Once a person left the house, you couldn’t reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn’t be long distance (oh yeah here’s one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren’t calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you’re going through their city. It’s like, “Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper.”
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
But was anybody home?
No, he was there all alone.
he didn’t leave the building?
Could he come to the phone?
For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who’s got that kind of time when you’re using a rotary phone?
This was around sporadically in the US Great Plains until maybe the 1990s. And calling outside your city but within the same area code was an eight-digit call:
1 + seven-digit local phone number
I still can’t quite believe it, especially when my city added a 6th area code a few years back.
That’s wild. We did have an old antique rotary phone though! My sister and I would play with it like a toy unplugged but it was also perfectly functional. You just had to be fast because it seemed like in later years the ‘timeout’ between dialing numbers had gotten shorter. You’d have to dial two 9’s in a row and before you could finish the second 9, you’d get some kind of “I’m sorry, the number you have reached is not available” message.
That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
That’s fair. I was younger when the change happened and fully unaware of it’s scope.
Jenny I’ve got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don’t change your numberEight six seven five three oh nine
Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you’re calling locally. The phone system will just assume you’re calling the local area code if you don’t dial one. In my area, it’s pretty easy because the only people who don’t have the local area code (there’s only one even though it’s far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.
Where I live now, area codes have been subdivided several times, then they went to overlays because there are just too many numbers. There are several area codes your neighbors might be, even if they have a local number.
I’m trying to always keep mine because a good 20 years ago they stopped giving it out altogether, so now it’s “rare”
Nonsense, you paged them and then they called you back from a pay-phone.
Sure, if you were wealthy enough to have a pager.
Pffff $10/month was cheaper then a phone line. Scraping together like $100 was a bit harder.
Being mistaken for a drug dealer… yeah, that never happened ;-)
My grandmother still had the list of her friends’ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. You’d pick up and wait for the operator – no dialing – and then say ‘Midland 4119’ or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
By the time I was young, they’d replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadn’t taken down her cheat sheet yet.
there was a time without cell phones? no way!
It is now safe to turn off your computerAlso:
And then there was the worst sight in the world…
Oh no! I wonder what the numbers mean. Looks like a hex dump of a 32-bit integer, probably an error code given that the number is so small.
It means “your Mac is dead. Buy a new computer.”
Glad you didn’t embed the worst site in the world.
“Scars from Ogrish run deep“, the kids wouldn’t know
Oh NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Oh man, I still remember when Windows finally powered your computer off when you shut down. My poor Nana spent half an hour trying to turn off my uncle’s computer because she kept hitting the power button just after that showed up (as was tradition) but after the computer transitioned to power off, so it just kept turning on.
I edited the file to change ‘now’ to ‘not’ just for grins.
I remember exiting Windows 3.1 to the MSDOS command prompt and then shutting down.
I’m not old enough to know this one.
Old computers wouldn’t turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).
When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don’t really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is “off”.
The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn’t cause any damage to the system.
I’m not young enough to know what “cap” and “no cap” mean
Same
You have awakened a distant memory I forgot I had.
Accidentally hard rebooting the PC with the tip of your shoe because you wanted to readjust your seating…
Flying being a really fun and nice experience.
You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.
My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.
In fact, before MBAs McKinsey’d the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant… Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can’t tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it’s normal…
I think I see boobs!
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
I remember the wheel that came with monkey island and test drive 3. I disassembled that shit and made xerox copies, then gave them to my friends.
Haha, my father and I did that for Battle of Britain and… Mines of Titan, I think, was the other one.
This station now concludes its broadcast day.
That’s right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.
And you stuck to the main, very large highways instead of trying the smaller routes. I always wonder if the Waze era of travel has helped or hurt smaller communities.
Great question.
One of the examples that comes to mind is from the SF Bay Area:
Los Gatos residents say Google’s Waze app causing gridlock, blocking only wildfire escape route
There has to be some coffee shop or antiques store somewhere that navigation apps have brought back from the brink though.
My family always went on holiday to Ireland so they had a map for it. When I was little I used to love opening that thing and picturing all the places we could go.
I did that back in 2008 when i get into college of another state, where gps device is expensive to me and i’m still using the now ancient phone. the first thing i did is go to the book store and bought one local map, study and memorise it, looking for nearby landmark and triangulate my position when i’m lost. Young people should try doing this if possible, it’s a good exercise on navigation skill.
Young people should try doing this if possible, it’s a good exercise on navigation skill.
I remember teaching orienteering to my son’s scout troop.
When they complained that would never need to know that because GPS, I handed them a GPS with almost dead batteries during a hike and told them to show me.
About 10 minutes later they became much more interested in the map and compass.
The good ol’ Road Atlas.
Also an excellent autism diagnosis tool.
No joke. My parents are convinced I’m autistic because I used to read the yellow pages (British phone book) to calm down when I was little.
I read the yellow pages to calm down one time when I was on acid.
I still play the role of navigator to this day…
My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
I remember rushing home to catch The Flintstones.
I would rush home to watch GI Joe. If I got there quick enough I could catch the last few minutes of Jem.
If I got there quick enough I could catch the last few minutes of Jem.
Truly outrageous.
Jem!!!
I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren’t on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.
And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
Cutting a notch in your floppy disk to write protect it…
Same thing for VHS tapes. That had to be something **super **important, like if they showed Raiders on TV
Cut a little square hole in the side of a 5.25" floppy to double its capacity.
Or, as my lazy ass would do sometimes, move the slider and grab a magnet so maybe my “homework” wouldn’t load and I’d get another day.
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you’d copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.
My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.
When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.
