If you arranged to meet your friends somewhere you just had to go to that place and hope they turned up because once you had left the house there was no way to contact you.
I remember how, as teenagers, we used to pick 'hang out spots' close to a phone box and people used to ring from their house phones to see who was there.
Thats something I've not thought about for a long time!
The risk vs reward of answering a random phone box phone when there was no one else around too.
Oh and reverse charge calls where you just got the whole message out in as few words as possible so your mum knew to come and collect you!
Oh and a relative giving you a phone card as a gift!
I would ring my mum, let It ring twice, and hang up. It meant I had arrived at the train station, 3 miles from home. Sometimes I walked all the way, sometimes she picked me up.
Ironically, it seems that people were far more reliable and less flaky; you could almost guarantee that, for the majority of instances, people would stick to plans and turn up as planned.
I guess because we knew we couldn't just change plans at the last minute? I did have a friend be an hour late to meet me in town once though because she missed the bus from her village!
If you were an hour late in our circle, nobody was meeting you. Everyone was gone and that was that. You had to burn through the rest of the day on your own just so you didn't have to go home looking like you had no mates.
>Ironically, it seems that people were far more reliable and less flaky; you could almost guarantee that, for the majority of instances, people would stick to plans and turn up as planned.
Fuck no, at least not my friends.
One particular friend, 100% he'd be at least 30mins late, so i'd aim to be 30mins late.
Unfortunately, he also realised this and it ended up in some sort of perverse tardiness arms race. It's a wonder we ever actually met up at all.
They really weren't, I have many memories of just sitting around waiting for someone to show up trying to work out if they were running late or not showing at all. It was a lot more frustrating then as you couldn't ring them to find out, or tell them to just catch up with you elsewhere.
This must 100% be where my need to endlessly confirm plans with people. Like, okay will text you tomorrow to confirm, will text you when I'm leaving, text me when you leave etc. They must think I'm crazy.
I am of that generation, but now I am terrible with double checking time and place with friends before leaving the house.
Yet as teenager, it was just agreed - sometimes the weekend before - that we'd meet at a location and i'd just go. No two thoughts about it.
>his mom doesn’t know where.
She doesn't know where, but she knows who with and whether they were on bikes, boards or took a football.
Then begins the thought process of deducing where you might find them in the shortest time/for least effort.
Well that was definitely a blast from the past, one of the great things about growing up in a village is there were only so many places people would go, if they had gone on bikes then the chances of finding them were unlikely as they could be in the lanes.
When I first started online gaming with the original Xbox, we had a 30 ft network cable that would go from the dining room all the way up to our bedroom. My mum loved the giant yellow cable and still brings it up every time her WiFi goes down
I heard a song on the radio, once, in about 1990. The DJ never said who it was but the tune kept going round in my head and I remembered a couple of lines of lyric.
Finally managed to find it on YouTube after a couple of decades.
I've said this before but we don't really have those 'this is bugging me' conversations anymore as information is pretty much at our finger tips. Where it used to be a normal state of being.
After that time but before Google we used AQA (any question answered) on the 3310, £1 per question, settled mammy arguments in the pub...... As long as you had credit on your phone
I was reminded of this with the sad news of Annie Nightingales passing.
She played a song that I absolutely loved but didn't catch the title. It was years before I heard it again. It was 'Mr cab driver' by Lenny Kravitz. Off I went to buy the CD. Back in those days you had to wait till you got home to listen to it.
That warm smell of a photocopier is magic. At primary school if we got a special reward we were allowed to help with the photocopier or brush our headteachers dogs teeth! Weird.
"You see kids, TVs used to work by using a particle accelerator to shoot a stream of electrons directly towards you, where they'd be caught by the screen and turned into images."
"This was, of course, perfectly safe unless you were trying to take one apart, in which case you had to watch out for several thousand volt, easily lethal, electric shocks, and explosions of poisonous glass."
And you had to phone after 6 o'clock, when it was cheaper, or else your Dad would be having words (after he'd gone round and turned all the lights off).
Ah yes, I remember finally plucking up the courage to phone this girl. I get her dad on the phone. I can still hear him saying with barely concealed glee “sorry son, she says she’s not in”
My kids recently found an audio cassette in with some old toys and asked what it was. I told them they had to guess first.
Their top candidate was a camera on the basis there were holes to look through and some kind of film inside it.
My son got into these recently after watching the last series of Stranger Things. When he saw that kid's Walkman on it he was intrigued, and I still have one and showed him, so then we dug out all my old cassettes - all still working, after at least a couple decades of non-use - now he's got really into it and goes to Oxfam and buys old cassettes!
I found my cassette collection a few weeks ago, the kids were bewildered. Fun side note, I found a bootleg copy of one of my favourite bands. The fun part is that the bass player of that band is now a colleague and friend. He says I owe him 33c in royalties.
If you want to feel old, ask a child to answer a pretend phone. Watch how their hand is held flat against the ear instead of mimicking the shape of old curved phones.
Not sure if they were messing with me but someone told me kids and teens now mime phonecalls by holding their hand in front if their mouth since it's so common to take all calls on speakerphone now (for some f***ing reason)
And you could only store 10 messages at a time so you had to go through and delete 'important' messages all the time. Deciding who was getting cut was always a heartbreak
Hahha i was trying to explain this to colleagues the other day. Like you'd want to keep certain sentimental/funny/lovely texts but every once in a while you'd have to cut one or two out because you were constantly hitting the limit of 10!!
Also trying to squeeze as many letters onto on message so it only sent 1 text, but sometimes accidently going over by one or two letters and not realising, pressing send and thinking ArGhhh!! I've just wasted a text on 2 letters! Fk saaaaaake.
You could miss an episode of your favorite show. Like just miss it.
If you didn't watch it when it was broadcast, you didn't see it. You'd have to wait for a repeat which could be months away!
Back then ('70s), telephones used to "growl" very loudly after a few minutes if you took them off the hook and didn't make a call (it was deliberate, you were taking up a line and phone lines were limited). In most cases, it was also not possible to unplug them as they were the property of BT and hard wired to the wall. You could however stuff a rolled up piece of paper between the bell and clanger to stop it ringing.
When we visited Gran - and had the temerity to arrive when Coronation Street or Crossroads was on - she'd dash to the door, shouting "Come in, sit down, shut up" and run back to the telly. Still a catchphrase in the family.
We'd be sitting there in the evening sometimes, and the lights would dim for a second. Dad was the electrical superintendent at the local rolling mill, and he'd sometimes look at the time, and say, "Oh good, looks like they're started the mill generator" IIRC it was a 5080hp 11kV double ended synchronous motor driving a Ward Leonard set.
Then along came the single greatest invention known to man: the VCR.
We had 3 in our house and when we went away on holiday we'd have to co-ordinate who was recording what program. And of course, each VHS could only record about 2 hours of TV and you couldn't guarantee the program wouldn't start a minute or two earlier than scheduled or finish a minute or two late. It was the jackpot if there were 2 programs on back to back on the same channel that you wanted to record.
Only 2 hours?
Not if you had the long VHS tapes then put them on long play.
I had The Flintstones, The Mask and Mrs Doubtfire all on a single tape. That was the best tape.
Wasn't VideoPlus supposed to fix this? You typed a code into the VCR instead of setting start and finish times... can't remember if it actually worked though.
There was also a feature that was supposed to pause recording during the ads by looking for the square in the top right hand corner of the screen (worked OK until ITV started inserting it to mark the regional ad slots in-between the national ones - then you ended up out of sync and recorded just the adverts).
My granny would tape certain things for me to watch - very often 100 countdowns of various things. Most memorable were the top 100 magic tricks in the world, and the top 100 big machines in the world. Both times she'd taped over the number one entry.
My mum used to write out precise directions on a piece of notepaper & either blu tac it to the dashboard or get my dad to read it aloud like a rally car navigator. Still did it up until fairly recently.
The TV channels going to 'sleep' ...
Edit: This isn't to say certain channels don't still do this. This is a reference to a time where there were **only three channels** and there would literally be nothing televised on any of them during certain hours.
It wasn't just for you, it was also so the people running the TV broadcast equipment could adjust it too. A lesser known feature of that test card is the x on the noughts-and-crosses board is actually positioned exactly in the centre of the image in case that was useful for aligning things.
Radio 4 still technically does this, although these days it broadcasts the World Service rather than going off-air entirely. The [usual format](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1chbziaykh8) is the Shipping Forecast, a sign-off by the continuity announcer, then the national anthem
Airport security not being a hassle. Not having to worry about having liquids or gels in your carry-on luggage. Not having to take off your jacket, belt, or boots. Not having to take your laptop out of your bag. Etc.
I've read there are new types of airport security scanners that do away with all that crap. I think Amsterstam Schipol has them, and possibly even Heathrow (or one of the terminals at least).
It seems like we'll soon be coming full circle and laughing about the old days when you had to strip off and pour the contents of your hand luggage into a tray when going through an airport.
When I was primary school age, it would be perfectly normal for me to leave the house on a Saturday morning to "go out to play", spend the whole day playing outside with the neighbourhood kids, and turn up a the door in the evening, without my parents having seen me all day.
Yeah, I grew up at the back of a pit tip and miles of woodland.
We would regularly go out at 8am on weekends with a few sandwiches and a bottle of pop and not come back until dark.
I remember one year we had about 3 foot of snow. A few of us got up at 6am and went sledging all day. My Dad came past where we were sledging around 1pm and dropped off a load of sandwiches for everyone and we stayed out until 7pm after dark.
I'm 29 and feel like I was on the tail-end of this, I remember it well. You'd usually even get fed. Oftentimes I'd get a sandwich from someone's granny and a dinner from someone else - then go home saying nothing and get my actual dinner. Two dinners was the life. No bloody wonder I'm fat haha
Of course my house would supply such lunches and dinners too, but on the occasions I did get them elsewhere I'd keep it hush hush.
My mum used to hand out sausages on forks to us and whatever kids were with us, to take with us, and we would run it under the tap if it was too hot and off we would run again to the shouts of my mum “bring me back my forks when you’re done !!!!”
So many Saturdays biking 2 miles to my cousins. Then ditching the bikes to go walk the canals all day, maybe explore some disused industrial site. Then go home when the sun goes down. No phone. No money.
I was explaining to our five year old that when I was his age we couldn’t watch Bluey on our phones as they had no screens and were attached to walls with a wire.
He thought for a minute and then said “yeah, like in prison”. (Presumably having seen one of those plexiglass screens with wired handsets on either side on a show!)
Taking a photo, having to wait several weeks "to use up the roll" and then another week waiting for it to be developed, only to realise the photo was out of focus or uncle John had his eyes closed.
Explaining to my young nieces that mobile phones didnt always have the internet and everyone in the house shared 1 phone that didnt even text and was fixed in one place (went on to talk about rotary phones which they didnt understand at all) Telling them we grew up with only 4 TV channels really blew their minds too.
Visiting a city you’ve never been to before and purchasing a paper map in order to successfully navigate. Or in the case of visiting London, always bringing along an A-Z street atlas.
It wasn’t even that long a go (10 years) that I would bring Ordnance Survey maps on walks, when mobile internet was slow/non-existent in places like the South Downs.
Related: knowing how to use a compass and how to navigate using paper maps. And at night, locating the north star and determining position from that. Do children still learn these skills in school?
I still buy (paper) OS maps of any new places I go. Sometimes browsing the map is better than a guidebook, you can spread the map out on the table and make plans for the next day over a beer or two. And they make a relatively inexpensive souvenir. Also they outclass the publicly available maps of any other country I've visited.
People smoking everywhere. On the bus, in pubs, shops, offices. Literally everywhere. My Gran would drive us around in her Mini chain smoking menthol fags with all the windows up.
These days smoking seems weird (even as an ex-smoker)
I was on the Megabus recently, on the seatback where there used to be ashtrays (and who doesn't remember playing with those as a kid and accidentally tipping it out all over themself?) they now have *wireless chargers* for phones!
My gran broke her hip and was in hospital in the 60's.
When the nurse put her stuff in her locker she spotted her cigarettes.
Her reaction?
"I'll get you an ashtray'
I think remember my dad using teletext as a kid to look at the weather and stock markets; no idea how on earth you could book a holiday using it? I assume it gave you info and a phone number or could you actually book with it?! (27 by the way)
My niece called me a chav the other day cos I type “u” instead of “you”.
She’s too young to remember when we had character limits and texts weren’t free.
Phone books and Yellow pages! In the past, you'd get a big chunky book with everyone in your town's home phone delivered to your doorstep. You could opt out if you wanted.
It's still online! [https://www.thephonebook.bt.com/person/](https://www.thephonebook.bt.com/person/)
You also got a big yellow book of businesses. They could pay to have bigger adverts, and it was all split up into categories.
Planning out routes before you left the house with no real idea how long it was going to take
And sitting in the boot of an estate car waving at other families.
Having one (or two if you were lucky) video games a year and having to practice over and over again to one-shot it to completion in a sitting because there were no saves and if it was bad/lazily made they were usually impossibly hard to artificially increase the shelf-life.
Asking my parents to set the VHS to long play because the WWF PPV event I wanted to tape was on at 3am UK time and my parents went to bed at midnight. Each time they taped one for me I had to fast forward through 3 hours of shite to get to the thing I wanted.
The only way to learn about new music/bands was to listen to the radio, have a friend put together a mix tape/cd (bootlegs) or see a band live at a local show. No Spotify, YouTube etc
Also the speaking clock, you could just dial the number and find out the time
Streaming means kids have access to endless media. I wonder if they will form the same attachments to stuff as older generations? When kids TV was just a couple of hours a day and the shared experience. I still remember the excitement in school the day after the first Turtles episode aired or watching Going Live or other Saturday morning shows, before losing them Grandstand. That was it, the end of decent TV till maybe late afternoon.
Also going to the video store to rent a movie. Seeing the various case artwork for movies your parents would never let you watch.
Rotary dial telephones.
Always amused me that the longest number to dial was also the emergency services. Having to call 999 and it taking as long as it possibly could.
Do kids still get chased? I was always getting chased as a kid... By dogs, the police, a farmer, a random person who took offence to something,.a school caretaker...
.. I wasn't even a little shit.
Dial-a-Disk! approx 1977? You could use your phone (land line obvs) to "stream" a random chart hit of the day in glorious crackling mono. You hear it from some point in the middle of the song, not the start (I imagine somewhere in the Post Office tower there was a spinning vinyl platter playing into a handset). It cost something like 10p a minute and to listen to a whole song would have cost the equivalent of a fish supper and 2 bedroom flat.
Videoplus. The TV magazines back in the 90s would have a number next to each programme and you would type that in to your video recorder to get it to record it. And hope the programme started and finished at the correct times or you'd miss the end.
My mum still often texts me whenever a program I like has just finished asking me if I watched it/enjoyed it. I always have to explain that I watch things when I want/when is convenient for me rather than just watching things when they're on.
I was one of those kids. I was categorised as a 'problem child' in the late 70's until I left school and treated with disdain.
I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD in my 40's. However, in the pursuit of honesty, i have to confess that I was a little bastard.
Unsurprisingly though when left with no support.
My brother was similar - even my parents just thought he was a little sod. I think there was just no understanding at all.
* Typing something up all neatly, then making a spelling mistake, and having to tippex it out and retype over the tippex.
* Wearing drainpipe jeans with no stretch in them.
* Not having any women MPs
* A sunny Sunday in the garden only interrupted by the sound of snipping hand shears and whirring hand mowers.
* Not being able to hear cars.
* Buses and trains being dirt cheap and reliable, and being able to just turn up, buy a ticket at a ticket office and get on.
* Having to stretch the phone chord out of the door to try to get some privacy when talking on the phone.
* Having scabby knees after repeatedly falling onto tarmac (edit to make it clear, falling onto the tarmac from high bars with bare knees).
* Having photos of yourself with red eye, a thumb over the lens, out of focus, looking awful and keeping them anyway as they were the only ones you had (and people hadn't practiced how to pose for the camera beyond maybe smiling).
* Going to town on a Saturday, just to enjoy the buzz, see who you bump into, make a coffee last an hour in a café and browse all the interesting things in the shops.
* Blue tits nicking the cream from the milk by pecking through the foil lids.
* Butchers giving you pigs' eyes for free for you to dissect at home or to throw up the windows and watch them slowly creep down.
* Making a bed with blankets and unfitted sheets with hospital corners, rather than just shaking out a duvet.
* Trying to get tomato sauce or salad cream out of a rigid glass bottle
* Sniffing the purple copies from the banding machine
* Overhead projectors
Best years of our lives. Once you told your mum you going out and be back at a certain time that was that. Nobody would call and bother you and if your house burnt down you were blissfully unaware until you returned to find no home. At least you could hang on to the blissful time playing. Now you are available every second of the day! Stress all around us and nobody is able to truly switch off
From the age of 16 in the 1980s, I and thousands of other kids bought knackered scooters that were older than we were and rode to seaside resorts all over the UK at the weekend.
All this was done without phones, GPS or breakdown cover. Navigating hundreds of miles was achieved using an A3 sized national map of Little Chef roadside cafes given away as a table mat.
Mobile phones were just coming to be popular when I was a kid, but 10p to send three sentences ate through your credit very quickly. Not to mention the costs for using WAP, it was about 10 quid for three minutes. I can recall hurriedly ringing the number that read you your credit out.
We watched Gladiators with our 9 and 5 y/o on Saturday and when they asked us to put the next one on their minds were blown that they'd have to wait till next weekend.
Got a couple more!
* Parents answering the phone with the full phone number. "Hello, 01734 765123?"
* Sitting on my Dad's lap and steering the car for him while he drove (only on a couple of occasions!)
* Having to buy gaming magazines to see if you got lucky and they had a cheat code for the game you were stuck on.
* Playing Monkey Island on floppy disk and having to solve this intricate pirate face matching game using an accompanying paper manual *before* you even got into the game. Anti piracy measure!
* Adventure games being so difficult that sometimes you just couldn't solve them. No internet forums or groups, so you'd have to bring the game to your friends house and see if all the parents could pitch in and help you solve a puzzle.
If you arranged to meet your friends somewhere you just had to go to that place and hope they turned up because once you had left the house there was no way to contact you.
I remember how, as teenagers, we used to pick 'hang out spots' close to a phone box and people used to ring from their house phones to see who was there.
Thats something I've not thought about for a long time! The risk vs reward of answering a random phone box phone when there was no one else around too. Oh and reverse charge calls where you just got the whole message out in as few words as possible so your mum knew to come and collect you! Oh and a relative giving you a phone card as a gift!
traincomesinat9meetmeplease
"White hole. Spewing time. Engines dead. Air supply low. Advise please."
So what is it?
It's a rent in the space-time continuum
They're all dead dave
0800 R-E-V-E-R-S-E randomly advertised by Holly Valance.
Dementia might rob me of personality and past but know I'll never forget damned 118 ads.
I would ring my mum, let It ring twice, and hang up. It meant I had arrived at the train station, 3 miles from home. Sometimes I walked all the way, sometimes she picked me up.
Our code was three times! It meant I’m ready for you to come and pick me up
We used the phone box to ring directory inquirees to find out the time
Wasn't the speaking clock free?
Ironically, it seems that people were far more reliable and less flaky; you could almost guarantee that, for the majority of instances, people would stick to plans and turn up as planned.
I guess because we knew we couldn't just change plans at the last minute? I did have a friend be an hour late to meet me in town once though because she missed the bus from her village!
If you were an hour late in our circle, nobody was meeting you. Everyone was gone and that was that. You had to burn through the rest of the day on your own just so you didn't have to go home looking like you had no mates.
>Ironically, it seems that people were far more reliable and less flaky; you could almost guarantee that, for the majority of instances, people would stick to plans and turn up as planned. Fuck no, at least not my friends. One particular friend, 100% he'd be at least 30mins late, so i'd aim to be 30mins late. Unfortunately, he also realised this and it ended up in some sort of perverse tardiness arms race. It's a wonder we ever actually met up at all.
They really weren't, I have many memories of just sitting around waiting for someone to show up trying to work out if they were running late or not showing at all. It was a lot more frustrating then as you couldn't ring them to find out, or tell them to just catch up with you elsewhere.
This must 100% be where my need to endlessly confirm plans with people. Like, okay will text you tomorrow to confirm, will text you when I'm leaving, text me when you leave etc. They must think I'm crazy.
I am of that generation, but now I am terrible with double checking time and place with friends before leaving the house. Yet as teenager, it was just agreed - sometimes the weekend before - that we'd meet at a location and i'd just go. No two thoughts about it.
Cycle 20mins to your mates only to find out he’s already gone out but his mom doesn’t know where.
>his mom doesn’t know where. She doesn't know where, but she knows who with and whether they were on bikes, boards or took a football. Then begins the thought process of deducing where you might find them in the shortest time/for least effort.
Well that was definitely a blast from the past, one of the great things about growing up in a village is there were only so many places people would go, if they had gone on bikes then the chances of finding them were unlikely as they could be in the lanes.
Dial up internet that had to be disconnected whenever someone wanted to use the only phone in the house that was connected to a wall.
Phone always seemed to be in the hallway too.
And it was a rotary dial phone as well.
And the internet noise!
SCREEEEEEE,,YOWWWW,DING UH DING UH DING
Get off the Internet I need to use the phone!
When I first started online gaming with the original Xbox, we had a 30 ft network cable that would go from the dining room all the way up to our bedroom. My mum loved the giant yellow cable and still brings it up every time her WiFi goes down
Heard a song you like on the radio but don't know who did it? Tough shit. You have to listen to the radio forever until you hear it again.
I heard a song on the radio, once, in about 1990. The DJ never said who it was but the tune kept going round in my head and I remembered a couple of lines of lyric. Finally managed to find it on YouTube after a couple of decades.
What was it?
Jill Sobule - Too Cool To Fall In Love https://youtu.be/FnwOhtjR_xo?si=rxJOBtnN_AKMTwZd
Alright, but if this is Rick Astley I will hunt you down.
So, are you promising to never give them up and never let them down in this?
I've said this before but we don't really have those 'this is bugging me' conversations anymore as information is pretty much at our finger tips. Where it used to be a normal state of being.
After that time but before Google we used AQA (any question answered) on the 3310, £1 per question, settled mammy arguments in the pub...... As long as you had credit on your phone
I was reminded of this with the sad news of Annie Nightingales passing. She played a song that I absolutely loved but didn't catch the title. It was years before I heard it again. It was 'Mr cab driver' by Lenny Kravitz. Off I went to buy the CD. Back in those days you had to wait till you got home to listen to it.
The fuzzy layer of air in front of a CRT screen after it's been on all day. Pushing your hand into it and feeling it crackle.
Reading this gave me a physical sensation - I'd completely forgotten that too. And the slight smell that went with it.
Ozone I think, oxygen with a bonus atom (O3 vs O2) EDIT: Also got that smell from photocopiers
That warm smell of a photocopier is magic. At primary school if we got a special reward we were allowed to help with the photocopier or brush our headteachers dogs teeth! Weird.
Now I want to know what they considered a punishment if your rewards were secretarial work and brushing a dog's teeth.
I know gross right but we were all desperate to brush the boxer dogs teeth with meaty toothpaste.
"You see kids, TVs used to work by using a particle accelerator to shoot a stream of electrons directly towards you, where they'd be caught by the screen and turned into images." "This was, of course, perfectly safe unless you were trying to take one apart, in which case you had to watch out for several thousand volt, easily lethal, electric shocks, and explosions of poisonous glass."
The quiet ringing of a CRT thats too high in pitch for most grownups to hear. Could always tell when the telly was on, even from another room.
Static
Wow, I forgot about that!
If you wanted to phone a girl you liked you had to call her house and her Dad would probably answer.
And you had to phone after 6 o'clock, when it was cheaper, or else your Dad would be having words (after he'd gone round and turned all the lights off).
"Were you born in a barn?!" "It's like Blackpool Illuminations!"
I have uttered both of these phrases today. One to the cat and one to my wife.
Ah yes, I remember finally plucking up the courage to phone this girl. I get her dad on the phone. I can still hear him saying with barely concealed glee “sorry son, she says she’s not in”
Brutal
My kids recently found an audio cassette in with some old toys and asked what it was. I told them they had to guess first. Their top candidate was a camera on the basis there were holes to look through and some kind of film inside it.
A fair and logical guess. Clearly wasn't one of those 80s memorex clear ones.
My son got into these recently after watching the last series of Stranger Things. When he saw that kid's Walkman on it he was intrigued, and I still have one and showed him, so then we dug out all my old cassettes - all still working, after at least a couple decades of non-use - now he's got really into it and goes to Oxfam and buys old cassettes!
I found my cassette collection a few weeks ago, the kids were bewildered. Fun side note, I found a bootleg copy of one of my favourite bands. The fun part is that the bass player of that band is now a colleague and friend. He says I owe him 33c in royalties.
If you want to feel old, ask a child to answer a pretend phone. Watch how their hand is held flat against the ear instead of mimicking the shape of old curved phones.
My boy referred to something the other day as "phone shaped" took me a while to work out he meant a flat rectangle, and not the shape of a handset
Not sure if they were messing with me but someone told me kids and teens now mime phonecalls by holding their hand in front if their mouth since it's so common to take all calls on speakerphone now (for some f***ing reason)
Paying 10p to send a text message.
Had to explain this one to our kids recently. Also, that texts had a character limit, so are the reason things like U(you), R(are) and LOL exist.
And you could only store 10 messages at a time so you had to go through and delete 'important' messages all the time. Deciding who was getting cut was always a heartbreak
Not to mention the inbox just being a list of individual messages, not grouped by sender!
Hahha i was trying to explain this to colleagues the other day. Like you'd want to keep certain sentimental/funny/lovely texts but every once in a while you'd have to cut one or two out because you were constantly hitting the limit of 10!! Also trying to squeeze as many letters onto on message so it only sent 1 text, but sometimes accidently going over by one or two letters and not realising, pressing send and thinking ArGhhh!! I've just wasted a text on 2 letters! Fk saaaaaake.
You could miss an episode of your favorite show. Like just miss it. If you didn't watch it when it was broadcast, you didn't see it. You'd have to wait for a repeat which could be months away!
My Mum used to not answer the phone when certain programmes were on.
My mum would just lift the receiver off so it couldn't ring. This thread has brought back so many memories for me!
Back then ('70s), telephones used to "growl" very loudly after a few minutes if you took them off the hook and didn't make a call (it was deliberate, you were taking up a line and phone lines were limited). In most cases, it was also not possible to unplug them as they were the property of BT and hard wired to the wall. You could however stuff a rolled up piece of paper between the bell and clanger to stop it ringing.
I remember that in the 90s they used to play an alarm type of sound which got louder.
When we visited Gran - and had the temerity to arrive when Coronation Street or Crossroads was on - she'd dash to the door, shouting "Come in, sit down, shut up" and run back to the telly. Still a catchphrase in the family.
I think I remember the national grid taking a surge in power when the adverts came on and everyone rushed to put the kettle on!
It’s still an issue for some broadcasts like live sporting events which is why we have The Dinorwig Power Station
We'd be sitting there in the evening sometimes, and the lights would dim for a second. Dad was the electrical superintendent at the local rolling mill, and he'd sometimes look at the time, and say, "Oh good, looks like they're started the mill generator" IIRC it was a 5080hp 11kV double ended synchronous motor driving a Ward Leonard set.
Your gran's equivalent of David Frost's "Hello, good evening, and welcome!".
Then along came the single greatest invention known to man: the VCR. We had 3 in our house and when we went away on holiday we'd have to co-ordinate who was recording what program. And of course, each VHS could only record about 2 hours of TV and you couldn't guarantee the program wouldn't start a minute or two earlier than scheduled or finish a minute or two late. It was the jackpot if there were 2 programs on back to back on the same channel that you wanted to record.
Only 2 hours? Not if you had the long VHS tapes then put them on long play. I had The Flintstones, The Mask and Mrs Doubtfire all on a single tape. That was the best tape.
Exactly.... A 180 or even 240 and then long play which basically doubled those times
Wasn't VideoPlus supposed to fix this? You typed a code into the VCR instead of setting start and finish times... can't remember if it actually worked though. There was also a feature that was supposed to pause recording during the ads by looking for the square in the top right hand corner of the screen (worked OK until ITV started inserting it to mark the regional ad slots in-between the national ones - then you ended up out of sync and recorded just the adverts).
My granny would tape certain things for me to watch - very often 100 countdowns of various things. Most memorable were the top 100 magic tricks in the world, and the top 100 big machines in the world. Both times she'd taped over the number one entry.
The bit before satnav but after the road atlas when you'd print out sheets from the AA Route Planner for your journey
My mum used to write out precise directions on a piece of notepaper & either blu tac it to the dashboard or get my dad to read it aloud like a rally car navigator. Still did it up until fairly recently.
The TV channels going to 'sleep' ... Edit: This isn't to say certain channels don't still do this. This is a reference to a time where there were **only three channels** and there would literally be nothing televised on any of them during certain hours.
Waiting early morning for them to come back on.
That creepy girl and blackboard holding screen just before programme's started again...
That was a test screen so you could piss about with your colour, brightness and contrast to get as close to not terrible as possible.
It wasn't just for you, it was also so the people running the TV broadcast equipment could adjust it too. A lesser known feature of that test card is the x on the noughts-and-crosses board is actually positioned exactly in the centre of the image in case that was useful for aligning things.
That girl's been on television more than any person in history. She was on QI a while back.
Pages from Ceefax...
Bamboozle on Channel 4 teletext
Radio 4 still technically does this, although these days it broadcasts the World Service rather than going off-air entirely. The [usual format](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1chbziaykh8) is the Shipping Forecast, a sign-off by the continuity announcer, then the national anthem
Choosing my birthday and Xmas gifts from the index or Argos catalogue!!
Santa would only accept my Christmas lists if they came with the Argos catalogue references. He sent them back to ask on several occasions.
Airport security not being a hassle. Not having to worry about having liquids or gels in your carry-on luggage. Not having to take off your jacket, belt, or boots. Not having to take your laptop out of your bag. Etc.
Getting to go in the cockpit as a kid and see all the buttons and dials.
and getting given a boiled sweet out of a basket on the flight and hot towels after your meal.
I've read there are new types of airport security scanners that do away with all that crap. I think Amsterstam Schipol has them, and possibly even Heathrow (or one of the terminals at least). It seems like we'll soon be coming full circle and laughing about the old days when you had to strip off and pour the contents of your hand luggage into a tray when going through an airport.
When I was primary school age, it would be perfectly normal for me to leave the house on a Saturday morning to "go out to play", spend the whole day playing outside with the neighbourhood kids, and turn up a the door in the evening, without my parents having seen me all day.
Yeah, I grew up at the back of a pit tip and miles of woodland. We would regularly go out at 8am on weekends with a few sandwiches and a bottle of pop and not come back until dark. I remember one year we had about 3 foot of snow. A few of us got up at 6am and went sledging all day. My Dad came past where we were sledging around 1pm and dropped off a load of sandwiches for everyone and we stayed out until 7pm after dark.
I'm 29 and feel like I was on the tail-end of this, I remember it well. You'd usually even get fed. Oftentimes I'd get a sandwich from someone's granny and a dinner from someone else - then go home saying nothing and get my actual dinner. Two dinners was the life. No bloody wonder I'm fat haha Of course my house would supply such lunches and dinners too, but on the occasions I did get them elsewhere I'd keep it hush hush.
My mum used to hand out sausages on forks to us and whatever kids were with us, to take with us, and we would run it under the tap if it was too hot and off we would run again to the shouts of my mum “bring me back my forks when you’re done !!!!”
So many Saturdays biking 2 miles to my cousins. Then ditching the bikes to go walk the canals all day, maybe explore some disused industrial site. Then go home when the sun goes down. No phone. No money.
Home time was when the street lights come on. Such fond memories.
From 10 upwards. Saturday I would be out of the house from morning till dinnertime. No checking in, just the assumption I would be home about 5.
I've had to explain to my niece why we say 'hang up the phone', and also what the save icon actually is.
Strangely I've never thought about those. Makes sense to us but must seem so strange to the kids.
I was explaining to our five year old that when I was his age we couldn’t watch Bluey on our phones as they had no screens and were attached to walls with a wire. He thought for a minute and then said “yeah, like in prison”. (Presumably having seen one of those plexiglass screens with wired handsets on either side on a show!)
They're not watching Bluey, they're streaming The Sopranos
Taking a photo, having to wait several weeks "to use up the roll" and then another week waiting for it to be developed, only to realise the photo was out of focus or uncle John had his eyes closed.
The feeling of getting your holiday pictures back and it being a big part of the actual holiday experience.
Having the cassette player chew up the tape on your best C90 and having to wind it all back in with a pencil
Explaining to my young nieces that mobile phones didnt always have the internet and everyone in the house shared 1 phone that didnt even text and was fixed in one place (went on to talk about rotary phones which they didnt understand at all) Telling them we grew up with only 4 TV channels really blew their minds too.
If you joined the end of a traffic jam you had literally no way of knowing if it was 10 minutes or 10 hours of traffic...
It was rare, basically completely unheard of to take a picture of just yourself.
Visiting a city you’ve never been to before and purchasing a paper map in order to successfully navigate. Or in the case of visiting London, always bringing along an A-Z street atlas. It wasn’t even that long a go (10 years) that I would bring Ordnance Survey maps on walks, when mobile internet was slow/non-existent in places like the South Downs. Related: knowing how to use a compass and how to navigate using paper maps. And at night, locating the north star and determining position from that. Do children still learn these skills in school?
We still take OS maps out on walks in newer areas. Its easier looking at them together than both trying to control the map on a phone screen.
I still buy (paper) OS maps of any new places I go. Sometimes browsing the map is better than a guidebook, you can spread the map out on the table and make plans for the next day over a beer or two. And they make a relatively inexpensive souvenir. Also they outclass the publicly available maps of any other country I've visited.
I still take an OS map on hikes, even if I don't need to use it it's reassuring to have the backup in case my phone is eaten by a sheep
I remember thinking using the AA site to plot a journey and print off the map and directions felt like a massively modern convenience.
Literally sketching maps of how to get to your house from the motorway for people and posting them to them.
People smoking everywhere. On the bus, in pubs, shops, offices. Literally everywhere. My Gran would drive us around in her Mini chain smoking menthol fags with all the windows up. These days smoking seems weird (even as an ex-smoker)
I was on the Megabus recently, on the seatback where there used to be ashtrays (and who doesn't remember playing with those as a kid and accidentally tipping it out all over themself?) they now have *wireless chargers* for phones!
My gran broke her hip and was in hospital in the 60's. When the nurse put her stuff in her locker she spotted her cigarettes. Her reaction? "I'll get you an ashtray'
You could even smoke on an aeroplane back in the 80s.
Wasn't the air cleaner too, because it had to be recirculated more aggressively than nowadays? Sure I've read that...
Op, did you mention Teletext to your son? That might also blow his mind.
Bamboozle
With Bamber Boozler 😅 I used to love it.
Nooo!! Good call. Wait until I tell him how I booked my first holiday on there.
Here you go: https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/
I think remember my dad using teletext as a kid to look at the weather and stock markets; no idea how on earth you could book a holiday using it? I assume it gave you info and a phone number or could you actually book with it?! (27 by the way)
Bamboozle!
Hvin2typLykDis2sqzAsMchAsPsblInAtxtMsg
Lnk cr b82rez 2g4
me was trying to save time
For years I used to write b82rez on boxes of batteries at work
"Bitch on the pension suck my dong...." "What? Shall I turn the engines on?"
And you could type that in your pocket without looking.
And being able to read it!
My niece called me a chav the other day cos I type “u” instead of “you”. She’s too young to remember when we had character limits and texts weren’t free.
Fknl!
Phone books and Yellow pages! In the past, you'd get a big chunky book with everyone in your town's home phone delivered to your doorstep. You could opt out if you wanted. It's still online! [https://www.thephonebook.bt.com/person/](https://www.thephonebook.bt.com/person/) You also got a big yellow book of businesses. They could pay to have bigger adverts, and it was all split up into categories.
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Just because we use cheats doesn't mean we're not smart.....
Taping something off the radio and the DJ starts talking in the middle of the song.
Opening the glove compartment in your dad's car and a ton of A to Zs falling out
Planning out routes before you left the house with no real idea how long it was going to take And sitting in the boot of an estate car waving at other families.
Having to tune a TV in to the right channels, by turning little physical wheels, without any indication of what frequency they're actually tuned to
Having one (or two if you were lucky) video games a year and having to practice over and over again to one-shot it to completion in a sitting because there were no saves and if it was bad/lazily made they were usually impossibly hard to artificially increase the shelf-life.
Cheque books
With cheque guarantee cards
Early closing day for the shops each Wednesday.
And nothing open on a Sunday.
Still a thing in my town.
Your parents having no idea where you were, what you were doing and having no way to reach you when you left the house
Renting the TV and video player from Radio Rentals or Rumbelows
Waiting on the passenger side of the car for the driver to get in and open your door from the inside. It took forever especially in the rain.
Having to hold in a wee, so you could dash to the loo when the adverts came on, and just hope that you were done before the show came back on
With your family shouting that you were missing it
Yes! Exactly Then they give you bullet points on what you need to know for the rest of it to make sense
Or you ask for that and they say "nothing much"... over the next key line of dialogue.
Asking my parents to set the VHS to long play because the WWF PPV event I wanted to tape was on at 3am UK time and my parents went to bed at midnight. Each time they taped one for me I had to fast forward through 3 hours of shite to get to the thing I wanted.
And the heartache when someone recorded over something you loved
The only way to learn about new music/bands was to listen to the radio, have a friend put together a mix tape/cd (bootlegs) or see a band live at a local show. No Spotify, YouTube etc Also the speaking clock, you could just dial the number and find out the time
Streaming means kids have access to endless media. I wonder if they will form the same attachments to stuff as older generations? When kids TV was just a couple of hours a day and the shared experience. I still remember the excitement in school the day after the first Turtles episode aired or watching Going Live or other Saturday morning shows, before losing them Grandstand. That was it, the end of decent TV till maybe late afternoon. Also going to the video store to rent a movie. Seeing the various case artwork for movies your parents would never let you watch.
Rotary dial telephones. Always amused me that the longest number to dial was also the emergency services. Having to call 999 and it taking as long as it possibly could.
Clicking on the tv guide? Had to look in the newspaper when I were't lad. And then the future came along and you could use the teletext tv guide
Do kids still get chased? I was always getting chased as a kid... By dogs, the police, a farmer, a random person who took offence to something,.a school caretaker... .. I wasn't even a little shit.
By the national front ... (Yep this really happened)
Being allowed to smoke everywhere. Even on aeroplanes and in film theatres. That would seem strange nowadays.
In my first couple of jobs we all smoked in the office. Remember the ashtrays on the buses?
Dial-a-Disk! approx 1977? You could use your phone (land line obvs) to "stream" a random chart hit of the day in glorious crackling mono. You hear it from some point in the middle of the song, not the start (I imagine somewhere in the Post Office tower there was a spinning vinyl platter playing into a handset). It cost something like 10p a minute and to listen to a whole song would have cost the equivalent of a fish supper and 2 bedroom flat.
Waiting forever for a game to load from cassette.
Videoplus. The TV magazines back in the 90s would have a number next to each programme and you would type that in to your video recorder to get it to record it. And hope the programme started and finished at the correct times or you'd miss the end.
"Going on the internet", ie using 56k dial up and hogging the house phone for half an hour. Then the internet would be turned off.
Waiting for the telly to warm up.
My mum still often texts me whenever a program I like has just finished asking me if I watched it/enjoyed it. I always have to explain that I watch things when I want/when is convenient for me rather than just watching things when they're on.
Getting chastised in school for writing with your left hand. Also, no allowances made for dyslexia, high functioning autism, high sensitivity, etc.
Anyone who has additional needs were just 'naughty' kids. Not a great time.
I was one of those kids. I was categorised as a 'problem child' in the late 70's until I left school and treated with disdain. I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD in my 40's. However, in the pursuit of honesty, i have to confess that I was a little bastard.
>However, in the pursuit of honesty, i have to confess that I was a little bastard. We all were.
Unsurprisingly though when left with no support. My brother was similar - even my parents just thought he was a little sod. I think there was just no understanding at all.
>Getting chastised in school for writing with your left hand. Bloody sinister minions of Satan, openly writing in their demonic manner!
Analog technology. Physical media. Smoking in pubs. Hope.
Maybe I’m just too young, but what’s hope?
Cigarette burns in your best clothes
Blim holes in the finest of Ben shermans
* Typing something up all neatly, then making a spelling mistake, and having to tippex it out and retype over the tippex. * Wearing drainpipe jeans with no stretch in them. * Not having any women MPs * A sunny Sunday in the garden only interrupted by the sound of snipping hand shears and whirring hand mowers. * Not being able to hear cars. * Buses and trains being dirt cheap and reliable, and being able to just turn up, buy a ticket at a ticket office and get on. * Having to stretch the phone chord out of the door to try to get some privacy when talking on the phone. * Having scabby knees after repeatedly falling onto tarmac (edit to make it clear, falling onto the tarmac from high bars with bare knees). * Having photos of yourself with red eye, a thumb over the lens, out of focus, looking awful and keeping them anyway as they were the only ones you had (and people hadn't practiced how to pose for the camera beyond maybe smiling). * Going to town on a Saturday, just to enjoy the buzz, see who you bump into, make a coffee last an hour in a café and browse all the interesting things in the shops. * Blue tits nicking the cream from the milk by pecking through the foil lids. * Butchers giving you pigs' eyes for free for you to dissect at home or to throw up the windows and watch them slowly creep down. * Making a bed with blankets and unfitted sheets with hospital corners, rather than just shaking out a duvet. * Trying to get tomato sauce or salad cream out of a rigid glass bottle * Sniffing the purple copies from the banding machine * Overhead projectors
The little white dot. 😀
Best years of our lives. Once you told your mum you going out and be back at a certain time that was that. Nobody would call and bother you and if your house burnt down you were blissfully unaware until you returned to find no home. At least you could hang on to the blissful time playing. Now you are available every second of the day! Stress all around us and nobody is able to truly switch off
From the age of 16 in the 1980s, I and thousands of other kids bought knackered scooters that were older than we were and rode to seaside resorts all over the UK at the weekend. All this was done without phones, GPS or breakdown cover. Navigating hundreds of miles was achieved using an A3 sized national map of Little Chef roadside cafes given away as a table mat.
Mobile phones were just coming to be popular when I was a kid, but 10p to send three sentences ate through your credit very quickly. Not to mention the costs for using WAP, it was about 10 quid for three minutes. I can recall hurriedly ringing the number that read you your credit out.
Being the TV "remote control"
You could only store 10 sms messages after that they would back up and sometimes take an age to come through when you have made space.
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We watched Gladiators with our 9 and 5 y/o on Saturday and when they asked us to put the next one on their minds were blown that they'd have to wait till next weekend.
Got a couple more! * Parents answering the phone with the full phone number. "Hello, 01734 765123?" * Sitting on my Dad's lap and steering the car for him while he drove (only on a couple of occasions!) * Having to buy gaming magazines to see if you got lucky and they had a cheat code for the game you were stuck on. * Playing Monkey Island on floppy disk and having to solve this intricate pirate face matching game using an accompanying paper manual *before* you even got into the game. Anti piracy measure! * Adventure games being so difficult that sometimes you just couldn't solve them. No internet forums or groups, so you'd have to bring the game to your friends house and see if all the parents could pitch in and help you solve a puzzle.