Now I Realize I'm Old

[Ray C]

`Mimeograph required that the original be typed on blue "stencil paper" and signed with a metal stylus (all freehand drawing was also done with a metal stylus). The blue paper was then peeled off its backing and fastened to the wheel of the mimeograph machine (small ones were desktop and big ones looked like the heavy duty xerox machines). The wheel was inked and the blank paper fed through. After your copies were done, you had to hand collate them. For large jobs. they had a "collating table" which people sat around and spun while they were assembling the copies.

 

"Dittos". If handed out quickly enough, you could hold them up close and sniff them.

[Mr King]

I realized looking at the pool of women to date that do not already have children, the majority of them are too young to remember these events.

 

 

Though if you are an ancient old fart you remember the Berlin Wall going up

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ExMR0c0aM

[Chris Werb]

Watching the Spru-cans come and go (even though they were actually axed early) didn't help

 

Well they were around in 1941! (fast forward to 01:21)

 

[shep854]

Oh, pul-EEZE..."Pearl Harbor" clips are way down there with "Starship Trooper" clips...

[Edmund]

When I was a kid, we got all of the glasses in our cupboards free. The large glasses came from the Peter Pan peanut butter, the medium glasses from Welch's grape jelly, and the small juice glasses from Kraft's pimento cheese spread. My mother owned one set of water glasses for special company dinners. The rest of the time, we used the peanut butter, jelly, and cheese glasses. Such were the lives of the blue collar.

 

Richard,

 

Tell us again how you helped George Washington cross that river.

[MiloMorai]

 

Oh, pul-EEZE..."Pearl Harbor" clips are way down there with "Starship Trooper" clips...

 

Hey some of us are old enough to remember 'Buck Rogers'. Well, the 1981 version anyway.

 

 

Some of us old enough to remember the Buck Rogers comics. Also, the Terry and the Pirates comics.

[baboon6]

 

Oh, pul-EEZE..."Pearl Harbor" clips are way down there with "Starship Trooper" clips...

 

Hey some of us are old enough to remember 'Buck Rogers'. Well, the 1981 version anyway.

I remember Erin Gray very well...

[DB]

It occurred to me last evening that Gulf War 1, occurring in 1990, was (just) more than half my life ago. If one were being shrill, one could argue that "we" have been at war with Arabs (and thence "radical Islam") ever since.

 

I remember distinctly going out of work at lunchtime and buying a copy of the Daily Telegraph with the ground campaign headlines. I expect it's in the drawer where I put it at the time.

 

Of course, "my first war" was the Falkland Islands campaign. I was 15 and obviously only an interested observer. For some reason, the Northern Ireland "troubles" never merited the same attention in me, not even when they crossed over onto "the mainland". The UK's lack of involvement in Vietnam (plus my being about 6 years old when it ended) means that it never really crossed my horizon, either.

[shep854]

Buck Rogers...go on YouTube and search "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century"...

[Leo Niehorster]

OK, I admit to watching Commando Cody on TV when it first came out ...

[EvanDP]

 

 

 

Oh, pul-EEZE..."Pearl Harbor" clips are way down there with "Starship Trooper" clips...

Hey some of us are old enough to remember 'Buck Rogers'. Well, the 1981 version anyway.

I remember Erin Gray very well...

 

She was blond, could dogfight like the Red Baron, and looked good in white plastic. Buck would have been a fool to let that one get way.

 

I liked all the "shiksas" on "Buck Rogers" and "Battlestar Galactica (1979)" because they were all pretty bio-degradable.

[Tony Williams]

I have to confess to being a devotee of the Roy Rogers and Lone Ranger TV series in the 1950s. Things were so simple then - the good guys wore white hats and never missed with their shiny revolvers despite never taking aim, the bad guys wore black hats and always missed. Where did we go wrong?

[Dawes]

 

I'm old enough to have assembled Paveway I's (them funny lookin' Paveways with the boxy tails).

 

When did Paveway I leave the inventory? Ditto the GBU-8?

 

We dropped some of the last PW1's at Nellis in (IIRC) 1985. GBU-8 I don't think survived much past the late 1970's (GBU-15 being it's replacement).

[Richard Lindquist]

I have to confess to being a devotee of the Roy Rogers and Lone Ranger TV series in the 1950s. Things were so simple then - the good guys wore white hats and never missed with their shiny revolvers despite never taking aim, the bad guys wore black hats and always missed. Where did we go wrong?

The good guys didn't kill the bad guys, they just shot the guns out of their hands.

[irregularmedic]

 

 

You realise you are old when aircraft younger than you are, are starting to appear in aviation museums. That horrible realisation arose for me when Duxford took delivery of a Tornado and an A10.

 

Im EVEN old enough to remember an era before this new fangled 'internet' thingie, and we all had tape drives instead. And we were thankful for them!

 

Black and white TV (1960 in my home).... and the home didn't get a telephone until 1963.

 

78rpm records

 

My grandparents next door had a gas powered refrigerator, but others in the neighbourhood still had ice delivered, in a horse drawn cart.

 

Yes, early 1960s.

 

When the young bloke at the service station who put petrol in your tank also checked the tyres and washed the windshield but your family car didn't have seatbelts.

 

And everyone used cash.

 

We had a deal with the local Mobil station. We just signed a sales receipt and at the end of the month the owner would send us a bill (no plastic involved). Good for me keeping gas in my 1953 Hudson Jet as my mother paid the gas bills.

 

I went through four years of engineering in college using a Pickett slide rule in "eye saver yellow".

 

The Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering departments jointly owned a half a dozen expensive (couple of thousand 1950s dollars) Friden mechanical calculators which could add, subtract, multiply, and divide (one of the machines would actually calculate square roots). They were noisy with all of the little wheels inside spinning around and had sliders with pointers to indicate the decimal points (manually). A three dollar pocket calculator does all of that today.

 

We also used twelve place logarithmic tables which were books the size of the old high end library atlases. Try taking an examination balancing one of those on your lap. Handouts and examinations were all produced in a purplish blue ink on spirit duplicators.

 

The instructors used blackboards and chalk for demonstrating the working of problems. Written work was hand typed on little portable typewriters or was hand written.

 

Permanent engineering plans were done on tracing cloth with inking done with "bow pens". They were copied onto blue prints which were white lettering on blue paper after reproduction. You stuck the tracing in a frame under glass with the white paper behind it, then secured the frame like a picture. You took the apparatus out into the sun to expose it, then went into a dark room and developed the paper in some yellow solution. After developing you had the blue print.

 

 

My elementary school (early 80's) used the old purple ink duplicators. Last year Seattle Central Community College replaced most of its chalkboards. Up until that time a lot of the classrooms had either half white boards or even all chalkboards. A lot of the instructors (and sometimes the students) used the chalkboards. Now it's mostly computer driven overhead projectors in conjunction with the white boards. First time I saw that I almost thought it was some sort of magic, I couldn't figure out how the computer was going through the projector.

 

I didn't realize Hudson still produced cars post-war. Thanks for that. I've seen a number of pre-war ads showing neat models of Hudsons. I'll have to peruse their post-war line-up now. Thanks for the explanation of blue prints too, I didn't realize that's where the name came from and how they were done. I used to handle them some (filing, distribution around the factory, etc) at my dad's work (at the time a burner manufacturer for boilers (both marine and facility)), and actually recently picked up a blueprint for a Spy vs Spy halloween costume my lady and I are making for this year. I always wondered why the paper felt funny.

 

I feel old hearing 80's music in the grocery store and when people describe bicycles and cars from the late 80's as "vintage" I cringe. 90's era equipment still mostly feels new to me.

 

My first work computer was a Compaq that was a heavy suitcase with a little green screen. Our TV was black and white for some time.

 

I still prefer cash a lot of the time. I almost never use GPS, much preferring a map and way-finding on my own. I own a wrist watch and wear it several times a week.

 

I also prefer cantilever brakes and fat tires and single actions.

Edited August 12, 2014 by irregularmedic

[mnm]

I also used a Compaq like that in the company in what, 1988? The brand was called Compaq because their computers were compact, that is, they contained a lot less air inside the box so they would be smaller and carriable with a leather handle. The one I used looked like a sewing machine case and was heavy as one, the frame inside was all steel. It was supposed to be rugged

 

 

Here it is, you laid it on it's side, pulled out the base and there was your keyboard The one I had had come straight from the US so it was 60Hz and local current is 50Hz, so that 8" or so green monochrome screen shimmered a bit. Two floppy drives (720Kb!) and a 20 Mb hard disk. And this was the portable computer in the company, at a time we never had figured out how those mickey mouse analog modems worked, and we were better off having Pony Express carry over a few 5 1/4" floppys together with a new drawing bundle anyway

 

dBase III ruled then, together with Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3!

[DB]

The Compaq "luggable" was pretty much following in the footsteps of the Osborne 1, which was, I think, without googling a CP/M machine. ground (and back!) breaking.

 

Compaq's main claim to fame, though, was in "clean rooming" a legal clone BIOS that broke IBM's monopoly on the provision of the actual PCs, as opposed to peripherals and cards.

 

And where are they now? Compaq is an HP brand, and IBM sold their laptop division to the Chinese.

[DougRichards]

I enjoyed building airfix, and frog, kits as a 'tween'.

 

a victim of airfixation.....

 

Yes, that old. (I remember getting the airfix guards band set as a child (1965?) , and the original foreign legion set. AND (yes, there is more) the original Fort Apache set with the Indians, the fort, the US Cavalry and the wagon train set. That was 1966. Yes, I remember it because my mother bought it for me, and she passed in 1967.

Edited August 14, 2014 by DougRichards

[Richard Lindquist]

Hudson was a long standing brand in Detroit (JL Hudson, the department store magnate, angelled the startup). The auto company "coat of arms" included Henry Hudson's ship the "Half Moon". Hudson's factory got worn out doing WWII production and their sales were not sufficient to modernize the factory (Packard was in the same boat). George Mason was the head of Nash-Kelvinator at the time. He felt that the four "independent" car companies should combine and make a viable fourth addition (American Motors) to the "big three" (GM, Ford, Chrysler). His scheme was that Nash would take over Hudson and Packard would take over Studebaker. The two companies would then combine to be the fourth automaker. As a result, 1955-1957 Hudsons were produced in the Nash factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin and were essentially a renamed Nash with a few trim differences (known as the Hash). Packard merged with Studebaker and found out that the Studebaker factory in South Bend, Indiana was in as bad a shape as the Packard plant in Detroit. 1957 was the last year for Packard, Hudson, and Nash . George Mason died and George Romney took over AMC. Romney wanted no part of Studebaker-Packard and felt that the small Nash Rambler was the future for AMC and went that way. Studebaker staggered on a couple of more years before throwing in the towel.

[Tony Williams]

Ah, the Studebaker Avanti - one of my favourite cars when I was a kid - I though it looked great!

[mnm]

I think I read somewhere that one of the first portable computers was built by Apple in the 1970s, can anyone remember that one?

 

The first Apple I saw was a brick with a taller than wide screen that was supposed to be better for word processing, and compared to IBM-ATs (80286 + 287 maths co-processor which we always yanked out as it was full of glitches!) it cost astronomically more.

 

I remember at the time the company had that single IBM-AT which had cost something like 8 months of my monthly wages, and when the board decided to buy a second machine I argued against as one machine was more than enough. I was 28-30 at the time but what do those stupid youngsters know

[Corinthian]

This thread makes me feel oh so young and vibrant and alive!

 

Hehehehe

[shep854]

This thread makes me feel oh so young and vibrant and alive!

 

Hehehehe

Enjoy it! Your time's coming...Heheheh...

[mnm]

Tomas, on the other hand you have a much shorter span of memories and experiences, I'm sorry. Now, as I was saying, when Columbus landed on the Bahamas he was swearing under his breath about his Spanish-Japanese phrase book the rats had eaten, but just when...

[RETAC21]

 

I think I read somewhere that one of the first portable computers was built by Apple in the 1970s, can anyone remember that one?

 

The first Apple I saw was a brick with a taller than wide screen that was supposed to be better for word processing, and compared to IBM-ATs (80286 + 287 maths co-processor which we always yanked out as it was full of glitches!) it cost astronomically more.

 

I remember at the time the company had that single IBM-AT which had cost something like 8 months of my monthly wages, and when the board decided to buy a second machine I argued against as one machine was more than enough. I was 28-30 at the time but what do those stupid youngsters know

 

 

There I was in the early 90s, thinking this Internet thing was a waste of time and that computers were only good for games...