My Millennial Mind Is Literally On Fire After Learning That These Everyday Items Were Staples In Most Gen X And Boomer Homes

Oh I forgot about our central vacuum cleaner.

Yes, that suburban home staple, the card catalogue

I remember every one of those things, and still have a few of them in my home. My condo intercom and central vac. The intercom was updated about 11 years ago, and the vac is on its 3rd motor since I bought the place almost 48 years ago.

They left off mimeograph machines. When I was in high school if you wanted copies of something typed you typed it on special mimeograph paper that cut through the paper to form the letters. It was a form of screen printing where the ink from the machine came through the blank spot where the letters were, onto the paper. If you mistyped you had to paint over the wrong letters with a thick blue goop from a little bottle, and then wait for it to dry before you could go back and type over it. The machine wasn't even electric. You had to stand there and turn a crank that fed the paper through.

I remember before fax machines were invented we had a Telex machine at work. God that thing was hard to type on. It produced a 1" wide tape with holes in it that you then fed through the machine, dialed the number and as the tape fed through the document was printed out on the receiving machine. Finally they invented computerized telex machines. Then then they came out with a precursor to the fax machine. It was called a Twix. You typed a document and attached it to a rotating drum on the machine, then the receiving end had to put a piece of Twix paper (a paper coated with a solution the machine literally burned the letters onto the paper. It actually produced smoke and a sickening burning smell.

When I was able to get rid of the Telex and the twix machines and buy a new fine Zerox copier and a plain paper fax machine, those were revolutionary days.

I wonder how many young'uns realize, that in 30 years, there will be articles like this about [bold]their[/bold] shit?

And, r4?

[quote] My condo intercom...

Intercom systems for apartment buildings were patented in 1894. Today you can have a live image of the person ringing your apartment from the front door, or connect the front door intercom to your mobile but they are not fundamentally different --or less useful-- today than 50 years ago or 130 years ago. People who live in apartments still need some system of admitting visitors from the main door (short of having an old fashioned doorman.)

I'd LOVE to have a central vacuum like my grandmother had. Just amazingly convenient.

Also, ViewMasters are still around in some form or another.

I just bought my niece one as part of her wedding present. You send in up to 30 pictures, and they send you the reels.

I think probably more boggling to young people would be the tv/record player I played with all the time at my grandparent's house. You played the record and put a long filmstrip in a plastic casing in the top. The record told a story and the slide would move automatically to show pictures. I'm probably not describing it very well. Anyone else remember it? It was probably my uncle's, so I got it second hand.

“Literally on fire”.

The "literally" troll has been awakened!

I don't know what a church key is, never used a bulb flash on a camera, and central vacuums and car phones were extremely rare - not common items or staples.

Everything else? Yep

A church key is a bottle/can opener, the kind with a magnet you put on your fridge. Those are still extemely common.

R11 - most people call them bottle and can openers. Maybe that's a southern term - never heard it before in my life.

I still own a magazine rack - at one time I owned the one depicted

all the others I've either had or have been in contact with

We had party line phone service until I was about 8, not by choice but because of limited capacity in the neighborhood. My mother went to work for the phone company and shortly thereafter a line crew showed up and strung lines from the "central office" (I don't know why they called it that; it was neither central nor an office) so that we could have private lines. What blew all my friends' (and my parents' friends') minds was when, at 13, I got my own line installed. My mother used it as an intercom, just calling me whenever she needed to tell me dinner was ready or to take out the trash. My father would blow his top when he called me and got my answering machine... when he knew I was home.

I'm just old enough to remember rotary phones. I wouldn't be surprised at all if people under 40 would have no idea how to use one.

Time marches on....

r15 What do you think pencils are for?

Most of these come with very tactile, and even olfactory, memories. I don’t know that there will be a similar list in thirty years, unless two dimensional screens are replaced with something else. Most the items on the list have been replaced by a mobile device.

Yes, r17, the smell of the mimeograph was one of my favorites.

I was born in 82 and the only thing I have never seen before is that phone extension cord system. I do remember extra long phone cords though.

[quote] My condo intercom

We don't have that type of intercom system and residents do not have the ability to "buzz" visitors into the building. We have a concierge desk and they are responsible for screening all visitors. My intercom system is just for my apartment which is sizable.

[quote] the smell of the mimeograph was one of my favorites.

These days the officious government types would probably pass a law that only those over 18 could use a mimeograph for fear kids would be getting high off the ink.

My parents second home was newly constructed in 1959. Not staples, but design features you don't see in houses today:

1. A phone niche, a recessed area in the wall, usually in a hallway. The niche accommodated a wall phone, and it had a small ledge for a desk-top phone and a place to put a phone book.

2. A clothes chute. Again, usually in the hallway leading to the bedrooms, or in the bathroom. You opened the small door which opened to a corrugated metal recess in the wall which led down to the basement. You stuffed your dirty clothes in there and they fell down to the laundry area in the basement.

The photo for carbon paper with no carbon paper in sight. Furthermore, although there were fountain pens nibs made expressly for using with carbon paper, that is not an example of one.

Physical card catalogs had the advantage when you kinda knew how to spell something but weren’t sure. Search engines are better nowadays but libraries got rid of their card catalogs at a time when you still needed to know the *precise* name of what you were searching for.

I still have a couple film canisters, handy for traveling. You can buy purpose made ones at MUJI or a camping store.

Those laundry chutes are sought after today, r22.

Some people will have them installed now.

Very convenient

That is a special sort, then R3. An intercom system to communicate with the fellow inhabitants and staff of a large apartment makes some sense, though I cant imagine ever using it even having lived in large places.

'Where are you? Come to the library. And bring a candlestick. There may be a bit of trouble.'

Even apartment bulldings with a doorman or front desk staff need a means to communicate with the residents: a house phone connected to the front desk or an intercom in the past, and not a bad idea today when people sometimes like to go incommunicado at home, or forget that they have done. For residents it would still be good to have a front desk intercom or house phone ring if someone were in the lobby expecting to be allowed up.

Those whole house music intercom systems always seem silly to me, the very best technology is dead in the water within a few years. And how many times do you need your music broadcast throughout a large apartment or house? Maybe if you entertain all the time and love 1960s Bossa Nova buzzing throughout the party.

R7 It was the GE Show N Tell. A relative who worked at GE got us one at a discount one Christmas. We loved it.

Has this person been in a coma? We're far too old for this wide-eyed naïveté.

I wish your "mind" "literally" was "on fire," you troll.

With your head in blazes.

Illuminated light switches. There was a tiny bulb in the light switch so when you walked into a darkened room you wouldn't have to fumble looking for the light switch on the wall.

"Gold Medallion Home" or a "Bronze Medallion Home." This may have been local to my flyover hometown. Builders teamed up with the local electric company to market newly built houses. A Bronze Medallion home had 200 amp electric service (standard today, but 100 amp service was common in homes built immediately after WWII), and an electric oven/range. A Gold Medallion home featured both of those items plus electric heat and hot water heating. There was a gold plated medallion or bronze medallion at the front door of the house that displayed the house number and was lit at night for easy address locating when driving at night.

R22 - yes - the phone nooks were common.

Laundry chutes should make a come-back in multi-story homes. Of course newer ones are putting washing machines on the same floor as bedrooms - which is convenient, but you still got to pick up all the clothes and take them to the machine.

Plus having the washing machine on the same level as bedrooms may make too much noise - God knows my mom would have started that fucker up at 6am on a Sat or Sunday. Thankfully it was in the basement.

[quote]Those whole house music intercom systems always seem silly to me, the very best technology is dead in the water within a few years. And how many times do you need your music broadcast throughout a large apartment or house? Maybe if you entertain all the time and love 1960s Bossa Nova buzzing throughout the party.

My grandmother's house: the smells of cooking and cigarette smoke intertwined with Sergio Mendes coming out of the popcorn ceiling in every room of the house.

r18 r21 Mimeographs didn't have a pleasant or distinctive odor. What you're thinking of is DITTO (spirit duplicator) which created purple-printed documents and definitely had a noticeable and intoxicating aroma.

[quote]We don't have that type of intercom system and residents do not have the ability to "buzz" visitors into the building. We have a concierge desk and they are responsible for screening all visitors. My intercom system is just for my apartment which is sizable.

Well SMELL YOU, princess!

r28 is literally triggered by the word literally.

Grow the fuck up.

I moved into a three-story townhouse with the laundry in the basement six months ago.

I would LITERALLY kill any random stranger for a central vacuum and a laundry chute.

Millennial here. Haven't read the thread yet to see if any other millennials agree, but I knew what everything on this list was.

Just because my household didn't have rotary phones didn't mean I had never heard of them or seen one. Same goes for a lot of things. And while they had computers, some libraries still had both the old card catalogues AND computers. Car phones you'd see in slightly old movies. I can think of an example like that for everything on this list.

Maybe if you weren't curious about the world or never paid attention you wouldn't be familiar with this shit. But this buzzfeed guy was blind.

Me too

[quote] Mimeographs didn't have a pleasant or distinctive odor

It was the correction fluid that had the strong smell.

No listicles on Datalounge. Ever!

[quote] Mimeographs didn't have a pleasant or distinctive odor

Yes they did.

We figuratively had a rotary dial phone.

I remember model airplanes contained Toluene which some people used to huff to get high. It made the national news back then.

[quote]purple-printed documents

Ditto machines — or more accurately, the spirit master — came in a variety of colors. Purple was the most common as the transfer in purple worked the best. But I had a lot of fun in junior high with the library's machine printing some great pranks.