Add to "have you ever seen.....? Past year 1950.

[Fun Doh Mental]

A slide rule. Do you know how to use it?

The old Friden calculators with more than a 10 x 10 grid of buttons. If you divided by 0, and left the room, it would fry itself.

Programming in Fortran with punch cards. What would the clue be if you had a programming error? (the dreadful pause by the reader).

A real dial phone. My 12 year old didn't know how to make a call.
A payphone with a dial.
A phone booth.
A record player with a record playing.
An 8 track player.

What can you add for the youngsters?

[Zankou 2.0]

A slide rule. Do you know how to use it?

The old Friden calculators with more than a 10 x 10 grid of buttons. If you divided by 0, and left the room, it would fry itself.

Programming in Fortran with punch cards. What would the clue be if you had a programming error? (the dreadful pause by the reader).

A real dial phone. My 12 year old didn't know how to make a call.
A payphone with a dial.
A phone booth.
A record player with a record playing.
An 8 track player.

What can you add for the youngsters?

No, no, no, yes, no, I'm almost certain I have(I've seen briish phonebooths on tv, but I think I've seen on in real life, too), almost certain I have(if not I have seen both components tgethr at the same time, I just wasn't allowed to play them), yes.

[farfalla]

A typewriter that uses ribbon
Carbon paper and a carbon copy

[St John the Blasphemist]

A payphone with a dial.

A payphone without a dial, where you had to tell the operator what number you wanted & as soon as you got connected you had to press the A button (the B button gave you your money back if they weren't home).

A pocket calculator that had no chance of fitting in your pocket.

An LED digital watch (unreadable in sunlight).

And something for the youngsters:

Lead-based crayons!!

[Mad Willyum Bonney]

A single reflex camera ,

Stamps and envelopes

[Fun Doh Mental]

TV's where you had to get up and change the channel.
The earlier ones without UHF - Only 2 to 12 or was it 13?

Polaroid pictures...Only in black and white.

Slightly off topic. Older buildings lack a 13th floor. I've seen
floor 13 in the newer ones. Have you seen 13 missing from
elevators in new buildings?

G. Fox & Co. in Hartford, CT had glass elevator doors from top to bottom. When the elevator was at the basement, you could look down 7 stories. It would churn your stomach. The glass had safety wire in it.

I just remembered....they had actual elevator operators who would crank it "up" full throttle and stop it fast at your floor. I'm sure we were weightless at that point.

[St John the Blasphemist]

TV's where you had to get up and change the channel.
The earlier ones without UHF - Only 2 to 12 or was it 13?

The rotary ones had channels 0-12, 14 channels in all (including, for some reason, channel 5A). And that ring around the dial that you could turn for some reason actually had a purpose. If you pushed it in & turned it, it would fine tune the channel.

Oh & the later rotary channel selector ones also had a channel U. The other dial below it selected channels 13 upwards (even though no UHF channels existed back then).

Slightly off topic. Older buildings lack a 13th floor. I've seen
floor 13 in the newer ones. Have you seen 13 missing from
elevators in new buildings?

They've stopped doing that cos of multiculturalism. They'd have to get rid of level 4 too just to please the Japanese & Chinese (the word/symbol shi means death as well as four), along with all the other numbers deemed as unlucky by whatever culture.

St John the Blasphemist
Saint of Ultra High Frequencies

[black bart]

Cadbury's chocolate in a foil wrapper and a seperate paper wrapper.

[Mad Willyum Bonney]

Candy that costs a penny for two pieces (or even one piece ).

[Gorilla The Hun]

Shave and a haircut...two bits

[boghog]

Programming in Fortran with punch cards. What would the clue be if you had a programming error? (the dreadful pause by the reader).

My parents told me about their computing courses at university where they wouldn't even get that: you'd go up to the window with your box of punchcards, hand them to the technician, and come back an hour or two later to pick up your printout and cards. If you were a lowly undergrad programmer, you didn't even get to be in the same room as the computer (though you could see it, because the university had a viewing gallery above the static- and climate-controlled computer room where you could "ooh" and "aah" at the marvel of modern technology that would fit into a single room).

[Capellini]

Who remembers being able to dial your own number, hang up really fast, and have your phone ring?

[Mad Willyum Bonney]

Oh the good ole daze of me youth .

[St John the Blasphemist]

Who remembers being able to dial your own number, hang up really fast, and have your phone ring?

Australian phones had a special number (119 I think) you could dial to make the phone ring. We used to go to the public phones at the post office & make all 10 of them ring at once (free call), until someone yelled out the window telling us to shut the f*ck up! You can't do it anymore.

Oh, and another one for the kiddies:

Chocolate/Candy Cigarettes!!

The candy ones were called Fags - another reason they stopped making them methinks.

St John the Blasphemist
Saint of Double Meanings

[pieces o'nine]

Laughing at your grandparents' 78 records; grooving to 33s.