The weirdest thing about many of these items is that we old codgers also would not have recognized them when we were teenagers.
Cue up “The Circle of Life.”
Of course, we knew rotary phones and dial-tuned TVs, but … ATARI, VCRs etc …
It’s fascinating to see what came and went in our lifetimes. We had no VCRs in our childhoods, and now again we have no VCRs. There were no video rental stores, and then Blockbusters were everywhere (as were video porn outlets), and now we again have (almost) no video rental stores. We had no Fotomats, and we again have no Fotomats. We had no indoor malls, then they became the center of youth social life, and now they are nearly gone, leaving behind sad, empty shells. We had no Radio Shacks, and we again have no Radio Shacks. We could only dream of something like the great chain book stores, and now they too are disappearing. We had no cable TV, and while that isn’t gone yet, it’s struggling for existence. I can remember everyone in the teachers’ lounge gathering around the early calculators, which now seem about as useful as an abacus. Fax machines once seemed like they came from sci-fi heaven, but I threw my last one out in the late 1990s. Pagers were a blessing, conferring a modicum of freedom on people who had to be on call, allowing them to do something away from their landline telephones, but kids today probably can’t conceive how how they could possibly be useful. Camcorders made our old 8mm home movies obsolete, and are now themselves obsolete. Same with digital cameras. There were the Walkman, the Discman, flip phones, and MP3 Players – all things we could only dream of when we were kids – now gone or nearly so.
Those were all things that provided a WOW factor when they first appeared. We thought we had truly entered the future.
And then we blinked, and it turned out to be the past.
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I went to see “The Holdovers” and there is a 21-year-old actor in the film (Dominic Sessa) who is required to use a rotary phone as part of the plot. The film is set in 1970.
I read on IMDB that on the day of shooting the scene, Dominic Sessa messed up a take because he didn’t know how to dial, and had to be shown how. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that he had never used a rotary phone before.
The Holdovers is a great film by the way.
Jimmy Kimmel did one of his “on the street” segments where he placed a tin can on a table with several tools, including a can opener, and many young people could not open the can. They often chose a completely different tool.
How to use a rotary phone (taken from a 1957 telephone directory):
-Obtain the number from the directory. For example, 2345.
-Remove the receiver and listen for the dial tone–a steady humming sound. Be sure to leave the receiver off while dialing.
-Then, place your finger in the hole over the numeral “2” and turn the dial around until your finger strikes the stop.
-Raise your finger and without touching the dial allow it to return to its original position.
And so on. Rural areas like where I grew up might not have converted to the rotary system as late as the early 1960’s. I’m just old enough to remember the operator saying “number please” when I wanted to call my gramma, before we made the switch over to rotary. But at least we didn’t have it as bad as Hooterville.
As late as the early 1980s, on a solo cycling trio through Ireland, I encountered rural payphones there with no dialing mechanism and for which you had to turn a crank a few times to get an operator who would place your call. It looked and worked like something from the 1920s-30s in North America. Now , of course, cellphones are everywhere in Ireland, and have been for a while.
Cigarette machines were not the only way to get cigarettes if you were underage
Many places would sell to you if you were just a little too young
And when I was an adolescent I used to buy cigs for my parents. They just had to write a note for me to show the cashier
My Dad would send me to the store to buy cigarettes when I was 5 or 6, and no one ever refused to sell them to me. Most of the stores in my North Bronx neighborhood would sell cigarettes to kids even when it was obvious that they were for the kids, not parents. I started working in a neighborhood pizza place that sold cigarettes when I was a senior in high school. When I refused to sell cigarettes to a kid who was 17, he thought I was joking. Everyone in our neighborhood sold cigarettes to kids, but I decided that I wouldn’t. I saw kids as young as 12 start smoking, and I didn’t want any part of enabling that, even though my refusal amounted to tilting at windmills.
Our neighborhood movie theater almost never refused to sell tickets for R-rated movies to kids under 17. My Dad took me to many inappropriate movies as a kid, but if I had the money for a ticket, I could buy that ticket without an adult. I only encountered one instance of the Kent Theater refusing to sell tickets to an R-rated movie to kids who were under 17. I was walking past the theater with my mother, and a couple of girls (maybe 14) from my class asked my mother to buy tickets for them because the person in the ticket booth refused to sell to them. My mother bought the tickets for them. Of course, some theaters actually enforced the no one under 17 will be admitted rule. I was going to college in Albany, and my then 16-year-old brother came up to visit me for the weekend. We decided to see the Lou Diamond Phillips film, The First Power. The woman selling tickets asked my brother how old he was, and he answered 16. She wouldn’t sell him the ticket. Perhaps foreshadowing my future legal career, I explained that my brother was staying with me, which made me his guardian, and he could, therefore, accompany me to see the film. It worked, and she sold us the ticket.
I went to 100s of movies as a teenager. I saw R-rated movies on my own since I was 13 and was only ever denied tickets once. We got some young guys in the parking lot to buy us tickets and boy was that guy who denied us pissed when he saw us lol. Purple Rain, btw.
For some reason, cell phones started out huge, got small and sleek, and now are huge again, relatively speaking. Not the size of a brick, like on reruns of “Friends,” but the last time I bought a new one, I couldn’t find one that fits comfortably in my shirt pocket. Now when I go to the gym, I’m back to using my little MP3 player and leaving the phone in my car.
As they’ve started replacing computers for a lot of people that screen real estate became important.
There are lots of things people just do on their phones, like booking flights or hotel rooms, for which I prefer to use my computer. I hate it when people text me links instead of emailing them to me. I’m only 56, but I’ve been retired on disability for more than a decade. I am almost always home with my desktop right in front of me. Of course, I don’t actually use a desk as I keep my PC connected to my TV and use a wireless keyboard and mouse while sitting on my couch.
Of the 20 entries on that list, there were only two I never used. I never owned a Swatch watch, much less multiple ones. I’ve also never used hair gel, though my barber always asks me if I want any every time I get a haircut, including today. I am actually old enough to have had realistic water pistols and other toy guns without the red plug in the barrel to warn cops it wasn’t a real gun. I have sometimes wondered, though, if anyone ever put red paint on the end of a real gun’s barrel to make a cop hesitate if they were ever trying to shoot him.
We may also be part of the few generations that actually have to go out and work for companies that began with industrialization. Before that most people just worked around their homes and now AI and robotics should fully automize everything so companies will not need people to work for them anymore. Companies far prefer using machines than dealing with humans and the machines should surpass us at everything at some point. So we will just be an odd blip in human history and all our discussions about workplaces and people’s roles will be for naught.
never could figure our why water beds got so popular and disappeared so quickly. Every town of average size had at least one water bed store.
Water beds and bean bag furniture. The way we were.
Unfortunately.