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The Old Coots Lounge

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13:15 / 12.01.06

When I first got on the internet, it was mostly .edu and .gov people. There were no, or few, .coms, yet.

You used Lynx. You wrote using programs like Pico and/or Pine.

There were no pictures, til Mosaic.

Those were the days.

13:46 / 12.01.06

I always loved them aesthetically but could never bring myself to ask Mum to get me them for Christmas as that would mean fewer Starwars toys.

That is great. All the (what seems at the time) intricate planning that pervades childhood...

Does anyone remember Krusher? He swatted many a Star Wars Snow Speeder out of the air under my tuteladge. Got his ass handed to him by Rodan one fine summer's day tho. Pity.

13:53 / 12.01.06

I remember Rodan but not Krusher. I really wanted The Kraken from Action Force, but think that you could only get him if you sent off.

14:28 / 12.01.06

Pine. Telix. Rates measured in baud -- 8 or 16.

14:48 / 12.01.06

Ah, Kraken! One of the neighbor kids had him, and he was indeed an awesome sight.

Rodan was The Toy, and I would have gladly lopped off a hand if assured that the other hand would immediately be presented the handle on Rodan's back that allowed you to move him up and down and make his wings flap. Mom staunchly refused this deal time and again.

14:49 / 12.01.06

Sending off for stuff! Do kids still do that? I remember collecting lots of Star Wars tokens and sending off for this little pack of accesories. A backpack, grappling hook, etc.

15:01 / 12.01.06

and that great cardboard death star - that was a piece of art! Hell, kids these days don't even seem to join clubs and get membership packs! Pah, instant gratification, idiots!

16:22 / 12.01.06

Sea Monkeys. Are there still Sea Monkeys?

I mean, I know brine shrimp still exist, but can you still order the silly things out of the back of an Archie comic?

21:58 / 12.01.06

I remember thrupenny bits, with the wrens on the back and polygonal sides.

I remember when I was a kid and I loved all my Mary Poppins books (seriously) being afraid to come to England because I was sure I'd never figure out how to use the money.

I remember our first VCR - I think my parents paid about $1100 for it back in 1981. I remember when videos cost $80 at the store.

I remember when MTV went on the air, and I remember when you had to get up and turn the dial to change the channel, we didn't have remotes.

I remember atari!! We had all sorts of cool games like Night Driver, which I loved but was really bad at.

I remember the Iran hostage crisis and being on the bus to school with kids who had t-shirts that said "Ayatollah Assahollah" with a picture of the Ayatollah's face in a bullseye.

I remember seeing "Star Wars" when it came out in the theatre (though this was probably months after everyone else had seen it... summer 78?)

But you know, I feel young.

22:33 / 12.01.06

Graaannnnt, Shogun Warrior is making me very excited.
I never had one of them, neither.

(I should point out that I had bazillions of Starwars toys and was horribly spoiled, so it wasn't all bad)

06:30 / 13.01.06

The first VCR we got was a piano key special, then we got one with a plug in remote control, but the cable wasn't very long so the remote control sat in the middle of the room, and one of us kids was pushed off the sofa and told to press the buttons.

08:16 / 13.01.06

Benny you must have grown up in my house. We had the same remote control thingy and the big keys on the machine. Yours wasn't Beta by any chance? God, I'm still scarred by that. Having only one tiny corner of the video rental shop to choose from ...

09:24 / 13.01.06

I also grew up in a Beta house - but it wasn't all bad - I got to Yamato for the first time on Beta...

10:39 / 13.01.06

I saw "Earthquake" in the theater. In Sensurround(TM). I used to watch the Superman/Batman Adventure Hour on TV on Saturday mornings (1969). I dimly remember going to visit relatives in New Orleans and we cut the visit short because of Hurricane Camille, which would have been 1969. I saw the splashdown after the first moon landing.

In the punk and new wave '80s I thought the '70s sucked, but that was mostly because local radio stations kept playing hair bands and "classic rock." Now I think the '70s were pretty good (great if you were a kid) and the '80s blew.

11:17 / 13.01.06

Our telly was made out of wood and was rented from Rumbelows. It would *stop working* at least two or three times a year and a man would come out and *fix* it. He didn't tell us to throw it away and get another one - no, he would fix it, with tools and everything. That was his whole job!

When it was working you could watch one of three channels, which closed down at night and didn't come on again until... when? Was it as late as lunch time? It was all Schools programs in the morning, wasn't it?

Xoc:

"I remember when the record player gave you a choice of 33 and a third, 45 and 78 rpm."

Ooh, ooh, ours had all them AND '16 and a half'. I used to play my 45 of Winnie the Pooh singing "I'm all Rumbly in my Tumbly" at that speed, and thrilled at the bits where he paused for breath, cos he sounded like a huge, sleepy monster at the bottom of a well.

12:53 / 13.01.06

My cousins got Pong and we played it for hours: a line down the middle, a dash on each side and a bouncing dot. Amazing.

I remember getting a color television.

The milk man, who came 3 times a week. (Do you still have milk men in England? It seems less common than it was when I first visited in the late 80s).

Lying in the back window of our big, old 1971 chevy on the way home from grandma's (seatbelts? child seats?), listening to the music my parents would put on to calm us down after getting all riled up playing with our cousins, looking at the stars.

12:57 / 13.01.06

Nope, mine was VHS - terrible quality, but bigger cassettes! I remember when The Godfather was presented in 8 parts on tele, and my dad taped in, putting the tapes in those crappy, faux leather bound video boxes to make them look like books.

Oh and milkmen are still around - the one in my close comes at about 5, so not sure when he collects money/gets new customers...

15:24 / 13.01.06

I also grew up in a Beta house - but it wasn't all bad - I got to Yamato for the first time on Beta...

The first people I knew to get any kind of home theater/movie playing device lived "out west in the woods" (in what is now the heart of suburbia).

Laser discs. You had to turn them over halfway through the movie. They were the size of LPs. That's how I watched Blade Runner the first time.

Sea Monkeys are still available, but I think almost exclusively for the nostalgia market.

18:11 / 13.01.06

Yeah the past was shit. Living in the future rocks.

19:34 / 13.01.06

Oh yeah? Where's my flying car?

Hey, remember hiding under your desk during nuclear attack drills? Yeah, wasn't that fun and useful? Didn't you love the pall of terror that accompanied any mention of Russians or the Soviet Union? Good times.

paranoidwriter waves hello

19:46 / 13.01.06

I remember watching 'Threads' on TV and my Dad saying: "Don't worry, kid. If they drop the bomb, I'll kill you before the radiation poisoning kicks in."

Ahh, bless.... Parents: they mean well.

23:39 / 13.01.06

Hey, remember hiding under your desk during nuclear attack drills?

I think we may have covered that here. If anyone wants a golden age, that would be the mid-1990s, when we thought our governments had given up on scaring us with that sort of shit.
Anyway, my oldness points consist of owning a ZX-80.

03:54 / 15.01.06

alas: When I first got on the internet, it was mostly .edu and .gov people. There were no, or few, .coms, yet.
You used Lynx. You wrote using programs like Pico and/or Pine.
There were no pictures, til Mosaic.

And Bitnet. Everything in capital letters and impossible to use. We definitely looked down our noses at those parvenu .com people. Still do, actually, even though we've also joined them. It's all very confusing. They say that happens a lot as you get older.

what do I miss most about Ye Olde Days? Well, there was lots not to miss (potential for mushroom clouds, beehive hairdos, it's a long list), but one thing I do miss. I live in the US, and I miss how some politicians used to think that some tiny part of what they were doing was serving the country. Now, it sounds funny even to say it.

15:00 / 16.01.06

Screw philanthropy and civic mindedness... tractor printers. You couldn't use copier paper or typing paper (which came in pads like sketch paper). You had to buy special paper which came with perforated strips along the sides with holes in 'em to run through the printer. And after you'd printed (if it didn't come off halfway through and jam the machine) you had confetti.

Printers couldn't do graphics either -- they printed using a big daisywheel first (a metal ball with the letters embossed on it) and then using dot matrix technology, which filled in ink along a square grid for each letter. I know there are dot matrix fonts out there now, but it's not the same.

15:11 / 16.01.06

I think they might still be in use - big versions, which print onto big sheets of perforated line paper - in some computer operations rooms. I had to work with a couple in my previous job, about 9 years ago. They would print foot-high stacks of gibberish every night, which was stored for a few months before being ditched. God Almighty, what a waste.

We didn't use PCs at work then - we had terminals - green screen terminals. Hooked up to a mainframe. Blimey, do they still use mainframes now?

15:40 / 16.01.06

Oh god yes, tractor feed printers. Immense piles of paper on the floor behind them from all the crap that everybody in the lab was printing, and whenever you needed to use the thing you ALWAYS had to get up and unjam it because SOMEBODY had always failed to line up the holes properly and it skewed gradually to the side until everything went wrong....

20:24 / 16.01.06

Green screens!

See, kids, way back in gandma's day, your green-screen terminal would end up with letters and gridlines permanently burned into it from having the same areas lit up all the time. That's what a "screen saver" is for.

And you thought it was just a pretty little display, didn't you?

20:46 / 16.01.06

Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously!

Sincerely,
Greenscreens

21:31 / 16.01.06

Green screen? Luxury. Can you say telex?

22:37 / 16.01.06

I remember the Iran hostage crisis and being on the bus to school with kids who had t-shirts that said "Ayatollah Assahollah" with a picture of the Ayatollah's face in a bullseye.

Yes, I remember getting death threats in fourth grade. Lovely.

Madman in the ruins.

13:29 / 17.01.06

I rembmer and participated in ...

Lucozade in glass bottles.

Frankie says T-shirts.

The phasing out of Pound notes to these new fangled coins.

The Channel 4 Red Triangle films.

My Cousion had a remote control TV, the remote was sonic not infra red and you could hear a high pitched bleep evey time they changed channel.

Free school milk.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:34 / 17.01.06

Dog licenses. That cost thirty-seven AND A HALF pence.

Half pences.

I think we had coal mines when I was a wee nipper, too.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

14:04 / 17.01.06

Blimey, do they still use mainframes now?

'tis called the Interweb. We are all soon to be naught but dumb clients on Google's great meister plan, or something...

Visiting the university mainframe room, with whirring tape drives with genuine flashing lights and everything.

Green-lined printout paper.

Computer programmes with line numbers.

Typing in text-only games from library books of CP/M, then tweaking them to change the values.

Actually writing stupidly simple computer games in BASIC and then debugging and playing them, because there was nothing else available.

5 1/4" floppy drives, with their own power supplies.

Playing tape software in cheap double-deck boxes for fun.

Vinyl with computer programmes in the runout groove.

GEM being the most horrible GUI in the world. Ever.

Making multi-track recordings with a piece of sellotape over the record head.

Making cassette compilations for friends, and treasuring songs recorded off John Peel by my brother as the only place I could hear them until I hunted down the records... in a record shop.

Buying 7" singles in newsagents.

The test card. Closedown.

Going to the library or bookshelf to find out information about something.

Margaret Thatcher taking away my free school milk.

Carrying 2p pieces in case of needing to make a call from a phone box.

Rag and bone men with horses and carts and a loud ringing bell, and coal deliveries in London.

Smoking on the upstairs back seats of Routemaster buses. Wood panelling on tube trains which had guards who pushed buttons to open and close the doors at each station.

Fuck, I even remember when there were ships on the Thames, sort of. Am I really that old?

Mon Oncle Ignatius

14:39 / 17.01.06

Sorry if that post above was long and rambling,. I think I just dumped my memory core. At least it wasn't in hex.

14:57 / 17.01.06

The milk man, who came 3 times a week. (Do you still have milk men in England? It seems less common than it was when I first visited in the late 80s).

Every friday and saturday night, at around midnight, someone in a milk float drives down our street. It happens every weekend. Have looked out window and its definitely a milk float. Don't ask me what's going on? Midnight milk runs. Personally I reckon its dealer in the 'ultimate' disguise.

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