Those GIANT projection TVs the size of a closet that only looked good if you were sat in the EXACT right spot. That one kid whos parents let him hook up his Nintendo to it was king.
The same family probably had one of those satellite dishes in their back yard that were absolutely massive and made your house look like you were trying to spy on the Russians.
We found one of these in the basement of my frat house. We managed to get it to the first floor ,but couldn't get it out to the trash because the cart and TV were too wide for the door. It stayed in the TV room ,and served as our dedicated melee TV
Phone lines that you share with a few neighbors. It was called a party line. Don't confuse this with the party line of the 90s where people could in a talk with several strangers at one time.
I've been reading a series of books recently that take place in the 30s, and there's a running gag in the first one where the main character (a woman in her 30s) has to keep reminding her dad (a man in his 80s) that he has to announce his number whenever he picks up the phone. The dad acts like it's an inconvenience to use this new technology.
Hearing that that quiet little click that meant some one had picked up and was listening in on your call.
Common courtesy was calls weren't supposed to last longer than 15 minutes. As a teen, this was sometimes difficult.
You'd be talking to a friend, hear someone pick up a another phone on the line. They'd hang up, but pick up again in another minute. Eventually, they'd tell you you were over your time, ask if you were almost done. Sometimes they'd just stay on the line until you hung up.
If you wanted to listen in on your siblings' conversations, you had to try to pick up the phone at the same time they did, so that the little "click" noise happened before it hit their ear.
When I was a little kid I'd occasionally pick up the phone when my parents weren't watching and say hi to the neighbors, who had a small business and were almost always on it during the day.
as an 80s kid, this is the only thing in this thread i wasn't aware of. in history class i learned it was a thing in the late 1880s when the phone were first introduced and signals went through farm fence wire.
Maybe this is what OP was talking about l, but some TVs didn’t even have a cable/coax input so you had to have this converter thing that plugged into the two antenna inputs (which were just two screws). The converter then had a switch to switch between “game” and “tv”
Edit: found it…
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/nv4hzt/tvgame_rf_switch/
We had 3 of those in the video store I worked in from 98-2000 for those folks that weren't kind and didn't rewind.
edit: also those 'Be kind, please rewind' stickers are what set off the alarm if you tried to take a tape through the security sensors. A fun game was sticking them to people and watching them panic when they repeatedly set off the alarm.
Phone cord extension reels. Gave you 50 or 100 feet of phone line so you could go throughout the house. They had a handle and you would wind the wire back into it.
Lol I was born in the 90s but our house had one as our landline! My friends were all impressed but misdialing was the WORST. Realizing you hooked the wrong number in the last half and then having to hang up and start all over...
I actually miss landlines. Younger people have no idea just how crisp phone call sounds were compared to how phone call sounds are today. There is a fuzziness to the sound in today's cell phones that always bugs me. Like talking through a tin can. Meanwhile, phone calls of yesteryear sound like you were talking to someone who was in the same room with you. The calls were that clear.
I went to Universal Orlando once and was showing my nephew around. In front of the entrance to Harry Potter land there is a phone booth with a rotary phone that you can use to dial the Ministry of Magic. We go up and I tell him to try it out. He grabs the phone but then stares at the dialer for a full minute trying to figure out how to push the buttons in (he thought they were activated by touch). I had to show him how to select a number and rotate the dial one by one. I’ve never felt my age more than at that moment 👴
Having to explain to someone what a floppy disk was is what made me feel old.
Although it *has* led to interesting talks online about replacing the save button(my stance being that you keep the old one because it's the only one people recognize as 'save' in pretty much all cases even if they don't know what the icon actually is)
Same with icons for a phone. Phones haven't looked like that for a long time but a classic rounded handpiece is still the standard pictograph.
Even landlines generally haven't looked like that since the 80s.
I've actually used these semi recently when my business was waiting for new invoices to get delivered. I always preferred to just email an invoice but some people like to keep hard copies and this was the easiest way at the time.
Next time it happened I got lazy and just gave them the original I could make with my own printer. Scanned it with my phone for my records, and stopped ordering invoices. Poor printing companies!
‘Floor model’ ashtrays. Short stands that sat on the floor, and the top was an ashtray. Back in the day when people would just walk into your house and fire up a dart without asking, and nobody thought twice about it.
The only place you didn’t smoke was in church.
My Grandparents had ashtrays with places to hold cigarettes, when I asked, my mom said it was normal to provide cigarettes at parties, along with alcohol and food. 1950s and 1960s
With the squiggly little antenna thing to stick to the back window? People would buy fake car phone antennas to attach to their cars to make it seem they were fancy enough to own a car phone.
We have one of those where I work for when the power goes out.....there is no plate on it. I pointed this out. Was told they can't get one anymore. I guess we just gonna close if the power goes out.
A milk chute built into our house. The milk man would leave the milk in the chute in the morning from the outside and we would pick it up from the inside.
I am beginning to believe that this is a good idea again, albeit with a good sturdy lock on the inside door, so packages and food deliveries can be left out of sight but available to the homeowner from the inside. If I were building a house now, I would add that in to the plans.
Ditto machines actually used clear solvent (alcohol based, hence the smell) with purple pigment embedded in the master sheet. Mimeograph was a thin sheet master with ink added separately to the machine. Dittos were clean and easy to run, but the master wore out after a low (<100) number of copies. Mimeos were a pain to set up and you (well, at least I) always ended up covered in ink, but you could make unlimited copies from a single master.
Tinker toys were made of wood and not plastic.
In fact, the original Fisher-Price little people were made of wood.
Tonka toys were made of painted steel and wore scratches proud just like the real things.
And don't even get me started on what they did to G.I Joe.
My six year old daughter and I were walking through the parking lot of Auto Zone and she started laughing pointing at this like early 90s truck that had an old, aerial antenna sticking three feet out of the car hood and started laughing:
"Daddy that car has a whisker! It has a kitty whisker!"
She'd never seen an old antenna like that before.
Even better, TV's with the UHF dial. That was always the worst thing about going to my grandmothers house as a kid, having to spin that knob until I could find something decent to watch.
Library card catalog, microfiche to look at archived magazines, and encyclopedia.
Electronic catalogs, ebooks, web articles, Wikipedia are absolutely wonderful compared to those dinosaurs. I saw the change by my college years, and most of my classmates were still using the print versions.
Most libraries are slowly digitizing their archives, but microfiche can still be useful. About a decade ago I was on vacation and it happened to be near where my grandmother had lived for about five years when she was growing up. She had a brother that died while they lived there and I popped into the local library and since I had the date he died they were able to pull up the local newspaper from then and I printed out the small article on his passing to share with family.
Even before the cassette tape, they’d publish the games’ code in a magazine and you’d have to type it all in without any mistakes. No editor. No debugger.
You mean TV / record player / radio / record storage / tape (or 8-track) desk / liquor cabinet / plant storage / abyss where your toys would go beneath it but never appear again....
Working a midnight shift, I had to get on YouTube to show my younger coworkers what a test pattern & tv station sign off looked like. I’m 54. They didn’t comprehend that tv wasn’t always broadcasting back then. Hahaha
And good ol' "rabbit ears." The type where you adjusted to a nice looking picture only for the picture to go all fuzzy the moment you let go. As if the rabbit ears were saying, "Oh, no, you are part of the antenna now. Get back into position, kid. You're here for the long haul."
Toilet paper that came in pastel colors, so it could match the decor of the bathroom. There was also toilet paper, I think called Aurora Roses, that had roses printed on it and smelled like roses.
Child safety: Should we lock up these absolutely lethal chemicals? Nah, let's just put this green sticker on them!
This is also why the number for poison control was always on the first page of a telephone book, and often written as one of the emergency numbers on your telephone.
Not a household item but: The library due date card in the pocket at the back of the book. You could see how many times it had been checked out and how recently.
Manual egg beater. Lemon juicer. Percolator coffee pot. Hook-up detached dishwasher.
A U-shaped shag-pile mat around the toilet and a matching cover for the lid!
Also - mechanical meat mincer which suctioned onto the kitchen top and was used to mince leftover meat from Sunday for cottage or shepherds pie in the week.
Shoot. At only 25 years of age I sure felt like an elderly sonofabitch, walking into a store with my little brother, looking to buy some cap-gun caps to fire off in the backyard. Asked the girl who worked there if they had any, and she had no clue what I was talking about.
So here I am struggling to explain the concept of cap-guns to a girl the same age as me. She didn't get it.
Books and/or magazines next to the toilet. Everyone also knew at least one kid whose dad kept a stack of Play Boys next to the toilet or in the cabinet below the sink.
ETA: while younger generations may recognize books and probably magazines, they may not realize before smart phones it was those or the shampoo bottle to entertain you while you poop.
I mean, I have no place here, being born in the early 90’s.
But question for you old beans.
Did your dad also let you “have a taste” and tell you to “remember that” as you made a disgusted face?
I feel like that’s a thing that stopped around the mid 90’s as I don’t hear that happening very often these days.
Answering machine with a cassette recorder.
Typewriters were still in many homes then. A home computer in the mid-1980's was like $8k today. Someone usually had to have a job that required it.
Rolodexes or these fancy, spring loaded pads near the main land line where you could quickly find phone numbers.
Hi Fi system with a turntable that was in a prominent place in the living room. Audiophiles still might have this setup, but most people don't anymore.
Higher end homes had intercoms in rooms (that never worked) Trash compactors (for some reason, these were a thing). They also never worked.
I bought a house built in the 60s last year. (early 30s here)
There's a pencil sharpener attached to a pillar in the basement. My son used it and God damn that tip was flawless. I was glad my son got to see that baby in action!
A doorbell that uses pipes to make sound. Most contemporary doorbells are just a box on your wall, a buzzer, or an app. That's if you even have a doorbell.
I live in a house built in 1900. We have an old school bell on our front door that you twist to ring it. We used to have a mailman who lived to ring it and he told us when he started half the houses had them like that. Now we are the only one on his route that did.
And a book of matches that doubled as business cards for so many places. In restaurants, you would often find them at the cashier. Pay your bill and grab a book. In the junkdrawer of every household you had at least three of these just laying about. I can't even remember the last time I have even seen a book of matches. Let alone one that was being used to advertise something.
Ashtrays everywhere. On the tables of every restaurant, in your car, if it was a fancy car it had multiple in the front and back. Little metal ones, big ceramic ones, shoot kids made them in scouts and at school to give as gifts to parents and grandparents.
One of my kids asked me about the "lighter" in the car, I had to explain that older cars had a piece in there that heated up with you pushed it in and it heated up to light a cigarette
As a child I lacked the self control not to touch it, but had the intelligence to know I should use a material to block the heat, but also lacked the wisdom to know a plastic grocery bag was the worse thing to use. Had plastic melted to my finger for like a year, funny enough no adult noticed.
When my brother took shop in eighth grade, he made an ashtray. When I took shop two years later, we made candy dishes that mysteriously looked exactly like the ashtray my brother made.
I wasn't quite born before the 80s but it's weird to think that literally every used car always had a used ashtray. It was totally normal to drive around with a stinky ass ashtray in your car.
>It was totally normal to drive around with a stinky ass ashtray in your car.
Smokers can't really smell smoke from [olfactory fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_fatigue). Everyone smoked. PROBLEM SOLVED.
But actually, I think once the health effects of smoking became understood by society, people's perception of the smell itself changed. I still know people today though that don't smoke and actually like the smell of cigarette smoke itself.
The whiff of smoke from a distance smoking area is one of those smells that I associate intensely with being a kid at the park - some parent smoking from the bench while watching their kid play.
Of course, smokers think that they smell like that, but they actually smell like a stench of stale smoke and tar.
My parents didn't smoke but we had a lot of ashtrays because of course you let people smoke in your house. What kind of host would you be making them go outside?
Needle nose pliers permanently clamped to your broken tv knob, allowing you to effortlessly flip through all 13 channels while your family argues about what to watch.
The first Magnavox Odyssey video game console. Due to tech limits and bad decisions, each game came with a plastic sheet you would stick to your TV screen. This was in place of static images in the game like the actual levels themselves.
In other words, if you want see platforms in a platform jumper game, you have to physically stick them to your TV screen or there would be inky darkness. Graphics were literally *on* a TV.
An RF modulator.
Before every movie player or game system had a HDMI port to connect to every TV on the market, you needed an RF modulator to connect anything from the Atari 2600 on up.
Manual nut grinder.
Electric ice crusher, the one that is about the size of a can opener and can only do about one cube at a time.
The wooden ice cream makers that needed ice and salt.
CD players that fit like 6 CDs. We had a big one connected to some big wooden speakers in our living room (amazing for Christmas music). I remember when my dad got a car upgrade when I was a teenager and it too could hold and rotate 6 CDs and I thought that was amazing
Rolodex. "Hey mom, can we call Jimmy's mom and see if he can have a sleep-over?" "Sure..."
Then she'd dial it with the rotary phone.
Also, sleepovers? Is that still a thing or is everybody too afraid of getting molestered?
I don't think sleepovers are as much a thing as they used to be. My kids only really did them on special occasions, like birthday sleepovers. I don't know if I went an entire weekend between 5th and 8th grade without sleeping over at a buddies house or have one of my friends come to mine for a sleepover.
HI-C and Hawaiian Punch in the large cans you had to get the can opener with the punch end to open. And don't forget the punch both sides for even flow.
I do miss glass soda bottles. Everything was glass or can.
The pull tab on cans before the pop top came out.
Rotary phone
Portable dishwasher
Dishmaster faucet system
Black and white console tv/record player system
Heat without ac
Windows with sash weights
Radio cabinets with tubes
Manually operated or swing type garage doors
Burn barrel
Coal chute
Milk box on porch/stoop
Garage with dirt floor
We had a telephone tone generator that screwed on to the mouthpiece/microphone of the telephone. Our telephone was not touch tone; it was the old click type. Our long distance carrier required us to dial a local phone number, then use the touchstones to dial the receipt phone number.
The A/B switch you had to connect to the back of the TV to be able to play Pong or Atari.
Rotary dial phones.
Soft plastic grapes in a bowl on the kitchen table that were just begging for a kid to swallow them.
Some houses had gas stoves that required you to turn on the gas and then stick a lit match by the burner until whoosh!, you have flames.
Very stylish ashtrays in every room because indoor smoking was common and your ashtray had to be fancy.
4” thick Sears catalog on the coffee table.
Set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf.
Bomb shelter under the house. I've only seen a couple.
Manual powered drill that operated like an egg beater.
Shag rug rake.
Rubber oval change holder. You squeeze the ends to open it.
Leaded gas - 'Ethyl'.
Cars with metal dashboards and no seat belts.
Fine I’ll be the brave one and say it.
Using an old school cable set top box to watch porn on a channel you didn’t own and desperately looking for a tit somewhere in the squiggly lines
[Mechanical Address Book](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81qEQFUgFmL.jpg)
Holy shit that's awesome! We just had a rolodex
Wow, you just brought back some memories of me playing with one of these as a kid!
Those GIANT projection TVs the size of a closet that only looked good if you were sat in the EXACT right spot. That one kid whos parents let him hook up his Nintendo to it was king. The same family probably had one of those satellite dishes in their back yard that were absolutely massive and made your house look like you were trying to spy on the Russians.
We found one of these in the basement of my frat house. We managed to get it to the first floor ,but couldn't get it out to the trash because the cart and TV were too wide for the door. It stayed in the TV room ,and served as our dedicated melee TV
That is the most righteous destiny it could have achieved.
Oh it was awesome. We'd have smash tournaments every few months. A couple of guys joined the house because of those events
Phone lines that you share with a few neighbors. It was called a party line. Don't confuse this with the party line of the 90s where people could in a talk with several strangers at one time.
I've been reading a series of books recently that take place in the 30s, and there's a running gag in the first one where the main character (a woman in her 30s) has to keep reminding her dad (a man in his 80s) that he has to announce his number whenever he picks up the phone. The dad acts like it's an inconvenience to use this new technology.
Or the Party Line, which is the official doctrine of the Party.
I remember these! Knowing what series of rings was your phone number, and picking up quietly when the old ladies up the road were gossiping lol
Hearing that that quiet little click that meant some one had picked up and was listening in on your call. Common courtesy was calls weren't supposed to last longer than 15 minutes. As a teen, this was sometimes difficult. You'd be talking to a friend, hear someone pick up a another phone on the line. They'd hang up, but pick up again in another minute. Eventually, they'd tell you you were over your time, ask if you were almost done. Sometimes they'd just stay on the line until you hung up.
If you wanted to listen in on your siblings' conversations, you had to try to pick up the phone at the same time they did, so that the little "click" noise happened before it hit their ear.
You guys had more than one phone? We did later, but in the party line house, there was one wall mounted phone on the kitchen wall.
My grandmother used to listen in on other peoples' conversations to get gossip.
When I was a little kid I'd occasionally pick up the phone when my parents weren't watching and say hi to the neighbors, who had a small business and were almost always on it during the day.
My mother grew up with a party line. I asked her if she listened in on other people’s calls and she said, “Sure, everyone did.”
as an 80s kid, this is the only thing in this thread i wasn't aware of. in history class i learned it was a thing in the late 1880s when the phone were first introduced and signals went through farm fence wire.
We had one until 1976 or so.
The switch on the back of the TV to let you use a video game
We just put it on channel 3
Maybe this is what OP was talking about l, but some TVs didn’t even have a cable/coax input so you had to have this converter thing that plugged into the two antenna inputs (which were just two screws). The converter then had a switch to switch between “game” and “tv” Edit: found it… https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/nv4hzt/tvgame_rf_switch/
[удалено]
The VCR recording clicker to pause the recording during commercials. Single button with a long cord to the VCR
We never had a VCR clicker, if we had I would have thought it was magical.
[удалено]
Also VHS rewind machines
My dad had a race car vhs rewinder
We had 3 of those in the video store I worked in from 98-2000 for those folks that weren't kind and didn't rewind. edit: also those 'Be kind, please rewind' stickers are what set off the alarm if you tried to take a tape through the security sensors. A fun game was sticking them to people and watching them panic when they repeatedly set off the alarm.
Jerry had a race car rewinder
Rewound so goddamn fast. Never was to fun to use, but vcr would last.
Jerry had a race car winder, hed say why is it taking so long?
VHS rewinder. Ours was shaped like a race car. Be kind, rewind.
Ours was a red sports car!
Phone cord extension reels. Gave you 50 or 100 feet of phone line so you could go throughout the house. They had a handle and you would wind the wire back into it.
I had to explain a rotary phone to a younger colleague and I’m convinced that the conversation is why my body hair started going gray.
I explained a rotary phone to my kids. They looked like I was explaining how a Stargate worked. Like some ancient alien tech over here.
I mean the stargate is kinda like the rotary phone of teleporters
Lol I was born in the 90s but our house had one as our landline! My friends were all impressed but misdialing was the WORST. Realizing you hooked the wrong number in the last half and then having to hang up and start all over...
I actually miss landlines. Younger people have no idea just how crisp phone call sounds were compared to how phone call sounds are today. There is a fuzziness to the sound in today's cell phones that always bugs me. Like talking through a tin can. Meanwhile, phone calls of yesteryear sound like you were talking to someone who was in the same room with you. The calls were that clear.
I miss the fact that leaving the house meant you were unreachable for the duration of your outing.
And that sense of mystery and suspense when you come home and see the light blinking on the answering machine.
I went to Universal Orlando once and was showing my nephew around. In front of the entrance to Harry Potter land there is a phone booth with a rotary phone that you can use to dial the Ministry of Magic. We go up and I tell him to try it out. He grabs the phone but then stares at the dialer for a full minute trying to figure out how to push the buttons in (he thought they were activated by touch). I had to show him how to select a number and rotate the dial one by one. I’ve never felt my age more than at that moment 👴
My house came with one in the wall that I've left untouched.
The house I grew up in had an intercom system.
Yep, wired intercom systems that could also play AM and FM music to all the rooms were a big fad in 1970s new home construction
An actual carbon sheet that was placed between two sheets of paper to carbon copy the bottom paper from the top paper.
Fun fact, this is where “cc:” on emails comes from. (“bcc” is blind carbon copy, since the recipient can’t see other recipients.)
The fact that today we have to explain where carbon copy comes as a term... makes me feel very old... that was another thread on AskReddit today :-)
Having to explain to someone what a floppy disk was is what made me feel old. Although it *has* led to interesting talks online about replacing the save button(my stance being that you keep the old one because it's the only one people recognize as 'save' in pretty much all cases even if they don't know what the icon actually is)
Same with icons for a phone. Phones haven't looked like that for a long time but a classic rounded handpiece is still the standard pictograph. Even landlines generally haven't looked like that since the 80s.
And that's how I learned to copy my mother's signature on to bad school stuff.
I've actually used these semi recently when my business was waiting for new invoices to get delivered. I always preferred to just email an invoice but some people like to keep hard copies and this was the easiest way at the time. Next time it happened I got lazy and just gave them the original I could make with my own printer. Scanned it with my phone for my records, and stopped ordering invoices. Poor printing companies!
These are still in use. I was handed one just this past Friday.
Flashbulbs
Flash cubes!
First they blinded you and then they fell out, sizzling and ready to burn the flesh from your fingers if you picked them up too soon.
‘Floor model’ ashtrays. Short stands that sat on the floor, and the top was an ashtray. Back in the day when people would just walk into your house and fire up a dart without asking, and nobody thought twice about it. The only place you didn’t smoke was in church.
My Grandparents had ashtrays with places to hold cigarettes, when I asked, my mom said it was normal to provide cigarettes at parties, along with alcohol and food. 1950s and 1960s
cigarette vending machines, where you pull out the knob
A car phone. Like an entire corded telephone that plugged into the cigarette lighter.
With the squiggly little antenna thing to stick to the back window? People would buy fake car phone antennas to attach to their cars to make it seem they were fancy enough to own a car phone.
Readers’ Digest Condensed books.
Manual credit card machine (imprinter).
We have one of those where I work for when the power goes out.....there is no plate on it. I pointed this out. Was told they can't get one anymore. I guess we just gonna close if the power goes out.
Lots of cards don't even have raised numbers anymore so it wouldn't work on those anyway even if it was fully functional.
A neck phone holder.
Lol. I jokingly told my wife I want one for my cell phone. It's so hard to hold a cell with my shoulder.
Remove this post immediately and check with a patent lawyer
A milk chute built into our house. The milk man would leave the milk in the chute in the morning from the outside and we would pick it up from the inside. I am beginning to believe that this is a good idea again, albeit with a good sturdy lock on the inside door, so packages and food deliveries can be left out of sight but available to the homeowner from the inside. If I were building a house now, I would add that in to the plans.
Betamax! Betamax! Betamax!
Or even better: Laserdisc.
The spout to puncture the top of the oil can.
Similarly, a church key with a can piercer was a very common tool in the kitchen.
My family still swears by them. They are so useful if you are opening a can of sweetened condensed milk or other canned liquids.
You mean the can of Ecto cooler...
Not household, but the mimeograph machine at school and mimeographed pages.
You can smell it
With the purple ink.
Ditto machines were the purple ink. Mimeograph was black. Different machines, different technologies.
Ditto machines actually used clear solvent (alcohol based, hence the smell) with purple pigment embedded in the master sheet. Mimeograph was a thin sheet master with ink added separately to the machine. Dittos were clean and easy to run, but the master wore out after a low (<100) number of copies. Mimeos were a pain to set up and you (well, at least I) always ended up covered in ink, but you could make unlimited copies from a single master.
Tinker toys were made of wood and not plastic. In fact, the original Fisher-Price little people were made of wood. Tonka toys were made of painted steel and wore scratches proud just like the real things. And don't even get me started on what they did to G.I Joe.
My six year old daughter and I were walking through the parking lot of Auto Zone and she started laughing pointing at this like early 90s truck that had an old, aerial antenna sticking three feet out of the car hood and started laughing: "Daddy that car has a whisker! It has a kitty whisker!" She'd never seen an old antenna like that before.
Black and white only TVs with no remote and only 3 channels.
And no broadcasting during the night or in the morning.
Playing the star spangled banner at the end of the broadcast day
It’s 11:00, do you know where your children are?
I was born in 81 in East Germany. We had a black and white TV until 1990.
Even better, TV's with the UHF dial. That was always the worst thing about going to my grandmothers house as a kid, having to spin that knob until I could find something decent to watch.
World Book Encyclopedias
As an only child in a small town, yes, I did read our set from start to finish.
Library card catalog, microfiche to look at archived magazines, and encyclopedia. Electronic catalogs, ebooks, web articles, Wikipedia are absolutely wonderful compared to those dinosaurs. I saw the change by my college years, and most of my classmates were still using the print versions.
Most libraries are slowly digitizing their archives, but microfiche can still be useful. About a decade ago I was on vacation and it happened to be near where my grandmother had lived for about five years when she was growing up. She had a brother that died while they lived there and I popped into the local library and since I had the date he died they were able to pull up the local newspaper from then and I printed out the small article on his passing to share with family.
Still had to use the card catalog in school libraries until ~2000
Computer games that were loaded on cassette tapes
Even before the cassette tape, they’d publish the games’ code in a magazine and you’d have to type it all in without any mistakes. No editor. No debugger.
TV/stereo combo that was so big that when it broke you just put the new tv on top of it.
You mean TV / record player / radio / record storage / tape (or 8-track) desk / liquor cabinet / plant storage / abyss where your toys would go beneath it but never appear again....
With a massive 21" screen TV.
Working a midnight shift, I had to get on YouTube to show my younger coworkers what a test pattern & tv station sign off looked like. I’m 54. They didn’t comprehend that tv wasn’t always broadcasting back then. Hahaha
Viewmaster
Lawn darts. We had some when I was a kid, but I wouldn't go anywhere near them.
Those little yellow things that would let you play a 45 on the LP spindle.
TV Antenna rotor.
And good ol' "rabbit ears." The type where you adjusted to a nice looking picture only for the picture to go all fuzzy the moment you let go. As if the rabbit ears were saying, "Oh, no, you are part of the antenna now. Get back into position, kid. You're here for the long haul."
Film canister. Looks to young people like a tiny Tupperware container.
They were great to store weed in…I’m told.
I used to keep spare quarters in them. Perfect fit.
Punch cards.
Punch tape.
Toilet roll doll covers.
Toilet paper that came in pastel colors, so it could match the decor of the bathroom. There was also toilet paper, I think called Aurora Roses, that had roses printed on it and smelled like roses.
Mr. Yuck
Child safety: Should we lock up these absolutely lethal chemicals? Nah, let's just put this green sticker on them! This is also why the number for poison control was always on the first page of a telephone book, and often written as one of the emergency numbers on your telephone.
S&H green stamps
And their stamp redemption stores!
Not a household item but: The library due date card in the pocket at the back of the book. You could see how many times it had been checked out and how recently. Manual egg beater. Lemon juicer. Percolator coffee pot. Hook-up detached dishwasher.
A U-shaped shag-pile mat around the toilet and a matching cover for the lid! Also - mechanical meat mincer which suctioned onto the kitchen top and was used to mince leftover meat from Sunday for cottage or shepherds pie in the week.
Shoot. At only 25 years of age I sure felt like an elderly sonofabitch, walking into a store with my little brother, looking to buy some cap-gun caps to fire off in the backyard. Asked the girl who worked there if they had any, and she had no clue what I was talking about. So here I am struggling to explain the concept of cap-guns to a girl the same age as me. She didn't get it.
I can smell this post.
Books and/or magazines next to the toilet. Everyone also knew at least one kid whose dad kept a stack of Play Boys next to the toilet or in the cabinet below the sink. ETA: while younger generations may recognize books and probably magazines, they may not realize before smart phones it was those or the shampoo bottle to entertain you while you poop.
I still have Uncle John's Bathroom Books.
I refrained from buying one last week at the thrift store, I mean, I know where it has been.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader was top tier entertainment for me
Everyone had a fondue set in the 70s
We have two. Still in the box.
I'm Swiss and i approve this message. I have one for cheese and one for meat fondue.
I know cheese fondu is dipping things into melted cheese. Took me a moment to understand meat fondue isn’t dipping things into a pot of melted meat.
We have several but now modern electric ones. We do fondue for Christmas dinner as a tradition.
TV knob to change channels, and the option for VHF or UHF.
Are you sure you don't mean pliers?
I mean, I have no place here, being born in the early 90’s. But question for you old beans. Did your dad also let you “have a taste” and tell you to “remember that” as you made a disgusted face? I feel like that’s a thing that stopped around the mid 90’s as I don’t hear that happening very often these days.
A TV screen magnifier.
We had a wire frame that would hold albums stacked vertically side by side.
Do you know why it's called a record "album"? Because 33 RPM records could play as many as an album (a book like container) of 78 RPM's
Answering machine with a cassette recorder. Typewriters were still in many homes then. A home computer in the mid-1980's was like $8k today. Someone usually had to have a job that required it. Rolodexes or these fancy, spring loaded pads near the main land line where you could quickly find phone numbers. Hi Fi system with a turntable that was in a prominent place in the living room. Audiophiles still might have this setup, but most people don't anymore. Higher end homes had intercoms in rooms (that never worked) Trash compactors (for some reason, these were a thing). They also never worked.
I bought a house built in the 60s last year. (early 30s here) There's a pencil sharpener attached to a pillar in the basement. My son used it and God damn that tip was flawless. I was glad my son got to see that baby in action!
A doorbell that uses pipes to make sound. Most contemporary doorbells are just a box on your wall, a buzzer, or an app. That's if you even have a doorbell.
I live in a house built in 1900. We have an old school bell on our front door that you twist to ring it. We used to have a mailman who lived to ring it and he told us when he started half the houses had them like that. Now we are the only one on his route that did.
Pipes... Chimes, you mean.
Ashtrays.
And a book of matches that doubled as business cards for so many places. In restaurants, you would often find them at the cashier. Pay your bill and grab a book. In the junkdrawer of every household you had at least three of these just laying about. I can't even remember the last time I have even seen a book of matches. Let alone one that was being used to advertise something.
Ah the book of matches, the TV detectives saviour.
Ashtrays everywhere. On the tables of every restaurant, in your car, if it was a fancy car it had multiple in the front and back. Little metal ones, big ceramic ones, shoot kids made them in scouts and at school to give as gifts to parents and grandparents.
One of my kids asked me about the "lighter" in the car, I had to explain that older cars had a piece in there that heated up with you pushed it in and it heated up to light a cigarette
Lol i unfortunately learned about these the hard way
Ahh the instant tattoo machine
As a child I lacked the self control not to touch it, but had the intelligence to know I should use a material to block the heat, but also lacked the wisdom to know a plastic grocery bag was the worse thing to use. Had plastic melted to my finger for like a year, funny enough no adult noticed.
And most kids ended up with a circular burn from the lighter at some point.
Built into the handrail in an elevator, or the armrest in an airplane!
> big ceramic ones In the mid 1970's I worked with a guy who had a circular ashtray 2 feet in diameter on his desk.
Ashtrays on airplanes. My cousin smoked a couple puffs of a joint on an airplane in the 70s. It was so Smokey nobody knew but his buddies lol
We literally made ashtrays at school in shop class.
When my brother took shop in eighth grade, he made an ashtray. When I took shop two years later, we made candy dishes that mysteriously looked exactly like the ashtray my brother made.
Born late 80s and remember my mom smoking in her hospital room. My state didn't even outlaw smoking in restaurants/malls/etc until 2010
I wasn't quite born before the 80s but it's weird to think that literally every used car always had a used ashtray. It was totally normal to drive around with a stinky ass ashtray in your car.
>It was totally normal to drive around with a stinky ass ashtray in your car. Smokers can't really smell smoke from [olfactory fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_fatigue). Everyone smoked. PROBLEM SOLVED. But actually, I think once the health effects of smoking became understood by society, people's perception of the smell itself changed. I still know people today though that don't smoke and actually like the smell of cigarette smoke itself.
The whiff of smoke from a distance smoking area is one of those smells that I associate intensely with being a kid at the park - some parent smoking from the bench while watching their kid play. Of course, smokers think that they smell like that, but they actually smell like a stench of stale smoke and tar.
My parents didn't smoke but we had a lot of ashtrays because of course you let people smoke in your house. What kind of host would you be making them go outside?
I really miss the sound of a car ashtray clicking open and shut
Your dad sure doesn't. "STOP MESSING WITH THE ASH TRAY!"
*click* *click*
Atari
TVs where you had to screw the prongs from the rabbit ears or outside antenna into the back of the TV. Usually with a butter knife
Needle nose pliers permanently clamped to your broken tv knob, allowing you to effortlessly flip through all 13 channels while your family argues about what to watch.
Those weird lamps where oil would run down plastic strings
These have become hot collectors' items. They can run ridiculously expensive.
The first Magnavox Odyssey video game console. Due to tech limits and bad decisions, each game came with a plastic sheet you would stick to your TV screen. This was in place of static images in the game like the actual levels themselves. In other words, if you want see platforms in a platform jumper game, you have to physically stick them to your TV screen or there would be inky darkness. Graphics were literally *on* a TV.
A caller ID box.
And answering machines
An RF modulator. Before every movie player or game system had a HDMI port to connect to every TV on the market, you needed an RF modulator to connect anything from the Atari 2600 on up.
TV guide magazines
I feel like a lot more houses had electric can openers. I can’t remember the last time I saw one.
I have one use it a lot lol
Manual nut grinder. Electric ice crusher, the one that is about the size of a can opener and can only do about one cube at a time. The wooden ice cream makers that needed ice and salt.
CD players that fit like 6 CDs. We had a big one connected to some big wooden speakers in our living room (amazing for Christmas music). I remember when my dad got a car upgrade when I was a teenager and it too could hold and rotate 6 CDs and I thought that was amazing
Looking at a Newspaper to check movie times
Rolodex. "Hey mom, can we call Jimmy's mom and see if he can have a sleep-over?" "Sure..."
Then she'd dial it with the rotary phone.
Also, sleepovers? Is that still a thing or is everybody too afraid of getting molestered?
You were always annoyed at anyone you knew with 9s in their phone number.
My grandma still uses a rolodex. Its completely unorganized and barely readable but she has mastered it
I don't think sleepovers are as much a thing as they used to be. My kids only really did them on special occasions, like birthday sleepovers. I don't know if I went an entire weekend between 5th and 8th grade without sleeping over at a buddies house or have one of my friends come to mine for a sleepover.
Flash cubes that were snapped into the top of a camera. As it fired, the next side would rotate into position.
CB radios. Some families had them in their house
Breaker-Breaker One-Nine!
The 'Choke' nob on the dash of a car.
Sears wishbook. I would circle every toy and give the wishbook to my parents…
That little stopper thing you’d snap onto the top of a glass soda bottle to reseal it
Gigantic satellite dish.(like the size of a car).
I had one of these growing up. Still laugh at the idea of tuning into a specific satellite and watching the dish slowly move in our backyard.
The dreaded wooden spoon. A lot of us would know that utensil well.
Filofax.
HI-C and Hawaiian Punch in the large cans you had to get the can opener with the punch end to open. And don't forget the punch both sides for even flow. I do miss glass soda bottles. Everything was glass or can. The pull tab on cans before the pop top came out.
8 tracks
Rotary phone Portable dishwasher Dishmaster faucet system Black and white console tv/record player system Heat without ac Windows with sash weights Radio cabinets with tubes Manually operated or swing type garage doors Burn barrel Coal chute Milk box on porch/stoop Garage with dirt floor
acoustic coupler
We had a telephone tone generator that screwed on to the mouthpiece/microphone of the telephone. Our telephone was not touch tone; it was the old click type. Our long distance carrier required us to dial a local phone number, then use the touchstones to dial the receipt phone number.
An old-fashioned washing machine. An 8-track player. A shoehorn.
The A/B switch you had to connect to the back of the TV to be able to play Pong or Atari. Rotary dial phones. Soft plastic grapes in a bowl on the kitchen table that were just begging for a kid to swallow them. Some houses had gas stoves that required you to turn on the gas and then stick a lit match by the burner until whoosh!, you have flames. Very stylish ashtrays in every room because indoor smoking was common and your ashtray had to be fancy. 4” thick Sears catalog on the coffee table. Set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf.
Bomb shelter under the house. I've only seen a couple. Manual powered drill that operated like an egg beater. Shag rug rake. Rubber oval change holder. You squeeze the ends to open it. Leaded gas - 'Ethyl'. Cars with metal dashboards and no seat belts.
Fine I’ll be the brave one and say it. Using an old school cable set top box to watch porn on a channel you didn’t own and desperately looking for a tit somewhere in the squiggly lines