[Fun] I'm So Old I Remember....

next door neigbours did jobs for each other! lol

 

I'm old as dirt and twice as gritty.

 

dreaming that someday everyone would be able to have their own computers and there would be an internet. the internet going public wasn't until the late 80s, and computers an ordinary person could afford and have in their homes weren't in stores until the late 70s, and only existed as kits in the early 70s. being born in 1948, neither of these things existed yet when i was in high school. they didn't exist yet when kennidy was shot, they didn't exist yet when sputnik was launched, they didn't exist yet when a human first set foot on earth's moon.

i'm so old i remember my parents telling me they were so old most people did not live in cities or drive cars. most had never riden on an airplane. even i don't think my parents ever did. radio was new and television didn't exist yet when they were kids.

i remeber wishing the narrow gauge and the interurban were still common (they no longer were in the u.s.) and that we could have had them, AND the computers at the same time (i still do)

i remember the entire human population being less then two or three billion, maybe even less then one, i'm not sure what the number actually was.

i remember when most major highways were two lanes only. they were called u.s. highways, and the interstates hadn't started being built yet. they had different numbers and the phrase interstate highway didn't exist yet.
i think the only place the word interstate existed was the interstate commerce commission.

the union pacific couldn't have bought the southern pacific or the western pacific because that would have violated the sherman anti-trust act. the only thing that got away with being a nationwide monopoly was the bell telephone company. and you couldn't legally connect anything to their phone lines that they didn't own and lease back to you.

i remember when everything legally binding had to be printed or written on paper.

i remember when paperback books were less then a dollar new. and magazenes were less then 50 cents.
candy bars were a dime, and my parents remembered when they were a nickle and bigger.
i remember thinking it was insane when they went up to 20 cents. and now they're what? two bux a piece?

$450.00 a month was a middle class income, and one person in a household earning that much could buy a house and feed a wife and three kids.

 

...the worst punishment I could receive as a child was to be forced to stay inside instead of roaming the woods and creeks in our area.

 

I'm so old I can remember a big hairy bloke inventing the wheel as he sat chipping at rock in his cave one rainy Sunday....

 

I'm so old my granddad keeps hitting on me.

 

Men with helmets knocking on our door demanding we turn our lights out so that the Japanese subs cruising off shore coun't see that there was a city there. Long Beach in '43. I was 4. (I win!)

 

I remember when you had to answer the phone to find out who was calling. Yes, those were tough times...

 

I'm so old I had to upgrade to B cup.

 

I remember party lines...

 

Party lines!! That was fun when someone was eavesdropping and heard something they knew that I and my phone mate didn't---and would speak up with an apology, but give us the info. Our phone was a nice oak cabinet with a handle on the side. Crank er' up and the operator would come on and ask--"what number, please." Don't know how I remember --but mine was 354r and my friends was 101w.

 

Roofers are your friend! My gramma (who raised me) cooked on a beautiful old wood stove until 1949. It was a big deal to get a gas stove.

 

i remember one place where the phone was a wooden box on the wall with a couple of giant 1.5 volt dry cell batteries inside. there was a crank in case they died, but there was also a button you could press to do the same thing, and our phone number on that line was something like a long and two shorts. it was a party line that didn't require an opperator, other then to patch to another line. everyone's "phone number" was a combination of long and short buzzes. well this was in a railroad company town in a remote location.

i also remember, speaking of phones, that you could make long distance calls without long distance charges by using a company's watts line. if you knew the right extensions. the first number was the local office, then a code, usually a single digit, to get onto their wats(wide area telephone system) line, then the wats line number of the office local to where you were calling to, then the number, again a single digit, to patch out from the wats line to the local phone system at the far end, and then finally the local number you wanted to call there.

before there were repeater stalites to bounce signals off of, the railroad built a network of micro-wave repeater towers for its on wats line, and started selling their left over bandwidth to government agencies and then other companies. the railroad was the southern pacific, which had been the central pacific, over donner summit, at any rate they called their micro-wave repeater network, "southern pacific regional inter-tie network telecommunications", which became shortened to the acronym "sprint", which of course, they eventually spun off as a separate company.

 

i can still smell the uren from these not being able to be mopped for days because too few and too poorly paid help had too many more urgent things they had to do then to get around to it.
good metaphor for our american health care system today too.

 

I remember when it was still rare to find a store that made use of UPC codes.

 

I remember when there were no UPC codes...