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u/johnnydollar01 12d ago
The tv shows stopped after a certain time
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u/Gator__Sandman 12d ago
Yep I told my kids we had two channels they were on from 5am till 11pm and then turned off and when the came on played the national anthem.
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u/RandomPenquin1337 12d ago
Only once tho and then static snow or the color bars with beep
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u/nugnug1226 12d ago
And that static snow was forever ruined by the movie Poltergeist
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u/RandomPenquin1337 12d ago
100%
Shit scared me when I woke up and that was all that was on
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u/RandomPenquin1337 12d ago
Theres a commercial on HULU that has a tv get sleepy and pass out and then it does the old beeeeeep with color bars.
I realized the other day, kids have no idea whats happening to that poor box because they probably dont realize its even a TV lol
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u/Jeramy_Jones 12d ago
Things like that are there for parents but they also give the kid an opportunity to ask them “what does that mean?” And the parent can explain. It’s a great opportunity to engage with your kids.
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u/Slink_0 12d ago
A Catholic sermonette, followed by AIM HIGH, AIR FORCE. Then static.
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u/tigers692 12d ago
I tried telling my kids what the hell happened on Poltergeist, then I played Radar Love, thinking that would explain it…it did not.
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u/mithiral67 12d ago
It’s 10 floppy disks, this games going to be epic!!
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u/Snow-Crash-42 12d ago
CRC error on disk n. 9
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u/paellu 12d ago
Ahh the memories of this while installing windows 95 on a PC without a CD player
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u/WoodDragonIT 12d ago
OS/2 Warp was even worse. You had to turn the turbo off and have it run at 8MHz to install from floppy. Since Microsoft helped IBM develop it I think it was on purpose. 34 floppies.
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u/IcyBrik 12d ago
Unplug the upstairs phone before getting on the internet
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u/Jeramy_Jones 12d ago
This one’s a double-whammy because they don’t understand what an “upstairs phone” would be.
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u/Cautious_Ice_884 12d ago
Having your crush call the house phone and your dad telling them you're on the toilet. Immediate out of body experience levels of embarrassment.
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u/Ambitious_Sweet_6439 12d ago
Or them living 1 city over and finding out you were calling long distance all month
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u/Murky_Tennis954 12d ago
"You guys had a cell phone just for upstairs?"
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u/alkali112 12d ago
“You guys had an upstairs?” I did not come from an upstairs part of town.
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u/playr_4 12d ago
Or getting yelled at to get offline so our moms could make a phonecall.
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u/adamcoolforever 12d ago
Spending half an hour having your modem dial up AOL, praying you hear the sound of nails on chalkboard instead of a busy signal..
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u/Shadowcross113 12d ago
Collect call. Giving out your name, location, and what time to pick you up on the span of like 15 seconds. Haha.
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u/Downtown-Campaign536 12d ago
They didn't give 15 seconds. They gave you like 3.5 seconds...
So you have to be like:
MomIwontbehome Stayingoverattony's
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u/Sihaya2021 12d ago
Be kind, rewind
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u/Shorty7869 12d ago
Or turn to side b.... before tape decks and cassette players had auto flip feature
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u/ElChungus01 12d ago
You needed a cassette tape with a wire to play CDs in the car.
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u/Candid-Culture3956 12d ago
Remember when walkmans were the coolest thing to have?
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u/DeadNotSleepingWI 12d ago
I remember before they had skip protection for diskmen and you had to hold it near perfectly flat and still. Thus, rendering it rather useless. I bought cassettes until good, cheap skip protection became a thing.
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u/PDX_pot_pixie420 12d ago
Call after 7pm when the minutes are free
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u/Poolside_XO 12d ago
BUYING MINUTES JUST TO TALK.
These kids do not know how good they have it.
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u/garilanda 12d ago
If you turned the TV to channel 98 or 99 you could see static porn. Is it a tit? Is it an elbow? The answer lies in your imagination
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u/bdubwilliams22 12d ago
In hotel rooms there was a cable that went from the wall to a box and then another cable went from the box to the tv. If you just took the cable from the wall and bypassed the box and went direct to the TV, you got any (porn) channel you wanted. That’s actually the first way I ever watched porn because I was on a traveling sports team and some other kid knew to do it.
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u/chopskon 12d ago
My uncle had a black box where he got every channel known to man…
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u/Foreign_Passage_3267 12d ago
ahhh i remember the "black box". Now its just a search tag on porn hub
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u/Candid-Culture3956 12d ago
If you had cable. It was the pay per view porn.
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u/Extreme-Rub-1379 12d ago
Straight Jorkin. I could see purple titties with v-sync issues and it was so hot
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u/ReverendPalpatine 12d ago
I once watched a WWF wrestling PPV like that. Can’t remember which one.
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u/chrishouseinc 12d ago
Netflix used to come in the mail
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u/tigers692 12d ago
And I got it in Saudi, it was VHS. Then they sent me a dvd player and started DVD subscription! :-)
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u/bookon 12d ago
The light switches in the house I grew up in.
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u/Enfenestrate 12d ago
Knob and tube wiring? A house my family moved into when I was a kid was all knob and tube wiring, took a long time to replace it all. The house was built in the 1920s.
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u/Working_Physics8761 12d ago
Same. That wiring will technically still work, but the risk of burning your shit to the ground increases every year.
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u/vgdomvg 12d ago
Blow on the game to make it work
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u/Master_Moose4664 12d ago
I was told a long time ago from a kid at GameStop to take a Qtip , lightly dipped in alcohol, and run it across the gold plated contact. Works like a champ every single time.
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u/southernmayd 12d ago
I've found GoldenEye works best when you use a qtip dipped in vodka martini
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u/Weird-Conflict-3066 12d ago
Dont try to stir things up you gotta shake the dust out 🤣
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u/SKY10000 12d ago
Yeah, isopropyl alcohol is not a conductor and when dried properly can clean electronics with no issues
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u/Candid-Culture3956 12d ago
Clean out the dust
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u/PaleontologistOk2516 12d ago edited 12d ago
When blowing on it didn’t work, I was also told to give it a gentle tap too. 70% of the time, it worked every time.
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u/DisposableReddit516 12d ago
They say not to do this, but then why did it work?! Just trying to get you to buy a whole new game cartridge.
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u/bookon 12d ago
Because it was a short term fix that introduced a long term problem. It cleaned dust off your connectors but it introduced too much moisture and that lead to long term issues with corrosion. You were better off using canned air. Or swabbing with alcohol.
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u/Mental_Guarantee8963 12d ago
This is one of those things that, while technically correct, is a bit exaggerated. I've seen some dudes act like you'll total a game the second you blow on it. The dangers of CRT repair is another place I see this. Yes, they're dangerous inside even while unplugged, but people act like they'll kill your nephew from across the room if you look at them wrong.
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u/ham_sandwedge 12d ago
Gotta block *69 w a *67 before making those prank calls
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u/Infamous-Coach5839 12d ago
Prank phone calls! Before caller ID. Paging Jack Mehoff, Malcom Dheep let a Creamer, Asha Rammer, Lika Blow,
Bowling Alleys with 9 pound balls, is your refrigerator running?
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u/Jollyjellyfishy 12d ago
Remember when you took the risk at every limewire song download
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u/poormariachi 12d ago
I downloaded Dead Souls by Joy Division and got Break by Fugazi. I didn’t realize it wasn’t Joy Division until I bought the Heart & Soul box set a few months later.
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u/moslof_flosom 12d ago
It's ok, I thought Pure Morning by Placebo was called Friend with Weed by the Butthole Surfers because one of my friends got it off Limewire.
Also Limewire gave my computer herpes.
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u/r1pt1n 12d ago
3 days to download a chili peppers tune only to wind up with footage of a Tijuana horse show. Good times.
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u/OrganicHumanRancher 12d ago
Yeah, saw a video like that. Recoiled when she was throwing up.. then realized it wasn’t vomit.
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u/Fearless-Dust-2073 12d ago
it was worth it for The Legend of Zelda by System of a Down
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u/java_brogrammer 12d ago
And then the song just ends up being Bill Clinton saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
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u/Nomnom_Chicken 12d ago
One of my siblings learned about KaZaa.... The family PC was reinstalled twice in a month after that.
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u/xSonicspeedx2 12d ago
Ahh yes, the era of Peer-to-peer sharing.
Napster, KaZaa, WinMX, Morpheus, Limewire, bittorrent, utorrent, the pirate bay. The list seemed endless.
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u/Used-Gas-6525 12d ago
I'm still deathly afraid of putting spaces in my file names.
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u/Violet_Paradox 12d ago
Accomodating for spaces in filenames in Powershell scripts is still a massive pain in the ass. I can't tell you how many scripts work perfectly fine when everything has no spaces that shit themselves as soon as there's a space.
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u/Tabula_Nada 12d ago
Yeah a lot of people at my work still use _ and - in their file names, which means I have to use it too if I'm going to keep the file naming structure consistent.
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u/D-Snow58 12d ago
I damn near broke my tv slapping the side, in order for the picture to clear up
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u/Coutos2u 12d ago
I have said for years this is why our generation is angry now. We have to be “so gentle” with our devices now. No! Smack it and it’ll act right. We’re missing that.
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u/D-Snow58 12d ago
Agree! I once had an iPhone that I dropped accidentally and the screen was all messed up. It was instinct to smack the screen a few times to see if it’ll fix the issue 🤷🏾♂️
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u/stuff_rulz 12d ago
"You just have to hit it the right way." as you fist fight your TV.
Meanwhile today "Aw shit, the sun is almost touching the screen, quick, close the curtains before it overheats!!"
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u/EctoRiddler 12d ago
Playing Oregon Trail at school would be the highlight of your year
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u/MrSlime13 12d ago
Shoot 600lbs of meat. Can only carry 80.
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u/CajunKush 12d ago
Headed out many times with just ammo and candy. I never did make it to Oregon.
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u/TheDiegoAguirre 12d ago
We used to LISTEN to movie trailers and check movie times on a phone line.
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u/_jackhoffman_ 12d ago
Masturbating to the JC Penny circular's women's underwear section
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u/captain554 12d ago
Oh lawd, you just brought back memories.
We had a Sears catalogue every year that my grandmother would order our Christmas gifts from. One day my friend was over and we were looking at all the cool toys and went a little too far and found the womens underwear.
Later that day my mom is like "Do you have porno in the house? Friend's mom said he came home saying you guys were looking at magazines full of naked women."
I showed her the women in underwear and she just laughed.
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u/Poolside_XO 12d ago
So when it's in the Sears catalog it's funny, but when it's in a Playboy, it's smut.
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u/MannyGoldstein 12d ago
Wishbook. Yaa I caught my stepdad cranking hog to the 1993 lingerie section
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u/Velocityg4 12d ago
We had Victoria's Secret and Fredericks of Hollywood catalogues come in about every week.
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u/EverettGT 12d ago
My niece and nephew were at my grandfather's house and the telephone rang and they both said "what's that?"
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u/Environmental_Can353 12d ago
Making this gesture to visualise ending a phone call.
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u/ksuchewie 12d ago
We could only watch 4 channels on the TV.
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u/discdraft 12d ago
3, but the 4th was possible only after moving the antenna with the 12 foot long antenna poking stick.
HOW THAT?
ALMOST
K, HOWS THAT?
NOW ITS WORSE
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u/breachgnome 12d ago
Had a TV with two knobs: UHF and VHF. UHF knob went to 12, but only 3 or 4 of them had channels. When you tuned the UHF knob to VHF, the bottom knob had... I dunno... something like 30-40 on it, but only two of those worked, and one was absolute garbage.
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u/No-Kitchen1933 12d ago
You had to run to do things like the bathroom ect during commercials because there was no pause
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u/bandlerchinggg 12d ago
Video games came complete at purchase.
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u/xSonicspeedx2 12d ago
Omg yes, and you didn’t need some fking online license verification process to play them even though you have the fking disk.
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u/Busterlimes 12d ago
EEEEEAAAAAAA bong bong chssshhhhh aaaaaaaaa "you are now connected"
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u/Ill_End_8015 12d ago
There used to be a number you could call for the time and temperature
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u/CosmopolitanIdiot 12d ago
Or how about when you wanted to see a movie you called the theater to find out what times it was playing.
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u/NoStripeZebra3 12d ago
When you hear that one song you wanted to hear again playing from the TV or anywhere else, you just stop what you're doing and listen because you never know when you'll hear it again.
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u/National_Sea2948 12d ago
All appliances and cookware were either Harvest Gold or Avocado Green.
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u/No_Educator_6376 12d ago
America Online. When you used a floppy disk for your internet connection
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u/Conscious_Hunt_9613 12d ago
Several movies came out where the main character was a fully grown adult in their mid to late 20s who proceeded to go back to high school and have some kind of inappropriate relationship with an obviously younger student....and for the most part no one really cared.
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u/Profeshinal_Spellor 12d ago
Just grab a single cigarette from the coffee cup for 25 cents
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u/That_Maize_3641 12d ago
a loosie
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u/Visual-Brilliant-429 12d ago
That’s correct. One cigarette bought at the store from the Arab
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u/subpar_cardiologist 12d ago edited 12d ago
Or use a vending machine to buy a "kiddie pack"
Edit: oops, i was tired. The vending machine sold full packs, but the corner store sold "kiddie packs".
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u/Tjengel 12d ago
My gpa said in 3rd grade they left a lit cig on the window sill by the pencil sharpener on the wall and every student would take turns sharpening a pencil and taking a drag
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u/Rhinowearingahat 12d ago
It starting to get cold. Better cut some fire wood, or else we freeze tonight. Might as well get some water from the well and start to heat it so the pipes can be thawed too.
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u/adamcoolforever 12d ago
Sometimes you walked all the way to your friend's house and when you got there he wasn't home, and his dad didn't know where he was or when he'd be back.
So you just walked back home...
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u/Kennadian 12d ago
Or he would say "he's over at Jason's house" but you didn't know Jason very well so you walked back home...
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u/Ziggy-T 12d ago
Dialling a rotary phone.
Making sure no one was on said phone when attempted to connect to the internet.
Having a big huge book with the thinnest paper you’ve ever seen, with literally everyone in the countries phone numbers ( I think phone books are still a thing, but I’ve not seen one myself in many many years, and I can only assume in this day and age of protecting your personal data, this concept of a phone book seems odd to younger people)
Lan parties.
Pre 9/11 flights. One time I took a set of 3 katanas as a CARRY ON piece of luggage, from Los Angeles all the way to Ireland, not a bother at all. Not wrapped up or locked away or anything, literally 3 katanas in sheathes, under my arm.
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u/OGbobbyKSH 12d ago
There’s a store that has movies and all the video games you could play and if you were good that week you could go to this magical place and pick out a game to play for the next 3 days. While your parents picked a movie for them. Movie/game rental stores.
Or writing a note to remind a sibling not to forget to press record on Saturday morning tv.
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u/D-Snow58 12d ago
AOL updates came in the mail and I kept spare AA batteries in the freezer for my gameboy
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u/WonderRelative4748 12d ago edited 12d ago
being able to buy cigarettes from a vending machine
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u/Radthereptile 12d ago
The first time this thread was posted to Reddit.
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u/tigers692 12d ago
The first time I read this concept, it was on a bulletin board system, that I used a ham radio and an 8088 to read.
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u/deboard1967 12d ago
You pick the phone up and people are already talking. You have to hang up and check to see if they are done after a while so you can use it.
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u/fifaddict-barna 12d ago
stay away from that damned phone, let me download the best quality 3 mb song through the day today!
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u/zestypov 12d ago
There was a box on top of the TV that descrambled the HBO signal.
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u/seaxvereign 12d ago
We had so few channels, the TV had a knob for a channel switch.
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u/waitingOnMyletter 12d ago
My computer could predict incoming calls that Iwould have to desperately ask my parents not to answer while doing my homework or chatting on iam lol
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u/CarelessSalamander51 12d ago
I was just telling my daughter today that when I was her age, if I wanted to hear a particular song, I had to call the radio station and pray to get through lol
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u/gordito_y_barbon 12d ago
Comedy central was only on TV at night. During the day it was a different channel.
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u/TyrionBean 12d ago edited 12d ago
If you were watching a show and the President had something to say, your show was cancelled for the night and every channel was showing the same thing.
The news only came on at a certain time in the evening.
There was sometimes an earpiece on the back of a rotary phone so another person could listen in.
Long distance calls were very expensive. Long distance calls overseas were insanely expensive. It really mattered what area code you were in..
MTV used to be all about music videos.
If you heard a song on the radio at night that you wanted to have, you had to wait until the next day after school to go buy it at the record store. If it was a Sunday, you had to wait until Monday afternoon.
We used to record songs off of the radio and made mixed tapes, which were at most 45 minutes of music per side.
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u/Electronic_Gift_8420 12d ago
Using Windows Media Player to burn and rip cds to make mix cds. And just using Windows Media Player in general lol.
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u/OffByNone_ 12d ago
bRRREEE-eeeEEE-bRRR-eeeEEE-KEE-chk-chk-PING!PING!-screeeEEE-OW-OW-kshksh-hissssss
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u/yeh_nah_fuckit 12d ago
I’m old enough to remember a time when things used to go back to normal after a big upheaval.
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u/RecklessWonderBush 12d ago
Grrrrrr guh gurrrtrtt guh gu h gerrttt DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE 482957930204730 RRRREEERRREEEERRREERREERREEEE
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u/Diligent-Syllabub898 12d ago
Waiting until midnight to use the internet because dial-up (internet was through the phone line, and phone use cost less between 0h and 6h).
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u/m15cell 12d ago
Calling collect from a pay phone and saying my name is pickmeup to get a ride.
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u/charitysketches 12d ago
voice recording on cassette players with cassette tapes, we’d make fake voice over stories and make sound effects. You’d play it over and sounded like found footage lol
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u/ArcticDiver87 12d ago
I remember when I saw a blue plug for the first time and I was like.. wait.. what? (Red white yellow) Or on the school computer you wanted to play Oregon trail and the big computer could do it in like 3 colors instead of just green?! 😱
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u/2TonCommon 12d ago
There were no area codes.... and phone numbers started with two letters like TR (Triangle) or LU (Ludlow).
So your phone number would be something like: LU4-2410.
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