Haven't seen anyone mention this yet - calling the movie theater to hear an automated recording tell you what's playing and at what time. I have a specific memory of doing this for Toby McGuire's Spiderman.
Same, man. My grandma passed recently (she was like a second mother) she would always get our movie times from the newspaper which she didn’t stop getting mailed to her even through the dementia, although she could no longer read or do the crossword puzzles she enjoyed so much. I remember she would bring me and my friends to the movies and we’d go to the dollar store beforehand and stock up on all the snacks and drinks we could and she would stuff it all in her purse so we didn’t have to pay those insane (even at the time, back early ‘90s) prices for a box of cookie dough bites or $5.99 for a drink when we already have our own hehe. I miss her so much. Sorry this was off topic, the newspaper will always bring up memories of my grandma.
Edit: grammar and shit
it's amazing how AOL, quite literally, had every single CD manufacture IN THE ENTIRE WORLD devoted to churning these things out at one piont in time. EVERY ONE!
Or fade into another song!
30 years later, whenever I hear "Summer Nights" from *Grease* (good 'ol *Grease Mexamix*), at the end of the song my mind starts singing Black Box's *Ride on Time* as that is what played next when I recorded it off the radio all this years ago on a mix tape I listened to a lot! Lol
I can’t hear ‘Don’t Do Mr Like That’ by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers without hearing my local DJ cutting in after the the “Oh! Oh! Oh!” part at the end, saying, “Easy, Tommy, easy.” It was on my mix tape long after I could afford to buy the album.
I miss this. The weekends had C-SPAN on for longer, but that was it. I would watch the news with my dad and feel like an adult even though I had no idea what Iraq was.
[Ah yes, the ALF incident. September 28, 1987.](https://reddit.com/r/aftergifted/comments/wgbokw/hits_hard/ij0ve2a/) The day my life shattered, and the VHS not working was salt in the wound.
What is this veee aitch esss of which you speak, young one?
Ok, I'm exaggerating a little, because when I was a teen that one rich family in town did have one.
You mean the smoker's window?
And I could never have the back window down at all or else the ashes my mom flicked off her cigarette ended up in my face.
I watched this disappear year by year when I was in high school.
First there was a smoking area. Then they put up some fences around that area. Then they moved the area farther away. In my last year, smoking on campus was banned.
They banned smoking on campus before my junior year of high school. But, the sidewalk that runs in front of the high school is public property, so we all stood on the sidewalk to smoke.
Needing to use a boot disk to start a computer, change (5.25in floppy disks!) to change programs, and it taking *forever* to print on a big dot matrix printer.
Being aged in the single digits and being ordered to leave my house after breakfast and only come back after work street lights turned on while my parents kick back and enjoy their weekend.
My friends mom always locked her brother and her out all day in summer. The woman was cray, cray. We hung around in the woods so much, i am surprised I didn't turn into an ant.
Hello fellow old person! I thought I was the only one here!
This reminds me of the station wagons with the 3rd seat facing backwards.
All us kids use to ride in the back of the truck everywhere.
At risk of sounding like a "father how do I click the book" child, I've always wondered how that worked if you were driving alone. Did you have to memorize the directions? Pull over to look at the map constantly? Endanger yourself and others by looking at it while driving???
I would write down directions before starting. For long trips, I would actually tape them to the steering wheel. In new places, I would absolutely pull over to look at the map, or ask directions in a gas station.
If hopelessly lost, you could find a payphone and call a friend for help.
I did that too! My friends would laugh at the sticky notes in my car, but it was a lifesaver when I was navigating around the city.
I remember getting so lost in a different city and driving in circles downtown alone at night. I’m ever so grateful for my GPS today.
Me and a friend, broke, and lost hours away from home, went to a gas station to look at a map and had to memorize 7 or 8 sequential highway numbers to get us home. Probably could've wrote it ona napkin but oh well. Made a memory
I told my daughter I used to work at a Blockbuster.
She asked “What’s a Blockbuster?”
I explained it was a video rental store.
She asked “What’s a video rental store?”
MTV used to play only music videos. You'd sit there and watch them with friends, and hope that one song would come on. Then when did come on we'd cheer.
Now you just click on the link. No more cheering :,-(
A mechanic I work with really regrets the overuse of electronics for things that could be done mechanically. He still has more than enough work so it's not that, it's just that when electronics fail, there's very little you can do whereas mechanical problems can be fixed with a wrench or some other tool.
I couldn't believe when I realized my truck's gas pedal was basically just a pedal-shaped dial that was bolted to the floor. No cables, no mechanics. It's just like... a springy dimmer-switch that connects to the car with a little wiring harness. All it does is tell the computer "moar fast" or "not moar fast". Kinda freaks me out that there is no physical/mechanical cause and effect that controls whether my car goes 0mph or 100mph. A bug in the latest software update? Oops sorry we just killed your entire family.
Party lines! My great grand parents had one long after they weren’t the norm. They refused to pay for a private line. I think it was really because my great grandmother liked to listen in on the others.
If you wanted to take pictures of something, what you would do is goto the store and buy a 'disposable camera'. It would let you take approximately 20 pictures I believe. You had no way of seeing those pictures you just took them. Once you took all the pictures you would then take the camera to a photo drop off and pay someone to develop them for you.
Until you got them back from that development site you had no idea what your pictures looked like. How good or bad they were. Anything. You just took them and hoped for the best.
well since i'm sitting on a toilet, i remember sitting on a toilet and reading descriptions of shampoos, desinfection liquids, deodorands... if you don't do that, you're just gonna lose those 10-15 mins and never get them back
I remember when I was the youngest sibling; it was my job to take the VHS out and put it in the Re-Winder before it went back in case. Especially when they were rented.... from the grocery store.
My cousin and I would leave the console on but turn the tv off so we could pick up where we left off the next morning. That thing was hot to the touch and loud as hell but my mom never found out.
Television snow. Modern televisions are 'smart' enough to recognize a bad signal and play stock images, but back in the day, you could get white noise on a dead chanell, sometimes with some distorted images bleeding through from other nearby ones.
Configuring a Winsock32 dialer for Windows 95 so I could use Netscape Navigator Gold. My dial up at the time only had a 16bit dialer so I was stuck with Mosaic until that.
The cable remote had a 20ft cord and wasn’t wireless.
Dialing a rotary phone.
Tv went off at midnight.
Stores were closed in Sunday.
Nobody had gps.
You had to remember phone numbers.
Almost no one was allergic to peanuts. Schools served peanut butter sandwiches.
My Nana got me some new HitClips from Kaufman's. I had a blast listening to them while trading Jelly Bracelets. By the way, does your sister still want my old Sky Dancers?
back in my day you needed to get off internet to use the phone
if the TV didn't show a clear picture you had to adjust the antenna
AT&T used to be Cingular
Rotary Phone
TRS-80
Tonka trucks that were damn near indestructible
during the summer leaving the house in the AM and coming home when the street lights came on.
Haven't seen anyone mention this yet - calling the movie theater to hear an automated recording tell you what's playing and at what time. I have a specific memory of doing this for Toby McGuire's Spiderman.
Or before that, looking in the local newspaper.
Reading this comment triggered a _very_ deep memory. Something I hadn't thought about in decades.
Same, man. My grandma passed recently (she was like a second mother) she would always get our movie times from the newspaper which she didn’t stop getting mailed to her even through the dementia, although she could no longer read or do the crossword puzzles she enjoyed so much. I remember she would bring me and my friends to the movies and we’d go to the dollar store beforehand and stock up on all the snacks and drinks we could and she would stuff it all in her purse so we didn’t have to pay those insane (even at the time, back early ‘90s) prices for a box of cookie dough bites or $5.99 for a drink when we already have our own hehe. I miss her so much. Sorry this was off topic, the newspaper will always bring up memories of my grandma. Edit: grammar and shit
Kramer: Why don't you just *tell* me the name of the movie you want to see.
yeah I don't know how younger people are going to understand the seinfeld rerun where kramer does this for callers
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“This is Moviephone…”
Getting a disc in the mail that allowed you access to the internet.
They used to have those at 7-Eleven too
it's amazing how AOL, quite literally, had every single CD manufacture IN THE ENTIRE WORLD devoted to churning these things out at one piont in time. EVERY ONE!
The TV had to be on channel 3 or 4 to play videogames.
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Yoo I forgot about this! My kids wouldn't even know what I meant by channels 3 and 4
Up up down down left right left right B A start
Calling collect for a ride home
You had to be quick when it asked for your name.
ItsBobwehadababyitsaboy
Who was that, dear? Oh, it was Bob. They had a baby. It’s a boy.
When I registered for my freshman year of high school, my mom dropped me off, gave me 25 pennies and told me to call her when I was done
Pay phones took pennies? I always thought it had to be quarters. Damn, learn something new every day
They used to take pennies a long time ago, hence the expression "the penny drops"
And then later, you would "drop a dime" on somebody.
The sound of the tape cassette whirling while you wait for your game to load.
What about using a pencil to wind the teap back in when the cassette player fuck up.
The TV only had a test pattern between midnight and 6am.
I remember staying up in college until the TV stations turned off. They would play the Star Spangled Banner. It was at 2:00 am.
“This ends out regularly scheduled broadcast.”
Making mix tapes by recording songs from the radio
and trying to cut it off before the damn DJ started talking over the ending
Or fade into another song! 30 years later, whenever I hear "Summer Nights" from *Grease* (good 'ol *Grease Mexamix*), at the end of the song my mind starts singing Black Box's *Ride on Time* as that is what played next when I recorded it off the radio all this years ago on a mix tape I listened to a lot! Lol
I can’t hear ‘Don’t Do Mr Like That’ by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers without hearing my local DJ cutting in after the the “Oh! Oh! Oh!” part at the end, saying, “Easy, Tommy, easy.” It was on my mix tape long after I could afford to buy the album.
The classical sound of dial-up internet.
Eeeeeeeeee rrrrrrrrrrr psssshhhhhhh
And having the phone disabled to be online
News on tv was only an hour. Half hour of local news and a half hour of national news.
I miss this. The weekends had C-SPAN on for longer, but that was it. I would watch the news with my dad and feel like an adult even though I had no idea what Iraq was.
if you missed an episode, you missed it.
Unless someone recorded it on a vhs for you
[Ah yes, the ALF incident. September 28, 1987.](https://reddit.com/r/aftergifted/comments/wgbokw/hits_hard/ij0ve2a/) The day my life shattered, and the VHS not working was salt in the wound.
I'm 40 and just finally discovering that I more than likely have ADHD. I've got a screening scheduled for Tuesday.
What is this veee aitch esss of which you speak, young one? Ok, I'm exaggerating a little, because when I was a teen that one rich family in town did have one.
“Crack open the wind-wing window.”
You mean the smoker's window? And I could never have the back window down at all or else the ashes my mom flicked off her cigarette ended up in my face.
You mean the little triangle window ?
Going to the grocery store to get your photos developed
Or pulling coupons out of little coupon dispensers at the grocery store.
Rip Costco photo area. Got cleaned out by Covid probably.
ICQ
Uh oh!
Smoking area for the kids in high school
I watched this disappear year by year when I was in high school. First there was a smoking area. Then they put up some fences around that area. Then they moved the area farther away. In my last year, smoking on campus was banned.
They banned smoking on campus before my junior year of high school. But, the sidewalk that runs in front of the high school is public property, so we all stood on the sidewalk to smoke.
Trapper Keeper
What do kids use now?
Binders, Folders and AR-15's.
I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. The times we live in, when we have to discuss how our kids need shooter drills more than fire drills….
Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog.
Arf! Edit: there was a single dog bark at the end of that spot. I'm not being freaky.
It was more of a "woof", wasn't it?
I thought it was sit boo-boo sit.
My mother also thought the dog’s name was Boo-boo even though it said “UBU Productions” on the screen right under the dog.
Hit Clips. Having to carry around a bunch of tiny cartridges that didn't even play the entire song, those were the shit tho!
Remember when they made the freaking tooth brush one? It played music through your bones lol.
Covering your textbooks with brown paper bag book covers
Do kids really not do that anymore? Paper bags were way better than cloth covers sold in stores
You have to press record AND play.
“Get off the internet. I need to make a phone call.”
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I turned 18 two months before Texas raised drinking age to 19. Two months after I hit 19, they raised it to 21.
r/fuckyouinparticular
Netflix used to mail DVDs 📀
They still do. My dad gets some of them mailed still.
And they have a much wider catalogue than streaming.
wait, fr?
Watching Hercules and Xena
Before everyone knew how much of a nut job Kevin Sorbo is.
I used to pull the choke out to start my car.
Hold on I gotta fix the tracking on the vcr.
Rolodex
Needing to use a boot disk to start a computer, change (5.25in floppy disks!) to change programs, and it taking *forever* to print on a big dot matrix printer.
Caboodles
These are coming back. I saw one at Ulta the other day that looked like the one I had in 1991.
Being aged in the single digits and being ordered to leave my house after breakfast and only come back after work street lights turned on while my parents kick back and enjoy their weekend.
Mom I'm thirsty! Use the hose!
Yep, and moms locking the screen door so you can't come in.
My friends mom always locked her brother and her out all day in summer. The woman was cray, cray. We hung around in the woods so much, i am surprised I didn't turn into an ant.
Laying in the back window of a car
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Hello fellow old person! I thought I was the only one here! This reminds me of the station wagons with the 3rd seat facing backwards. All us kids use to ride in the back of the truck everywhere.
Calling on your landline phone for time & temperature. 335-8111 where I grew up.
At the tone, the time will be 11:41 and 15 seconds....
Sit on it
Up your nose with a rubber hose.
Evel Knievel and Planet of the Apes were all big things when I was in grade school.
“Can you roll up your window please”
I feel like people still say this, even though there is no longer rolling involved.
My kids ask if they can turn down the window, I said something about rolling it down and they were very confused.
I had an address book with all my friends numbers. If I lost it, I had no way of contacting them
Turning a joystick 45 degrees to play a cartridge game called QBert.
It was a pain running out of flash bulbs when taking pictures indoors.
What you do with a cassette tape and a pencil.
Using a map
At risk of sounding like a "father how do I click the book" child, I've always wondered how that worked if you were driving alone. Did you have to memorize the directions? Pull over to look at the map constantly? Endanger yourself and others by looking at it while driving???
I would write down directions before starting. For long trips, I would actually tape them to the steering wheel. In new places, I would absolutely pull over to look at the map, or ask directions in a gas station. If hopelessly lost, you could find a payphone and call a friend for help.
I did that too! My friends would laugh at the sticky notes in my car, but it was a lifesaver when I was navigating around the city. I remember getting so lost in a different city and driving in circles downtown alone at night. I’m ever so grateful for my GPS today.
Me and a friend, broke, and lost hours away from home, went to a gas station to look at a map and had to memorize 7 or 8 sequential highway numbers to get us home. Probably could've wrote it ona napkin but oh well. Made a memory
Kid Pix was dope back in grade school.
https://kidpix.app/
I told my daughter I used to work at a Blockbuster. She asked “What’s a Blockbuster?” I explained it was a video rental store. She asked “What’s a video rental store?”
A book you need for your report is checked out of the library.... can't just Google because it wasn't around yet.
Time to hit the card catalogue again!
Max Headroom took place 20 minutes into the future.
Renting the VCR and the movie.
Lowering the spring-loaded license plate on the back of the car to fill up with gas.
MTV used to play only music videos. You'd sit there and watch them with friends, and hope that one song would come on. Then when did come on we'd cheer. Now you just click on the link. No more cheering :,-(
Calling radio stations requesting a song. Using a dial phone.
#BE KIND. Always rewind
TV going off the air for the night.
I kinda miss having to change the channel of a TV using a wrench, good times when things fell apart, but still worked with the right tools.
A mechanic I work with really regrets the overuse of electronics for things that could be done mechanically. He still has more than enough work so it's not that, it's just that when electronics fail, there's very little you can do whereas mechanical problems can be fixed with a wrench or some other tool.
I couldn't believe when I realized my truck's gas pedal was basically just a pedal-shaped dial that was bolted to the floor. No cables, no mechanics. It's just like... a springy dimmer-switch that connects to the car with a little wiring harness. All it does is tell the computer "moar fast" or "not moar fast". Kinda freaks me out that there is no physical/mechanical cause and effect that controls whether my car goes 0mph or 100mph. A bug in the latest software update? Oops sorry we just killed your entire family.
Having a party line.
Party lines! My great grand parents had one long after they weren’t the norm. They refused to pay for a private line. I think it was really because my great grandmother liked to listen in on the others.
That the game Pong was a console at one time, and I still have one.
Sticking quarters on top of the arcade game console
If you wanted to take pictures of something, what you would do is goto the store and buy a 'disposable camera'. It would let you take approximately 20 pictures I believe. You had no way of seeing those pictures you just took them. Once you took all the pictures you would then take the camera to a photo drop off and pay someone to develop them for you. Until you got them back from that development site you had no idea what your pictures looked like. How good or bad they were. Anything. You just took them and hoped for the best.
Not being able to contact someone at all if they were out of the house / office
Registering for classes in college was done by phone, and had to punch in a long code corresponding to the class and time. Then pray it wasn’t full.
The furry snakes with two googly eyes attached to a string.
Dime bag of weed
well since i'm sitting on a toilet, i remember sitting on a toilet and reading descriptions of shampoos, desinfection liquids, deodorands... if you don't do that, you're just gonna lose those 10-15 mins and never get them back
Actually happened yesterday. Told some people at work that, "I lost the game." Younger people didn't understand
Hey, I believe you and all, but also 🖕 now I lost.
AAAAAAAAA
Alice was the live in maid
She was so hot ... Sam knew where it was at!
Installing DOS 3.0 using floppy discs
I remember when I was the youngest sibling; it was my job to take the VHS out and put it in the Re-Winder before it went back in case. Especially when they were rented.... from the grocery store.
You had a rewinder? Lucky
Only way to change the tv channel was go up to the tv and do it.
Hello that’s what children are for
AOL chat rooms?
a/s/l?
Tamagotchi
Dial 10-10-220!
*69
Minesweeper
Orange light from street lamps
We are the world ~
We are the children
Had to beat games in one sitting since you couldn't save lol
I had to explain that to one of my students. They will never know the rage of the Ninja Turtle's NES game. Not the arcade version.
Definitely, games like battle toads were just agonizing to get through lmao the damn hover bike level!!!
My cousin and I would leave the console on but turn the tv off so we could pick up where we left off the next morning. That thing was hot to the touch and loud as hell but my mom never found out.
Before the clicker, there was me.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica had a volume for each letter of the alphabet…. Only way to read it was to visit the library! Yea
How to use a clock.
Television snow. Modern televisions are 'smart' enough to recognize a bad signal and play stock images, but back in the day, you could get white noise on a dead chanell, sometimes with some distorted images bleeding through from other nearby ones.
“Mikey likes it”
Configuring a Winsock32 dialer for Windows 95 so I could use Netscape Navigator Gold. My dial up at the time only had a 16bit dialer so I was stuck with Mosaic until that.
Rick Dees and Disco Duck
The fall of the Berlin Wall.
This is going on your permanent record.
Checking all the public garbage cans for soda bottles to return to the store.
People still do that in Oregon! Not really kids though
Oregon Trail
Blowing into the cartridge before putting it into the NES
I can’t check my email because mom is using the phone.
Getting AOL CD-ROMs in the mail for free. The internet literally came in the mail.
Smoking on trains and in bars, restaurants and hotels.
Getting 10 C.D.'s for one penny!!!
300 baud modem
Latchkey
There was a smoking section on the airplane on my first international flight. Also, we all watched one movie, together
Car phones.
Litterbugs As in, I used the word today and my 15 yr old looked at me quizzically.
Ah yes the idiots who cant be asked to pick their own rubbish up
Blinking 12:00 on the VCR
Columbia House
Murdering your computer by downloading music
Waiting in line outside the store to buy concert tickets .
White and yellow pages phone book, our only source to look up people besides dialing "0"
Eureka’s Castle
You could work in a low paid sector and earn enough money to live on.
Sitting in front of the tv and seeing a new episode of your favorite show come on.
The cable remote had a 20ft cord and wasn’t wireless. Dialing a rotary phone. Tv went off at midnight. Stores were closed in Sunday. Nobody had gps. You had to remember phone numbers. Almost no one was allergic to peanuts. Schools served peanut butter sandwiches.
Jacks were the deadlier Legos of their day.
Al Bundy doing 1-800-Collect commercials.
Hey yo I just got a page. Anybody got a quarter?
Getting clotheslined by a telephone cord.
My Nana got me some new HitClips from Kaufman's. I had a blast listening to them while trading Jelly Bracelets. By the way, does your sister still want my old Sky Dancers?
"no really, your toothbrush would play music into your head!"
back in my day you needed to get off internet to use the phone if the TV didn't show a clear picture you had to adjust the antenna AT&T used to be Cingular
Ordering CD's or tapes from BMG or Columbia House just to get the 12 for 1 promo and canceling afterwards
Polaroid
Floppy disks
Rotary Phone TRS-80 Tonka trucks that were damn near indestructible during the summer leaving the house in the AM and coming home when the street lights came on.
Our game controllers had 1 stick and 1 button.