Things young people have never seen
misterorange
Kamala, you're FIRED!
At age 57, I remember some things that don't exist anymore. A few of you guys are older than me and probably would come up with more interesting memories of commonplace items that are no longer around.
Some that come to mind:
Chap-Stick in a metal tube. Looked and worked pretty much the same as today, but metal instead of plastic. Sometimes the cap would get bent out of shape and you had to squeeze it back into round to get it on the base. Similar would be the metal toothpaste tubes that would almost always develop a small hole with toothpaste coming out from where you didn't want it to.
Phone booths. Nowadays any kind of pay phones are almost non-existent. But I'm talking about real phone booths with a door that closes. The older ones had rotary dials.
Adjustable windshield washer nozzles. They didn't spray out in a nice fan-shaped pattern like today. Each one shot a single stream of washer fluid. For whatever reason, they would sometimes lose their aim and start squirting up over the roof or off to the side, not hitting the window at all. But you could adjust them with a pin or a paper clip to get them back on track.
Add to that cars without seatbelts, and cars with analog radio adjustment knobs. "Automatic" push-buttons that would physically move the indicator across the dial. To set them you had to turn the knob, get a station tuned in, then pull the button out and push it all the way back in.
Refrigerators with latch handles. The doors opened and closed like a car door. And the freezer was inside the fridge with a spring loaded cover. Those damn things lasted FOREVER though. When my mother died 6 years ago she had one that was still working perfectly. I would guess it was at least 70 years old because I remember as a small child it was already old as shit and had been moved to the basement as a secondary fridge.
What are some things that, for better or worse, aren't around anymore?
Some that come to mind:
Chap-Stick in a metal tube. Looked and worked pretty much the same as today, but metal instead of plastic. Sometimes the cap would get bent out of shape and you had to squeeze it back into round to get it on the base. Similar would be the metal toothpaste tubes that would almost always develop a small hole with toothpaste coming out from where you didn't want it to.
Phone booths. Nowadays any kind of pay phones are almost non-existent. But I'm talking about real phone booths with a door that closes. The older ones had rotary dials.
Adjustable windshield washer nozzles. They didn't spray out in a nice fan-shaped pattern like today. Each one shot a single stream of washer fluid. For whatever reason, they would sometimes lose their aim and start squirting up over the roof or off to the side, not hitting the window at all. But you could adjust them with a pin or a paper clip to get them back on track.
Add to that cars without seatbelts, and cars with analog radio adjustment knobs. "Automatic" push-buttons that would physically move the indicator across the dial. To set them you had to turn the knob, get a station tuned in, then pull the button out and push it all the way back in.
Refrigerators with latch handles. The doors opened and closed like a car door. And the freezer was inside the fridge with a spring loaded cover. Those damn things lasted FOREVER though. When my mother died 6 years ago she had one that was still working perfectly. I would guess it was at least 70 years old because I remember as a small child it was already old as shit and had been moved to the basement as a secondary fridge.
What are some things that, for better or worse, aren't around anymore?
58 comments
I might be the last generation that was left to play outside unsupervised and told to come in when the streetlights came on.
Diapers delivered
Howard Johnson’s
The Automat put in a quarter get a meal
Rooftop antennas for TVs
And if your automobile had a choke you’re old as dirt.
Another thing that was at my grandparents house was the trolley cars used to go down the middle of Atlantic Ave.
My parents had a AMC station wagon where the fold down rear seat faced out the back window.
No remote controls, as a kid that was your job to change the channel.
both working much better than my actual ex-wife.
TV stations signing off
Using a map to go somewhere
Cars with CD players - almost all new cars don’t even have those anymore.
Jersey is also known for full service strip clubs. Lol. Not as many places as there used to be, but still fairly easy to find.
Plastic "colorizers" that taped to the front of your TV that had 3 color bands. Blue at the top for sky, pink in the middle for skin and green at the bottom for grass.
Going to the store to get vacuum tube replacements for your TV set.
Your home breaker panel had screw in fuses.
YOU COULD HAVE UNPROTECTED SEX AND THE ONLY THING YOU EVER WORRIED ABOUT WAS PREGNANCY!
-bus/subway coined token
-a juicy mcdonalds quarter pounder. last time i had this was around 2002-3. they also made changes with the french fries around 10 years ago.
-laminated library card
-pong video game console
-nedicks orange soda
-schaefer beer
-80's hairdos
long before there was tinder or eharmony back then there was a phone line called the night exchange. no pics with this, so voice, conversational skills and personality were all a must to get the girls' numbers. then there was always the anticipation of what she'll look like. i met 5 of them. 3 were low 7's, a 5 and a kathy bates lookalike.
Along those same lines with the returnable beer bottles, I had an old church key to open them.
Incinerators in our back yard for burning trash.
Another thing no longer seen - a milk door built into every house on the block, with inner and outer doors.
"Supermarkets" not much larger than a lot of today's convenience stores. Speaking of which, A&P groceries.
Sunday blue laws.
My grandparents still had a wall mounted phone with a mounted microphone and a separate large wired earphone. It did have a rotary dial, but accessing long distance on any phone required an initial connection to an operator!
Exterior visors on cars - my family owned one for a while, a '49 DeSoto. Later, extravagant tail fins.
Single speed bikes with coaster brakes, actuated by pressing the pedals backwards.
Heck, we learned math without calculators including long division.
I still have a slide rule that I occasionally bring out just to prove I can still use it. Know this, when we run out of fossil fuels and the power goes out, we old time engineers will rule the world! Bwahahaha.
Cold breakfast cereal may be the only packaging that changed little.
"FUN SNACKING IN A JIFF
As much fun to eat as it is to make"
+Carbon paper to make copies.
+Turkish Taffy.
+African-American families with married parents.
+Woolworth's and Kmarts.
+Mood rings.
+Mr. Rogers.
+Lava lamps
@Lockjaw, I have a cousin who still owns and uses a lava lamp
Betamax
5 1/4 floppy discs
Transistors
Walkmen
The green monochrome pc displays
Daisy wheel and dot matrix printers, plus the paper with the tear hole tracks on the side
Rabbit ears on TV and the antennas on rooftops
The high-tech expensive casios with the calculator keypad
A blackberry phone (if you had one, you know)
When my big brother and sister were tikes they got into the back of the unlocked egg van and broke dozens and dozens of eggs. The egg man wanted my mom to pay for it but when she told my dad he went apeshit on the egg man and told him he ought to beat his ass for not locking his van. The was the end of our egg deliveries.
Bradlees
Caldor
Lechmere
I was one of those DJs while in college in 1977/1979.
Ah yes, John "Bluto" Belushi crushing a can in "Animal House". I just re-watched this last week - priceless movie. A must see.
Pay Phones: with the individual slots for Nickles, Dimes and Quarters, and they had paper phonebooks
Phone: you could dial a 3-digit number (free) for Time and Weather
Saving Passbook: Before ATMs, you had Savings and Checking Accounts. For saving, you had this pocket-sized booklet that the bank stamped so you could keep track of your deposits.
The Internet: Developed in 1974 by DARPA to keep the military-industrial-government-university complex connected in the event of a nuclear war, not for social media, shopping, Zoom and porn. The primary developers of TCP/IP (IP was the packet protocol, TCP guaranteed packet delivery if the end node was reachable) were Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn: when you “surf” the Internet you are really “Cerf’ing” the Internet.
Lobster was $1/pound on Cape Cod in the 1960s, and steamers/corn were common at county fairs in NY - and cheap.
HoJos was known for its sherbert
Carvel invented soft-serve ice cream – common ice cream drive-up in the 1960s/1970s in New England
Space Invaders video game: The thump-thump-thump sound would slowly speed up as the Invaders were killed off increasing your adrenaline. Without that sound, the game would get boring.
Original Zip Codes: Single digit. I have a John Glenn signed postcard sent to Syracuse, 5, NY (that was the order) - see next
Project Mercury: Astronauts couldn't get life insurance. My dad was big in aerospace at GE. For John Glenn's Mercury space launch as the first to orbit the Earth, you could send a self-addressed card to Cape Canaveral, John Glenn signed it (no auto-pen shit), and NASA mailed it back with a special date stamp: Feb 20 1962 3:30PM "First Day Issue" - I keep it on my desk in a sealed display container. Also, while at GE, my dad was able to get original 14"x20" Gemini space and Apollo moon landing photos from the original negatives. My brother and I would take them to "Show and Tell" in elementary school - this was way before "Mikey has 2 Mommies" and "Why Porking Your Buddy is Fun".
Battlezone arcade tank game: The Army actually hired Atari to develop one for Abrams’ tankers and Bradley gunners for target training. Some Atari developers refused to work on it as it was for the Army – candy ass wimps.
East German Women’s Swim Team 1970s: The USSR had these women so jacked-up on ‘roids that they were about as close to men as you could get
Miracle on Ice – Men’s USA Hockey Team: This team was a quickly assembled of college hockey players from all over, went to the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics and beat the professional USSR Hockey Team. In the Cold War decades, this was a HUGE defeat for the Soviets. This was a bad as Jesse Owens getting 4 Gold Medals in the 1936 Germany (Nazis) Olympics.
TV: 3 VHF channels via rabbit ears, and PBS on UHF via that funky loop antennae
Klipschorns (or Khorns) were developed by Paul Klipsch in Hope, AR in the late-1940s, and are still one of the most sought-after speakers today. People know about them, just not that the folded-horn design dates back almost 80 years. And, Klipsch still makes them – about 170 pounds each, and they need to be placed in a corner of the room; La Scalas are a great alternative not needing corner placement.
COBOL: COmmon Business Oriented Language 1959 (still in use today actuially). Based Navy Admiral Grace Hopper FLOW-MATIC programming language using common English, not formulas, and was one of the primary developers. CompSci students today have no clue who Grace Hopper was, and she has Rock Star status with computer historians. People make a huge deal about “Girl Power” and crap, she is largely ignored by the #MeToo crowd. So is Radia Perlman, MIT Physics/CompSci, who developed IS-IS Link-State Routing Protocol in the early 1990s used today by global enterprise and Tier-1 Internet providers based from her work on Spanning Tree for Ethernet LANs in the early 1980s – she too is Rock Star in Computer Science, and a woman at that who is largely acknowledged by the Woke #MeToo Mob.
Hate to break it to you, but my folks opened the seventh Dairy Queen in Canada when I was 5 in 1956. I think that Tastee Freeze may have even beaten FQ.
Tastee-Freez was founded in 1950 in Joliet, Illinois, by Leo S. Moranz and Harry Axene (formerly of Dairy Queen). Moranz invented a soft serve pump and freezer ...
I was incorrect.
* watching non-stop music videos on MTV, BET, VH-1, after school
* watching daily video countdown shows on MTV and BET
* local mom-and-pop VHS / DVD video stores with an Adult / XXX section behind a curtain
* playing pick-up football games after school with fellow kids from the neighborhood
* hanging out at an arcade with a pocket full of quarters
* Cereal commercials for a wide array of different morning cereals
* floppy disks for computers
* non-electric typewriters
* public city bus daily paper transfers tickets
* white correction tape for typewriters