Things Only Boomers Will Remember Page 2

What are your favorite memories?

My dad was a computer programmer at WearEver and Alcoa Aluminum. He brought a modem and a printer home once. He cradled the wall phone receiver into the modem cradle and called (dialed!) the work computer. We proceeded to play one of the first computer games. It was Star Trek. No monitor. Just communication of the challenge (Klingons) and the battles by printer. (I think the keyboard was integral to the printer, but it might have been separate.) It was on that wide, green-tint continuous ream paper. I might even still have my game stashed somewhere.

>2 2wonderY: My first computer was the Commodore 64 in about 1982-1983. Following that I had IBM's 386, & 486. I lost track after that--they didn't name computers as such anymore! On the Commodore (I think) we could play a game called Pong....it was with stick figures and a ball--much like tennis.

> (397 of the previous thread)

Computer science was one of my accessory subject at university in the late 1970s. We programmed in Pascal onto coding sheets, and were entitled to submit one batch of coding sheets to the typists per day and receive a pack of punch cards something like twelve hours later. Fixing bugs took days, which I suppose made us concentrate on getting the algorithm right in the first place. I'm not sure that we saw an actual computer during the whole two years.

>2 2wonderY: The only game available on a monitor in the departmental quiet room was something to do with ruling and feeding Sumer. Wikipedia suggests it was probably 'Hamurabi' or one of its predecessors.

P.S. My wife's dad also worked for Alcoa Aluminum, in Banbury, Oxfordshire. No computers for him, but somewhere we still have his slide rules for fluid flow.

Before home computers, I worked on the first home banking application. The user interface for it was an Atari 400.
Sign up for the service and they gave you the console for free. It took about two weeks to get the cartridge so you could dial into the app.
First big upgrade was writing the protocols to handle the Apple Macintosh, the IBM AT, and the Commodore 64.
We opted against supporting the "peanut."

I used a word processor at the newspaper in 1980. It sent stories directly to the composing room and spit them out of the printer where the compositor still waxed them up and did paste-up by hand from rough sketched dummies. There was no word count, so you still had to estimate story length when you were sketching out the dummies.

Syndicated columns like Ann Landers were still sent in hard copy and had to be typed in by hand.

It's all done digitally now, and, at smaller papers, the role of layout designers, photographers, proofreaders, and fact-checkers has dwindled to near zero, to the detriment of the enterprise.

>6 nohrt4me2: I remember the first word processors at my government agency. They were huge things, were only located in the state office, had their own clean room and operators.
We had electric typewriters in the county offices and ancient mechanical tabulators. Though we processed and serviced loans, most of our calculations were done with paper and pencil. And we routinely had to double-check and correct annual statements issued by the St. Louis Finance Office. We did have Amortization Tables in book form.

In the late 80's early 90's, I worked for my neighborhood homeowners' association. I was bookkeeper/secretary. The BOD decided to make my job easier by buying a computer for me. They assured me that it would be "faster". A $5000 IBM took 1.5 hours to print a monthly financial report and 16+ hours to print a yearly directory. Turned out to be the daisy wheel printer that was so slow. After getting a nine-pin printer, it was faster.

I still miss dimmer switches in the floorboard of my car...

>7 2wonderY: That damn St Louis Finance Office ...

>8 perennialreader: Dimmer switch, yes! I miss manual transmissions, too. Last one I had was in a 1995 Saturn. They only had a limited number of manuals at that time.

>10 nohrt4me2:

No foot dimmer switch, although my dad's 1958 Ford Consul on which I learned to drive had one, but my 1982 Land Rover still has the manual starting handle to crank the engine. Both my Land Rovers are of course manual transmission. I drive mostly on dirt roads and off road, and automatic is not much fun in those conditions. While I have driven cars with automatic transmission from time to time, I have never actually owned one, and have never wanted to.

Recently I was in UK and I watched the 2022 film Living starring Bill Nighy and set in 1950s London. It brought back a lot of childhood memories of that post-war period, including the RT buses, and the polite, under-stated and somewhat restrained behaviour of many of the characters.

This is late to the party but the March comments about early computing do bring back a number of memories. On my first job all we had were the big mainframes and you wrote your program on computer cards. Once you had your program finished you would take the long box (or if it was a big program, multiple boxes) over to the window where they took your cards, made sure the boxes were in the right order, and then, depending on their backlog, you either stood at the window and waited for the green printout and a return of your program or you went back to your desk and waited until you got a call to come and pickup your program and your printout.

There were usually mistakes/programming errors etc. so you had to do this multiple times. If your program ran enough times while you were standing there waiting you got to the point when you could tell when it was being read in just by the sound of the cards passing through the reader. The worst sound you could hear was thup-thup-thup-thup-BUZZZZZZ- thup-thup-thup..etc. The normal sound was the thupping. The thupping was not a uniform sound but rather a combination of the sound of the physical card movement along with a tone that would vary depending on the punched holes the reader was sensing. The BUZZ either meant an error in the punch sequence (the cards had to have preface punches which were for some kind of internal record keeping) or worse, a warped, bent, or damaged card. If it was the latter, your whole run would abort.

There were, of course, individuals who either had too much time on their hands or just liked to play with things. Someone had written a nonsense program which, when read through the card reader would result in the sounds coming from the reader humming "Happy Birthday"

Back in 1973, many typewriters were still manual. Xerox copiers were still in the future for most people. I guess you could take pictures of pages and then send them away for processing into 3x5 images.

If you wanted more than one copy of a document, you used carbon copy paper.

If the library had a book you really wanted to own, your local book store was your only option. No internet, no distance shopping.

I just came across a project I undertook - copying Colonial Kitchen Herbs and Remedies with pen on heavy art paper. Looks like I got half way through it before quitting.
It ties in perfectly with a class I’m taking this semester - Appalachian Plants and People.
Showed it to my professor. It kinda fulfills an end of term project requirement. 50 years in the making.

>2 2wonderY: good old "green bar" paper. My job about 25 years ago was to keep that paper loaded so that the massive printers we had could print out the daily/weekly/monthly reports. Good times and definitely a boomer memory.

>13 alco261: My first job was as a keypunch operator. I got to the point that I could read the holes in the cards without the printing along the top. I also remember the reader that played Happy Birthday.

Blind typing (very carefully) Gestetner stencils (see? spell check doesn't even recognize Gestetner!) and using fuschia correcting fluid (also very delicately) to cover and type over errors.

In case you never had to do this, to cut the stencil cleanly you needed to inactivate the ribbon so that the type bar struck the stencil directly. Hence you were typing blind unless there was a dark backing sheet that helped make the typing more visible without clogging the stencil.

>17 librorumamans: fuschia correcting fluid

We often couldn't obtain that in Sudan forty years ago, so we would make use of ladies' nail varnish, which produced nice pink patches on the stencil. At that time Gestetner machines were electrically powered, but we were often in places which had no electricity so we needed the older hand-powered machines where you just turned a big handle. There was a Dutch charity where retired technicians repaired old Gestetner machines and manual typewriters for use in developing countries.

My first teaching job......we had a mimeograph machine that required a carbon master and alcohol placed in a drum. We attached the paper to the drum, turned the machine on (had to let the alcohol warm a bit) and then hand-cranked out the copies. Oftentimes the students got warm papers that smelled of alcohol. The writing was always purple.

>19 Tess_W:

Yes! I remember!

>19 Tess_W: I still have a few of those!

>19 Tess_W:

I also remember correcting typos by scraping the wax away with a razor blade. For longer errors or misaligned material, a carefully trimmed piece of masking tape worked well.

If we asked very politely in the office, sometimes we could get red or green masters. Multicoloured handouts!!

>18 John5918:

That's interesting: I would have thought that nail varnish would be too hard and would flake and chip, especially if you tried to type over it.

>23 librorumamans:

Ah, but that was one of the challenges! We often found ourselves having to do all sorts of things without the right tools and materials.

>17 librorumamans:, >18 John5918:, and >22 librorumamans: there was also correction tape which worked the same way as carefully trimmed masking tape but it was white.

I invested in a Brother electric typewriter that had memory! on a floppy disc and a two line screen so you could catch typos before hitting the print button.
Was that in the 80s?

>26 2wonderY: In 1982 or so, I had a typewriter with a nine-line view. As I recall, I found that I began thinking in chunks that would fit on the screen.

Sorry - offending content has been removed - I didn't mean to upset everyone - let's get back to more pleasant things

>28 alco261:

Thanks! That's just the sort of arcane, largely useless, information that will fit in an empty dollar-sized box in my brain.

My grandfather gave me a manual typewriter when I graduated high school in 1979 which I only used once in college. But then I consider myself in the vanguard of generation X despite being born in 1961

Girls were required to take typing in my high school. I deliberately did poorly. At that time, all women were asked about their typing skills in job interviews. Uh-uh. Not me thank you.
And then my last job before retirement was an assistant’s position that did require typing. (Never say never!)
Thank the lord for cut & paste!

I actually took typing in high school. I could type faster than most of my computer science peers

Crank roller washing machine. My mom wouldn’t let us help because of the danger of hands being pulled through. It happened to her more than once.
And then we’d haul the soggy full baskets out to the backyard and hang it all on the lines.

>28 alco261: Interesting to note that IBM's punch cards played a big part in the Nazi regime's efficiency.

>33 2wonderY:

Likewise! My grandmother had a hand-cranked roller out in the back yard of the pub they ran, and washed clothes by hand on a washboard, which seemed strange to us who had a (then) modern washing machine with the electrically-cranked roller.

In our street it seemed that all the housewives washed their laundry on the same day, and if you stood in the back garden and looked up and down the street every house would have washing lines festooned with wet clothes. If it started to rain, the first lady to notice it would run out to bring the clothes in and shout a warning to her neighbours, who would come out one by one and repeat the cry all the way up and down the street. Although some of them had been friends and neighbours for donkey's years, they never used to use each others' first names. They always referred to each other by the first letter of their surnames - my mum was Mrs A, our immediate neighbours were Mrs B and Mrs M, then there was a Mrs W and another Mrs B, and so on. So the cry, "Mrs A (or B or M or W or whatever), it's raining!" would be heard progressing up the street from one house to the next.

The other task when it rained would be to run out into the street and make all of us children come in out of the rain. We all used to play together in the street - in those days there were very few cars around.

My grandmother had a hand-cranked roller

Isn't that a washing mangle? That's at least what comes to mind.

>36 librorumamans:

Yes, thanks, mangle is the word I was looking for!

>35 John5918: Monday was washing day, Tuesday was ironing day, Wednesday was for shopping in town, Thursday was for ‘turning out’ the bedrooms (ie giving them a thorough clean). At least that’s how my gran and her neighbours lived their lives in the 50s/60s. Fridays she went to collect her usual order from the Co-op which would all be nicely ready packed up in a box for her to carry as she was a longtime and respected customer, no queueing involved!

>38 mlfhlibrarian:

Yes! Monday washing day!

>33 2wonderY:
>35 John5918:

We called them wringer washers.

>40 Tess_W:

Yes, I also now remember the word "wringer".

I was thinking of using a "real" ie. live Christmas tree, after 30 or so years without one.
I saw/found the old "baubles", under the house, that I remember first buying with Dad in 1954.
He and Mum had just bought their first home. They were migrants - Latvians.

PS. I have deferred MY tree till next year. Merry Christmas to all on LIBRARYTHING.
PPS. Bugger this, I am getting rather OLD!

>42 guido47: reminds me of a time when it was perfectly normal to buy the Christmas tree and decorate the house and tree on Christmas Eve. I've managed to keep my family on the straight and narrow, although the children are now living away in shared houses and have succumbed to the modern habit of decorating the shared spaces some time in the middle of December.

The shops selling Chirstmas trees won't be re-stocking after this weekend. I've had to buy my tree this morning and secret it in the garden, to re-appear in nine days' time.

Which brings up the question - Do you put away the normal decor or just add the Christmas decorations? If you remove, how much, and where does it go?

Asking for a friend.

When I was growing up my dad still went to his brother's farm (the one my dad grew up on) and cut our Christmas tree. They always looked dismal and when we complained that we wanted a bought tree he would say nobody should be cutting down perfect trees! My dear daddy caused me to be a tree hugger!

I was thinking about the computer cards the other day. I was a Den Mother for Cub Scouts and we used old ones for crafts.
It was wringer washer and I got my arm caught one time but there was a release bar. I was trying to help my mother without her knowing it when she was at work.
I have embroidered dish towels with the daily activity sayings such as Monday is wash day.
Remember cars without cruise control? Mine is not working now and I miss it. My son plans to fix it for me.

>46 mnleona:

I remember the release bar on the wringer. It was fun to push it sometimes!

Remember cars without cruise control?

I was nearky forty when I first encountered cruise control, on my first trip to the USA in 1992. I have never owned a car with cruise control, and I don't think I've ever driven one with cruise control outside of the USA, as on the rare occasions that I hire a car I usually hire the smallest cheapest one. Needless to say my two old Land Rovers do not have cruise control!

Sentence diagramming? I don’t recall that my children learned this in school. Of course, sentences tend to be much shorter and simpler these days.

>48 2wonderY: The State of Ohio does not require sentence diagramming. That means, it's not on the end of the course test. That means, they ain't gonna do it! However, most private schools still have students diagramming.

I had never heard of sentence diagramming. I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and I certainly don't remember doing anything like it at school. Was it a US thing?

>48 2wonderY:  — >50 John5918: at high school in Australia, we did what we called "analysis", which seems to have been much the same thing.

>49 Tess_W:, >50 John5918: My Dad's job meant we moved a lot during my school years. Basically, I went to a new school for every grade from K - 12th. We lived just about everywhere in the US save the deep south and my experience was sentence diagramming seemed to be a function of school district choice. Some places had it and some didn't, the grade it was taught varied, as did the duration of teaching in that grade. I wound up having to take it twice - once with an emphasis on diagramming which wended its way through the entire year of English and once as almost an afterthought.

>46 mnleona: - shifting subjects (sorry about that :-)) what about cars that had a headlight dimmer switch on the floorboard on the left side of the clutch pedal?

My granddaughters could not use cursive writing in high school.

>53 mnleona: I spoke to a library special collections manager. He told me cursive is being taught to college history majors.

>52 alco261: what about cars that had a headlight dimmer switch on the floorboard

My dad's first car, a 1958 Ford Consul which he bought around 1960 and still had a good few years later when I learned to drive on it as soon as I reached the magic age of 17. It also had the gear shift lever on the steering column, a three-speed manual gearbox. Almost all British cars were manual in those days - autonatic transmission was something foreign and weird.

If you wish to explore sentence diagramming, or even if you want a refresher course on it, get yourself a copy of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey. For me, it brought back all the joys of sentence structure analysis, and the nightmare of Sister Inez splintering pointers over the back of fellow students' hands.

Advanced sample of sentence diagramming:

>54 2wonderY: Have to, if not, they can't even read an original copy of the Constitution or any historical documents pre-typewriter!

>57 Tess_W: I hated sentence diagramming, but unfortunately had to teach it my first year as a high school English teacher (1967). Thankfully, the school neglected to buy textbooks for my Remedial English classes for the following year, so I taught them transformational generative grammar and history of the English language instead. My "remedial" kids had the highest scores of the entire school in the end of the year standardized tests! The school switched over to teaching TG grammar in all its English classes. I did have to teach the kids how to translate from the TG notation to the sentence diagrams, in order to answer any questions on the standardized tests that may require them, but the students caught onto that easily.

>59 TempleCat: I love sentence diagramming, it's almost "scientific" to me. "Back in the day" (when you had to pick a major and a minor in education---History/ELA respectively), I taught some ELA classes and although not required to teach it, I did and the students didn't really hate it! I will say that the foreign language teachers said it really helped when trying to teach a foreign language. Ohio has never had sentence diagramming as part of their curriculum since there had been State Standards (2010).

On reading a review about a book on the hunt for a vaccine for polio I remembered collecting for the March of Dimes. Elementary children were given little collection folders to fill with dimes to help pay for the research. This was in the fifties. I also remember my father stopping after Sunday morning church for us to get the Sabin vaccine later on.

>61 hailelib: I think I remember the dime folders. And the entire town went to the local high school gymnasium to get the oral vaccination. I was 6. I think I recall it was offered on a sugar cube in a tiny paper cup.

We also went door to door on Halloween to “trick or treat for UNICEF.”

Just saw a short renovation video.
Remember the in-wall medicine cabinets with the slot in the back for disposing razor blades?

I used to sit on the edge of the tub and watch my dad shave. He had a soap mug and a boar bristle lather brush. He used a safety razor which held the blade curved to the proper angle. There was a stick of something used to daub nicks. Old Spice aftershave.

>63 2wonderY: That "stick of something used to daub nicks" is a styptic pencil. It helps to control bleeding.

If I promised to stay very still my father would let me watch him strop his bluish-silver razor, first on a course canvas strap and then on a thick leather strap, both of which hung from the hot tap and down the side of the wash basin. Then the working up of the foam, its application that turned him into a bald Santa, and finally the scritch scritch as he sliced the whiskers away, carefully cleaning the foam from the razor as he went.

Then he became short-sighted and switched to an electric razor. Scary things, straight razors.

>59 TempleCat: I can honestly say I have taught since 1977 and never heard of transformational generative grammar!

>66 Tess_W: Well, the school year I described was 1968-1969. Transformational Generative grammar is a generative grammar theory introduced by Noam Chomsky in 1957. It has gone in and out of favor in schools over the decades. An interesting, reasonably short, read on U.S. schools' love/hate relationship to grammar instruction can be found in the Department of Education article The Story of English Grammar in United States Schools. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on generative grammar theory as well. Unfortunately, the Latin-based eight parts of speech model seems to have dominated (cue the Greek chorus chanting 'παράδοση' (Tradition))!

Reader's Digest is closing it's UK edition after 86 years.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/apr/30/it-was-instrumental-to-my-early-ed...

Perhaps not something only over-60s will remember, but you've got to be getting on for 60 to remember the monthly booklets in magazine racks everywhere. Yet another thing I hadn't noticed that I hadn't seen in years. A straw in the wind is that although Reader's Digest has 6,120 works on LT, no-one seems to have created a series of the magazines yet. Is no-one collecting them?

>68 Cynfelyn: The end of an era, for sure. I searched and found that Reader's Digest is still sold in the U.S., both in print and digital form. It's only $10 per year, quite a bargain in this day and age. I think I remember reading at one time that it had become politicized, but no direct knowledge.

I love(d) the Condensed books that I would buy at garage sales for a quarter. 3-5 great abridged novels, which I'm not a fan of, per se. However, I would often read the abridged version and if I liked it then I would seek out the full version at the library. I read some books that I would not have read the full version. These are still being published. I credit these condensed books with getting me hooked on adult books when I was about 12 years of age and read My Cousin Rachel, East of Eden, The Good Earth, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, just to name a few.

>60 Tess_W: I felt the same way about sentence diagramming; it’s very “structured” and educational. The ultimate test was to diagram The Pledge of Allegiance (it’s a single sentence). I had to tape two pieces of notebook paper together to complete the entire diagram. Diagramming sentences served me well when selected to be the Editor of both our junior high and senior high school newspapers.

I still have a love for written language and the precise meaning and use of words. In my last position before final retirement I was referred to as the Grammar Hammer by the younger generation; one of the staff members made me an actual hand carved, engraved wooden hammer. It’s a prized possession.

>56 WholeHouseLibrary: Thanks for recommending Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. I bought it and enjoyed it greatly. I'll probably reread it, too.

What are pointers?

>71 maisiedotes: What are pointers?

Pointers have been replaced in many cases by laser pointers. So, slender wooden rods tapering to a point useful for drawing attention to something on the blackboard* without blocking it with your body. Also useful (up to some time in the 60's) for discipline.

* Real slate blackboards are also something that only people over 70(?) will recall.

When there were idle moments to fill, I sometimes challenged a class to punctuate — only punctuate — the following so as to make one correct sentence:

John where James had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher's approval.

Some of you, of course, may have seen this before.

>71 maisiedotes:

My immediate thought, especially regarding a book about a dog, was that a pointer is a type of gun dog used by hunters for seeking out game. It gets its name from the pointing stance that it adopts to indicate the direction where it has spotted or smelt a game bird or animal.

>72 librorumamans:

We're still using blackboards in many parts of rural Africa, although they're usually not slate, just blackboard paint slapped onto any suitable flat surface. I've been in many schools where they consider themselves lucky even to have black paint.

>72 librorumamans: "Real slate blackboards are also something that only people over 70(?) will recall."

Damned cheek! I'm mid-sixties and had slate blackboards to the end of my secondary education, so that'll be good for people now in their mid-fifties as well. I only encountered the next stage of evolution - the rubber endless loop blackboard - at university.

>56 WholeHouseLibrary: "the nightmare of Sister Inez splintering pointers over the back of fellow students' hands."

At the risk of coming over all "Four Yorkshiremen", one of the accoutrements of a blackboard is a blackboard cleaner, which made a handy throwing weapon in the hands of at least one of my teachers. Hit by the wooden side or by a cloud of chalk dust, take your chances; better still, pay attention! "But you try telling the young people of today ..."

Edited to correct a spelling.

Who had the after school task of taking those erasers outside and beating the chalk out of them?

>77 2wonderY:

And, boy, did you hear about it if you beat them against the bricks (which was faster) rather than beating them against each other.

In my elementary school by the late 50's slate boards were already being replaced with green boards and yellow chalk. The rationale was that they were easier on students' eyes. I suspect that the real reason was that coated metal was a lot cheaper and sturdier than slate.

My high school was all slate boards. In grade 12, my math teacher was an excellent, but very intense, teacher who, in his passion to make a point, often pounded the board with the soft side of his fist, causing clouds of chalk dust to billow out around the edges. I was regularly astonished the stone never cracked.

When I used to teach, forty odd years ago, there was always a white patch on the outside of my right hand trouser pocket where I would automatically wipe the chalk off my fingers every time I finished at the blackboard.

And I had to learn to be cautious about leaning against the chalk ledge because I would end up with a white line across the back of my suit jacket or blazer.

In grade 8 I switched to a private boys' school where my Form Master had the unique ability to face the class full on while writing on the board with his outstretched right hand, never needing to take his eyes off his bunch of unruly, high-energy fourteen-year-olds. Later on, I regretted being unable to learn this useful survival skill myself.

>71 maisiedotes: You're welcome. It is worth the reread.

And >72 librorumamans: is correct in the description of the pointer, except I recall they had black rubber tips on them. Regardless, the shatter factor of them was devastating.

>70 EdwinDrood: Nice!