair share when I started teaching.   I hope you enjoyed the isopropyl  ;-)

[GuitarStv]

Kids took guns to school for show and tell, and in high school we kept them in our cars to go hunting with buddies after school.

We had a gun check and rack at my high school because so many people would bring their rifles in to go hunting afterwards during the fall.

[Uturn]

I remember at 5 or 6 years old, bouncing off the dash in the truck.  The old man just said "I told you not to be standing up while I'm driving." 

When I was around 12, my friend got a .22 rifle for Christmas.  I told Mom that we were taking it out and her response was "wear a jacket, it's cold."

Duck and cover drills.  Because curling up in a ball under a desk is the best protection from radioactive fallout. 

[BlueHouse]

I remember at 5 or 6 years old, bouncing off the dash in the truck.  The old man just said "I told you not to be standing up while I'm driving." 

Up until I was in junior high, all the kids used to ride in the back (bed) of my uncle's pickup truck.  That was the only car they had and there were a bunch of us to go wherever.  Even on the highways, this was still okay. 
His dogs usually rode back there too without any problems.  One time he had a new dog and it was tied loosely to the truck bed.  I asked him about it because the length of the rope seemed a bit dangerous (long enough that the dog could jump off the truck and get dragged).  Answer:  If he does jump, he'll only do it once.    Yikes!

[RonMcCord]

I'm probably younger than most of the people posting in this thread.  But I remember playing games in DOS and installing them with 12 floppy disks.  I remember talking to someone older and he said my generation will probably be the last ones to know what the picture on the Save icon refers to.  I had a "portable" game system that was 6-8 inches long and ate through batteries so fast that you might as you eventually gave up and played it plugged to the charger.  I watched VHS tapes, and when we couldn't get a hold of American shows in Europe we had relatives send us taped shows from the states, commercials and everything. 

[coppertop]

I took a computer programming class in high school and the computer took up an entire room.  My first office job was after school when I was a junior in 1972.  I did "keypunch," meaning I typed employees' overtime data into a keypunch machine, and when I was finished with each employee, I pushed a button which punched holes in the cards that would later be fed into the computer to prepare payroll.  I took shorthand in 11th and 12th grade, and we were considered the "elite" class in the high school business department, because you had to test into the class.  I received an award at graduation for my proficiency in shorthand - I took 140 w.p.m.  You had to take 120 to get an A.  I went to college and received a degree in Legal Secretarial Science.  At my first job in a law office, I operated a machine called an IBM Mag Card II.  This was basically a large Selectric typewriter with a big box on the floor next to it.  You'd type your information on paper that you rolled into the typewriter part, and when you were satisfied with your copy, you'd punch buttons that would transfer your typing onto magnetic cards from the big box on the floor.  Each legal document had a set of magnetic cards that were kept in special cardboard envelopes.  When you were finished with the document, you'd erase the cards and use them over again.  The firm got their first computer at the same time my daughter was born, which was in 1980.  Only one of the staff had that computer.  The Mag Card machine at that time was relegated to the firm library, to be used for overflow work. 

[AvisJinx]

I'm probably younger than most of the people posting in this thread.  But I remember playing games in DOS and installing them with 12 floppy disks.  I remember talking to someone older and he said my generation will probably be the last ones to know what the picture on the Save icon refers to.  I had a "portable" game system that was 6-8 inches long and ate through batteries so fast that you might as you eventually gave up and played it plugged to the charger.  I watched VHS tapes, and when we couldn't get a hold of American shows in Europe we had relatives send us taped shows from the states, commercials and everything.

Funny. That never occurred to me before.

[LeRainDrop]

I'm probably younger than most of the people posting in this thread.  But I remember playing games in DOS and installing them with 12 floppy disks.  I remember talking to someone older and he said my generation will probably be the last ones to know what the picture on the Save icon refers to.  I had a "portable" game system that was 6-8 inches long and ate through batteries so fast that you might as you eventually gave up and played it plugged to the charger.  I watched VHS tapes, and when we couldn't get a hold of American shows in Europe we had relatives send us taped shows from the states, commercials and everything.

Funny. That never occurred to me before.

Mind blown!  So true!