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Tempos became a family joke because the one my parents had as a child might well have been possessed. They bought it new. I think it was a 1988 model and it replaced their lime green Ford Escort. The first issue with the car was that the lights sometimes refused to turn off. The car was parked, the lights were switched off. The car was checked before leaving it. The lights came back on. The transmission blew up twice, I think within 18 months of purchasing it. The fan belt went, too. They finally offloaded it for a Taurus that held up well. There was one good thing about the car. Ford used to include a demo cassette to show off the speakers' capabilities. It was a pretty good selection of songs and they continued to hold on to it after the car was dumped.
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Aug 15, 2018 16:58
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Metal Geir Skogul posted:I forgot whichever thread this came up in, but I trawled some goodwills today and found something Can't remember if it was this thread or another one that I just talked about that demo album. My parents bought a Ford Tempo in 1988ish and this was included. The car was a possessed nightmare and was traded in within 18 months. The tape stayed, though, as Dad adored the harmony on Africa.
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Aug 22, 2018 03:25
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DrChu posted:I'm not sure if it still works this way, but it used to be that those tickets that included an album counted as an album sale, so all those old artists that could draw crowds would have albums on the charts despite no airplay or people buying them in stores. Mike Love's doing it at Beach Boys concerts this year with one of his solo albums, so I'd imagine it counts for something.
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Nov 17, 2018 14:52
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The only time I ever saw a real, live Virtual Boy in the flesh was a demo unit at Target. Speaking of demos, I remember an area Christian bookstore had an NES unit set up to sell copies of Bible Adventures, one of the unlicensed cartridges from Wisdom Tree.
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Apr 24, 2019 04:10
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ryonguy posted:Speaking of obsolete classroom equipment, filmstrip machines. No, not 16mm or whatever film projectors, individual frames of film used as slideshows. We "watched" The Three Musketeers this way in third grade. It had narration over individual slides. Between this, the film projectors, record players, teachers' smoking lounge and reading choices, there are times I feel my elementary school days were closer to my parents' than what kids experienced just five years later.
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Jun 25, 2019 03:23
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Alright class, we're going to see a film today.
Sweet, easy class today.
wait why did they say "film" and not movie?
(entire class under breath) goddamn it
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FilthyImp posted:We had a Laserdisc player with some kind of Karaoke function in like 5th grade and that poo poo was the loving future right there man. Commodores were put into classrooms in first grade. We had one at home and I have vague memories of staying in at recess to show the teachers how to load programs. An actual computer lab was in place maybe in second grade. I think it was Commodores to start, then Apple IIs(?) soon after. At the middle school, they were still using Commodores to run Accelerated Reader in sixth grade, then got all new equipment when a new school was built. Humbug Scoolbus posted:And that mimeograph smell is a smell from my youth all the way to high school. The third grade building had a working mimeograph machine. Glorious purple ink. And this. We had these in elementary school, but not many as they were dying out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXi06xoVlYM System80 ran on hard plastic punch cards. I don't remember the records, but the teacher possibly already had those in the machine before they let us touch them. I seem to remember these things running hot. I also remember them as being much noisier, but that might have been the sound of one in a death throe.
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Jun 25, 2019 05:26
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We sometimes get spam faxes at work.
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Jun 28, 2019 02:36
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Keith Atherton posted:I. remember in our town in the 70s you only needed to dial 5 digits for a local call. On the phones was a little label under a piece of clear plastic with the phone number (ours said NOrmandy-26996) My grandparents might have still had a wall phone (rotary, of course) in 1990. My mother said they had a party line when she was a teen. I can remember that it used to be an insane hassle for anything that required touchtone. Our house had pulse dial in 1995 and maybe even later than that. If Dad needed customer service on anything that involved touchtone, he had to go to his workplace, or to the payphone down the street. WithoutTheFezOn posted:Now I want my phone to say something like “dialing Klondike 5, one two one two” when I make a phone call. My mind was blown not long ago, when it I realized the movie was a) BUtterfield 8 and b) that's what it referred to. I knew about exchanges, but had never given the film any thought.
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Aug 6, 2019 04:06
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Iron Crowned posted:What always blows my mind is just how long it's taken for 9-1-1 to propagate. IIRC, we got it in 2006. That was the year we got broadband, which tied into phone line upgrades. I want to think 911 went with that, too. Obviously, since there are still places without 911, we weren't bottom of the barrel, but it did take so long to happen that it had consequences. I lived in the sticks, where addresses were things like Route 3, Box 42 and such. The US Postal Service came through fine. UPS came through fine. FedEx did not. FedEx insisted that rural route mailboxes were post office boxes in a post office. If you were lucky, customer service actually believed you and wrote down directions for the driver. 911 resulted in address changes for everybody on the rural routes, switching to road names instead of route numbers.
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Aug 7, 2019 04:20
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rndmnmbr posted:Also, if you think olds suck at computing now, try then, when your average old had never touched a computer and believed every garbled half-truth they ever heard about them. Mr. Skelley was a good principal, but didn't even know how to use a typewriter. We got a Commodore 64 when I was 4 or 5. When the local elementary school got Commodore 64s when I was in first grade, I earned snacks and Cokes at recess as I knew how to load things off a floppy disk. As in: LOAD:"[program]",8,1 waits a million years RUN
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Oct 5, 2019 13:03
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Guy Axlerod posted:My mom took keyboarding in high school and made money in college (70s) typing up papers for people. She noted that keyboarding for a computer wasn't quite the same, since you could edit much easier, and the keys didn't require the same force. We had a Smith-Corona that did the beeping when you misspelled something. It also had this fancy feature that you could type up to a line of text on a tiny screen and look over it for errors before committing it to a page. I had to actually use the thing for a couple of high school assignments. We had an old Macintosh but the printer was busted. We lived in the sticks, the internet wasn't a place for commerce and printers were expensive, so the Smith-Corona it was.
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Oct 6, 2019 06:06
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Imagined posted:That video made me sad, looking at all those middle aged guys too old to start a new career and too young to retire who had a good blue-collar job until that day, after which they're probably delivering pizza or something, or killing themselves, literally or implicitly with booze. What do you do when you've spent the best years of your life becoming a master of something no one needs anymore? The Times was probably way ahead of the curve. No doubt that these guys could have moved to other press facilities and hung on years more. rndmnmbr posted:And no, entire pages at a time wasn't a thing until Aldus Pagemaker came out in '85, and it was honestly faster to do paste-up until the mid-90's or so, after computers got a lot more powerful. The little weekly I worked at didn't switch to fully DTP until the original Creative Suite came out in '03. When it went out of business I took the pagination table and various sundries and built a little paste-up display we donated to the local museum, along with our entire bound archive. Curious. Was there any way to do double trucks on those? I know it wouldn't have been more convenient, but would have it been possible to do them? (For those unfamiliar: double trucks.) RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 08:02 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 07:57
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The Ape of Naples posted:Nirvana had one. I think Blur had one or two but I don't know. Often hidden tracks were just the last song followed by silence and then the hidden song. Yeah, sometimes there were empty index tracks. I suppose there's nothing to hide in these days. Did LPs have hidden tracks? The had their own tricks I guess like on the White Album. You could do like NIN did for Year Zero and leave USB sticks around for people to find. Each medium has their own contrivance. Offspring's Americana did the silence thing before the hidden track.
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Apr 26, 2020 18:15
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Peanut Butler posted:when most DVD players were still like $400, I had a $100 one that could play some .avi container files right offa whatever disc I burned em to I still have a $40 Memorex that I bought from Fred's Dollar Store because it could play FLV files.
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May 26, 2020 03:30
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monolithburger posted:I put a peanut butter sandwich in the slot of the family VCR circa 1992. Whoa, whoa, whoa. World Class Leaderboard with commentary? The Commodore version only had the sounds of golf swings and the gently hitting things. Fantastic game, though.
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Jul 31, 2020 22:01
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spaceblancmange posted:I can't imagine it without the commentary, it's what it was most remembered for I just had this boring thing instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0W7RT-Yp9E
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Aug 1, 2020 02:52
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That's some combination of VCRs, bulky cable boxes, CD changers and CDIs. Whatever it is, there are way too many of them.
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Aug 12, 2020 01:46
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Our first family VCR was a General Electric. It recorded like normal, but there was something weird the way it registered time. If you were two hours into a tape, it didn't display that, but a different number. I think they were called tracking numbers. The 1290 on the right side is the tracking number. I don't know if it was cumulative seconds elapsed on the tape or if it had no scientific basis at all. It was a gigantic pain and Dad meticulously labeled his tapes so he could find what he wanted. You could also program the VCR via a front panel that opened up and it had all kinds of little switches.
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Aug 13, 2020 19:29
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LifeSunDeath posted:reminded me of our old wooden cabinet TV with the very clacky channel knob...if you ripped through a few channels at once it felt like it was going to break. My grandparents console lasted so long that the power button quick working.They plugged it into a switch and turned it on that way. It was still going when everything went to digital, probably a 30-year lifespan.
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Aug 14, 2020 20:21
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Weren't Audreys being sold as the home/kitchen hub for use with recipes (it's always recipes) and browsing? Oprah promoted the hell out of it during an episode of her show. I think it was also being promoted as a hub for the technologically-impaired. Why that memory has suddenly emerged after all these years, I have no idea.
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Mar 25, 2021 03:38
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We learned touch typing, then moved on to longer typing assignments in Microsoft Works in 7th grade. Same class also taught us BASIC. The computers were some kind of cheap, IBM model that I seem to remember was one single unit combining monitor and disk drive. Black and white display. I had one at home, too, as my parents taught and it was pretty cheap if bought through the school system. Didn't use it too long. It was way obsolete in a hurry and the only programs we really had were a multi-pac of games on 3.5 floppies by a company called Advantage Computing.
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Mar 27, 2021 06:09
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My high school business class was so long ago that we learned to balance a checkbook and how to write in shorthand. Touch-typing was in 7th grade, when we also learned BASIC.
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Apr 20, 2021 21:57
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Pham Nuwen posted:I've had a SanDisk Clip Jam for several years now. It lasts forever on a charge, takes a microSD, and even does pretty good with audiobooks (there's a separate folder & UI interface for books. I listened to the entire LotR trilogy on it) I loved my SanDisk, but it met its demise in the washing machine. The SD card survived unscathed. When I was checking Amazon for another, the one feature I needed, a recorder, made them almost impossible to find for cheap. Ended up with a Victure, which is a pretty good player in the same $30-$40 price range. Battery life's very good and it has Bluetooth as well. Unrelated, I'm still hanging on to my Dad's childhood radio, a leather case Zenith. I've never attempted to fix it up. Not my photos. Dad used his enough that the handle is pretty much completely thick layers of tape.  Its guts, if it was still in working order.   Roughly $316 in today's money!
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Oct 5, 2021 02:36
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Humphreys posted:HAHA I remember to this day a kid named Reece jumping up on his desk in school during a meltdown screaming "DETACHABLE PENIS!!!!!" and running out the classroom. While one side of my brain is kinda grossed out about it, the other is singing detachable penis to the chorus of Personal Jesus.
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Nov 26, 2021 05:49
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Was I the only one using AudioGalaxy for music sharing?
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Dec 9, 2021 03:07
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I'm trying to remember a learning thing that was used in elementary school. This would have happened in the 1980s, but the technology would have been a decade or two earlier. I want to believe the book in question was The Three Musketeers. It was an audio recording, but we had a few visuals. There were projected from a projector - my memory has the projector almost handheld size - but illustrated still images. Every few minutes, it would advance, presumably on a certain audio cue. I do not think the teacher had to hit a button to advance it. We still had record players and the old school film projectors. Some of the classrooms even had the Dick and Jane-type readers. And this beautiful thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXi06xoVlYM
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Jan 22, 2022 06:12
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GutBomb posted:You’re talking about a filmstrip projector. I didn't think the name would be that simple or that obvious, but that's it. Thank you.
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Jan 22, 2022 21:54
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Rexxed posted:Floppy drives have retired and started a band. Honestly not much different than the version on the C64's Music Processor program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxyAe0vWE0M&t=109s Start at 1:50 if it doesn't automatically do so.
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Apr 6, 2022 02:35
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One set of my grandparents bought a nice huge house in the 1950s and after the kids moved out, they didn't need half of it, so everything pretty stayed in statis for the last 30 years they owned it. Everything was kept clean, but nothing was ever added or removed, including dead teleivisions. When they finally downsized and sold everything, I grabbed the smaller of the dead TVs. After a certain amount of time, it's not junk but vintage, right? So I own a useless but interesting display piece that is a 1962 Sylvania. Here's an ad for one:  My grandparents also forked out the money for the stand, which I have as well. I've never plugged it in. I'm dumb about electronics and lack the boldness to try to open it up and check/fix the power source or the 60 years of dust sure to be in it.
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Aug 8, 2022 02:59
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Desert Bus posted:I think? It might have just shown file name and length. It's been a couple of decades so I don't fully remember. I think it was this, since people song's were all different quality of uploads, too. I was the jerk who never made my (veyr modest) music available for download. I was running a 14.4 modem and their downloading made my downloading slow to a stop, so I didn't share.
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Aug 16, 2022 02:00
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Vile_Nihlist666 posted:How about inkjet word processors? Useful for maybe two years in the 90s, maybe. While nowhere that sophisticated, I typed half my high school papers on a Smith Corona that had one line of memory. You could edit the single line before printing it. I think there was a built-in spell checker and it also beeped at the end of a line.
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Oct 13, 2022 06:00
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Vile_Nihlist666 posted:Similar to one of these, I take it? Although, this one can store roughly 20-24 pages in memory. From Googling, I think it was the SD 670. Here's one on Etsy that feels familiar. I'm almost positive it had the word eraser feature.
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Oct 15, 2022 03:59
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Dick Trauma posted:Influence>influenza casts social media "influencers" in a new light. I had a little bird Its name was Enza I opened the window And in flew Enza
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Dec 17, 2022 04:17
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I own at least two of these. No, not any of the remotely decent ones as it was my Dad's mustical tastes. Best thing in the pile is the Moody Blues, because it's got Melancholy Man on it. Today's Super Greats is a K-Tel production and is a super mediocre listing of what they could cheaply get the rights to.
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Mar 9, 2023 04:30
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The last blank cassettes I remember buying were darn near impossible to find, but I got two at K-mart somewhere between 1999-2001. I used them in my 1996 Contour commuting from college. The Contour's tape deck was a beast, but the fast foward and rewind buttons yeeted themselves somewhere in the car one day and I couldn't find them. It left metal tabs poking out and those were still operational. During the life of that car, a relative took pity and gifted me a 12-disc CD changer, which had to be mounted in the trunk.
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May 28, 2023 15:49
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Mister Kingdom posted:Never heard of this one (and it's not Techmoan!) I had one! Still probably do somewhere. Had that little 1990s green/purple stripe design. Pretty sure I had that version of The Wind Beneath My Wings on it. My Dad, fully realizing I was a weirdo with very out of date tastes, made me up a tape that was similar to his own interests. We lived out in the sticks, so there wasn't a kiosk. Pretty sure he either ordered it out of a magazine or maybe mailed off for a list of songs. Have no idea how he would have found out about it, but I definitely had a tape in 1992.
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Dec 26, 2023 03:04
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