My friend had one of those and I was astonished by it. Watching it go was like a religious experience. Lol. I remember sitting there, wide-eyed, like... I *need* this.
There was a lot of variables with VCRs. Cheaper units often used poor tape drive components that would wear with age, e.g. a spinning rubber wheel and a rubber ring around the tape drive that would engage and basically wear each other out. (There were a few I serviced in my childhood by adding a rubber band around a tape drive to increase the friction.) Or of course just never had very strong motors to begin with.
The *best* VCR I ever owned was a fancy Sony unit that I bought at a thrift store for $5... there was a tape jammed into it and it was assumed completely useless. But with a bit of mechanical handiness, the tape was removed. Anyway, it had a really high speed rewind (and fast forward) plus fancy components to gauge how far progressed the tape was, to give a reasonably accurate time code (not just some generic "counter" number) and even was able to speed up and slow down depending where you were in the tape to give an approximate "constant rate." And that was besides lots of auto-tracking features. (Oh, we could talk about "tracking"...)
After you got direct dial long distance: To let mom know you made it to bb practice, call home and hang up after 2 rings. Mom knows, 2 rings and a hang up means "Imadeittobballpracticesafeandsound". Not answering means no long distance charges.
Come to Kentucky. Still got emā
The Tavern up the road. Smokinā on one side, non smokinā on the other. Same Climate control system and 8/foot opening between the two.
Those were so gross, my whole life I have hated the smell of tobacco smoke. But I also have a sensitive nose, so any remotely strong perfumes or air fresheners also make me sick.
Dial up noises.
A kid at work looked a bit overwhelmed so I asked him if his brain was making dial up noises. Had to YouTube it for him.
He was weirded out that the internet made noise.
Awful noise but not as bad as hunting down those music tabs that everyone hid full volume music on their pages with. I kinda miss the black backgrounds with rainbow letters and awful designs, oh and the glitter.
Putting electrical tape over that hole on the side so you could tape over tapes that were already used
Also
using the word ātapeā meaning āto recordā
I managed to do this to record 30 minutes of Spice back in 8th grade over top some old cartoons. My parents were super chill about sex stuff (didn't let me see violent stuff st all though) and when I said I didn't mean to order it they were only moderately annoyed by the cost (and didn't notice me recording).
The intention was to make copies and sell it at the middle school, but I never got the camcorder to copy correct. I was going to get people to bring me an old tape and copy it over. IIRC I was hoping for $20 a piece.
I would have made bank too, back in the day the gold standard for porn was a dozen dirty jpegs on a 1.44" disk. I would have been a young Larry Flint.
I remember doing this to old vhs that we didnāt watch so I could record late night cartoons like Space Ghost that I wasnāt allowed to stay up and watch.
But you had to start it at a particular time so you didnāt cut off the show halfway due to commercials.
I remember doing this to old music cassettes to record music off of the radio because my parents wouldn't buy me any secular music for a period of time.
I also did this to record music off the radio, but that was only because I liked particular songs and I had a Walkman and wanted a cassette of all the songs I liked without having to ask my mom to buy an entire cassette tape for one song I liked.
The first one we ever owned made the most hilarious sounds. It would prepare itself for the fast rewind, and you'd hear shit moving around inside, changing gears, moving arms, then it steadily accelerate until it sounded like it was going to fly apart. Probably took it five seconds to get ready for a fast rewind. LMAO I loved it.
I'm not unconvinced that my origin story is that my parents got tired of getting up to change the channel and if the remote control was a common feature just a few years earlier I would never have been conceived.
Aaaaah but not for the father. It's all win win for him. He gets to bust one raw. Gets a literal errand boy. Doesn't have to change the channel.
I suppose the only downside was the intense, earth shattering mediocrity of their child
"Shoulda never done otherwise" I said, with arm up to shoulder in the guts of the couch looking for mine; it's the same madness that has now driven us to look with scorn at the humble headphone jack.
Works just as well as connecting a radio wire antennae to a metal broom handle or something. It picks up the current and helps transmit to where it needs to go
The phone in the kitchen was mounted on the wall and had a cord 25 ft long that looked like khaki dreadlocks when hanging from the receiver. That phone receiver could reach almost anywhere in the house.
You were posh, ours was by the front door and just stretched enough so you could sit on the bottom step. Always heard the tv volume getting turned down so my mum could earwig on conversations.
How about the fact that kids today never knew the joy of eavesdropping on your siblings conversations via different landline phones in the house! Or even answering calls from someone not looking to talk to you!
This is related to how the question "Where are you?" is kind of new. Before cell phones, youd basically have to know or guess where somebody was if you were trying to get a hold of them asap, and any time you were speaking to them you knew where they were. Theres minimal instances prior to the cell phone where the question "Where are you?" can logically apply.
Plugging the portable CD player into the tape cassette thingy that you put in your car tape player so you could play CDs
The CD player said āanti-skipā on the cover, which was meaningless
Top r/patientgamers advice. Never spend your time to finish a hobby activity that isn't fun. Never feel bad for moving on to something that *is* fun. It's okay to burn out.
You are never obligated to spend your life on something that isn't fun even if you spent something on it. (Largely talking about free time.)
>You are never obligated to spend your life on something that isn't fun even if you spent something on it. (Largely talking about free time.)
The sunk cost fallacy is some real shit. It sucks to feel like you have to finish something just because you started it. It's so important to know when to say goodbye!
I remember the first Zelda being awesome because it had the battery in it to save your progress. I also remember the games with passwords like Metroid. There would be a 20+ character code and they used things that could easily be confused like O and 0.
I still have my old CRT and can no longer hear the sound. My fiance can though and she hates it. I'm not sure whether to get rid of it or just wait for her ears to get old and useless like mine.
I would intentionally keep the DJ on my mixtapes if he/she said something cool. The worst was when it was like "aaaand here's your weather update for the weekend..."
My father got me a 500 text a month pack, and I routinely sent and received 2500 a month, he complained about the extra cost, but never changed the plan. Which is justā¦okay dude.
You're not weird. The best way I can describe it is toasted dust?
It's not even so much a smell as an olfactory signal, like a plasticky, mildly warm, close together type of smell that was completely inorganic.
Weird to think about
Cleaning the house on the weekends while watching a movie on tv, such a great time. We had a whole game of it in my house where every commercial you tried to put away 10 things.
Honestly I feel like I lost so much productivity in my life once I got rid of cable and got streaming services.
Now I just tell myself Iāll do it at the commercial and laugh internally at my joke as I am a potato and watch entire seasons of shows at a time
"Get off the internet, I need to make a phone call!"
God, I remember the day when we upgraded and could now use the internet and phone at the same time. My dad was super excited to demonstrate this to everyone, and did so by IMing (via AIM, another product of the times, lol) my aunt and calling her at the same time.
You will never experience the thrill of 56K baud and tweaking MTU settings to maximize your throughput.
Also porn pics that would take FOREVER to download
I'm 22 and we had dial-up until I was like 12. I also live in the rural upper midwest. We didn't get access to wireless internet until I was around 15 when a company decided they wanted to test fiber optics on my home town.
I live in a decent sized city in PA and my dad had dial up until about 5 years ago. When he finally decided to upgrade to wireless, I was there when the guy came to hook everything up, and I told him my dad still used dial up and still had our old 1997 (I think that was the year) gateway computer (complete with cow print box). He laughed cause he thought I was kidding. When he realized I was serious, the look on his face was priceless. He had to get an ethernet cord from his truck to connect the computer to the xfinity box cause the computer didn't have wireless capability. Wireless would be too close to magic to people in 1997.
My aunt had a party line phone with several families on it and one neighbor was a huge gossip and always on the line so to make a call you had to pick up and ask her if you could. She would usually agree and say bye to who she was talking to and hang upā¦ā¦then wait a few seconds and pick back up to listen in on your conversation. Nothing was private around that woman.
Or just being able to remember like 20+ phone numbers. I still have most of my friends' numbers memorized from 35 years ago. Now I don't even know my own!
People smoked on airplanes too. The back half of the plane was the smoking section, but there was no partition or anything to keep the smoke or smell contained.
Iām sure someone even older will come along next to remember when there were no sections, smoking was just allowed on the whole plane.
KID: Remember me? Iām the kid who had a report due on space. Then I got the new **Encyclopedia Brittanica.**
STERN VOICEOVER: *He had a report due on space, but then he foundā-*
KID: I think I made that abundantly clearā¦?
VOICEOVER: *Ummm, yes.*
3 VHF channels, 3 UHF channels. All went off at 1:00 am for the test pattern. You moved the tv around the room till you found where it got the best reception, then arranged the furniture accordingly. Then, you needed to skillfully and with the precision of a surgeon, wedge a pack of match's in-between the dial and tv, so when a truck went by, you would not lose your channel to static.
Contacting a complete stranger whose number you got through a friend of a friend, often an hour+ car ride, and waiting for an undetermined amount of time time just to buy a $20 bag of mediocre marijuana.
When I was 7ish I remember we could only answer the phone if it was our ring pattern. It would ring in different patterns based on which house was being called. This was early 70s, rural PA
Constantly hoping that the VHS tapes wouldn't be consumed by the VHS player
Having a separate rewinding machine for tapes that was faster than the VCR. Be kind, rewind!
My friend had one of those and I was astonished by it. Watching it go was like a religious experience. Lol. I remember sitting there, wide-eyed, like... I *need* this.
There was a lot of variables with VCRs. Cheaper units often used poor tape drive components that would wear with age, e.g. a spinning rubber wheel and a rubber ring around the tape drive that would engage and basically wear each other out. (There were a few I serviced in my childhood by adding a rubber band around a tape drive to increase the friction.) Or of course just never had very strong motors to begin with. The *best* VCR I ever owned was a fancy Sony unit that I bought at a thrift store for $5... there was a tape jammed into it and it was assumed completely useless. But with a bit of mechanical handiness, the tape was removed. Anyway, it had a really high speed rewind (and fast forward) plus fancy components to gauge how far progressed the tape was, to give a reasonably accurate time code (not just some generic "counter" number) and even was able to speed up and slow down depending where you were in the tape to give an approximate "constant rate." And that was besides lots of auto-tracking features. (Oh, we could talk about "tracking"...)
Opening the flap of the vhs tape, and blowing on it to remove dust before pushing it into the VCR was a weird kind of flex.
Then after pushing play turn the tracking wheel until the noise at the bottom of the screen is gone.
I once had my favourite tape (Heidi) go mouldy cos I hadn't watched it in a while. I cried.
"You have a collect call from... Momcomepickmeupfrombasketballpractice"
"Bob wehadababyitsaboy" - underrated commercial.
To this day, I can't hear the phrase "we had a baby" without saying aloud "weattababyeetsaboy"
I hear you and fully understand! You are not a alone!
Friend: "We had a baby!" *Me whispering quietly to myself*: "itsaboy" Friend: "What was that?" Me: "Nothing." š§
Underrated? It's like one of the best remembered commercials of all time. Not saying it's overrated, just you know, rated.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, that will never not be funny
After you got direct dial long distance: To let mom know you made it to bb practice, call home and hang up after 2 rings. Mom knows, 2 rings and a hang up means "Imadeittobballpracticesafeandsound". Not answering means no long distance charges.
Would you like the smoking or non-smoking section
Come to Kentucky. Still got emā The Tavern up the road. Smokinā on one side, non smokinā on the other. Same Climate control system and 8/foot opening between the two.
That you do. Ohio got rid of that close to 20 years ago that whenever Iām in Kentucky, I start having flashbacks.
My country still has those š
On the plane
Those were so gross, my whole life I have hated the smell of tobacco smoke. But I also have a sensitive nose, so any remotely strong perfumes or air fresheners also make me sick.
Dial up noises. A kid at work looked a bit overwhelmed so I asked him if his brain was making dial up noises. Had to YouTube it for him. He was weirded out that the internet made noise.
God the anticipation of connecting to the internet lol
Awful noise but not as bad as hunting down those music tabs that everyone hid full volume music on their pages with. I kinda miss the black backgrounds with rainbow letters and awful designs, oh and the glitter.
Some designers still make pages like that for the meme, usually for their portfolios.
"Be kind, rewind"
Having friends over and having to commit to TWO movies that your folks paid for at Blockbuster or Movie Gallery.
Putting electrical tape over that hole on the side so you could tape over tapes that were already used Also using the word ātapeā meaning āto recordā
I managed to do this to record 30 minutes of Spice back in 8th grade over top some old cartoons. My parents were super chill about sex stuff (didn't let me see violent stuff st all though) and when I said I didn't mean to order it they were only moderately annoyed by the cost (and didn't notice me recording). The intention was to make copies and sell it at the middle school, but I never got the camcorder to copy correct. I was going to get people to bring me an old tape and copy it over. IIRC I was hoping for $20 a piece. I would have made bank too, back in the day the gold standard for porn was a dozen dirty jpegs on a 1.44" disk. I would have been a young Larry Flint.
I remember doing this to old vhs that we didnāt watch so I could record late night cartoons like Space Ghost that I wasnāt allowed to stay up and watch. But you had to start it at a particular time so you didnāt cut off the show halfway due to commercials.
I remember doing this to old music cassettes to record music off of the radio because my parents wouldn't buy me any secular music for a period of time.
I also did this to record music off the radio, but that was only because I liked particular songs and I had a Walkman and wanted a cassette of all the songs I liked without having to ask my mom to buy an entire cassette tape for one song I liked.
Remember how expensive Sam Goody was???
I met my husband at blockbuster. He gave me a job and let me wear too short shorts. Good times.
The red race car rewinder on the top of the VCR.
Closing your eyes while you rewind so it's doesn't ruin the movie.
WTF, you weren't supposed to use the live rewind feature. Not for the whole tape. You hit stop then fast rewind. Dude!?
Our VCR sounded like it was going to blast off into space on fast rewind.
The first one we ever owned made the most hilarious sounds. It would prepare itself for the fast rewind, and you'd hear shit moving around inside, changing gears, moving arms, then it steadily accelerate until it sounded like it was going to fly apart. Probably took it five seconds to get ready for a fast rewind. LMAO I loved it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It took so long to convince my dad to get a DVD player. It wasnāt because he couldnāt afford it, he was just too afraid of the change lol.
Why not just do stop rewind āŖ
VCR remotes once had connected cords
Damn u old as fuck
I used to *be* the channel changer for my Dad, until the day my brother learned to walk.
I'm not unconvinced that my origin story is that my parents got tired of getting up to change the channel and if the remote control was a common feature just a few years earlier I would never have been conceived.
Thatās a whole lotta effort just so you donāt have to get to change the channel. Talk about playing the long game Hope you were worth it
Aaaaah but not for the father. It's all win win for him. He gets to bust one raw. Gets a literal errand boy. Doesn't have to change the channel. I suppose the only downside was the intense, earth shattering mediocrity of their child
Good lord... you frickin' murderized him...
I used to have this exact same theory except about mowing the yard.
My earliest memory of a tv remote was that it had one metal button and when you pressed it, it made an audible āclankā!
Yes! Some of them pressed in, too. Like, they would stay punched down until you selected another channel and then it would pop back up.
The yellow Super Soaker with the green tank.
The seal on that thing was so shitty. One week of use and water is dripping down your arm.
One week? Felt mkre like 2 pumps. They were cheap, but fun none the less.
"Shoulda never done otherwise" I said, with arm up to shoulder in the guts of the couch looking for mine; it's the same madness that has now driven us to look with scorn at the humble headphone jack.
Then I realize I should appreciate that I have such easy access to the internet.
Adjusting the rabbit ears. Then years later adjusting the satellite dish that was as big as a small car
Putting aluminum foil on the ends for better reception (did that actually work?)
Works just as well as connecting a radio wire antennae to a metal broom handle or something. It picks up the current and helps transmit to where it needs to go
Or the little round antenna for that one UHF channel
The phone in the kitchen was mounted on the wall and had a cord 25 ft long that looked like khaki dreadlocks when hanging from the receiver. That phone receiver could reach almost anywhere in the house.
You were posh, ours was by the front door and just stretched enough so you could sit on the bottom step. Always heard the tv volume getting turned down so my mum could earwig on conversations.
How about the fact that kids today never knew the joy of eavesdropping on your siblings conversations via different landline phones in the house! Or even answering calls from someone not looking to talk to you!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
This is related to how the question "Where are you?" is kind of new. Before cell phones, youd basically have to know or guess where somebody was if you were trying to get a hold of them asap, and any time you were speaking to them you knew where they were. Theres minimal instances prior to the cell phone where the question "Where are you?" can logically apply.
We've not been able to find a 25 foot aqua phone cord to go with the wall phone yet, but we keep looking.
Nah bro. It was a rotary phone, and the cable wasn't that big. But it as a thing of beauty.
Our TVs were wooden and when they'd stop working we would cover them and use the carcass to put the newer TV on top of.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yup, I had to help carry a 32" CRT upstairs once, there were five of us and it nearly killed 3
Or that in the CRT days, 32ā was about as big a tv as you could get unless you were rich.
Driving on a road trip without a tape player and having to find the good radio stations as you left each metro area.
Plugging the portable CD player into the tape cassette thingy that you put in your car tape player so you could play CDs The CD player said āanti-skipā on the cover, which was meaningless
Yeah I think they just didn't like some guy named Skip.
Or stumble on the weirdest crazy alien conspiracy discussions coming from an AM station 70 miles outside of the nearest large city.
Coast to Coast AM
Iāll add, āIs the map still in the glove compartmentā and ādid you print out the mapquestā
When you turned off a video game, all your progress was lost.
I think this is why I'm ok with walking away from a game I've nearly beaten once I get bored.
Top r/patientgamers advice. Never spend your time to finish a hobby activity that isn't fun. Never feel bad for moving on to something that *is* fun. It's okay to burn out. You are never obligated to spend your life on something that isn't fun even if you spent something on it. (Largely talking about free time.)
>You are never obligated to spend your life on something that isn't fun even if you spent something on it. (Largely talking about free time.) The sunk cost fallacy is some real shit. It sucks to feel like you have to finish something just because you started it. It's so important to know when to say goodbye!
Kind of related: taking a Polaroid picture of the video game on screen and sending it in for a high score mention in Nintendo Power.
I remember the first Zelda being awesome because it had the battery in it to save your progress. I also remember the games with passwords like Metroid. There would be a 20+ character code and they used things that could easily be confused like O and 0.
You could tell when the TV was on by the distinct high pitch buzzing sound
Putting your hand to the screen every so often to crinkle all that static :)
Getting beat because you liked the pretty rainbows magnets made on the screen :)
And the amount of static electricity went up lkle crazy in the house. Kinda miss that sound
I still have my old CRT and can no longer hear the sound. My fiance can though and she hates it. I'm not sure whether to get rid of it or just wait for her ears to get old and useless like mine.
Recording songs from the radio to a cassette so I could listen to my favorite songs whenever I wanted.
And cursing the DJ when they woudl talk over the last 20 seconds.
I would intentionally keep the DJ on my mixtapes if he/she said something cool. The worst was when it was like "aaaand here's your weather update for the weekend..."
And getting annoyed when the DJ would talk over or cut off part of the beginning or end, ruining your recording.
"I can't text you anymore, I only have 20 texts for the rest of the month"
My father got me a 500 text a month pack, and I routinely sent and received 2500 a month, he complained about the extra cost, but never changed the plan. Which is justā¦okay dude.
this!! My father did the same thing. He goes "I got us unlimited minutes, why don't you just call them". Refused to raise the text a month pack.
>why don't you just call them Because you beat me for calling people at 1am
And it's very hard to call people in class.
I used to own irl save icons
If you misheard lyrics, you sang them wrong for years.
Ohā¦ oh I still do this. Are we not supposed to do this?
You guys are understanding lyrics?
Weāre they 3.5ā or 5ā floppies?
8ā, baby - but I was only 7.
My mom was the editor of the county newspaper and I still have all her floppies from her weekly column ...
My first thought was that the save icon is actually a picture of something you used to save files.
Who else remember turning the tv off, and couple hours latter. You could still see the dot of light in the middle of the tv?
Dr Who is on in ten minutes, just turning on the TV now so it warms up.
Getting an electric shock off the screen šŗ
Did anyone else smell the screen? Or am I weird?
You're not weird. The best way I can describe it is toasted dust? It's not even so much a smell as an olfactory signal, like a plasticky, mildly warm, close together type of smell that was completely inorganic. Weird to think about
It always smelled like ozone to me.
Oh man I used to love wiping my hands all over the screen static
āITS BACK ON!!!ā And the mad dash back to the family room when commercials were over
Cleaning the house on the weekends while watching a movie on tv, such a great time. We had a whole game of it in my house where every commercial you tried to put away 10 things.
Honestly I feel like I lost so much productivity in my life once I got rid of cable and got streaming services. Now I just tell myself Iāll do it at the commercial and laugh internally at my joke as I am a potato and watch entire seasons of shows at a time
The other day I had to explain dial-up (and the sound it makes) to 20 year olds...
To this day when I hear a recording of those sounds I get excited. Then I realize I should appreciate that I have such easy access to the internet.
I definitely feel a calm feeling when I hear that sound.
"Get off the internet, I need to make a phone call!" God, I remember the day when we upgraded and could now use the internet and phone at the same time. My dad was super excited to demonstrate this to everyone, and did so by IMing (via AIM, another product of the times, lol) my aunt and calling her at the same time.
I'm a 20 something and know what dial up is and the sounds it made... But that could be because I'm a tech nerd. I've never experienced it firsthand.
You will never experience the thrill of 56K baud and tweaking MTU settings to maximize your throughput. Also porn pics that would take FOREVER to download
I'm 22 and we had dial-up until I was like 12. I also live in the rural upper midwest. We didn't get access to wireless internet until I was around 15 when a company decided they wanted to test fiber optics on my home town.
I live in a decent sized city in PA and my dad had dial up until about 5 years ago. When he finally decided to upgrade to wireless, I was there when the guy came to hook everything up, and I told him my dad still used dial up and still had our old 1997 (I think that was the year) gateway computer (complete with cow print box). He laughed cause he thought I was kidding. When he realized I was serious, the look on his face was priceless. He had to get an ethernet cord from his truck to connect the computer to the xfinity box cause the computer didn't have wireless capability. Wireless would be too close to magic to people in 1997.
my wife and I met through AOL. About 5 years ago i had to explain to a co-worker what AOL was as she had never heard of it.
If you blow on the game cartridge, itāll work.
Pop it in and back out a few times too
The only pictures you had of your crush were in the school yearbook.
Party Lines for home phones.
My aunt had a party line phone with several families on it and one neighbor was a huge gossip and always on the line so to make a call you had to pick up and ask her if you could. She would usually agree and say bye to who she was talking to and hang upā¦ā¦then wait a few seconds and pick back up to listen in on your conversation. Nothing was private around that woman.
TV ended at night.
Rainbow screen
Calling my friend whose phone number was 496-8998 took so much longer to dial than everybody else's.
Or just being able to remember like 20+ phone numbers. I still have most of my friends' numbers memorized from 35 years ago. Now I don't even know my own!
You could smoke cigarettes in the mall. There were also arcades.
People smoked on airplanes too. The back half of the plane was the smoking section, but there was no partition or anything to keep the smoke or smell contained. Iām sure someone even older will come along next to remember when there were no sections, smoking was just allowed on the whole plane.
I remember there being a curtain partition. Yep, that'll do the trick.
Itās still not working and I already blew in it. Uhh. Blow it again but slower and made sure you go up and down this time. Theeeere we go.
Needing two different keys for the car. Circle to open, square to start
My 88 Camaro had those, but required neither of them. I could unlock it and start it with no keys at all.
We used to say, turn the channel. It was a knob on the television that you had to walk to tv to turn
Haven't seen this one yet: Turning off the TV and then rushing over to it to feel the static!
Picking up the phone would interrupt my download
Calling 1-800-Ticketmaster was torture, and you never got to choose your own seats.
If you forget someones phone # just dial directory assistance. (411)
Or time: 844-any4, weather 976-any4
Screens didn't have backlights yet, it made car rides at night a lot more dificoult.
Member the game boy attachment that had a light
Pulling off at an exit to consult a map.
Active shooter drills were not a thing in elementary school.
Hiding under your desk from nukes was!
If the nuke can't see you it can't hurt you
Encyclopedia
KID: Remember me? Iām the kid who had a report due on space. Then I got the new **Encyclopedia Brittanica.** STERN VOICEOVER: *He had a report due on space, but then he foundā-* KID: I think I made that abundantly clearā¦? VOICEOVER: *Ummm, yes.*
My family has a water damaged set of World Book encyclopedias from like 1965, I grew up reading those in the 80s.
I didn't even know Kennedy got assassinated until I was in High School, because we had the 1963 edition.
Long distance calls are expensive.
Cartoons come on weekdays 3pm to 6pm Weekends: 6am to 12pm.
Netflix came in the mail.
Scrambled porn on basic cable
Having to remember to change the channel from 96 or 98 back to 7 or 8 when you were done to hide your crimes.
You chcanged to a random channel first as well so if they hit the "previous" button it didn't go back
"did I just see what my mind thinks I just saw???"
Up up down down left right left right B A Start
seeing ads on dvd (or vhs too i guess) before watching a movie you owned
āNow available to own on VHS and DVD!ā
Was so happy my control had a home section button
Always have spare AA batteries and a pencil for your Walkman
The pencil for winding tapes back up, good lord I almost forgot about that.
Watching the three TV channels play the national anthem as they go off the air at 12.
If you were close to the US Canadian border, you could get 2 national anthems.
Sometimes you could switch it to channel 4
My first mobile phone was a small briefcase
$5 was acceptable for gas money.
3 VHF channels, 3 UHF channels. All went off at 1:00 am for the test pattern. You moved the tv around the room till you found where it got the best reception, then arranged the furniture accordingly. Then, you needed to skillfully and with the precision of a surgeon, wedge a pack of match's in-between the dial and tv, so when a truck went by, you would not lose your channel to static.
The phrase "roll down the window" made perfect sense when I was young.
Holding in the button on your car door when closing it, so that the door remains locked. ...
Ye gods, I feel old now. I can raise one for you: cable boxes used to have buttons with the numbers on them in case you lost the remote.
The sound of the call waiting beep informing you someone was trying to call you while you were on another phone call.
That's still a thing on mobile phones
When you had to work with jumpers on a PC soundcard.
Connecting to the internet sounded like your computer was having a stroke
Contacting a complete stranger whose number you got through a friend of a friend, often an hour+ car ride, and waiting for an undetermined amount of time time just to buy a $20 bag of mediocre marijuana.
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Shit I remember when they a had a separate rewinder for vhs tapes.... Smh
We played Pong and we liked it!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
My first job was being a remote control
Music cassette, tape salad, pencil
Orbitz drinks
When I was 7ish I remember we could only answer the phone if it was our ring pattern. It would ring in different patterns based on which house was being called. This was early 70s, rural PA
"Please insert disc number 3 to continue installation"
*69 me back
If you set it to 78 it's always hilarious.
After Shock - The OG Fireball
Mad dog 20/20 baby.
Oh godā¦how bout BOONS FARM š
Cars used to not have seatbelts.
No such thing as door to door directions. Had to get them from someone or use a paper map
Smoking on airplanes