Get ready to hear more about "pre-internet" times

This reminds me of a top reddit post this week - Did parents really used to let their kids go outside all day? As though that was some kind of ancient barbarism. It makes me sad that you don't see kids running around and playing outdoors anymore. I do sometimes see kids riding their bikes in circles near their driveway while their parents watch them and that's about it. Fucking sad. I really miss video stores and record stores too.

"How did you meet up with people?" No wonder despair and mental illness is ravaging the youth - the concept that you could just interact with the people around you is almost completely foreign.

Remember how expensive long distance calls were? I moved out of state from my Dad when I was 10, and my mom would insist I call collect on the weekend so he would pay for the long distance charges. And we would also call "Time and Temp" so you get the exact time to set your watch to. "At the tone the time will be..." Do they still have directory assistance? Assuredly not.

Is that the correct use of the word cohort? Seems clunky.

Just delete your accounts and find out for yourselves, lazy kids.

If you wanted to see a movie that just came out you had to go to a theater. Even after the VCR became common it took months for new releases to become available.

[quote]If you wanted to access your money, you had to go to a bank during banking hours.

Well that's bullshit for starters. There were ATMs in the US as early as the late 1960s. And even before that, you used checks. Nobody who worked full-time had a chance to go to a bank, unless they happened to work near one, because banks kept less than full-time working hours.

I frequent a reddit thread about unsolved mysteries. We were discussing the Donna Lass case and one poster said the killer had to have known her otherwise how would he get her sister's phone number. I explained that there were things called telephone books which had everyone's number written down. Also telephone operators who would just tell you the number and address you were looking for.

I was a teen in the '90s, so this reminds me of when we used to ask my grandparents (b. 1930s), "How did you grow up without television or rock music"? or asked our parents (b. 1950s), "How did you grow up without video games, VCRs, or cable?"

I'm sure kids in the 1920s were asking their elders, "How did you grow up without radio or (silent) movies or cars or telephones?"

R6 Banking hours were not bullshit for boomers. The first ATM for public use wasn't until 1969 in New York at Chemical Bank. I grew up on the west coast and remember banks closing at 3 p.m. which we thought was dumb even then. You were screwed on the weekend if you didn't get enough cash on Friday.

This reminded me of this piece of trivia I read about from the movie, “The Holdovers” :

On the day of shooting the scene Angus calls home, Dominic Sessa flubbed a take because he didn't know how to dial, and had to be shown how. It hadn't occurred to anyone that he had never used a rotary phone before.

I think it was better this way:

[quote]Before the internet, you didn't keep in touch with everyone from your past — much less wish them a happy birthday, get periodic doses of their political views, or stumble on photos of their gender reveal parties (which didn't exist).

Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered; a civilization gone with the wind...

It's funny when Gen Z just assumes everyone had a cell phone and a computer 20 years ago. When I started college in 1999 nobody had a cell phone. Computers were only available in the library. We had landlines in our dorm rooms and payphones on campus. I know the truth because I was there.

As a teacher, “critical thinking” is a buzzword term that’s been emphasized the past decade. However, in my opinion, technology and the internet has stunted critical thinking.

I remember nights, weekends, and vacations in which the only time I spoke to somebody from or at work was when [italic]I wanted to.[/italic]

I fondly recall lazily reading the Sunday [italic]Times[/italic] with a cup of coffee or two.

And then there was going to Tower Records and spending a couple hundred dollars on CDs, meeting some interesting people (several times, the artist whose CD I was holding!) and striking up conversations and more... and I'll leave that right there.

Speaking of, the Hanky Code, bars packed wall to wall with hot men, and Sunday "T" dances.

Getting together with friends to watch something on TV; conversely, being anxious to go to the office after a particularly popular program anticipating the discussion about the latest plot twist, chicanery or cliffhanger.

But mostly, intelligent conversation in which someone's expertise was actual and backed up by education and experience (and not just a regurgitation of rightwing talking points).

[quote]Boredom begat creativity and useful ideas.

Not to mention a fuckton of sex.

Does this also mean more "Eldergays, tell me about..." threads?

ATMs were very rare until the 1980s.

[quote] And we would also call "Time and Temp" so you get the exact time to set your watch to

I used to set my Casio digital watch by the clock the local tv station would display when it was off the air.

Trying to identify and find a song you heard was much harder. Besides humming a snippet of a song to friends and music store employees to identify it, you couldn’t be sure if a song you thought might the want you want was it until you bought it and listened to it. I have a bunch of cassette singles of what I thought might be the songs I was looking for, but I could only know for sure by buying them and seeing if they were or not. These were dance songs and not top 40, so it wasn’t evident what a song or artist was.

Bank hours were horrible. 9am to 2am Monday to Friday. Friday, they would reopen from 4pm to 6pm for people to cash or deposit their paychecks. I can remember being in a bank that is now part of Truist on a Friday afternoon. Huge amount of people inside.

Also, very few stores were open on Sundays.

Unlike now, there are large swathes of my life only sparsely documented in photos, few of us wanted to lug cameras around everywhere, so those few photos that survive are really precious.

I'm 41, and I do remember the pre-internet times. But I don't necessarily look back on the period nostalgically. As much as people complain about how technology has ruined society, it really has made a lot of things more convenient.

Rotary phones already baffle some Gen Zers

The past is past there is no going back

[quote]Also, very few stores were open on Sundays.

I lived a few blocks from University Avenue in Palo Alto in 1979. Not a single store was open on Sunday. It was depressing, like an evacuation had been ordered. I don't like the crowds everywhere now but I sure hated Sundays growing up.

The mall opened at noon on Sundays

What I remember is, when you needed to know something that you didn't know you asked your smart friend or your parents. And when I wanted sports scores and didn't want to wait til the 11pm news, I would call the local newspaper's office. The only place I could get NBA trade rumors were in Peter Vescey's column in the NY Post. It is true that ATMs weren't common til the 80s. I remember having to get to the bank before the weekend to get money. Yes, we had checks (and still do) but not every place took checks. I remember watching movies when they aired on TV. Also, HBO (which stands for Home Box Office) was a way to watch movies, sometimes before they came out on videotape. I remember when MTV was 24 hours of music videos. Even before that, there was a late night show called "Friday Night Videos." I remember commercials were a good thing because it was a chance to use the bathroom, get food, or call a friend. I remember having a voicemail number that people could call and then I could check my messages on a payphone. I remember prepaid phone cards to use on payphones. I remember waiting for someone to get off the payphone so that I could use it. I remember, before arcades, when you'd play Pac Man at a convenient store. I remember when you didn't have to take shoes off to get on a plane. I also remember that your friends/family could wait with you at the gate before you got on the plane.

I don't think it was the internet or cell phones that destroyed society. I don't remember being glued to my flip phone because the only thing could really use it for was talk or text (and texting was way more expensive then it is now).

But the emergence of the smartphone and social media at around the same time - that really was an explosion of dysfunction.

ATMs were around in the mid to late 80s, but in smaller towns like the little podunk two stoplight town I grew up in, we didn't see one until the early 90s. Which was also around the time we got our first McDonald's.

Before then, you had to either go to the bank (open till 4 except till 6 on Fridays, closed weekends) or you could cash a check for up to $50 more at the local grocery store if you needed cash.

[quote] The mall opened at noon on Sundays

Some stores never opened on Sundays.

Some places had blue laws which meant they wouldn't sell liquor on Sunday.

R31 yup, PA had that

R8, the internet is different. The internet is probably the most important invention to man next to fire the way it has united humanity across the globe. They say humanity has advanced more in the last 50 years than it had in the previous whatever. If you dropped someone from 1975 into todays world, they would have a nervous breakdown. You can't compare the internet to radio or television. I don't see it as a breakdown in society. Society is just transitioning in leaps and bounds into something new. It is DEFINITELY the end of society as man has known it to be for a very long time and that death will last until the last of those who remember how it was before are gone.

One thing I DO remember fondly with the onset of streaming music was the death the $25 CD. You remember right at its apex CDs were up to$17/18 sometimes $25? You would have to buy a whole fucking CD if you wanted one song. They were really gouging people. That is when I was going to Virgin Music in Union Square in Manhattan on the weekends and standing at the Kiosks listening to the latest. At first CDs came in those huge rectangular cardboard boxes that made them less likely to be stolen. But man was the music industry making hand over first with those things. Karma.

R33 Yes, I remember that too. For me the straw that broke the camel's back was going to Sam Goody's for the new at the time New Order CD (the one circa 1999 or so) and paying over $20 for it.

I didn't do Napster much but I'm glad iTunes made it cheaper. I buy some albums on vinyl now and they're $20 or more but (a) I only do that for favorites, (b) I generally get the digital files too and (c) I'm also getting artwork, etc too.

I was working at the World Trade Center when my Chemical Bank branch installed a couple of ATMs at that branch.

A few months later, the company I worked for added direct deposit for our paychecks.

My employer used to open a window on payday to cash the checks they had just issued. People used to write checks at the grocery store for more than they bought to get cash as change. (I think you could get more than $50 that way where I grew up)

There were other ways the world was more mysterious. There weren’t all the cameras in public spaces, no DNA testing, no fetal sonograms, no E-Verify and no national database of fingerprints. You could easily disappear and change your identity. Crimes were much easier to get away with. Adoptees had no expectation of ever knowing biological relatives and a gender reveal party was referred to as labor and delivery.

R6 There were five Citibank ATM machines in NYC starting in September of 1969 and nowhere else in the United States, so to say they've been around since the 60's is a bit wide of the truth. ATM's were in incredibly limited use for the last four months of the 1960's in one city. They came into widespread use in the 1970's but not every bank let alone every branch had one.

"Nobody who worked full-time had a chance to go to a bank" Of course we did. How else did we cash those checks? There was no direct deposit then, either.

A lot more families had non-working adults (generally women) in them as a norm (instead of a tragedy) so having limited hours wasn’t so problematic.

[quote] I was a teen in the '90s, so this reminds me of when we used to ask my grandparents (b. 1930s), "How did you grow up without television or rock music"? or asked our parents (b. 1950s), "How did you grow up without video games, VCRs, or cable?"

I was a teenager in the 90s, and I don’t remember us ever asking anything like this. I think we knew those things didn’t exist at some point in the past and we just thought, “Damn, it must have sucked to be alive then!”

Napster was awesome. The YT of music. And you could get individual songs without buying the whole album when I was a kid. They were called 45s.

31, I was working in Wilmington, Notth Carolina in 2012 or 13, and they still had dry laws. So weird to watch people at TJ's rush around to stock up on liquor on Saturday afternoon.

I miss the satisfying "clunk" of the phone receiver when you got mad at someone and hung up on them, also stretching the cord to its limits. Remember the busy signal?

I'm a DMV native who's shopped at Giant Foods since the early 1970s. As mentioned above, lack of ATMs meant lack of access to getting cash for an emergency. If you enrolled in a plan, Giant would allow you to write a check for $20 or $30, which was often a godsend, especially since credit cards were difficult to get back then.

I guess the idea of “taking a message” is unfamiliar to them.

Though no gays are in it, I thought Freaks and Geeks shows this well.

Miss R41's favorite moment in film, one assumes!

[quote] Napster was awesome. The YT of music. And you could get individual songs without buying the whole album when I was a kid. They were called 45s.

Yes, but there was a time in the mid-late 90s where some record companies were declining to release singles in any form (at that point there were cassette and CD singles) to force the consumer to buy the whole album if they wanted the hit.

I was living in NYC at that time and there were plenty of places you could go to buy second hand CDs for much cheaper. There was a great place in the east village called St. Marks Sounds where you could spend an afternoon going through all the bins. Your fingers would get super grimy flipping through the CDs, but they also had a great 88 cent bin which was a combo of promo singles and artists no one had ever heard of. That was how I discovered Duncan Sheik several months before he actually broke on radio. It was early summer of '96 when his debut album came out and no one was playing anything from it. I had never heard of him, but I liked the cover and took a chance for 88 cents, and I've been a fan ever since. Eventually the album broke in early 97.

I know a lot of record label interns would plunder their offices for promo copies of CDs and sell them to the store.

And there were small mom & pop electronics stores all over the city that sold all new CDs for 9.99.

SIAP, but a whole other aspect of that Great Divide is the Boomer-Gen X cusp (1964-65) of Black people like me who remember Whites-Only (posted or "understood") drinking fountains, trains, buses, public restrooms, eating establishments, and motels/hotels.

On family trips I would BEG my parents to stop at the various Stuckey's or HoJos between Mississippi and South Carolina. They always told us No, but not why. When prepping for the pre-Interstate trips from La. to SC my Dad spent the entire day going over the car with a fine-toothed comb, poring over highway maps, and mixing up gallons of diluted bleach solution (to sanitize the never tended, always-filthy Colored bathrooms); while Mama spent her day frying chickens, making sandwiches, washing tons of fresh fruit (and a dozen carrots for me), slicing cheese, and freezing pans of water to break up and put into our GIANT insulated water carrier thingy. Then loaded it all into the car while we kids packed and napped, to get on the road by 7:30pm while it was still light.

It felt like adventure to us kids, but we also sensed an undercurrent of anxiety...no, [bold]FEAR[/bold] in them. Worry over car trouble hitting us at night in Klan country, worry that their children would have to use the bathroom and not be able to because many gas stations didn't even have a "Colored" bathroom (we had to go off road into the woods), worry worry worry.

From high school into adulthood my white friends often teased me about my prodigious bladder and bowels, because unless I was ill I regularly went 8-10 hours without using the bathroom, or even feeling much of an urge to.

Eventually I started telling them why.

You needed a camera to take pictures and then bring the film somewhere to have it developed.

Interesting if you watch the Tower Records documentary.....the whole CD thing is what gave them a final boost (everyone buying all the same shit they had on vinyl or cassette again on CD) but then also killed them when streaming and MP3s came into the picture.

Same with the Columbia House/BMG-RCA record clubs.

The proliferation and availability of porn has just exploded. If you didn't subscribe to some magazine, even in many urban settings, there were only a few adult bookstores where you could find gay porn for sale. You hung on to those magazines for dear life. Such sentimental gems now.

"Selfies" were taken with a Polaroid camera. I actually still have a couple from old boyfriends who gave them to me (naked in their prime). Just memories, but they make me smile.

I remember dictating into a recorder and having a secretary type all of my correspondence. Then proofing it and having her/him make all the corrections. And also waiting at work for the mail to come so we knew what we had to address that day. I also remember having to wear a coat and tie or suit to work. Ugh.

Did parents really let their kids play outside all day? Are you fucking kidding! We were locked out most of the time. I was feral then and I’m still feral now, preferring to spend my days outdoors.

Summers of swimming in the lake until all hours, designing obstacle courses for our bikes and ponies, playing cowboys and Indians with BB guns as weapons. Camping under the stars. Sleeping on a pontoon boat in the middle of the lake on a sleeping bag. The stars!

In the winter, the neighbor’s pond would freeze and we’d play hockey or football in skates. We’d go sledding using busted garbage can lids and an old countertop someone found. We would come home wet and half frozen.

We were creative, industrious, imaginative and resourceful because we HAD to be. There was no YouTube to find out how to do anything. You just had to fuck around and find out.

The thrill of discovering something new and showing your friends is gone now. Anyone can find anything at any time.

Speaking of ATMs, I remember the first time my mom used one back in the late 80s. She was freaked out because the thing knew her name. The receipt said, “thank you, Barbara” and she kept asking “how does it know who I am?!?”

So did the feral Gen Xer's grow up to coddle and 'safe space' their own kids? When di d the term 'play date' come into affect? Because my parents didn't schedule my time with other kids. They told me to go outside, find friends and figure it out.

This might explain the popularity of vinyl records.

[quote]"Nobody who worked full-time had a chance to go to a bank" Of course we did. How else did we cash those checks?

Exactly.

r52- Remember catching fire flies?

Yes, r56!

I have made my backyard a haven for them and will catch them still. Just hold them and watch them before they fly off my hand.

We have quite a few here and I don’t spray or leave light on outside at night so they can can breed like crazy.

Yeah I went to Walmart today and there were $40 record players in a box. It didn't feel right putting a Taylor Swift record on it though. Those were sold with other albums.

I kind of miss the days when some grocery store chains had movie rental sections. The movie rental sections weren't always that big, but it was sometimes fun to rent older movies or movies that weren't aired often on cable.

I grew up in Oregon when Mt Saint Helens erupted. We had about two inches of ash everywhere. Like snow but grey. Crazy. We saved some ashes in a jar but I don't know where it is anymore.

Don’t tell shit to the little fuckers.

BrendaD was causing controversy with one-liners within Plain Old Television promos instead of facetuning on the Internets.

Going out was more fun. Conversations with strangers were more fun for some reason. Relying on people is more fun.

Technology is ok but sometimes it takes the reward out of things. I think I liked figuring out the weather before asking Alexa. Now I ask the dot and I don't feel better. It didn't bring me the over inflated happiness the actors portray in perfect life ads.

[quote]Summers of swimming in the lake until all hours, designing obstacle courses for our bikes and ponies, playing cowboys and Indians with BB guns as weapons. Camping under the stars. Sleeping on a pontoon boat in the middle of the lake on a sleeping bag. The stars!

And no cell phones. Half the time our parents had no idea where we were. Checking up on us probably never even entered their mind.

We just had to be home for dinner.

R41

What kind of an asshole misses being restricted and tethered to a 10 foot phone cord?

An aside/tangent to what R58 posted:

Please don't get those little Crosley record-player-in-a-box sort of thing. They suck, big time. It's like playing a real record on a little Fisher Price record player.

Crosleys in particular are known not to work well and your record will just skip constantly, or the needle will just slide across the record without playing.

I know it looks cool and seems very convenient, it's understandable why people would find it appealing but....no. Get a stand alone turntable if you can and connect it to a receiver. Or buy an old vintage stereo if it still works!

R52 was inside the house playing with dolls and watching Dynasty with his mother or his babysitter.

You’re not fooling anyone, R52

I remember being fascinated by my grandparents’ talk of ice boxes and rumble seats.

Same, R68. Well, my parents. Both lived in houses when they were young that had no electricity, running water or, in a few cases, indoor toilets.

Not only were you tethered, but many families only had a single phone so everyone overheard you. My best friend and I used to speak in (terrible) French so our parents couldn’t understand what we were saying. And there was no call waiting or automatic call back so if someone was trying to call with an important message while you were bemoaning the Russian Princess Sasha’s complete of interest en Francais, well you’d never know, would you?

And you would try to listen to conversations by quietly picking up a phone in another room....GET OFF THE PHONE MOM, I CAN HEAR YOU!

I had a few rich friends who had their own telephone line in their bedroom, which I thought was the height of luxury. I did finally get a phone in my room, but still need to share the phone line with my family.

There was so much sex. People didn't read about it or scroll about it or strategize about it. They just did it.

Kids today have no idea how much we got back then.

R56 I would stay at my grandma's house in the summer and there were always tons of them at night - I loved laying on my back in the yard and watching them until I got sleepy. Sad.

Remember when you used to be able to call the Operator for information? As kids my cousins and I would prank the operator until one day she called back and spoke to my grandfather about getting us to knock it off.

I remember having to GO OUT to date or hook-up...IN PERSON!!!

Radio .... someone still loves you.

When I was a kid, we had a party line. It was weird being able to pick up the phone and listen to a neighbor’s conversation in-progress, and having to wait until they were done before you could use the phone.

R74, I have a cousin-in-law who was an actual operator in the 60s-early 80s. South Central Bell. Made bank, too. She and her husband (my 1st cousin) were swingers before I even knew what that meant. In the late 70s-early 80s they'd regularly ask me to babysit their 4 kids for the afternoon...which stretched into the evening...then overnight...then the whole weekend. But they paid me well (when they finally returned), plus they lived just 2-4 streets away, so my parents were OK-ish with it.

Why were phone numbers a word? Butterfield

I think originally it was the street or the neighborhood that you lived in r80.

I kinda miss Thomas guides, even in Los Angeles.

R73 That's right.

[quote]Why were phone numbers a word?

Mine was the name of the town I lived in. My aunt's phone exchange was one digit different, and her named phone exchange had nothing to do with where she lived. It seemed pretty random (original definition).

The party line phone thing is either (a) VERY serious eldergay (mostly pre 1965 or so).....

Or (b) in rural areas that didn't get updated lines until later.

I used to work at our local newspaper in the 90's when it was in it's prime, now their subscriptions are way down and lots of my former coworkers have been laid off. Also the local news is going to be hurting because Gen Z and a lot of millennials don't watch it.

You could dial "0" for operator at any time, and one was always there and they answered immediately. You could ask them to look up numbers for you.

[quote]The party line phone thing is either (a) VERY serious eldergay (mostly pre 1965 or so).... Or (b) in rural areas that didn't get updated lines until later.

It wasn't rural. It was a city. However, the local telephone company was a non-Bell company.

You used to be able to call up the hospital and find out patient information like if your friend had a baby boy or girl

My dad worked full time and my mother stayed home with us 4 kids. I remember going to the bank with her during the day for her to deposit my dad's check and get some cash out. They had a Tube system so you could drive up, grab a cylinder container, pop the endorsed check in and then whoosh! watch it get sucked into the tube. Some time would pass and then whoosh! the tube came back to you with cash inside. That was the height of technology back then.

I remember milk being delivered by a milk man in the early 70's.

I remember the Avon Lady would come to the house a few times a month (or maybe once, I don't recall). My mom would have her come in and the Avon lady would show my mom the new make up they offered and give us tiny, white tubes of lipstick samples. My sister and I LOVED those. Mom would order makeup and it would arrive the following week or two.

I never had my own phone in my room or my own TV. My parents were against that. They felt it was giving kids too much control. Then, as I got older my asshole step father put time limits as to how long we could actually talk on the phone with our friends. It was 15 mins. And it sucked.

I remember rushing home to try to watch a tv episode because if you missed it, that was it. And fights with my sister if there was someone she wanted to watch at the same time on another channel.

I remember taping tv show like Charlie's Angels with an old cassette recorder so I could listen to Sabrina's voice as I thought it was hot. Upon play back, all you could hear was my parents fighting in the background. They fought constantly.

We would make trips to the local library a lot as kids. My mom would let us pick out as many books as we wanted and take them home. In high school, if we needed to research something we could use the World Book Encyclopedias we had or go to the library.

I went to college pre computers but I did have a word processor that I adored. You could type your papers and it would be stored on a floppy disc. Then you would have to feed paper into the machine and watch as it typed each page out for you. I loved that thing. Prior to that, I had a small Brother typewriter that would let you enter in about 4 pages before you had to print them. If you ran out of ribbon, you were fucked so you always had to have some for back up.

I learned to edit film in college on actual film. We would cut the film manually with a splicer and tape the film back together. It's a lost skill. I still have my splicer but everything today is on computer. It made me a better editor because you had to really think out which frames you wanted to cut prior to making the cut.

VHS and Beta came out at the same time and we got a Betamax because the quality was better. It went the way of the dinosaur except for professionals. Film and TV cameras used to be HUGE.

TV channels would go off the air at midnight so there was nothing to watch at night. We would read or write to pass the time.

I had a pager during college and they would sell these little "key cards" at 7-11's with pager codes on them so my friends and I were sort of texting before it became a thing. It sucked if you were driving somewhere and got paged. You'd have to find a pay phone to call.

And yes, we did play outside all day, every day after school. We were told to be home by the time the street lights came on and if not, we would be spanked or grounded. Usually just spanked so we always made sure we got home on time for dinner.

We rarely went out to eat and if we did, it was usually to Bob's Big Boy for some burgers and shakes. We mostly ate at home though. And yes, my parents had a big garden and two huge peach trees in our backyard. Summers were nice. My sister and I would pick fresh strawberries and my dad would make biscuits from bisquick and we would have strawberry shortcake. Parents did a lot of canning of the fruits and vegetables we grew. My mom got a dehydrator one year and we had a lot of fun making granola or banana chips in it.

One tv per household, our tv was usually tuned into sports so I missed out on watching some shows I liked.

Oh yeah, and we played lots of board games as kids. I still love board games. It taught us how to get along.

There was also 411 for businesses which you could call to find out the 1-800 customer service number for big companies.

I don't young people fully appreciate how limited news of current events was. I would buy the afternoon paper to get news about what ever happened after the morning newspaper was published, and then could watch the evening TV news and local late night TV news, and then that was it until the morning TV news and morning paper. For a working person, with no access to a TV during the day, that's when you get news. You also waited for the weeklies, Time and Newsweek, to get more in-depth information about current events.

r89, you do realize, don't you, that you unnecessarily combined 14 replies into one, making it less likely that people will read any of it?

I’m in my mid-30’s.

It’s not true that you had to wait to hear a song. You could record it on a tape, you just had to wait until it came on the radio lol.

I'm sorry that your attention span is that of a gnat, r94. Another big difference in the people of today vs. my gen.

AM radio news and traffic stations kept the masses au courant of the day’s unfolding events.

So crazy how operators could plug a hole to connect a call. Did the hole go to the house?

R87 oh yeah, that too, the smaller phone companies.

The hole patched into your phone line, yes.

[quote]I don't young people fully appreciate how limited news of current events was.

I don't remember there being so much news you need to be plugged in all day. You caught up with the news from the newspaper or the nightly news. If something really big happened - the 3 big networks would break into their regular programming. Now everything is 'breaking news.'

R6...ATMs were not common until the 1980s.

I can remember my parents going to cash a check at a local liquor store or supermarket for cash.

Pre-internet, there were more common cultural references because most people received their news or were entertained from various newspapers, the networks, and shows.

Pre-Google, people went to their local libraries and looked things up.

The internet was supposed to connect the world, but it has also made individuals more isolated from everyone other than those who share their views.

The first I remember of ATMs existing was from the commercials for Tillie the All-time Teller. Tillie originated in the 1970s.

She sang, "I'm Tillie the all-time teller, at Florida National Bank"

My parents only let me have a black and white TV in my room until high school. So uncool.

Sigh.....

Pre-VHS, my sister paid me 25 cents a week to take my little cassette tape recorder and tape (audio only) the Hardy Boys show. She loved Shaun Cassidy.

She usually had to work Sunday nights at the nursing home, so she'd miss it a lot, but I taped it and would offer her helpful little commentary sometimes.

(a good memory of my dear sister, a sweet and generous soul who took her own life a few years ago.....)

When people talk about how bad TV is now, we should remind them of what we dealt with.

I think ATM is now a pretty universal name for, well, ATMs.

But I remember moving away from my local area for college (where they were called MAC machines) and seeing that other areas called them Genie machines, for example. (That was just PA and OH so I'm sure there were more regional nicknames.)

Where did I leave my pencil?

r107 Hello Larry was Shakespeare compared to Manimal!

I remember when an ATM opened on Broadway on the UWS in the early 80s. It was right on the side of the building. No vestibule or anything. If used it in the evening, you really had to look over your shoulder to see if anyone was around.

Wasn't there a Citibank ATM at 72nd and Broadway in 1975?

Although I must say that booking flights/checking in are easier now that we have internet.

If you travel in some of the 2nd/3rd world countries/cities, then an ATM is a must.

Not only did we have a physical boarding pass, we had to have the physical plane ticket attached to it.

[quote]"Nobody who worked full-time had a chance to go to a bank" Of course we did. How else did we cash those checks?

Either you worked within walking distance of a bank, so you could go in your lunch hour (I acknowledged that in my original reply), or your non-working wife did it. If you didn't have a wife and didn't work near a bank, or you had urgent business such as wanting a home loan, you had to take time off work. Because obviously there were also no flexible working hours except for executives.

You could also, as someone has said, cash checks at all kinds of places, including the many post offices. You can still pay bills by cash or check at post offices in Australia, though checks are nearly phased out.

I acknowledge that ATMs, while available from the late 60s in big cities, did proliferate in the early 80s as electronics expanded. However that was still a solid 30 years (more than a generation) before electronic banking really caught on, so to say you "had to go to the bank to get your money before the internet" remains incorrect.

My great aunts lived in a small town in Kansas in the 60's, they would call the grocery store and give them their order and Robbie would deliver it. Robbie was the store owner's teenage son. One day he didn't have other deliveries so he cut down a 20 foot tree hanging over their back porch. My smart ass sister inferred he was providing other services to younger customers and my aunt called her Miss Dirty Mind.

When I was a teenager I wrote several novel length stories because I was bored. I don’t think I would have done something so creative with my time if I had 24/7 access to the internet. Most people didn’t have computers at that time and people still used crappy dial up internet. I’m glad i grew up before smartphones.

[quote] When I was a teenager I wrote several novel length stories because I was bored. I don’t think I would have done something so creative with my time if I had 24/7 access to the internet. Most people didn’t have computers at that time and people still used crappy dial up internet. I’m glad i grew up before smartphones.

Absolutely! I had all these different toys, action figures, etc. from Star Wars guys to animal shaped erasers, and I would group them all together and come up with my own action stories or murder mysteries and play them out with the different figures as characters. I could come up with a whole script w/ dialogue and different voices on the spot and entertain myself for hours doing that. We had to rely on our imagination back then to entertain us. And sure, I watched my share of television, but I'd also spend hours in front of my stereo listening to music, flipping the radio dial back and forth to find something, and I'd lay in between the speakers and just let my mind go.

I don't think Millennials and Gen Z have much creativity or imagination in them. Everything's been spoonfed to them.

No one ever gets lost anymore or has to pull into a gas station to ask for directions thanks to GPS.

The mystery is gone,

I studied abroad during college pre-internet. I received room and most meals at the college where I studied. I got my first Amex card then, and I had Traveler's Checks for spending money.

You went to the American Express Office to cash them.

When traveling in the early 90's in Europe, I still used Traveler's Checks, because the fee at ATMs was too prohibitive.

Yes! Traveller's Cheques! Woe betide you if you lose your booklet.

[quote]Woe betide

This is why I love DL.

[quote]in Europe, I still used Traveler's Checks, because the fee at ATMs was too prohibitive.

I found out on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Canada to ski that withdrawing cash at foreign ATMs had a fee, but it was more than compensated by getting the [italic]bank[/italic] exchange rate, usually several points better than what they offer consumers (even AMEX when cashing travelers cheques).

Of course the banks stopped that practice by the late-90s. Now you pay a fee and get among the worst exchange rates at ATMs.

It was easier to shield young kids from information. I remember when I was young my father's TIME magazine had a cover that said something like "Bringing the boys home", I asked my Mom what it meant. I didn't even know there was a Vietnam War. Today with the internet kids know more, which is good and bad.

[quote] Yes! Traveller's Cheques! Woe betide you if you lose your booklet.

that's not what Karl Malden led me to believe as a child.

I moved from LA to NYC back in 92 - I spent 7 weeks on the road zig-zagging across the country, seeing the southwest and visiting friends and relatives along the way for several days each. I had some paper maps, a book of travelers checks, a styrofoam cooler and often slept in the car at a rest stop or on the side of the highway.

Sometimes I'd pay for a KOA so I could shower in the morning, or paid for a shower at a truck stop. I saw Sacramento, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Vegas, Death Vally, Salt Lake, Arches and Zion in southern Utah, the Grand Canyon, Phoenix, Dallas, Memphis, Chicago and Cleveland. I'd check in with my mom about once a week, as I had done while away at school.

r117, I also did that! I have a handwritten, 235 page "book" I wrote when I was 12. Kids don't do that shit anymore.

R80 I am not sure that the "why" is explained here, but this is how it worked. BUtterfield 8 was BU8, or 288 ( the phone exchange for the Upper East Side). By the time I was born, this was over (everyone dialed direct) but some long-time businesses who never updated their newspaper ads would still show "Sunset 3-1234" as their phone number.

R124 You still get a better rate at bank ATMs than you do at any currency exchange counter. Of the three options - exchanging at a US bank for foreign currency, exchanging by withdrawing at an ATM, and going to a foreign currency exchange counter in the country you're visiting - the ATM withdraw generally has the best rate, because the bank is getting a better rate by compiling all its transactions into one.

This is especially so for Canada, and most EU countries.....others may differ. (India has banking rules that differ from region to region and sometimes town to town!)

I always thought the name exchange was because most phone numbers in a particular area all had the same first two digits, which corresponded with the letters assigned, so they used those letters to find a memorable word that started with two of those letters.

Have you heard about FEllatio? It's a new exchange.

[quote]It's funny when Gen Z just assumes everyone had a cell phone and a computer 20 years ago. When I started college in 1999 nobody had a cell phone. Computers were only available in the library. We had landlines in our dorm rooms and payphones on campus. I know the truth because I was there.

True, it took several years before everybody and their mother had a cell phone and a personal computer. I was also in college in the late 90s and cell phones were not common at all, and most students didn't have a pc either, you went to the computer lab. It wasn't until the early 2000s that everybody had a cell phone.

What we are seeing now is the truth of this statement:

“Instant gratification is the death of desire.”

R131 You have the end result correct, but not the cause. Vastly simplified, it came from how telephones in a give area were wired -- all to the same exchange -- and how calls were put through -- by mechanically connecting one exchange (caller) to another (recipient).

"Automatic exchanges, which provided dial service, were invented by Almon Strowger in 1888. First used commercially in 1892, they did not gain widespread use until the first decade of the 20th century. They eliminated the need for human switchboard operators who completed the connections required for a telephone call. Automation replaced human operators with electromechanical systems, and telephones were equipped with a dial by which a caller transmitted the destination telephone number to the automatic switching system."

So when one dialed, would they still dial the corresponding numbers to those first two letters?

136 - yes -- the exchange name / letters were a mnemonic device to help people memorize phone numbers numbers by adding a word or letters into the string. Since the letters are paired (really tripled) on the dial along with the numbers so dialing one or the other was the same thing.

As a kid it was easer for me to learn my home phone number as BU5-6789 than 285-6789. I still usually think of it that way.

Thanks

Before CDs, Napster, etc you could go to a store and buy a single. They even had singles on cassettes, for a while. Disco singles were on 12 inch records. Before that, regular singles were on those small 45s. Most kids (and even their parents) had a lot of those. Before that, you could buy a single song on a 78.

[quote] Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like

There are still plenty of people older than Boomers (i.e. born before 1946) around to tell us what it was like to live without tv, let alone internet. My parents (in their early-mid 80s now) got their first tv when they were in junior high or later.

You used to deal a lot with telephone operators. If you didn’t know someone’s phone number you would call the operator and she would look it up. ou needed the name and address. But they would stay on the line with you and try to find you the person’s number. And connect you. You also used to call the get a recording of the accurate time.

People here talk about this like it was a really long time ago but I remember in the early 2000s, cashing my work check at the supermarket (which had a bank branch inside) - or cashing checks so I could shop with cash. Many people never used ATMs. My parents never used an ATM.

When I was a kid people didn’t use credit cards that much - there weren’t many. People weren’t running up debt like they are today. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people still used cash a great deal. If you went to a doctor you cold 9and did) pay cash.

Parking was much less restricted on city and town streets, also. You could just pull up and park, all over the place.

[quote]When I was a kid people didn’t use credit cards that much - there weren’t many.

Many places didn't accept credit cards, especially smaller stores and businesses.

The rich kids at school had "children's phone" underneath their parents name/number in the phone book.

I remember sitting at home by the radio station that would repeat popular songs often (in the mid to late 80's), waiting to hit REC so I could capture my newest, favorite song on cassette and replay/rewind/replay until I knew all the words and inflections and could sing it!!

Lucky Star by Madonna was one that stands out.

Although we lived "in the country" (East County San Diego) then, we didn't have a party line. But we did have the avocado rotary dial phone with the long phone cord. Trying to dial into radio contests were laborious, and I definitely used a pencil to try to get that dial back as quick as possible to dial the next number. Nope - never won anything.

Although we were poor folk, somehow my mom lucked into two Selectric electric typewriters, one of which she let me keep down in my room. I guess I didn't realize until now I may have had some bipolar tendencies, because i would stay up nights typing out stupid, Harlequin type stories on that typewriter. I really wish I had one of those stories to read now, 30 years later.

Also (i've mentioned this on other threads), we got only THREE channels to watch our ONE television, as we were too poor to afford cable, even though it was pretty standard for most kids' families to have. AND we weren't ever allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons or after school tv. EVER.

We knew were were "different" lol.

God, I actually miss those times now.

I remember when landlines were everywhere you would call a number and sometimes you'd hear a three note tone, then an announcement that "the number you have reached, ###-####, has been disconnected or is no longer in service."

Or sometimes it was "changed to an unlisted number."

"No further information is available about ###-####."

A few bill collectors and tricks were undoubtedly sad to hear that when I moved to a new apartment.....

Radio stations all had count down programs so you knew when a hit was likely to be played.

The only people I know who still have landlines are older people.

^^And that's how old I am, but don't think I am. It was 40 years, ago, not 30.

I remember when a bottle of Coke was a dime and a candy bar was 5 cents. Oh well.

Remember when you could smoke in movie theatres. And the subway.

Although there had been office/desk recording devices for at least 20 years prior, my high school taught shorthand & the want ads still mentioned it as necessary for secretarial positions. There was a three-finger method for adding machines, and you still find that raised dot on the 5 key.

Question about smoking on the subway- did they have any built in ashtrays or did people just ash on the floor?

Mimeographs, with carbon copy paper. Then later printers with the smell of toner. And other printers with the perforated /folded automatic feed paper for computers. I remember early computers that need a giant stack of punchcards to feed info into the computer (this was after the spools) at my Dad’s job.- he was a systems analyst.

As whistfully we can reminisce i hated on the street Pay phones and hated writing long letters, though I did both as I had no choice.

I do miss coming home and checking the answering machine for messages, in place of constantly getting pinged by spam-bots on my iPhone

I swear to god. One season, circa 2009 I left my cell phone on a New York City subway. I was in college at the time and waited about 4 months to replace it. Life was bliss. I actually had to make plans in advance. A lot of times I was more spontaneous because of lack of portable communication. I would show up at people’s apartments or dorms have break breakfast with them. I used pay phones. Life was so stress free in that 4 months.

I remember people smoking in the supermarket, and they just stamped the cig out on the floor.

I can remember when you could book an alarm call from the operator, and it was really expensive.

I went to a friends 60th birthday dinner party recently. I always remember a story she told me when I first knew her 35 years ago. She worked as a Saturday girl at the local telephone exchange in London aged about 17. It was actually the last working telephone exchange in the country. She had the hots for a guy who was local and because she worked on a Saturday she was often connecting calls to his phone from his mates. They would plan where they would meet up that night, which pubs they would go to etc. My friend used to eavesdrop on the conversations so she and her friends could coincidentally turn up at the same places, and maybe get to know them.

R157, that sounds archaic enough to be the treatment for a 1937 movie with Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone.

I remember being bored at home. I used to turn off the TV and go read a book. Go put on skates or blades and go find some kids outside. Go exploring with them. We'd find a cat, or talk to another teen neighbor boy working on his car, or go to someone's house and watch MTV.

The recording songs from the radio is very relatable. We could not instantly look up songs. That's why you have your album, tape, cd collection and stereos were so big. There was something more rewarding about taking a record or cassette out and putting it in the machine to listen to.

People were everything. People were gps, time, information, directions, what's going on. People were entertainment. Outside of the tv, that's how you got your information because you didn't much. I think people were more willing to interact with strangers, I could be wrong.

Then the Internet came and it seemed clunky. Took forever to load. I remember in high school a teacher bringing in a webpage on a floppy disc to show us something. It was just taking off with AOL. Mtv started showing videos with people in a chat and it seemed State of the Art.

Nobody really does edgy rock anymore. It was replaced with pop which now sounds like a blend of everything.

You don't really see a lot of punks, goths or people who really stand out like that anymore. It's more anime cosplayers if anything.

People often mention a trip to the library to look things up pre-internet, but for those reports you didn't start until 9pm the night before, the World Almanac, a good dictionary, an atlas, and a set of encyclopedias were all ass-savers.

The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature was akin to Google, a printed index of magazine articles from the preceding year. That one did require visiting a library.

When you wrote a paper and needed articles from back issues of magazines (no articles older than five years!) you went into the stacks where the back issues of magazines were in bound book form. IIRC if it was a weekly magazine like Time, several months worth were bound in separate volumes.

It was easier to plagiarize.

I used to comb through back issues of Sports Illustrated for pics of hot guys. I'd tear the page out and hide it in a book to enjoy later.

Catching your favorite song on the radio just in time to press the record on your boombox for you "My mix" cassette built an appreciation and higher incentive to want to go out to a store and purchase a record.

Now? What used to take days, luck, or an actual phone call to a radio station to "make a request" is now just a few seconds away. You can just stream an artist's music on YouTube for free and listen to your favorite song whenever you want. As a result, I don't get as excited anymore when I feel like hearing a song I enjoy. It's not unpleasant, but the "thrill is gone" so to say.

Speaking of which...

Oh, and speaking of music. Thanks to apps like Shazam, you don't have to wait until the end of the closing credits of a film or show to (hopefully) find the name of a song you liked from the soundtrack.

My mother is Silent Generation. I remember as a kid in the 70's when Happy Days was popular my Mom told me she wore saddle shoes and a poodle skirt in the 50's and that seemed like the olden days. Today that would be like me talking about 2004. That will make you feel old.

The disconnection between the 50s and the 70s was an abyss compared to now and the 2000s. The 60s were a real watershed.

I read that acceptees aren't allowed to get political, hope somebody rebels

^^^^ oops wrong thread, sorry

r166 When I was in high school in the early 2000s, styles and music from the 80s was "old school" to me. It still is, but damn, now early 2000s music is "old school" to this new generation.

Yes, it really makes you feel old that the 2000s are now "vintage." For most of us, the 2000s seem like yesterday.

r171 Yep. Vintage enough to remake "Mean Girls" apparently.

The audacity.

R80 The phone numbers were words because they related to the name(s) the telephone company gave the local exchange office that was handling the calls, which in turn, related to one or more of the telephone prefixes assigned to that office. The names were derived from the letters assigned to the numbers on the telephone dial.

For example, where I was, the local exchange office handled calls for the prefixes 390, 391, 393, 394, and 396, so looking at the dial, they came up with a name from the letters related to the "3" and the "9." The name for our exchange was "EXbrook": "E" for the "3" and "X" for the "9."

Customers liked it because it was easier to remember someone's telephone number with just the common exchange name and five digits. It also gave you an idea of where someone lived or a business was located.

R172 - some early-mid 2000s teen shows they've already rebooted are Roswell and Gossip Girl and those were flops. I hope they keep their hands off Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Felicity.

Why would they remake Mean Girls? It doesn't look better. What's so different about the two times? Nothing!

I think they remade it as a musical.

The Mean Girls remake, like the second Color Purple and Hairspray films, is based on the musical.

So original film ---- > Broadway musical ----> film of musical.

Young people like to fantasize about life before the internet but they couldn’t survive after the way they grew up.

Hell, I grew up without the internet and I couldn't survive without it. Neither could most people my age.

[quote]Hell, I grew up without the internet and I couldn't survive without it. Neither could most people my age.

I'm in my 60s and it's now distressing to me when I'm someplace where I can't yell into the ether, "Alexa, what time is it? Alexa, what's the weather?" That is, somewhere I can't get an answer to the query.

I don't want to return

There was a period of time when phone books were still being printed even though phone numbers could be looked up online. The phone company would leave the new phones books outside my home every year. Being in a metro area, the white pages and yellow pages were separate books and both huge. I didn't even bring them into the house. They went straight into the garbage bin. Thank goodness the practice has stopped.

r161, MICROFICHE

My little town in NJ still prints and distributes a phone book each year and we still have our local once-a-week hometown newspaper.

r182 as late as 2010 the phone company would deliver stacks of phone books to my office and they were stacked up in the mailroom. All of my co-workers were like "why are they still doing this?" Nobody took one.

R183 Microfiche was never going to last. It tended to be unstable. I used to work in a government documents library, and sometimes we'd open up a box of it, and it had turned into a gooey mess. My boss called it mushyfiche.

R186 I used to work in a Gov Docs technical services department! (My first full-time job.) No one ever wanted to catalog the microfiche; it was so tedious and there was so much of it. We'd let it back up, then our boss would try to motivate us to work on it by declaring "Fiche Week" and bringing us Goldfish crackers.

Phone books might make a comeback now that you can't lookup peoples' phone numbers online anymore. Google stopped allowing that years ago.

But if you don't know their phone number you email them.

I miss how quiet the world was in the 80s and most of the 90s. It’s not that I necessarily loved “quiet” as a younger person, quite the opposite. But back then you had noisy public or social spaces, and then it was contrasted with quiet moments between. I didn’t even realize it at the time, but I remember it. Waiting in an office lobby, sitting in a movie theater before the film starts, pumping gas, being at an airport. Now it feels like there’s sound and ads and alarms and cell phones and constant layers of noise everywhere.

I used to pack up files eligible for microfiche and then file them in a special cabinet when they came back. That cabinet is off in long term storage now, but every once in a while I have to retrieve documents. The last few times the lawyers were completely flummoxed by what I sent and how they were supposed to read it.

Back in the 80s I used to collate marketing materials for a manufacturing company’s distributors as an after school job. A print shop would create glossy pages for charts and pictures, pages without fancy graphics I’d just photocopy and it was my job to put together the covers and appropriate pages (by product) and hand pun bin them so they could be shipped out. Mind you this was quite professional for the era. Once a week a letter would be written to all the distributors around the country and it would be my job to do all the envelope stuffing and stamping.

Who uses a phone to call someone? Text is king these days.

There's a number of friends and acquaintances I have where we only communicate on Facebook/Messenger.

I remember having a crush on a guy in class in the 9th grade (early 80s), learning his last name, getting out the phone book and looking for the last name, finding several of them, calling each one until I could figure out which family’s number was his… I think I may have asked for him and when I got a “Hold on…” I hung up. No caller ID or *69 in those days! Then I’d get out the huge, paper city (suburb) map with all the roads listed and search inch by inch on the map until I found the street listed in the phone book. It took a while! The map my parents had didn’t have a street key/index. Then I’d ride my bike past his house every once in a while on the off chance I might catch a glimpse of him. One day I did! He was mowing the lawn listening to his Walkman, and all sweaty.

That’s how we stalked people in the olden days!

[quote]It’s not true that you had to wait to hear a song. You could record it on a tape, you just had to wait until it came on the radio lol.

Haha, R95 you're 100% right. For YEARS I bought dozens of blank cassettes, popped them into my low-mid quality RCA record player-stereo radio, and when my favorite disc jockey came on, taped entire blocks of their shows because they always played songs I loved.

40+ years on, and to this day if I hear certain songs that I'd taped, when it fades out I immediately start humming the next song from my taped block. Example: if I hear Badfinger's "Day After Day," when it ends I start humming the intro to America's "Horse With No Name," because they were back-to-back on my tape. Or Who's "My Generation" into The Doors "People Are Strange."

For years I kept the tapes in a huge travel bag, and sadly they were lost in a fire at my storage facility a few years ago.

We used to stand in line at the bank to deposit our paychecks which had to clear before you could use that money. Direct deposit wasn't widely used or wasn't available at all for many people.

Born in 1984, so old millennial. I can’t imagine how miserable kids are today when they’ve been handed an iPad from birth, basically. I wonder how my sister’s generation (she is ten years older than me) turned into horrible helicopter parents? She is childless but her and her friends were always very loose and free people, it was cool to grow up with them playing old punk records or taking me to the city movie houses (yes, that is how you found out about “cool” music outside college radio stations as a kid)! Everybody gets everything from the algorithm, it seems.

Also, the zoomers seem insanely prudish about sex. I blame my generation for this. Millennials started all that xoJane confessional bullshit (I knew a number of women personally who regularly wrote for that website) and that “drunk hookups are LITERAL RAPE” nonsense that spiraled into causing the mentality that sex that isn’t comfortable, happy, or with a person who is your exact age, income level, etc. is evil and there’s something inherently wrong with it. Certain young people talk about age gap relationships like racists used to talk about interracial ones…I think the internet has caused this. Extreme positions are what get attention online, paired with groupthink.

Oh and lack of streaming meant certain TV shows were an event and you had to catch the botched version of movies airing if there wasn’t a copy at the video store and you didn’t live in a city where there were rep screenings.

I’be read about there being much more of a presence of arthouse cinemas across America pre-1980s from DLers older than I am, which is something that seems so strange to me. People knew about Bergman and Antonioni even if they weren’t film fans?

My mother’s job died because of the internet. She worked for decades in the payphone sector of AT&T. Laid off in 2009.

R195, you could also float checks back then. It used to take several days (or more if close to the weekend) for personal checks to clear, so if you just HAD to get something, but were broke, you wrote a postdated check, got your merch, and went home happy.

Or even wrote a check for the current day, knowing you had 3-4 days' grace before your hot check hit the bank.

Nowadays a written check gets processed as an electronic check or debit card. Boooooo!

In the period shortly before phone books went out, there was a time when you could look up a phone number easily on the internet. “White Pages”, I think. Now it’s gotten harder and harder to look up someone’s phone number. Eventually I’m sure they’ll make you have to pay a fee to do so.

I lived in Manhattan from 1979 to 2014. The years prior to cell phones and especially smart phones were blissfully anonymous if you wanted.

I'd leave home and be gone half the day reveling in the facts that no one could reach me or knew who or where I was.

[quote] Certain young people talk about age gap relationships like racists used to talk about interracial ones…I think the internet has caused this. Extreme positions are what get attention online, paired with groupthink.

And then it catches on with older people, as well.

Several of my friends’ dads growing up were older than the moms. This had to do with WWII or Korea and the men not being around to get married at younger ages - as people often did, then. Younger women were still unmarried, and maybe guys still had ideas about marrying virgins. Anyhow, no excuses needed, they did nothing wrong, and were good people I still remember fondly.

I forget how this came up but I mentioned it to a young relative who responded with a face and said “That’s creepy.” It was depressing. This passing of judgment.

It’s honestly hard enough to meet someone compatible, then to have to try to stary within 4 or 5 years of one’s age group...wtf? It’s stupid.

*stay

I also see discussions on other forums about celebs where younger people try to make the case that if one celeb is 18 or 19 and the other is 23 or 24, the relationship is unconscionable.

[quote]Who uses a phone to call someone? Text is king these days.

I have three elderly relatives who refuse to text or own Smartphones so communicating with them is always done with phone calls.

Does anyone else here hate texting as much as I do?

Eldergays I think you guys illustrate something beautiful. In the olden days one could leave an organization or job and not be expected to remain in contact with everyone you knew there for life. That level of anonymity no longer exists.

[quote]Certain young people talk about age gap relationships like racists used to talk about interracial ones…I think the internet has caused this. Extreme positions are what get attention online, paired with groupthink.

I see this on Reddit all the time, and it's usually on TV show forums about fictional couples who don't even exist. There's also a lot of 18,19, 20, 21 people ARE LITERAL CHILDREN.

R205, I despise it. I never learned to type. Whatever happened to the secretary I was supposed to have?

[quote]In the period shortly before phone books went out, there was a time when you could look up a phone number easily on the internet. “White Pages”, I think. Now it’s gotten harder and harder to look up someone’s phone number.

That's a good thing. Other than for stalking, why should someone look up a person's number? If they are a friend or business, they would just ask a person directly for their number. Looking up business numbers is still easy to do.

I don't want anyone looking up my phone number, and I certainly don't want anyone calling.

[quote]Also, the zoomers seem insanely prudish about sex.

That's true, from my own observations. They're so hung up and almost Victorian about sex.

I'm glad I'm Gen X (born '76). We were absolute WHORES in our youth and loved to party. I had a wonderful time and had so much amazing sex, I don't regret it at all.

One of the best things before cell phones was that when you left work you were DONE. Nobody from work could reach you. They had to wait until you showed up for work the next day or on Monday.

R209 I guess you wold have to ask cities and towns why they published people’s phone numbers in a phone book, then. As a public service.

I shouldn’t have to explain to you why you can’t ask everyone in person for their telephone number. It could be as simple as meeting someone in school and wanted to go out with them, so you looked up the number in the phone book. Nobody’s number was stored on a cell phone. If you were out someplace and say, needed a ride, you might have to call someone using a phone book or if the phone booth didn’t have a book, you’d call information (operator). You needed to have phone numbers readily available somehow.

R212, I used present tense, talking about today. Try again.

[quote] Eldergays I think you guys illustrate something beautiful. In the olden days one could leave an organization or job and not be expected to remain in contact with everyone you knew there for life. That level of anonymity no longer exists.—Teacake

But Teafake, you're old.

R214 You press as fuck. Good lawd you need mental help.

[quote] You press as fuck. Good lawd you need mental help.

Ladies & Gentlemen, Sweet Daddy Williams.

R216 ????? And I don’t mean the question marks cuntingly. The joke is lost on me.

Look it up, Teafake. You have time to research the geneaology of Jeremy Alan Williams' mother and argue it like you're gunning for the Supreme Court. This should take you no time at all.

R218 I don’t know who the fuck you think you are talking 2 with this condescending ass tone. I don’t know who hurt you but don’t take that shit out on me. If you can’t be a joyous cunt and take a joke like everyone perhaps you need to give the site a break.

Fuck off. No one on here likes you, we're all sick of your cosplaying and your bullshit. Are you really that obtuse that you can't see that?

R220 You are the only one who thinks that you low iq idiot. I don’t care though. I’m not fucking pretending to be a 35 yr old black man. You fkin cunt. You take me there because you are so fkin exhausting with your lies.

No, sweetheart, I'm not the only one. If you weren't so in love with the sound of your own shucking and jiving, you'd realize that. Just stop acting like such a performative asshole and maybe people would be able to tolerate you.

R222 Nah bitch I’m good. I will continue to operate as I please. I’m sorry to offend your narrow minded sensibilities. You can fuck right off now cunt.

You're so white.

R224 No you’re just fucking racist and clueless.

R207 At 18 I was regularly fucking 40 something men. I wonder if they’d call me an abuse victim!

R226 - they would 100% call that rape.

I get the impression that mainstream media and TV news were much more trusted back in the day, because they simply had to be: there weren't many alternatives. Journalism was a more respected profession.

R226 same.....

Not only did they publish everyone's phone number in a book but you had to pay extra for it to be unlisted.

I kinda wonder if that was better, though. A level of accountability. Kinda like how the Dutch don't have curtains on their windows.

Wait, why don't the Dutch have curtains on their windows??

R231

Lort! I don’t want anyone to see the mess in this place! Someone would call the cops thinking a violent struggle had taken place!

I'm not one to lament that things were better in the old days. Some things are better now.

But I won't back away an inch from feeling sorry for kids now who don't play the way kids used to play.

I know others have already commented on this, but I can't stop from adding to it.

I'm a 60s and 70s child and teenager.

On weekdays, after school homework was completed, and during Winter school year, after Saturday morning chores were done our parents KICKED. US. OUT. OF. THE. HOUSE.

Same in Summer after morning chores.

"And I don't want to see you back here unless somebody is dead or bleeding!"

Holy Cow. We lived in the city. We'd explore for miles. Games, sports, bike-riding, sledding and ice skating in the Winter and swimming all day in the Summer.

And no hovering parents.

R234 Yes, I agree. I’m in my 50’s now.

As a small child I grew up in the Dallas suburbs in the mid/late 70s, when I was in grade school and middle school. All our parents were basically like, “Be home before dark!” (or dinner). Little supervision. It’s like they trusted us.

We played in sewers and storm drains, roaming underneath entire blocks of the neighborhoods. At our size we could stand fully upright in them and still have room to reach up and touch the top. There would just be a trickle of water at the bottom. We brought flashlights. There would be bright beams of sunlight at points beaming in where there were curb drains, where you could go up into the rectangular under the drains (and still stand up) and crawl out if you could lift the manhole cover, or fit out of the curb drain, and you’d be in another part of the neighborhood.

We’d play in creeks, or the scraggly woods.

We played in construction sites, with huge piles of dirt the size of the pyramids.

We’d play in homes that were being built (from wood skeletons on concrete bases, to vast finished homes fully carpeted and windowed with plumbing and electricity… I’m still amazed at this… the front doors would just be unlocked).

We’d ride our bikes to 7-11 or air conditioned supermarkets and spend our allowance money coins on candy or big gulps.

Such rich, complex memories, and friendships camaraderie bonds that lasted well into our adult years.

I guess every generation is different.

[quote] We played in sewers and storm drains, roaming underneath entire blocks of the neighborhoods. At our size we could stand fully upright in them and still have room to reach up and touch the top. There would just be a trickle of water at the bottom.

Wow. Loved reading of your old days, r235.

[quote]We played in sewers and storm drains, roaming underneath entire blocks of the neighborhoods. At our size we could stand fully upright in them and still have room to reach up and touch the top. There would just be a trickle of water at the bottom.

I look back to my 1960s childhood and am amazed none of us got killed....climbing trees to the top, walking and skating on frozen ponds, digging caves and hanging out in them ...not to mention cars without seatbelts and riding in the back seat standing up.

That's the real point R237 -- none of us did get killed (or to be more realistic, very few).

But the idea of protecting kids from danger is what caused the big shift in parenting culture here in the US, and I think it has done much more harm than good, overall.

Obviously the dead kid aren’t posting so…

[quote]Obviously the dead kid aren’t posting so…

Yep, that was our biggest danger: climbing trees to the top, walking and skating on frozen ponds, digging caves and hanging out in them...etc.

Seems rather quaint compared to today, wouldn't you say?:

"Guns Are Now Leading Cause of Death for U.S. Kids" - CNN Oct. 2023

I think Adam Walsh changed everything. Maybe not necessarily for the parents of that current time, but the Gen X kids who grew up seeing that in the news every night, it really made an impression. Not for our own safety but after many of us became parents (I'm assuming, as I'm not a parent, myself).

I actually grew up in the same town as Adam Walsh and was a little older than him, and I can tell you my mom shopped at the same mall, and the same Sears, and when she'd drag me with her, I'd park my ass in the toy department and then she could come find me when she was done shopping. I can remember it clearly to this day. The outdoor entrance to Sears was maybe about 50 feet from the toy department, so it would have been super easy for any kid to be abducted from there with little struggle or notice.

But you know what- after it happened, and while it was going on, none of our parents changed anything. We were still allowed to roam free. I think our parents at that time were so desensitized that they figured- Oh, nothing's gonna happen to my kid. And then when the rumors started about John Walsh having some sort of shady business deals and this being retribution, then they really felt off the hook.

However, I remember a few of my friends being afraid about it. Me- I didn't care one bit. In fact, I hated my father so much, I prayed someone would take me away. I was an only child and a latchkey kid from the age of 9. I'd get home from school and I had to clean, do my homework and start dinner every afternoon. Then I could go outside after dinner until it got dark. My mom was dropping me off at the movies by myself from age 12. I liked going with friends, but I wasn't going to let that stop me from going to see stuff I knew they didn't want to see. And I was great at sneaking into R rated movies. I'd take the bus into Miami to go to the good malls down there and some of the indie record shops. I'd hang out at the mall and smoke. (Back then, you could say you were buying them for your parents and you could usually get away with it if you were young enough.) But most of the time, I'd barricade myself in my room and read and listen to music for hours and hours, making up stories in my head. I sure do miss those days, even if we had shag carpet for a year.

I look back at the downright dangerous things I did as a kid and can't help feeling rather lucky nothing awful happened. I rode around in the cubby hole in the back of the 1965 Bug my father gave my mother after my difficult birth. Dad traded in his 66 Coupe de Ville for a horrible 1970 pop-top camper van that we drove around the western US for a week each of 5 Summers. I rode sitting on the engine cover between the two front seats, no seatbelt or padding of any kind except a towel when the cover got too hot to touch. And this just scratches the surface of just the automotive risks.

I agree, Gen X were completely hedonistic, at least my people were. We were all SLUTS and loved every minute of it.

R240 I was actually making a joke about the structure of the all of us who are still alive to talk about it didn’t die of it so it must not have been that dangerous argument. It doesn’t matter if it’s bubonic plague, famine, car crashes or guns. It’s weird reasoning when you think about it.

But to talk seriously childhood fatalities have gone way down since we were children.

I was a Boy Scout when I was about 13 years old, and we used to have ‘bob a job week’ once a year. I would travel miles from home knocking on strangers doors saying I was willing to do anything for a UK shilling.

At about the same age I was out knocking on strangers’ doors by myself collecting for the American Heart Association.

Did any of you do the foreign pen pal program through your school? You’d fill out a questionnaire and countries you were interested in and a month or so later you’d get an address of your pen pal. I had pen pals in Austria, Italy and the West Bank. When I was fifteen my pen pal in Italy invited me to stay with her the following summer. I saved up from my various jobs all year and got a passport and at 16 my parents put me on a flight to Europe (a place none of us had ever been) to go live with absolute strangers; all arranged by letters because phone calls were too expensive. The flights home were more expensive than the flight there at the time of booking so I didn’t get my return ticket until I was there and the prices had gone down. I had a great time, but just unimaginable today.

Pen Pals!

ElderLez, that’s truly a thing of the past.

That’s too bad.

As a child, when my mother reached out her hand to me and it held the very first piece of USPS mail I ever received, I was stunned.

“Here”, she said, this is for you.”

In my little kid’s mind, mail was an adult thing so I asked Mom, “Did you read it?”

“Oh no, it has your name on it”.

What a gigantic moment in that seemingly little one. I got my first piece of mail and a lesson in respecting privacy.

I was a little indie music gay in HS and there was a magazine in the US called Star Hits (the US version of the UK's Smash Hits). It included a pen pal section - you could write in and say, Hi, I'm so and so and love [list of bands]. I did. I think they published my address, which is insane to think, even in for the mid-to-late 80s.

I'd listed a lot of bands I liked (Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Smiths and that sort of thing) and I swear 98 percent of the responses were from female Duran Duran fans with big loopy handwriting. But I did make a few friends there. And had a few slightly inappropriate photos from male authors sent my way. LOL.

These days, of course, our addresses and phone numbers are guarded with more care. I've spent time searching myself on Google to see what info databases my info shows up on, just to delete it. Though like kudzu, it can always somehow make its way back....nothing every really disappears online.

Getting paper mail was a huge thing for me too R247.

There was a store at the mall that got imported Smash Hits. Loved both DD and the Smiths.

Good times

I remember walking into the library and heading straight to the card catalog. I loved doing research papers for school. At one point, I wanted to be a paralegal but never followed through on it. The day I walked in and the card catalog was gone, I damn near had a heart attack!

We didn't have a computer but papers needed to be typed with the 1 inch margins at the bottom. I remember a teacher telling me to use the first thumb joint if a ruler wasn't handy. It sucked when I had to remember to leave room for the citation at the bottom of the page! My Mom had an old typewriter that used ribbon, Many a paper was tunred in with red ink smudge marks.

Typing on forms with carbon paper between them. If you made a mistake, you had to use White Out on each page and then type over the typo.

I'm the poster who mentioned watching The Sopranos this week. I had no idea there were so many pay phones! Tony was always on the side of a highway, making calls. The also showed Christopha (Adriana's pronunciation) throwing out the hard disks he used to type his manuscript.

At one company, we had only TWO secretaries who were allowed to use the WANG computer. At this same company, it was my job to file blueprints of the items we manufactured. Each Friday, was filing day. I would find the old version, drop it in the shredding file, and then replace it with the updated version.

Pay phones seemed to disappear overnight.

Sort of a differing opinion: I used to work in a library and card catalogues were there two or three years, at first. I used to use them when I was a student, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, then when in all went online it seemed like a great advance. Way easier to find something, more information, et.

People would come into the library where I worked and for years would say “I miss the card catalogs!” And I’d say, “Why?”

At least where I live, they eliminated a huge number of mailboxes. I remember how there even used to be those small ones attached to telephone polls - like the one at the end of the road where our summer cottage was. People don’t usually have those any more either.

Hey ElderLez -- I'm one of the "well we didn't die..." posters that you were reacting to, and yes you are correct those of us who can make that statement are the lucky one's who didn't get seriously hurt, or die. There were a few really bad injuries in my neighborhood growing up -- one kid doing an Evel Knievel stunt with his bike, and another boy who was hit by a car.

Your statistic at R244 is interesting, but it is for kids under 5 - so it really doesn't reflect all the shenanigans we were up to in the 70s as older kids / teenagers. I wouldn't be surprised if the overall mortality rate for that group was down as well, given how much kids today can't do -- but each individual case aside, I still don't know if overall that statistical trade off is worth Gens Y & Z losing most of the freedoms we had growing up, the freedom to do some dangerous stupid shit included.

To add some nuance to what I said above -- obviously seatbelts and car seats are a vast improvement, and less access to fireworks is also smart -- but being allowed to just roam on your bike until the streetlights came on seems more beneficial overall than the very low potential for getting hurt or abducted.

I grew up in outer-boro NYC and at 13 (freshman year of HS) I was allowed to go into Manhattan with just another friend -- and a year later, by myself. This was in 76 / 77 when the city was arguably as dangerous as it has ever been. None of my nieces or nephews had that freedom, and most still can't navigate Manhattan by themselves as young adults. Interestingly , I did have restrictions on me my parents didn't in the late 30s early 40s -- my dad came into Manhattan from Queens as a 9 year old to take violin lessons, and my mother an here sister would travel from Brooklyn to Fort Lee, NJ together to visit an aunt while they were still in grade school

I’d agree that the big decrease is probably car safety related; seats, belts, air bags and drunk driving laws. And they’ve outlawed my personal favorite, riding in the back of a flatbed truck with a dozen or so other kids.

As an adult child of hippies I may have too dismayed by the excess of freedom they displayed to truly appreciate my own freedoms at the time. (That’s kind of a joke) I was too busy complaining about being dragged to wild parties on communes on school nights to appreciate the fact that I could say I was going hiking in the woods and just be gone for hours.

I grew up in a rural area and the biggest extracurricular was the hunting group and kids used to bring their guns to school for that and just store them in their lockers. One kid was shot in the eye on a school outing.

I’m convinced violinists are just a special bunch to whom the normal rules don’t apply regardless of decade. My wife got to travel all over the city alone as a kid starting in the late sixties going to lessons and concerts and then almost every day into Manhattan in the seventies going to performing arts and Julliard pre-college.

She got side-tracked from her musical career and had many jobs, but one she had for years was getting pay phone locations. I remember being on the LIRR in maybe ‘94 and hearing this conversation about this new thing the pre-paid phone card and thinking oh my. Sure enough that was the beginning of the end for pay phones, much more than and prior to cell phones. And of course all of the people who had been in pay phones pivoted to pre-paid cards. I was so glad when my wife went back to music.

I will go to bed happy tonight knowing that ElderLez liked The Smiths.

ElderLez you reminded me of when cell phones first came out circa mid-90s. I remember so many people (myself included) who thought they were stupid and said "I never want one of those. Why would I need a phone attached to me?"

God, little did we all know.

[quote]And they’ve outlawed my personal favorite, riding in the back of a flatbed truck with a dozen or so other kids.

My siblings, cousins, friends and I constantly rode in the back of pickup trucks (including on major roads with lots of traffic) throughout our 80s childhoods and none of us even got so much as a scratch. Even when the driver of the truck was going 45mph.

R258 We used to joke they were an electronic leash.

i It's sad that the internet has allowed more people to be selfish, self-righteous, and egotistical . In fact it encourages it sadly this selfishness, self centeredness, and self righteousness is polluting the rest of the culture.

r257 same!

Yeah, that not riding in the back of a pickup is so bogus! That was one of the best things about summer- hopping in the back of our old beater pickup and driving on those back roads. The smell of the hay and the wind in your hair was a great joy of childhood

We used to take trips from Chicago to Wisconsin in the back of a station wagon that had side and back door seats- all the kids would fight for that back door seat, and it was inevitable that someone would get car sick on the way there.

Adults minds would be blown now on how i used to roam around Chicago at around 10 years old- taking the El to downtown, walking to the Century mall from Wrigleyville along Clarke St., riding bikes through Lincoln Park by Lake Shore Drive. I've had a few creepy guys try to follow me around (I'm female), but I would always manage to shake them off- stopping into a store, fake getting off the bus and getting back on again, or just run through the byzantine alleys in the neighborhood. I've done a lot of stupid shit too: burned myself on my knee with an iron, got the needle of a sewing machine stuck in my finger almost setting the house on fire by striking matches in a waste basket (I picked it up and threw it in the tub), jumping off of garages into a huge snowbank, skitching in the winter, and it goes on and on. And yet, at 59, I'm still here and relatively sane.

However my older cousins didn't fare as well: AIDS, heroin, getting shot in the heart, 3rd degree burns and skin grafts, having babies at 15, 16, 17.

I feel so lucky having been able to enjoy life pre-internet.

I remember riding in a neighbor’s convertible with her nephews (3 other kids) to get ice cream - we rode on top of the back seat (where the top was folded down), not even on the seat. She was a teacher.

R264 Have heard that a lot from city kids that grew up in the 70s/80s, that they were able to take the train into town during the day.

I never quite did that the entire way into my smaller rust-belt city, but I did cut classes a few times and take the bus to the mall near the city. Which was pretty ambitious stuff for a suburbanite kid at 14-15.

There was a period in the late 60s when there were some riots and protests and none of our family went into the city at all. When things got a little better I started going in - age 13 or so, in the 70s. I didn’t realize kids didn’t do this any more. I know a guy who’s 27 - still lives w/parents but more to the point, never socializes without his family and goes on vacation with them.

I was skipping school and taking the train downtown from the 'burbs and getting BJ's in the mens room of the Paramount Theater when I was 13 back in the early 1960's.

I thought I was free-range kid until I read Dominic Dunne saying he was giving BJ's in the gas station bathrooms on the Wilbur Cross Parkway when he was 10 or 11 - in the late 1930's and early 40's.

r252 "People would come into the library where I worked and for years would say “I miss the card catalogs!” And I’d say, “Why?” "

Electronic searching is too focused. Yes, certainly you quickly find precisely what you're looking for (if you entered the data correctly!) . . . but you find nothing else. What do I mean? As a researcher for decades, I can tell you that one of the great enhancements to one's research is serendipitously finding something which one was NOT looking for and which one knew nothing about, but which turns out to be something of great significance to one's work. With the card catalogs, one flips through the cards, homing in on the precise book one is looking for, but in the course of that one sees other works by the same author, or other books on the same subject . . . "Wow, that looks interesting . . . I'm going to check that out too . . . "; and the result is that your paper or book has greater depth, greater breadth, and more insight than it would have had otherwise.

But I'm sure some also miss the unique sensual pleasure of flipping through the cards. Same as with flipping through LPs at the record store, there was just something very satisfying about the feel and gentle sound as you made your way through.

R260, you were right.

R269 That's why keyword searches exist. You'll bring up a wide range of material about, say, "fruit bats." Then if you go into the record for one book on fruits bats, you'll find a Subject Headings, that should be clickable and display all of the material on that subject.

Not the same, r271. I know exactly what r269 is talking about. The magic of the card catalog was stumbling across something you weren’t necessarily looking for, but found anyway by some random chance.

There’s no serendipity or magic anymore.

Look, I love my public library, but today it looks like an abandoned hospital. Huge, empty space, glaring white walls, bright ass lights, 3 or 4 books sitting out.

The stacks are gone. You have to order books now. There’s no browsing or getting lost in stacks for hours. If something wasn’t written in the last five years, it’s not out. It’s fucking depressing. All because fucking computers.

One of my great joys in college was going to the main library and just wandering the stacks for hours randomly reading stuff. Now, it’s all popular shit. Anything else, you have to order, know the authors name or title or genre. Maybe I don’t know.

Maybe I’m just wandering and I’ll know it when I see it. Maybe I want my magic back.

R269 speaks the truth. Certain aspects of research are expedited by the technology, but when libraries are removing books to an annex and you have to order material and wait days to check an index or footnote (most stuff, contrary to popular belief, isn't online), or just to see if a book is relevant, where you used to simply scan the adjacent shelves (and incidentally discover all kind of leads you hadn't suspected), the process as a whole comes to a grinding halt.

r272, Same thing with record stores- an album art would catch your eye, or you would get entranced reading the liner notes. I would get lost in record stores for hours, especially at Licorice Pizza.

We learned how to read and write and compute. We don't print as adults like a First-Grader. We understand North and South on a map. Our landline doesn't stop if our modem does. We can decipher analog and digital. We read physical, and also Kindle, books, the point's being that we still read books and don't spend every waking moment looking at or making Tik-Tok videos and Instagram photos.

Do we use the resources of a Smartphone? Yes, yes we do. Because we also aren't fools.

R272 The more you post the less you sound like you know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any public library in my vicinity where you can’t browse the stacks. Public (not private, or college) libraries do need to weed their collections, because of limited space, of course. There are book and materials budgets that have to be used every year to acquire new stuff. You can’t keep all the old stuff (though quite a lot is kept). Especially when no one has taken it out in 30 years.

Personally, I find way more related things to my subject in online catalogs than I ever did using a card catalog. Also you can browse consortium and statewide catalogs and have things shipped to you and aren’t stuck with the collection in front of you.

If you have nostalgia for card catalogs that’s okay with me. But you’re sounding like a luddite now.

[quote] We don't print as adults like a First-Grader.

I'm 51 years old, and as soon as I left Catholic school in 8th grade and no longer had nuns forcing me to write in cursive, I reverted to all printing all the time. I had excellent cursive script in 8th grade; I just didn't like doing it. Printing feels more natural to me.

r272 r276 Girls! Girls! You're BOTH fetid cunts!

R278 Sorry. Will try to entertain you better in the future, since they pay me so much to write, around here.

Maybe I AM a Luddite. So what?

I hate that my library is devoid of books. Now, it’s all fucking computers and computer work stations.

The book shelves are 4’ high with maybe ten books per shelf. Nothing but empty space. Same with the DVD shelves and the CD shelves.

I never go in there anymore because it’s too depressing. There aren’t any books anymore and I miss that.

Crank calling pay phones at the mall, or even sometimes across the street. We would call a pay phone claiming to be a DJ from a local radio station giving away concert tickets, groceries, and other “prizes.” Among other pranks. I think we saw it in a movie or something.

Google public libraries, look at images, and you’ll see most public libraries aren’t like the one you describe. R280

Well, mine IS like that, r282. The three local branches near me look like deserted hospitals. Low, empty shelves, only a handful of recent titles and nothing but computers or computer rooms.

It’s depressing and I hate it.

Maybe the main branch downtown isn’t like that, but I don’t know as I’ve not gone there.

All I know is my local branch used to have floor to ceiling shelves of BOOKS. Old titles, big print books, reference books, and tons of paperbacks. Now, the shelves are half the size and bare.

I used to cash my paycheck at the grocery store every week, I worked until 8 pm and then would go cash my check and buy groceries.

R283 Local libraries are not well funded. The approach now is, rather than have three libraries in a library system buy three copies of the same book, the system will buy one copy and ship it around to the other branches on request. Public libraries have spent the past two decades hand wringing and desperately trying to find ways to stay relevant/provide services other than books.

I'm not one to mention something like this, but it does seem that the subject of libraries on this thread has been beaten beyond all recognition.

If you please, a little more on libraries. My university library became essentially a cyber cafe. All old books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, sheet music, scripts, microfilm, fiche, etc., etc. , etc. which weren't checked out with some frequency were sent off to an annex where one has to request them to see them. The books available on the relatively few shelves remaining are the sad remnants of the above, plus either the "current interest" sort, which means that soon nobody will want them, or of the "how to write a term paper" sort, which means that no one will read them at all, now or ever. And this is a university library! Meantime, my community library has gone much the same course, except the few books are modern novels, and much former shelving space has been allotted to space for community meetings. "Lack of funding"? Yeah, library-lover that I am, I sure don't feel moved to contribute to support such chimeras. Libraries are modernizing themselves out of existence. The way to save libraries is to teach people to ignore the Cyber Sidneys shrieking "Luddites!" and to appreciate the physical presence of uncommon books.

At my university the reference room became a big empty space with comfortable chairs for students to look at their phones and laptops, with all the reference works banished to a corner of the stacks (at least we still have stacks) without room to spread out and use them. Even though the university, and society in general, is far richer than ever, cost-cutting means that we're to expect "a just-in-time library, not a just-in-case library." They're trained not to consider that there is no research library that's a "just-in-time library."

I don't think this problem was caused by the internet; I think it's the just usual neoliiberal imperative to funnel money up to the top, letting quality and competence fall apart, with digital technology used as a half-hearted pretext.

One thing I don’t miss about old-time libraries was having to photocopy medical journal articles from those huge binding that they were sewn into that never opened all the way so a good portion of one side of the page would always be missing. And you’d have to refill the payment card in the middle.

I hear you, ElderLez, but in my field the demise of the library photocopiers/scanners, along with the prohibition on checking periodicals out of the library (!), means that you have to stay in the library to read journal articles that aren't online—and for many journals that means anything from the past few years—or anything at all in the older journals that have never been digitized. Not fun when you're facing a 40-page article in German.

This thread makes me feel ollllldddddd

I notice a lot of articles today are just posting what is on social media, for example I just saw an article that posted the Twitter posts about Jason Kelce. So now print is writing about what's online.

[quote]It's funny when Gen Z just assumes everyone had a cell phone and a computer 20 years ago. When I started college in 1999 nobody had a cell phone. Computers were only available in the library. We had landlines in our dorm rooms and payphones on campus. I know the truth because I was there.

Well, maybe not in 1999, when dial-up Internet was still a thing

But by 2004 -- 20 years ago -- many people indeed had cellphones -- and fast-speed internet hookup.

(I was in college in 1998-2002)

Granted, you still had to be on a desktop/laptop to go online (e.g., home, library, cybercafe.

The iPhone debuted in 2007 and that changed everything, along with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which all came out in the mid/late 2000s.

I would say 2002/2003 was the tipping point for cell phones. That was when everybody and their brother had one.

Celebrities were more unreachable. No Internet famous people.

We boomers had tons of freedom as kids. No hovering, kids are supposed to have fun.

As a teen I used to go to a lot of concerts out of town, it was great not having cell phones because we didn't have to contact our parents, it was freedom. Also people weren't holding up their phones all night recording the concert.

It was nice not being able to be contacted, esp. by work. If somebody didn't know exactly where you were, they had no way of contacting you. I really miss that sometimes.

Another pre-cell phone thing just occurred to me - remember when you were over at a friend's place and you knew somebody was trying to track you down and you didn't want to speak to that person so you would say to your friend "if (person's name) calls, I AM NOT HERE. "

I haven't thought of that in ages.

Like Madonna

No more 'snow days'. You used to be able to fuck around on days like that. Now you can just plug in and work from home.

Nobody should have to work during a snow emergency, you need the time to shovel or try to move your car, or whatever.

Some people don't have a car or a driveway to shovel.

Shit, r302. We had a level THREE snow emergency here a few years ago, and I was threatened with termination if I didn’t drive in. To a fucking testing lab for fucking CAR PARTS!

I told them to fuck right off as it was ILLEGAL to be out unless you were medical personnel, cops, firefighters or emergency personnel.

They just didn’t GAF. So I quit.

R303 It has to assumed that some do, and all have to be treated the same.