I was wearing an onion for a belt, as was the fashion at the time.
i understand this reference
Did you keep any of the bees when we got nickels back?
As a belt? Was this popular in Europe? In America we merely wore onions on our belt
late 80s here. We had a nice world before 9/11. there was hope.
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It’s definitely felt that way. But climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and end-stage capitalism were all already in the pipeline, most of us just weren’t being forced to confront them yet.
they might have been in the pipeline, but due to the success we had against CFCs and other pollution issues, we felt like it was just another battle to progress. Then 9/11 happened, and instead of fighting to improve things, we fought to keep things, and then just got kicked in the face repeatedly.
Yeah my children remind me daily how awesome I had it, and I had no clue how just good I had it.
One of the things I miss the most about the 1900s is that people didn’t expect you to be reachable 24/7. Even though cellphones had been around since the 80s very few people had one. That meant that most people could only be reached through the family landline. If you didn’t answer people would just assume you were out of the house, thus unreachable. That all started to change in the 2000s when cellphones became common place. Now days I feel like everyone expects me to pick up when they call, and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.” As a very introverted person who often needs a lot of alone time, it sucks, and sometimes I really wish I could go back to a world without cellphones.
I remember meeting up with friends was either you stay together after school or try to guess where they might be at that moment. Maybe they’re in this persons basement because they just got an n64, or maybe they’re playing ball in the field, etc.
Now it’s all very organized and less chances to get lost and find your way back. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the cell network was just gone one day, for whatever reason.
There is nothing stopping you from putting your phone on… say, a kitchen counter, and leaving it there and only talking on it while in that room and don’t take it with you, when you go out.
I had a rotary phone until 2017 (and needed to stay in touch with my grandfather after my grandmother died) so I ported my landline number to a cellphone.
Now that most of my family is gone, I routinely leave the phone at home. I can let it go to voicemail just like I used to let the answering machine take the calls when I was out.
It’s only a digital leash if you let it be.
However, it was also normal for people to come and visit unannounced because they were close by. It is rare people don’t phone ahead now before visiting. This can be a good or a bad thing, you don’t tend to get visitors when it is inconvenient but there is also less spontaneity.
and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.”
You don’t owe them a explanation though. If they demand a answer, you can just lie, joke or tease them a bit. “I was busy, painting a horse” or “I was attempting a new record at standing on my head.” Or just reply with “did you want something?” if they keep pushing the issue.
My go to is: I was uh… doing something
My default… (which often is the actual case)
“Ack… The phone battery died again.”
Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.
Now everyone vapes and smells like Barbie farts instead.
If you went to a bar, or a bowling alley, everything you had on you smelled of smoke until it was thoroughly washed.
Don’t miss that, or trying to get across a dance floor without getting burned …then in 2008 everything changed. Kind of bitter sweet.
All US college campuses had this smell until around 2010 when they began banning smoking even outside. I miss that smell so much.
Ew
Ya it’s weird. Ever since I was very little I’ve loved the smell of second hand smoke, maybe because it was everywhere. One of my earliest memories is playing with a half full ash tray INSIDE a McDonalds.
I graduated in 2k. I rarely smelled smoke. Even at the parties there wasn’t that much of it. What I did smell came from the older staff and such taking smoking breaks, which were always outside. And I went to school in a red state.
I graduated in 1988, in a blue state.
I saw things go from smoking everywhere, to there being non-smoking sections, to eventually no smoking inside
While there were still way too many smokers, they were already becoming less common. I saw smoking go from something the “cool kids” did, to individuals saying “come on out with me for a smoke so I’m not alone”
I liked the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Still do, actually. But yeah, smoking indoors is wild. Can’t believe thst was normal when I was a kid.
The problem is it isn’t usually fresh. At the time I didn’t mind that so much either but the lingering smell of stale smoke and ash tray over clothes, hair, buildings, was always a problem.
Now that we don’t live with the constant stench, I realize even fresh smoke was never good. It was only less bad than the stale lingering stench and we didn’t have clean air to compare to
Instead of doomscrolling, I read the newspaper. Having to go out and get it was a nice little nudge towards sociability.
I would hang out at a cafe in the city, reading and having coffee, and inevitably, someone I knew would come along and have a chat, maybe get a cuppa, tell me about something crazy, etc. Like a group chat in real life. We would never really organise to meet there, you would just turn up if you felt like it.
The paper itself being curated was good, too, because while it was definitely skewed by its corporate masters, or the inclinations of its editor, the stories had more time to be well-written and well-sourced within those constraints.
With experience, you could read between the lines to infer what wasn’t being said, or know that something was missing and to check by other sources. Since everyone else was reading similar things, you could sometimes talk about the issues in more depth, without having to explain the basic facts.
Oh, and most people agreed on those basic facts.
Also, people were casually racist and sexist and bigoted, and lots of things we care about today were not even acknowledged by the majority as being problems.
A friend of mine got gaybashed (there’s a term you might need to look up, hopefully) and it was like he’d just suffered an accident. People just shook their heads and muttered sympathies, like it was an inevitable result of being gay in public, instead of a brutal fucking hate crime. That sort of thing didn’t even make the news unless the guy died.
Mostly people miss it… Unless you were gay. Then you probably have some unhappy memories about that time. Of course there’s nostalgia for other stuff, but civil rights were way worse for lgbtq.
I’m surprised no one brought this up yet. Being gay in the 90s would be about as controversial as being trans now, and it would not be okay to walk around holding hands with your same sex partner unless you were in a known gay area. it might not be illegal, but it would’ve attracted attention, probably people would’ve said slurs at least. The f slur was used in television and movies until around the 90s. People just used it like “nerd” or “dweeb”. Cocksucker was a pretty bad insult, insinuating someone was gay being pretty damn insulting at the time.
Things were significantly worse for lgbtq people, and there was the fear of HIV being basically a death sentence, and it wouldn’t have been long after people called it the “gay disease”. Some people were very uneducated about that stuff. My mom, who believed that gay men were our equals and should have equal rights, told me not to touch my gay teacher or shake his hand or anything because he might have “a disease”. Thankfully my father was more medically knowledgeable and told her it doesn’t spread like that, even if he had it.
It wasn’t until around after the 2000s at least that gay people were proudly saying, “HIV is no longer a death sentence”. It used to be a disease running rampant that no one gave a shit about because of homophobia basically. Fucking Reagan.
It was illegal in Texas to be gay actually
Everyone’s saying what was better.
Bullshit, lol.
We were still people, and we still had all the people problems. Misogyny was worse, racism was worse, homophobia was really bad still, and “trans” was just a guy who liked wearing women’s clothes. Not that any man would ever admit that. Schools were super clique-ish, bullying was public and not prevented. Rapes were swept under the rug even worse than today. Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier. I can personally vouch for how amazing the environmental laws are and have improved air quality. Want to buy something that wasn’t available at a local store? Plan on waiting a month or more for it to arrive on order. Cars were more unsafe, often only had lap belts, and wtf is an airbag, lol. Car seats for kids were all but nonexistent. Air travel was crazy expensive, too.
All that said, yeah, there were some good things. We weren’t tied to screens all day. If someone stayed in and watched TV all day all the time you thought something might be wrong with them. We weren’t “on-call” 24-7 with cell phones. Basic jobs were easy to get. All my first jobs were walk in and ask if they needed anyone or just word of mouth, show up, and start working. Mass shootings weren’t the thing they are today. You actually owned the music or games you bought. Local stores had a huge variety of stuff and hadn’t been crushed by walmart and big box stores (I actually remember when big box stores were new and touted as sources of better variety for consumers. Lol, that worked out great). Concert tickets to top bands were less than $10. Local radio was great, your DJ told you about local events, and we had Dr Demento and Casey Kasem on weekends. Nobody was forcing you to pay subscriptions for everything, homes and cars were more affordable, so was education, and health care hadn’t gone nuts yet. You could actually talk to your political opponents, you wanted the same things mostly, it was just how you wanted it to happen was different. Crazy wingnuts were just that. Crazy wingnuts and not mainstream. Nobody gave them platforms unless it was “The National Enquirer.”
So yeah. We had plenty of problems. But there was a lot of good shit too.
One other thing that was ubiquitous… Cigarettes, and consequently cigarette smoke; EVERYWHERE!! Doesn’t matter whether you smoked or not, you smelled like cigarettes. Every bar, every restaurant, every club… Bus stops, movie theaters, trains… Cigarettes
You’re right, lol. I completely forgot. “Smoking or non?” was a completely normal question when entering a restaurant, and bars or whatever didn’t bother asking. A night out meant smelling like cigarette smoke when you got home.
How quickly we forget.
In the EU or at least Finland, smoking in bars was still a thing in the 2010’s almost. 2007 definitely I was dancing and smoking a cigarette on the dancer floor of a club. Then 2007 they had go get non-smoking sides as well. And then the smoking rooms came in for some years, but you weren’t allowed in with a drink. (And you couldn’t get special dispensation, even for a bar which sold cigars as their thing, nope, can’t have your drink with you in the smoking room.) Idk how long ago the last tobacco rooms got banned as well.
But yeah in the 90’s it was fkin everywhere, not just in nightclubs and bars.
All cars were pretty much smoking as well. Any car from the 90’s definitely has a cigarette lighter and an ashtray. My -06 Huyndai still has an ashtray.
Pollution was really bad
1970-1980’s was the first environmental movement. We were all excited to change the world. Some of the worst cases of pollution were because people finally cared enough to find them. Some things didn’t work and something’s had backtracking
This was the era of huge successes like the clean air act, clean water act, and bottle deposit laws! Superfund cleanup for the worst of the worst.
Cars were more unsafe
Car safety was becoming a concern and we started doing something about it
Air travel was crazy expensive
But also the rise of discount airlines
No shit. The question was “what was life like?” Not “what changed everything?”
I’m well aware of the things I mentioned because they’re different than today which is what the question asked for.
Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier.
Yeah, 'member leaded gasoline? I wasn’t there, but I 'member. Just burning an extremely toxic metal in a city full of people and kids.
And then there was the insane 70’s crime/violent crime rate suspiciously about 20 years later…
Pff. I used to wash motor parts off with leaded gas and no gloves when I was young. I’d probably be a goddamn Einstein if it weren’t for that.
There are some very cool videos on YouTube of people from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s describing the experience, and worth listening to.
As for myself, life in the 80’s and 90’s was an adventure every fucking day. I grew up on county land with a huge forest behind it, and my brothers and friends and I were there so often that there were trails we’d made from walking so much. If we weren’t in the woods we were on bikes zooming around the neighborhood or up to the gas station for snacks and drinks. I gained a love of reading and spent a lot of time at the school and local library picking up books and having more adventures in my head. We had huge video game arcades where you could spend hours with your friends too. We watched plenty of TV and movies, but you actually had to commit to it because streaming didn’t exist. (Though VCR’s later mitigated this somewhat.) Lots of us have great memories of video stores though, and yeah, I miss them. And without phones feeding you constant dopamine, it was easier to focus on these things and you enjoyed them more.
Most of us had very few rules and weren’t as closely-minded by our parents as kids are now. We just had to be home by sundown. We took care of ourselves and figured shit out for ourselves, partly why GenX and elder millenials aren’t complainers by nature now.
The downside is, when your friends moved away, they were just gone. You might exchange addresses or phone numbers, but you basically just never stayed in touch because you made new friends to replace the old ones. Long-distance calls were expensive and letters took too long to write when you had shit to do, and with such a big, wide world to explore as a kid, you always had shit to do.
For me, the best way to describe it was that it was just quieter and much more peaceful. It was really nice not being able to read everyone’s mind all the time and not knowing everything that was going on in the world. If someone hated certain types of people, they actually had to say it, and most people weren’t willing to translate their personal biases and hatred into action without the veil of anonymity.
Most of what you said was true for me as well. However I wasn’t able to provide that for my kids. Part of it is personal electronics, part societal as it is frowned on, but also economic since I have to live where the jobs are and that is not where the land is.
And I’m reminded just last week: ticks. We’re were out in the woods all the time and rarely worried about ticks. Now my kid gets one playing frisbee
Yeah. :(
I don’t visit my childhood home anymore because much of that forest gave way to new roads and homes and it just makes me sad to think about how little of it is still there.
Yeah I don’t visit either, but it’s because it’s the land that time forgot. Our major employer left and the town never recovered. It’s exactly the same but a lot more worn and run down.
I last went back for a reunion, and discovered the same with the people. The few who are still in town never moved on from their high school selves
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Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.
Back then it was boring, but the trade off was you could be someone without being the best in the world. What used to be “let me tell you about my friend” became “let me show you this internet video.” You didn’t have to be the top player in the world to be the top player at the arcade. You didn’t have to be a prodigy to have people think your art was cool. The internet moved the goal posts out of reach and we were all suddenly nobody, consumers, wannabe influencers at best. The technology thought to allow everyone to find an audience put us in our place and we’re all nobody now. You get zero views, zero interest, the famous get a billion.
I was born in 1979. Growing up, I remember laying on the floor in the summer, seeing the HBO title scene come on before watching Star Wars with my father on our little CRT TV. Then later, growing up in a trailer park, being raised by a single mom, me and my brother raised hell and had tons of friends. We’d ride our bikes, play in the woods, jump off the docks into ponds, sell golf balls we found in the creek back to the golf course to buy some superman ice cream.
Some other things I remember from that time:
- Doritos bags were clear with no foil and me and my brother would try to find the “flavor cube”
- Crush Apple pop was my favorite
- Listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller on a record player
- Renting Pitfall and River Raid for our Atari 2600 for $1 for a weekend at Believe in Music
- Atari games were like $15 for most games, $20 for some
- Playing Smurf Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle on our Colecovision or Mindstorm on our Vectrex with our friends
- Pizza Hut and the Book-it program
- The dual-sided styrofoam container from McDonalds that was used for breakfast or the McDLT
- Tato Skins chips
- My first Cherry Coke
- My first TV dinner that had to be baked in an oven - came in a foil tray
- Hi-C Juice
- Mr. T cereal
- My first Cherry 7-Up
- Jello Pudding Pops
- Bannanna Frosted Flakes
- Dialing phone numbers with a rotary dial
- Cartoons before school, such as Thundercats, GI Joe, Voltron, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Pepsi A.M.
- Keebler Pizzaria Chips
- Getting my first Sony Walkman to listen to Micheal Jackson’s Bad album on casette
- Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, D.A.R.Y.L. movies
- Mtv music videos and seeing Michael Jackson Thriller Video for the first time
- Seeing and playing Super Mario Bros. on our new Nintendo for the very first time was such an amazing experience
- NES games were like $20-30 at the time
- Our brand new NES was $250 - my mom and step-dad almost got a divorce over my step-dad buying one
- Going to Muzzy’s or Ole Taco in West Michigan
- Muzzy’s was a burger chain that had “drippy cheese” and firedogs, which were spicy chili dogs
- Ole Taco was a fast food mexican restaurant before Taco Bell and had by far much better food. The rice there was amazing!
- The first time I saw an Apple IIe computer and coding my very first line of code
- Seeing the Karate Kid, Goonies, Ghostbusters II and Back to the Future movies in the theater
- Seeing The Wizard in the theatre and then playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time
- Saturday morning cartoons
- ABC always had a marathon of cartoons from first thing in the morning until noon
- Saving money up to purchase a Super Nintendo with Super Mario World and Final Fight
- Satellite TV - having to change satellites for different channels
- Trying to see porn on the distored/scrambled cable channels
- Saving money up to purchase a Nintendo 64
- My very first Commodore 64 computer
- Clear Pepsi
- Salsa Rio Doritos
- Mr. Phipps Tater Crisps
- Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid
- Crunch Tators
- Viennetta Ice Cream
- Peanut Butter Boppers
- Whatchamacallit candy bars
- Shocktarts
- Skittles Bubble Gum
- Chips fried in Olean (olestra)
- Our first phone with push button numbers to dial phone numbers
- Party phone lines
- Your entire neighborhood would share a “party line”
- You would have your own unique phone number, but only one call in your neighborhood could occur at a time
- So you could listen in on other people’s conversations and you had to wait for their call to complete before you could make or receive a call
- Our first cordless phone
- Drawing the Stüssy logo on everything
- Sobe drinks
- My very first CD player
- Listening to and buying CDs from Musicland/Sam Goody
- Porn on VHS tapes
- Shopping/hanging out at the mall with friends
- Getting online for the first time with our 56k modem
- Renting games from Blockbuster
- Encino Man, Clueless, Cruel Intentions, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
- Drinking and playing Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye with my friends all night long
- Watching Beavis and Butthead with my friends
- Playing Quake Arena on dial-up
- Watching porn pictures online download one line at a time
- Surge pop - so much sugar and caffiene - was practically the first energy drink
- Installing a Sony DiscMan in my car
- Black ganster movies became more popular: Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, South Central, Dead Presidents
- Napster and Limewire to download MP3s
- AOL Online
- ICQ messenger
- MSN messenger
- AOL messenger
- Preparing for Y2K
- I had a paranoid roommate who stocked up on bottled water, sterno, canned goods, toilet paper, etc.
- Nothing ended up happening and we didn’t have to get groceries for the next 3 months
- Burning my first music CD
- Playing Ridge Racer, Siphon Filter and Final Fantasy on Playstation
- Pagers and sending codes to my friends
- Building my very first custom PC that ran Windows 98, then later Windows 98 SE and eventually Windows ME
- Installing my Nvidia Riva TNT II graphics card
- Getting our first cable internet connection with 1Mbps speed
- Splitting up Warez rar file downloads for Windows 2000 between friends, meeting up to extract and burn the ISO, then being disappointed when the operating system didn’t even have support for sound cards or games
- Using Netscape Navigator to browse the web
- Installing a 50 CD disc changer in my car
- My first Nokia cellphone
- McDonald’s Arch Deluxe and Chicken Fajitas
- DSL internet with speed up to 5Mbps
- Using Yahoo search, then later Google for the first time
- The very first time YouTube started up
- My first Motorola flip phone
- My first Vanilla Coke
- Building my first computer that ran Windows XP
- Building my first computer that ran Windows Vista with 2 GTX 260 on SLI
- My first cable modem with speeds over 20Mbps
- Downloading my very first torrent
- My first Compaq iPaq smart phone
- Burning my first DVD
- My first HP iPaq smart phone
- Subscribing to Netflix to get DVDs by mail
- Redbox movie rentals
- My first iPhone
- Movie streaming through Netflix
Bottom line, as a kid in the 80s and 90s we actually wanted to leave the house and do stuff all the time. Staying at home was boring. Even if it was just riding our bikes around with friends. Or riding a bike to a friends. Even as a teenager, staying at home was lame. There was the mall, arcade, pizza place, other friend’s houses.
The Internet really had a huge impact on society in a way you cannot imagine. Life before the Internet was much less stressful. You had many more “real” connections with a lot more people. You may have had a computer, but you only really used it at home for homework or games and that’s it.
Yes, I may be younger, but I also feel that some things were lost because of the internet. It now seems to me that the oversupply of content has, unfortunately, led to a decline in the appreciation of content—or rather, in the value attributed to it.
It’s a bit like Christmas for kids: you look forward to it for a long time, and finally the day comes when you get presents. Today, however, every day is Christmas, and the presents aren’t as special anymore because there are so many that you don’t even have time to really appreciate them—you can binge-watch one series after another and somehow lose your sense of proportion and the feeling of when enough is enough, or so it seems to me.
This is certainly a nostalgic impression, yet it seems to me that “more” is only positive to a certain extent, since this “more” can easily turn into “too much,” which is more of a burden than a joy.
Veinetta mentioned!!
The marketing worked on me for SURE but not my parents so I only had this like once at a friends house.
Splitting up Warez rar file downloads for Windows 2000 between friends, meeting up to extract and burn the ISO, then being disappointed when the operating system didn’t even have support for sound cards or games
eh, I didn’t have many problems, but opengl was MUCH faster than dx. Windows 2000 supported multiple processors (dual and quad) and gobs more memory than 9x.
Grew up in the 70s and 80s.
After school, kids would roam around on bikes. We’d go to grocery and convenience stores to play the latest arcade games.
Alternately we’d find an empty lot and make our own bike parks out of dirt and whatever scrap wood we could find.
No mobile phones, so nobody knew where anyone was, we’d just agree to meet some place at an agreed time.
Parents didn’t care. “Come home when it gets dark.” When the street lights kicked on, you knew it was time to head home.
You had to think for yourself, because nobody was there to help you. If you wiped out on your bike, blew a tire, got attacked by a dog, or threw a chain, you fixed it yourself or dealt with it yourself, nobody was coming to save you.
Same here. When we weren’t outside in the yard or the pool, we were out in the woods.
My parents installed a large bell that my Mom could ring for dinner time, that we could hear from far away.
The only time my parents objected was when we described the fort that some neighbor kids had built, “you know they stole that material from our house under construction, right?”
This depended entirely on where you lived. My parents were divorced and one lived in the country and one lived in the suburbs. I could ride freely around the neighborhood in both places, which was literally within sight of my house, but beyond that were dangerous roads and nowhere nearby to go anyway.
Neighboring kids were hard to find. In the country, there were 5 houses on our road and only one had kids my age. We were kinda friends but they were kinda weird.
The suburban neighborhood had 25 homes, and all the kids were older or younger. I never met anyone my age in that neighborhood.
Hanging out with friends meant you called them to see if they could come over. If both parents agreed and one was available to drive, you had a friend for the day.
It’s funny to hear my childhood years described and it feels like this when past times were described when I was a kid:
If you wiped out in your bike
This was in the late 1990’s. I fell off my bike and got myself scraped up pretty badly. I was nowhere near home, so my friends and I knocked on a random woman’s door and she patched me up. Headed home and freaked my mom out when she saw my arms.
Back when neighbors could post up signs that told kids “Hey, if you’re in trouble, this is a safe house.”
We had the Internet, but it was for dorks. We didn’t have touchscreen phones yet, so if you wanted to “surf the web” as we called it, you had to have a dedicated desktop PC, and you connected via “dial up” where you plugged in the phone line¹ and it literally dialed up the Internet. Long story short, it was an obscure hobby for nerds, like D&D or birdwatching².
Anyway, they used to mail you a lot of CDs back then. Some people got on the Internet using a CD that came to your house like junkmail or a phone book³ That’s how Netflix got their start actually. You’d surf to their webpage, set up a queue of movies you wanted to watch, and they’d mail DVDs to you one at a time like a mail order Blockbuster⁴.
Anyway, you put this CD you got in the mail into your desktop computer, and it would call the Internet, or as we called it the “information superhighway” on the phone. Once you got there, you were mostly doing what we’re doing now; sharing silly pictures about Star Trek on message boards with anonymous nerds around the world. The whole Internet used to basically this, but with cheesy gifs.
Honestly the Internet was better when people would make fun of you for spending all your time on it. Normies ruined the vibe.
¹ Back then, a phone was an integrated appliance/utility in your home. It only did voice calls, and it was physically connected to the wall of your house by a wire. You’d push little buttons or twist a little dial (which is why it’s called “dialing”) in one part to to enter a phone number, and then pick up this other part that looks like the “phone” app icon, which was attached to the first part by this tight curly wire.
² Oh, back then, D&D wasn’t streaming and there weren’t birdwatching apps, so those were obscure hobbies for nerds.
³ A phone book was a big book with super thin pages that was periodically sent to your house, and it had the names, addresses, and phone numbers of basically everyone in town, and then there was a second one with the same but for all the businesses in town.
⁴ Blockbuster was a business that rented out VHS tapes⁵ and eventually DVDs. Like Netflix that you had to physically drive to and browse rows of physical movies. Then you took them home, watched them, and then returned the tapes when you were done like a library.
⁵ VHS tapes were little plastic boxes with a pair of spools inside wrapped in magnetic tape. You’d put them into special devices that plugged into your television⁶ that would physically turn the spools so it could read the magnetic data on the tape, playing the film on the screen. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “Be Kind, Rewind”, it was a message printed on Blockbuster tapes reminding you to run the spools in reverse after watching the film, so that it would “rewind” to the beginning for the next renter to watch. That’s where the word “rewind” comes from, you had to re-wind the tape around the first spool.
⁶ TVs back then were these huge glass tubes with a little particle accelerator in the back and phosphorescent powder in the inside of the screen. The screens were much smaller, but the device itself was massive, almost a cube. You couldn’t wall mount them, you needed a sturdy piece of furniture, “entertainment centers” we’d call them.
