Ship of Fools: I remember... (For older shipmates?)

Thread: I remember... (For older shipmates?) Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

When I go to the supermarket and select a couple of peaches (with only one consumer you don't want them to go brown before you can eat them) or two potatoes...
I remember when you went to the Chinaman for your fruit and veg and you mustn't handle the fruit; you said "I'd like a pound of the peaches"; and some fruiterers were a bit sniffy if you asked for just one or two apples or bananas...

When singing lessons at primary school at various stages included tonic sol-fa, diaphragmatic breathing exercises, and lots of wonderful folk songs. (On a long bus journey a few years ago I sang folk songs in my head for miles to amuse myself.)

GG

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Ah, being served in shops...

'Half a pound of mixed biscuits, please'

Shopkeeper places paper bag on scales, goes to shelf and heaves down large square tin, removes lid and cautiously shakes contents into bag, both of you watching the tembling needle approach 8 oz. Relids box, replaces it on the shelf, picks up bag and twirls it and places it on the counter.

'And a half pound of bacon'

Shopkeeper goes to the corner of the counter with the bacon slicer - above which hangs the flypaper with its speckling of luckless bluuebottle. You watch the curling strands of red and white. These too are weighed and wrapped.

'A quarter of rhubarb rock'

You process to the other end of the counter where the confectionary lives in ranks of glass jars. More bags, more scales, more weighing.

It used to take for ever.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

It did take forever but that didn't matter as much. Many things took longer but the pace of life was slower. When I first started work, we still typed things on typewriters, and there were still carbon copies and you had to take care over typing accurately. Electric typewriters or not.

It was amazing when electric typewriters that could actually remember a standard letter and pause for you to fill in the gaps came onto the market. Insert a sheet of paper into the rollers, align it carefully (because it would usually have the company logo, which you didn't want to accidentally overtype), press one key and the letter would start typing by itself. And you didn't have to bang the carriage return lever at the end of every line.

The problem was that you had to type the standard letter carefully with no mistakes and there was only room in the tiny memory for one such letter, but it was a start and quite incredible.

In my first job photocopying was done at the local post office/newsagents so out I would go with a bundle of papers and some coins clutched in my other hand.

The phone rang a lot more often and people didn't expect instant responses to their letters. Some colleagues smoked like chimneys - you learnt to open certain office doors carefully when misty blue fug seeped out from underneath.

[ 30. January 2016, 08:13: Message edited by: Ariel ]

Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :

I remember going to see my mum in her office when she started working for the Education Department and the photocopies came out wet and had to be hung to dry on a conveniently placed line close by.

Those tins of biscuits were such a wondrous sight to me - and the Chocolate Digestives individually wrapped in foil! My dad called them Chocolate Died-yesterdays for some obscure reason.

...and nothing was presealed in plastic!

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Originally posted by Ariel:

quote:
In my first job photocopying was done at the local post office/newsagents so out I would go with a bundle of papers and some coins clutched in my other hand.

In my first job we didn't have a photocopier. Copies were made by cutting a stencil in a thick plastic template. You had to do it on a special typewriter which was strong enough to cut the letters right through the plastic. One mistake and you had to start all over again. Then the stencil was used to run off copies in a sort of mangle affair, which printed in purple-pink ink. We thought it was incredibly high tech.

Later our Prof's secretary had one of the first typewriters with a memory. I remember her coming into coffee one morning as white as a sheet. "What's wrong?" we asked. "I don't know what I did, but it's suddenly printing all Prof's letters in italics". Poor Rosemary. I think they had to get someone from IBM to reprogram it.

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

All trains were pulled by proper steam engines. None of them were preserved. They were driven and fired by people who were paid to do it, not volunteers for fun. And when you went on holiday in another part of the country, they were all quite different. Some of them, even had polished numbers on plates instead of painted on the sides of their cabs.

Oh, and in the trains, you sat in separate compartments.

Posted by Nenya (# 16427) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
In my first job we didn't have a photocopier. Copies were made by cutting a stencil in a thick plastic template. You had to do it on a special typewriter which was strong enough to cut the letters right through the plastic. One mistake and you had to start all over again. Then the stencil was used to run off copies in a sort of mangle affair, which printed in purple-pink ink. We thought it was incredibly high tech.

Offset litho! My school made copies that way, and it was part of the curriculum at secretarial college! I'm envious of Ariel's typewriters - there were two electric ones at my college (golf balls) and the rest were manuals. I often wonder whether my fingers would strong enough to type on them for any length of time now.

And the sweetie shop with the jars! I used to go in after school if mum said I was allowed, and get a quarter of Pink Pips or Cough Candy, weighed out by the shop lady and handed to me in a little white paper bag.

We used to have the chimney sweep to the house as well; everything had to be shrouded in white dust sheets.

And who's calling who an older shipmate? It wasn't that long ago! [Biased]

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
In my first job we didn't have a photocopier. Copies were made by cutting a stencil in a thick plastic template. You had to do it on a special typewriter which was strong enough to cut the letters right through the plastic. One mistake and you had to start all over again. Then the stencil was used to run off copies in a sort of mangle affair, which printed in purple-pink ink.

Not offset litho but a Banda machine like this one - ah, that lovely smell of alcohol on the fresh copies, the true scent of geography lessons. My wife managed to do line drawings in three colours on them!

[ 30. January 2016, 09:46: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]

Posted by Nenya (# 16427) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
In my first job we didn't have a photocopier. Copies were made by cutting a stencil in a thick plastic template. You had to do it on a special typewriter which was strong enough to cut the letters right through the plastic. One mistake and you had to start all over again. Then the stencil was used to run off copies in a sort of mangle affair, which printed in purple-pink ink.
Not offset litho but a Banda machine like this one - ah, that lovely smell of alcohol on the fresh copies, the true scent of geography lessons. My wife managed to do line drawings in three colours on them!

You're right; my mistake. Yes, they featured a lot in my geography lessons too. [Smile]

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I remember Bandas. We had one in the chaplaincy at uni for doing notices (and at school, but we never saw that one.

We did have a typewriter at home, which I occasionally used, but it was hard work. When I first started to work, all our memos had to by typed by the office secretary, with duplicate paper, on a typewriter.

I was working in IT - software development, so cutting edge. We have half a dozen terminals around the office, and had to code on coding sheets, then get them typed up by the punch girls (and yes, they were all female).

And after work, there were 4 channels on the TV, that closed down sometime after midnight. That was luxury compared to the 3 channels we used to have, and the TV that you had to get up and tune.

Does anyone else remember having to switch their TV between 405 and 625 lines (the latter for BBC2 only, I think).

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

It's been a snowy morning - which reminded me what an epoch it was when we first got a wall-mounted heater in the bathroom. Before that, getting out of the bath was like surfacing in the Bering Sea.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Curiously, I have come into the house having a discussion about Bandas (with mirror written ink on shiny sheets) and Gestetners (with ink in the drum and waxed paper stencils, with correcting fluid like nail varnish), because I had raised the question of how people spread conspiracy theories before the internet, and convenient photocopiers.

The school was given a photocopier, which was a long box - six foot? - about a foot deep, with a roll of paper, and a tank of fluid in it, which I (as responsible for audio-visual stuff) had to drain every holiday. It had a peculiar smell. The copies were damp, and faded. As did the Banda copies.

[ 30. January 2016, 16:06: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
Not offset litho but a Banda machine like this one - ah, that lovely smell of alcohol on the fresh copies!

Spirit duplicators, we called them over here, or simply Ditto machines. And only the school secretary was allowed to operate the Xerox machine -- we teachers couldn't -- and it took a special kind of paper.

Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on :

I can remember when we got our first TV - hired, not owned, of course. It was to watch the wedding of Princess Margaret Rose to Anthony Armstrong Jones.

And the first 'fridge! Oh, the sheer delight of ice cream that wasn't half-melted.

But it being a parsonage house I was into my teens before we had reliable heating and I had my first really hot bath.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:

And after work, there were 4 channels on the TV, that closed down sometime after midnight. That was luxury compared to the 3 channels we used to have, and the TV that you had to get up and tune.

Does anyone else remember having to switch their TV between 405 and 625 lines (the latter for BBC2 only, I think).

My earliest memories of television are of Watch with Mother (Andy Pandy, Tales From the Riverbank etc), news broadcasts that seemed to take about ten minutes and two channels; we were always tuned to the BBC but there was also "the other side" as my Mum always called ITV.

I remember getting our first 625 line (UHF) set in 1969 and it coincided with the rollout of BBC2. Maybe there wasn't room on the old VHF/405 line band for more TV channels?

Posted by M. (# 3291) on :

I remember the school trip to see a computer. It filled a whole room - we weren't allowed in the room, of course, we just looked at it through big glass windows.

Later, in my first job, we got a huge new machine, called a facsimile machine - apparently, it meant you could send letters down the telephone line! It was terribly exciting and completely useless, because no-one we dealt with had one.

M.

[ 30. January 2016, 16:50: Message edited by: M. ]

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Nenya:
And the sweetie shop with the jars! I used to go in after school if mum said I was allowed, and get a quarter of Pink Pips or Cough Candy, weighed out by the shop lady and handed to me in a little white paper bag.

Saturday treat, my dad and I would call in at the newsagents on the way back from the library. I usually had a quarter of American hardgums and "coconut teacakes" to eat as I read through my newly borrowed library books.

The jars weren't limited to sweets. In Dublin we used to call in to Bewley's in Grafton St, all highly polished dark wood counters and shelves with an array of huge canisters coloured with Oriental designs. The aroma of freshly ground coffee was everywhere. You could ask for a half pound of a particular coffee or tea and have that weighed out of one of the huge canisters onto the scales and poured into a packet for you.

The only place I know that still does this is Cardew's in Oxford, although their canisters are smaller and undecorated. The smell is still rich and aromatic, though.

Posted by Graven Image (# 8755) on :

I remember my phone number had two letters followed by just 4 numbers. We had a party line which we shared with two other homes so you had to listen to make sure someone was not using the line before you started to dial. I remember that we waited until the evening to call long distance because it was less expensive. I remember when there was no emergency number and you dialed the operator for police and fire. I remember in Washington D.C that women were not allowed to sit at a bar and could only have a drink while seated at a table. She also could not stand up with a drink in her hand. No drinks were served on Sunday. You could not purchase anything you had to cook on Sunday, so you could buy bread or milk but not eggs. They were called blue laws.

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

Lots of little shops other than in the high street. I remember at least 5, plus a butcher and a baker. And we had two department stores, one of which sent money around the store in tubes on wires.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

Speaking of shopping, Saturday was half day. If you didn't manage to get the shopping completed by midday, tough luck, the shops had closed and the markets had packed up and you had to wait until Monday.

Wages came in cash, weekly, in small brown pay packets which you queued up to get from a sour-faced employee behind a grille.

Milk was delivered in glass bottles from a crack-of-dawn milk float and left on the doorstep. The birds sometimes used to peck holes in the foil tops to get at the cream, and we would have to throw the rest of the pint away.

Posted by Carex (# 9643) on :

The transition from typewriters to computer keyboards (even for punch cards) was more difficult than expected for those who were used to doing their own typing, because of course one used the lower case "el" for the number 1 and the upper case "oh" for zero. Somehow the computers didn't understand that approach...

Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :

My earliest memories of home include a telephone like this. Then, when I was eight years old, we moved out in the country and had this as our phone. Except ours wasn't this pretty.

It felt like we had gone to the dark ages.

Posted by John D. Ward (# 1378) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
It's been a snowy morning - which reminded me what an epoch it was when we first got a wall-mounted heater in the bathroom. Before that, getting out of the bath was like surfacing in the Bering Sea.

This, so very much so. And this is fairly recent history as well. I moved into my present house in 1988, and heating in the bathroom was conspicuous by its absence. A few years later, when I had wooden window frames at the back of the house replaced with aluminium, I had a wall-mounted fan heater installed in the bathroom. Taking a bath in the winter months was no longer an extreme form of self-mortification!

Posted by Hilda of Whitby (# 7341) on :

My mother ground meat from the butcher using a meat grinder she would clamp onto the kitchen counter. Something like this.

She would dampen clothing to be ironed (there was lots and lots of ironing) using a clean soda bottle filled with distilled water. The bottle had a cork stopper with a sprinkle head attached. Like this.

We used to have a wringer washer in the basement. It looked like the one on the far right in the picture. My mother used it in the 1940s and sometime into the 1950s.

For years we used to hang our clothes up outside to dry, and in winter inside on wooden racks in the basement. It wasn't until 1963 or so that we got a dryer.

Mom used metal pants stretchers . She would wrestle the wet pants from the washer onto these drying racks and the pants would dry with a nice crease.

She used to wax the floors with Jubilee floor wax , which has been reintroduced, She would clean the oven with this ghastly oven cleaner from Easy-Off. It was this horrible brown muck that she would paint onto the interior of the oven--it was a huge mess.

I remember all this stuff because my older sister and I helped with housework!

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

My grandparents' tin bath was stored in a shed midweek. It was taken in on a Saturday night and filled with jugfuls of hot water. The side of you facing the fire burned and the side away from the fire froze, resulting in an odd red/blue mottling of the skin which we called tinker's tartan.

At least they had an inside toilet - one of Granny's sisters still had her toilet at the bottom of the garden.

[ 30. January 2016, 20:39: Message edited by: North East Quine ]

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

If the milk was left when there was a frost, there could be a milk candle projecting up from the bottle, having pushed the top up and off with its expansion.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Milk was delivered in glass bottles from a crack-of-dawn milk float and left on the doorstep. The birds sometimes used to peck holes in the foil tops to get at the cream.

You didn't have one of these on your porch for the milk bottles?

And remember letting the milkman know if you wanted anything extra delivered via one of these (fifth photo down) stuck in an empty milk bottle?

Posted by Stercus Tauri (# 16668) on :

Early 1950s, my aunt's house in Greenock had the toilet in the kitchen. Years later they built a cubicle around it. I think it may have been classified as a near-slum, but we didn't mind - it was a nice place and a friendly neighbourhood.

Many more years later, working in Edinburgh, if I wanted a photocopy my boss would wish me good luck and I went on bended knee to the Manager's secretary to request the key to the machine. If she didn't approve, then that was the end of it - no copies.

And then there was petrol for my first car... Three gallons for £1.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
And remember letting the milkman know if you wanted anything extra delivered via one of these (fifth photo down) stuck in an empty milk bottle?

No, it was the good old fashioned method of writing a note on the back of an envelope or similar then rolling it up and carefully wedging it into the top of the empty bottle. Sometimes it slipped down into it, and had to be extricated carefully with tweezers and curses. No such thing as the flag system. It was either that or one of us sprinting down the road very early in the morning trying to catch the milkman before the float disappeared.

Strangely enough I actually saw a milk float as recently as last week, delivering early in the morning. I don't see why not, given that home deliveries seem to be back in fashion and increasing in popularity; but it was the first milk float I've seen in - oh, a good 20 years.

[ 30. January 2016, 21:08: Message edited by: Ariel ]

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

Does anyone else remember the switch from town gas to natural gas? For us, this was done a street at a time, and caused havoc with roadworks and individual upgrades.

We had a gas boiler put in, meaning we no longer had to stoke the coal one. My mum is still using it (must be 45 years later). We converted our coal store into a more general store room, and it is now a downstairs toilet.

That is going right back into my earliest memories!

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

Our kids (8 and 10) think it's normal to ring granny on our phone , and normal to have to start again if you mess up one of the 11 digits!

And we use a hand-wound meat grinder like the one above (lacking the correct Kenwood A701 attachment, which I guess I could find on ebay). Except, in terms which are perhaps questionable within the politics of sexual preference, we call it the 'mincer'.

Posted by Landlubber (# 11055) on :

I remember the shock the first time I saw items from my own lifetime in a museum. (I am, alas, accustomed to it now.) I remember a knitted swimsuit which I think I saw in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood (how mine did hang down once wet and how cold and clammy it was when I left the water).

I do admire Hilda of Whitby's wringer washer. My grandmother had a copper and a mangle and I remember the excitement when my mother got a twin tub washing machine, although the wet clothes still had to be hauled out of the washer into the spin dryer.

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

A television programme, I can't remember which one, had a weekly "mystery object." One week the "mystery object" was a darning mushroom, identical to the one in my sewing box. It was described in terms which suggested that no-one alive would be likely to recognise it. I'm not that old!

(Socks being cheaper than darning wool, I no longer darn, but it was a perfectly normal thing for someone born in the 1960s to have learned.)

Posted by basso (# 4228) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
You didn't have one of these on your porch for the milk bottles?

And remember letting the milkman know if you wanted anything extra delivered via one of these (fifth photo down) stuck in an empty milk bottle?

In the Bay Area, milk freezing wasn't ever a problem. We had a plywood crate for our milk bottles.

I do remember the order dingus - hadn't thought of those things in ages! Don't remember ever using one, though. It may be that we didn't order things much from the milkman. (I grew up on a steep hillside: the milkman had to back his truck up the hill because it wouldn't make it up in a forward gear, and the road was a dead end at the top.)

Speaking of milk deliveries, did anyone get interesting things on the stoppers of the milk bottles? Our dairy ran a series of US Presidents. I saved the little cardboard stoppers (after Mom cleaned them!) and glued them to the scorecard the dairy provided. That's how I memorized the names and order of the presidents. In those days the series ended with JFK...

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Stercus Tauri:
Early 1950s, my aunt's house in Greenock had the toilet in the kitchen.

A quarter century or so later, my parents bought a house with a toilet in the kitchen. The first thing we did was get rid of it and put one somewhere else!

I was quite small at the time, and had a regular school exercise on Monday to write about what I did at the weekend. My classmates all wrote about going to the park, riding bikes and going swimming. I wrote about bending pipes and installing radiators.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by jedijudy:
My earliest memories of home include a telephone like this.

Ours was like that, except the cord was not coiled and was covered in fabric, and there was no dial. You picked up the phone and gave the operator the number you were calling.

Party line numbers ended in a letter: J, M, R or W. Our number was 4927-W. You could call someone on your party line, for example 4927-J, by telling the operator, "Ring J, please."

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by M.:
I remember the school trip to see a computer. It filled a whole room - we weren't allowed in the room, of course, we just looked at it through big glass

The computer mouse must have been enormous, elephant sized.

Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
... only the school secretary was allowed to operate the Xerox machine -- we teachers couldn't -- and it took a special kind of paper.

It did indeed, and it was horrid. It had a ghastly scratchy quality about it and smelled funny. Not like the delectable aroma of a freshly-run Banda.

Reading Firenze's post about the shop-keeper made me think of this.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

We did a local survey in the early 80s and the collator entered all the data on to punch cards.

Then I had (briefly) a computer studies class a bit later. Computers were much simpler then – Maybe 1984. When I was going to be away for a week I divided the class into groups and arranged for them to visit places in the city where computers were used – city council, library etc. One lad who was probably more knowledgeable about computers than most of the class went to the multinational computer company that the Grandad was currently working for and was amazed when they sent a computer message to their US parent and got a reply straight back.

Telephones not so long ago disconnected if you were dialling and paused to check a digit. You had to start again and dial the number without a break.

And I remember the hours I've stood on the table while Mum/friend/husband pinned up a hem and got it dead level. Hah!!

GG

[ 31. January 2016, 06:48: Message edited by: Galloping Granny ]

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:
Telephones not so long ago disconnected if you were dialling and paused to check a digit. You had to start again and dial the number without a break.

They still do.

Nobody has yet mentioned that it was the era before mobile phones. On public transport, people would read real books or newspapers, or actually talk to each other. You made arrangements in advance on where to meet, or you drew up a shopping list before going out instead of phoning someone from the supermarket to ask what was needed when you got there. (It was also possible to avoid phone calls you didn't want just by getting out of reach of the landline.)

Journeys were relatively peaceful unless some rebellious youth had brought a transistor radio with them. Or someone was smoking like a chimney on the bus.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
Does anyone else remember the switch from town gas to natural gas? For us, this was done a street at a time, and caused havoc with roadworks and individual upgrades.

I remember that and the "High-speed gas" slogan. It was quite the thing and caused a bit of a hoo-hah as the natural gas had a higher calorific value than town gas, so the price was higher per unit volume.

It set a trend however as there were some cowboy electricians in the 'Seventies going round doing conversions for "Nuclear electricity"!

Posted by Arabella Purity Winterbottom (# 3434) on :

The party line. I grew up in semi-rural NZ, and telephone lines were shared between up to 6 or 7 houses. There was a particular clicking noise that meant someone was listening to your conversation without participating.

The advent of an inside toilet was epoch making in our family. I think I was about 16.

Milk deliveries by horse and cart - my town was the last in NZ to have these, and the last one was some time in the 1980s.

Full school earthquake drills. The ones where you got under your desk every month until the bell rang the all clear. As a child I took them for granted: its only as an adult that I've realised that 1931 wasn't all that long ago for the adults around me at the time. (There was an earthquake that flattened the two cities in the area in 1931, and my grandfather was sworn as a special constable).

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

I still get a doorstop milk delivery, but it does not come on a horse drawn float, or even an electric one.

There was a good practical reason why horses were used for delivering milk long after everything else had been motorised.

Posted by anoesis (# 14189) on :

This is hilarious. I'm thirty-eight, so I don't think I even qualify as middle-aged yet. But: I remember, let's see, manual typewriters, yes, carbon copies, yes, banda machines, yes, two channels only on the TV, the TV ending at a certain time of night, yes, bakelite telephones yes, party lines, yes, glass milk bottles delivered by milkmen, yes, darning mushrooms yes (my Dad darned his own socks of an evening while listening to a big ugly SONY wireless with a literal dial you wound to change frequencies). Oh, and everyone smoking all the time, yes.

On the other hand, I most certainly don't remember steam engines as anything other than curiosities or biscuits that didn't come already packaged. Or chewing tobacco and the associated spitting, which my father-in-law (late sixties) was relating to us as a normal part of his childhood a few months ago. That was a little hard to wrap my head around (he's not OLD-old, after all), but what really made my eyes widen was when he mused, 'I remember the first time I saw something made out of plastic. I suppose I was about twelve.' Obviously there's a lot of old shit that I am old enough to remember, but in my life plastic has just always been - although perhaps less ubiquitous than now.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

I can just remember working steam trains. Our local station is on a branch line, and it was the last line in the old British Rail Southern Region to be converted to diesel. The "up" trains (going "up" to London) went through a tunnel immediately before the station. As the engine came out of the tunnel there would be an enormous burst of smoke which had been confined by the tunnel. The engine would appear as a monster through a dense cloud of smoke - and the noise was extraordinary.

As a very small child I was terrified. I remember hiding behind my mother's skirt on the station platform. I was convinced the monster was going to attack me. So I hated going to London because it meant waiting for the scary train.

One day we were going to London and I was fussing and complaining. My mother said, "Don't worry, it's a nice train now". And when we got down to the station the train came in quietly with no smoke at all - the service had been converted to diesel. What a relief! This must have been in the very early 1960s.

My mother preferred the diesel trains too, because they were so much cleaner. The steam engines covered every surface with a black sooty deposit.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
On public transport, people would read real books or newspapers, or actually talk to each other.

Really? On the London Underground (especially if the train stopped in the tunnel) people gazed across the carriage, trying not to cough and studiously not meeting the eyes of the person opposite.

And on compartment trains you could be "trapped" by a loquacious companion, especially if the train had no corridor.

Generally, I agree, travelling was quieter, and better for it.

Re. "Spitting" - I remember arriving in Glasgow in 1975 and being puzzled by the "No spitting" notices in the Subway trains. They must have been the last places to have them - we certainly didn't have them in London.

And another thing: bus conductors! Who has them now (except, I think, for one "heritage" route in London and a route in the Dundee area)?

[ 31. January 2016, 08:13: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
The engine would appear as a monster through a dense cloud of smoke - and the noise was extraordinary. As a very small child I was terrified.

I was frightened at seeing sparks flying out of the chimney as they rushed past at night.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

Bakelite telephones remind me of my grandmother [Votive]

Posted by Signaller (# 17495) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Milk was delivered in glass bottles from a crack-of-dawn milk float and left on the doorstep.

It still is round here. We leave a stack of empty yoghurt pots on the doorstep for the milkman to put over the bottles to stop the birds pecking the tops.

Doesn't everyone?

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Landlubber:
I do admire Hilda of Whitby's wringer washer. My grandmother had a copper and a mangle and I remember the excitement when my mother got a twin tub washing machine,

AS a child my arm followed the clothes through the wringer. It hurt, but the shirt sleeve was nicely pressed.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I remember when the "Canal area" of any town was the rough part where you wouldn't want to be especially at night. This was partly because it tended to be the industrial area, which (in the Midlands where I lived) was partially or totally abandoned.

These days, of course, the canal-side flats are premium and very sought after. How things have changed.

Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :

Going back 60 years or so my Gran had one of the old candlestick phones - and I'm also old enough to remember when the area she lived in [Tilbury and the docklands] had the big flood in the early 1950s.

My hair was blonde in those days and is now a rather distinguished shade of grey.

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

One of my minor claims to fame, is that I actually saw the first Blue Peter. I can't remember anything about it apart from its being introduced as a new programme, the little ship appearing and an explanation about the flag a ship flies when it is about to set sail. But there was a programme about whales on the same evening.

Although it's younger than me, I can't remember the Archers starting. It always seems to have been there. My grandfather listened to it. As they did not have electricity, they had a wireless which took a battery. We used to collect this for them en route when we went to visit them. It wasn't any modern sort. Nor was it a wet one like a car uses. It was a box rather the shape of a large box of chocolates.

I can, though, remember the king dying in 1952.

Posted by Landlubber (# 11055) on :

quote:
Originally posted by balaam:

quote:
Originally posted by Landlubber:
I do admire Hilda of Whitby's wringer washer. My grandmother had a copper and a mangle and I remember the excitement when my mother got a twin tub washing machine,
AS a child my arm followed the clothes through the wringer. It hurt, but the shirt sleeve was nicely pressed.

Ouch, Balaam!

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

quote:
...they had a wireless which took a battery. We used to collect this for them en route when we went to visit them. It wasn't any modern sort. Nor was it a wet one like a car uses. It was a box rather the shape of a large box of chocolates.

I, ummm, sometimes hang out with people who make a study of this kind of thing, as you can see here. The cost of an HT battery was apparently prohibitive enough before the war that many folks would just use the radio for the news and nothing more.

[ 31. January 2016, 12:27: Message edited by: mark_in_manchester ]

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

We didn't own a washing machine when we lived at Folkestone. (I don't know what we did before.) We rented one. It was a single tub Hoover with wringer, and it cost 2/6 an hour, delivered by the Zanussi brothers, one of whom would carry it down the drive by the house (a 30s semi-detached) and deposit it in the kitchen. We also had the bedlinen done by the laundry, sometimes (as I also remember the sheets being hung up down the garden).

I went for a school visit to the laundry, where I remember they had a thing for preparing shirts, in which the garment was placed over a blower, and lifted up like an inflated Jack-in-the-box over the machine - which was tall, and like something from "Chicken Run".

On one occasion while Mum was up the garden hanging out washing, I had been pretend ironing with my miniature Morphy Richards iron, just like her big one, on my miniature ironing board, and was getting unsatisfied with the results.

So I took the string which was the pretend lead and had a pretend plug at the end which only fitted a pretend socket with a suction plug to hold it to the wall, and tied to the lead of the real iron. This was not in the wall socket, for safety. So I pushed it in to he socket.

Then, realising that this did not make my pretend iron heat up, I tried to pull the plug out of the socket, and couldn't. So I went to Dad's toolbox and got a screwdriver to lever the plug out with. But it didn't work.

So I went and swapped it for a longer one, and tried again. It touched the live pin, and started sparking around like a fairy wand - I had pulled it away. My sister screamed. I don't know if I did, but Mum came rushing in. The screwdriver had a semicircular crater near the end, with little bloblets of melted iron. It was like that for years, because Dad couldn't afford to replace it, and it was a perpetual reminder.

The serious thing about this, the divine protection part, perhaps, was that the first screwdriver was entirely brass, handle and all. The second had a plastic handle. I don't remember when, or if, I ever told my parents about that.

Posted by Nenya (# 16427) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

quote:
Originally posted by M.:
I remember the school trip to see a computer. It filled a whole room - we weren't allowed in the room, of course, we just looked at it through big glass
The computer mouse must have been enormous, elephant sized.

This reminds me of two conversations I've had in the past. One with Nenlet2 when he was little: "We didn't have computers when we were your age." "So how did you get onto the Internet?" The other with my mum in the last few years of her life. "Should I get the Internet?" "Are you going to get a computer?" "No!" "Not much point getting the Internet, then, Mum..." "Oh. I just thought the Internet might be something I ought to have..." [Axe murder]

[ 31. January 2016, 14:41: Message edited by: Nenya ]

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
I remember arriving in Glasgow in 1975 and being puzzled by the "No spitting" notices in the Subway trains. They must have been the last places to have them - we certainly didn't have them in London.

They still had them on buses in Huddersfield in 1978.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

And sawdust on the floor? [Devil]

(Mind you, there was a butcher in this town which had that until a couple of years ago).

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

It used to be fun to sign out library books, writing your name on the book card, below the names of others, with their dates of borrowing and return, wondering about the additional stories the book might tell of the lives of others.

There's also 1970s fashions in facial hair. Big moutasches and atrocious sideburns. Far out, man.

Posted by Stercus Tauri (# 16668) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mark_in_manchester:

quote:
...they had a wireless which took a battery. We used to collect this for them en route when we went to visit them. It wasn't any modern sort. Nor was it a wet one like a car uses. It was a box rather the shape of a large box of chocolates.

I, ummm, sometimes hang out with people who make a study of this kind of thing, as you can see here. The cost of an HT battery was apparently prohibitive enough before the war that many folks would just use the radio for the news and nothing more.

There were animated discussions in the school playground about the relative merits of electricity and gas for light and cooking. One boy was adamant that gas radios were much better than electric ones, as his parents had one.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
And sawdust on the floor?

(Mind you, there was a butcher in this town which had that until a couple of years ago).

For a moment, I caught the whiff of butcher's shop, the meaty sawdusty smell. How does that work? It's clearly not in my nose, which is where one normally experiences smells.

Posted by Offeiriad (# 14031) on :

Change comes at a rather uneven pace, doesn't it? When Subscriber Trunk Dialling first enabled us to dial calls out of our local area (whose local codes began with 9) I was aged about 11.

STD didn't touch the remoter areas where my family came from: the trunk operator was quite bemused to be asked for 'Bishop's Castle 27' - 'that's a very short number, are you sure?' Shorter still was the number of the hotel where we stayed when my grandfather's house was full up: the Castle Hotel rejoiced in being 'Bishop's Castle 3'!

Posted by Stercus Tauri (# 16668) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Offeiriad:
Change comes at a rather uneven pace, doesn't it? When Subscriber Trunk Dialling first enabled us to dial calls out of our local area (whose local codes began with 9) I was aged about 11.

STD didn't touch the remoter areas where my family came from: the trunk operator was quite bemused to be asked for 'Bishop's Castle 27' - 'that's a very short number, are you sure?' Shorter still was the number of the hotel where we stayed when my grandfather's house was full up: the Castle Hotel rejoiced in being 'Bishop's Castle 3'!

That does take you back a while. These days nobody boasts about having STD.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

My dad used to talk of the property at the end of Wastwater in the Lake District having the number "Wastwater 1". That was it.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

One of my first girlfriends, her telephone number was 782.

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:
They still had them on buses in Huddersfield in 1978.

I've seen "no spitting" on buses in the last decade.

Posted by basso (# 4228) on :

In the mid to late 70s, I had to return a customer's call who lived in the wilds of Humboldt County in northern California. The only way to reach that number was to be connected to a local operator, who would route the call. I think it was the last such switchboard in the state. (I think I've actually seen the hardware in a museum up there!)

The real trick wasn't getting that operator to connect me - it was reaching her in the first place. Closer to the Bay Area, it involved lines like "You want an operator? Do you need directory assistance, sir? You say that is an exchange name, sir? What is its number? It must have a number, sir."

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

In the Milton Keynes Museum they have a couple of switch boards, all working. And you can operate them! It's absolutely brilliant.

Posted by TonyK (# 35) on :

So many memories being triggered.

There was a (genuine) little old lady who lived up the road from us in about 1950. She had a television, which was pretty rare in those days and my brothers and I used to walk up to her house on a Sunday(?) evening to watch Muffin the Mule.

I remember the king dying the day before my 8th birthday in 1952 and hearing very serious family discussion as to whether it would be appropriate to hold my birthday party the next day. You can imagine my feelings! It did take place...

I don't know what happened to the old lady, but we didn't go to her house to see the Coronation in 1953 - we listened to it on the wireless!

My earliest recollection that I can positively date was asking my mother(?) about a road sign showing 5 rings and being told it pointed the way to the London Olympics - 1948 and aged 4!

Milk in bottles being targeted by the blue-tits; my grandfather rushing out with bucket and spade to collect the horse-droppings from the road for the compost heap; ice on the inside of the window on frosty mornings (my bedroom had a fireplace, but you only had a fire if you were really ill!); the older boys next door who had every copy of the Eagle comic since it had been started; the last trams running from my home town of Purley, Surrey and seeing a cyclist getting caught in the tram rail and falling off; our Bakelite telephone (number UPLands 1705).

And no doubt many more too boring to mention!

Posted by balaam (# 4543) on :

quote:
Originally posted by TonyK:
we listened to it on the wireless!

I had a large valve wireless at the end of my bed well into the 1970s after the rest of the family had upgraded to the portability of transistor radio. (Separate transistors in radios seem a long time ago in this age of DAB).

The reason for my hanging on to old technology was the valves that powered it. It made a good practice guitar amplifier.

Wish I still had it <sigh>.

Posted by georgiaboy (# 11294) on :

So many memories of long ago (not THAT long, it seems really).

Growing up in small town & farm in KY, USA.

First event seen on TV (B&W 12" screen): Coronation of HMQE2. We didn't have a set; went to landlord's in next door apt. Telecast was made possible by the network (CBS?) outfitting an airplane with a film lab, so that they could process the film while over the Atlantic.

Phones hung on the wall, no dial. You 'took down' the receiver and told Agnes the operator what number you wanted. Our number at home was 203 (we shared phone in the corridor with the landlord).
Agnes also rang the noon whistle each day, and was dispatcher for the volunteer fire dept.

At our house on the farm we were on a party line with IIRC 7 others. There was one subscriber (maiden lady sisters) who ALWAYS listened in on everybody's calls. All phones on the line rang for all calls, you had a ring pattern to identify each subscriber -- ours was 'three longs and a short.'

There were 2 grocery stores, and you could phone in your order, either to pick it up later yourself or have it delivered. The delivery man for one of the markets was named 'Blue Tinker,' don't remember the other.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by georgiaboy:
There were 2 grocery stores, and you could phone in your order, either to pick it up later yourself or have it delivered. The delivery man for one of the markets was named 'Blue Tinker,' don't remember the other.

Ah, yes. The lady who took the phone orders in our local store had the wonderful name of Essie Hagadorn.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

In liquor stores in Saskatchewan, it was required to fill out a form and the clerk would go and get your hootch. You could get a cheaper price with a prescription from a doctor. A mickey every 2 weeks (13 oz bottle, usually rye whisky) was permitted. The idea was it was to help you sleep.

Taverns (what we called pub, bars) had entrances for men and for couples. Separate seating. Beer was always in identical bottles called stubbies, brands merely had different labels. They all tasted alike anyway. Improved by mixing with tomato juice which is called a Redeye. Does anyone drink Redeyes anymore?

The first big TV watching I recall was the 1969 moon landing and walking on the moon. We got our first TV just before. A crowd of about 20 waited forever watching and waiting for this to happen in our living room on the one channel we could receive.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Stercus Tauri:
One boy was adamant that gas radios were much better than electric ones, as his parents had one.

Of course, people did talk about "old-fashioned steam radios" once transistors were coming in.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

TonyK remembers

quote:
my grandfather rushing out with bucket and spade to collect the horse-droppings from the road for the compost heap

– for me, a student boarding in a quiet suburban street in 1950, it was my landlady in the morning ready to dash out with a shovel if the milkman's horse had blessed her.

Earlier, on a telephone party line, it was picking up the handset to ask "working?" and if someone else was on the line you hung up until you heard the short ring that meant the other person had finished.

Still a student, I went one evening with a few pennies to a public phone box. There was a woman talking with a pile of pennies ready, and when I heard her say "Then I had a birdie on the third" I decided to walk on to the next phone. It was a penny for three minutes.

I know that when I was a kid, but I don't know when it changed, you got olive oil from the chemist ('Cook with it? Don't be disgusting!') and I think margarine needed a prescription.

Going by train to boarding school in the late forties we went through a number of tunnels, and we could never get all the windows to shut, so it was smuts for all.

We must have got TV in the early 60s, and I remember going to an art exhibition opening and hearing the cognoscenti admitting that they knew people who'd got television but they weren't interested in knowing what programmes there were; they obviously regarded TV as pabulum for the masses. Our first TV when we were married was about 1972; it was a 12inch portable and we took it on holiday to keep up with, I think, the Forsyte Saga, but the reception where we camped was definitely patchy.

GG

[ 01. February 2016, 06:51: Message edited by: Galloping Granny ]

Posted by Aravis (# 13824) on :

I remember central heating being installed in our house when I was about 7. I didn't know what it would be like and was scared of it; probably it somehow became linked with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fiery furnace (my parents read us a lot of Bible stories). When the dreaded radiators actually arrived, their blandness was very reassuring and oddly disappointing at the same time.

I'm too young for mangles, but remember helping Mum fish clothes out of the twin tub with wooden tongs and slop them into the spinner. And how the towels stuck to the sides of the spinner and looked so different.

When I was five, we had a two week holiday in a cottage belonging to a distant relative, in a remote part of Shropshire, which had no electricity or running water. We lit oil lamps, took a calor gas stove, used a chemical toilet in a corrugated iron lean-to outside, and had to fetch water in enamelled metal jugs from a spring between two large rocks on the hillside. My brother and I loved it.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

The first TV I can remember watching was Sir Winston Churchill's funeral. Our whole family went down the road to a neighbour who had a set. The screen was about 6 inches across.

Pre-central heating, I remember my father having to dash out on cold nights to fill the coal skuttle for the kitchen boiler. My grandmother would say, "we're running low, Pat", and dad would try to persuade her that there was enough coal to last the evening, but usually she would win the argument and he'd have to brave the winter blast.

We had an old blackout curtain from the 2nd world war on the inside of the kitchen door to try to keep the heat in. It was sewn out of a grey wool blanket. As a child I used to love to get behind it and poke my fingers through the moth holes. I remember the red wool blanket stitching around the edges.

Posted by Huia (# 3473) on :

quote:
Originally posted by TonyK:
So many memories being triggered.
the older boys next door who had every copy of the Eagle comic since it had been started;

My brother used to get the Eagle, and I got The Princess, which had my favourite comic strip about Sue Day. She had a big sister called Gloria and a big brother called Sid who had a motor bike.
Her best friend was called Edie, whose brother was Tommy.

So how do I remember all this when the whereabouts of my ATM card is a constant challenge?

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

That last paragraph of Aravis' post is pretty much my mother's old home. Summer holidays was a week or so there about the time they were bringing in the hay (by horse and cart of course). There was one oil - Tilley - lamp which hung in the main room. Lighting it took about 10 minutes of priming and pumping. Going to bed, you took a candle, opened the latched door and climbed a very steep flight of stairs to 'the loft'. The bedrooms gave off one another. The beds were brass and had a single long bolster.

There was no bathroom or toilet. You washed in a basin of water warmed with a splash from the kettle on the range at the kitchen table. And you 'went' outside somewhere there was plenty of dock leaves.

[ 01. February 2016, 07:47: Message edited by: Firenze ]

Posted by Offeiriad (# 14031) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Aravis:
I remember central heating being installed in our house when I was about 7. I didn't know what it would be like and was scared of it; probably it somehow became linked with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the fiery furnace (my parents read us a lot of Bible stories). When the dreaded radiators actually arrived, their blandness was very reassuring and oddly disappointing at the same time.

I was once interviewed for a job where the previous Vicar had allowed the diocese to install radiators in every room, but had then forbidden the installation of any kind of boiler to warm them!
It was in 2005...... [Ultra confused]

Posted by crunt (# 1321) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:

quote:
Originally posted by Stercus Tauri:
Early 1950s, my aunt's house in Greenock had the toilet in the kitchen.
A quarter century or so later, my parents bought a house with a toilet in the kitchen. The first thing we did was get rid of it and put one somewhere else!

My house has a toilet in the kitchen - it's the one thing I don't like about it, but the rent is only around $150 a month, so I have put up with it for the last four years.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

I had an old flat with a bath in the kitchen. You could slosh around in there with your rubber ducks, and keep an eye on the cheese on toast nicely bubbling under the grill.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I had an old flat with a bath in the kitchen. You could slosh around in there with your rubber ducks, and keep an eye on the cheese on toast nicely bubbling under the grill.

Not quite, but I lived in a flat where a room had been (flimsily) partitioned into a bathroom and kitchen. If you left the connecting door open you could certainly both bathe and keep an eye on the dinner. It was also very dank, and stocked not only with particularly large bath-dwelling sp*ders but the occasional big, bouncy liquorice slug.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

I think somebody mentioned stencils, OMG, my first job, my boss was obsessed with this, and spent hours typing the damn things on a type-writer, and then putting nail varnish on the mistakes, and then putting it on an old Gestetner drum, which he would rotate to make copies. This would go on with many curses in his strong S. African accent, and so a day later, he would emerge with some faint copies of an article. Triumph! It now sounds like rubbing sticks to make fire.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

We had a coal fire in the living room during the winter of '63. It was lovely while you faced it but that winter was bitter enough for your back to be shivering at the same time as your front was thawing out nicely.

Not only that winter but many of them you could see your breath in the air in the bedrooms. One morning I went to draw the net curtains aside and discovered just too late that they'd frozen to the window during the night. Oops.

At junior school we wrote with chalk on slates at first, then moved on to using a pencil in lined exercise books. A few years later we were allowed to use fountain pens, provided we held them properly. That felt very grown up, even though we often came home with inky fingers.

(I'm not going to dwell on the horrors of the school inkwells, sometimes deliberately and maliciously sabotaged by pupils with chalk dust, blotting paper, bits of rubber and anything else they could adulterate it with during a particularly boring lesson.)

(Most of us brought our own ink. Remember the fun of discovering it had leaked inside your bag?)

[ 01. February 2016, 17:07: Message edited by: Ariel ]

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

This stuff is so addictive. After the war, coal was still rationed, and for a period the coal-lorries were not working in M/c, so people used to go to a central depot, and fill sacks with coal. I remember people taking an old pram to fill up. Now why is that so poignant? I guess, it's just a long time ago, and I'm an old geezer.

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

My grandparents had a coal fire. I loved it when they were lighting it - you'd put the poker in the bars of the grate, then use a page from the Echo, which used to be broadsheet, to get the fire to draw. You'd be able to hear the roar of the flames and see them through the paper, but it was always a disappointment when the paper got taken down, as the flames were quite ordinary.
Coal fires were brilliant for making toast on a toasting fork, and the best way of eating an "oyster shell" ice cream from the ice cream van was sitting in front of the fire.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

Our first house had a coal furnace in the basement, over which was a grate ("register") in the living room floor. Surprisingly, there was no register in the ceiling, so the upstairs rooms were always cold.

I loved to drop things such as crayons down the register and watch them melt on top of the furnace.

Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :

When I was a child we were on a party line. Usually by that time it would not be with somebody you knew. In my family's case the shared line was with the folks next door whose daughter was my bff. What a coup for a budding teenager to have a phone ready made for a conference call! Of course my dad headed long conversations off at the pass. No more than one fifteen minute call per evening. [Frown]

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

When I was 16, my girl-friend lived next door. We used to sit on the dustbins at the back and do heavy petting. Those bins would be clanging like the fire-doors of hell, and my mother would be trying to look out through the kitchen window, envious I suppose.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

Milk safes were in most houses. Usually at the back door. A small door opens in exterior wall where milk and other dairy was exchanged for money. A offset door to the house inside. Kept milk from freezing in winter and cooking in summer.

There was also the breadman and iceman. Bringing their products by wagon. Horse drawn until 1960s.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

I used to have the Girl comic, sister of the Eagle, with improving tales such as the martyrdom of Ss Perpetua and Felicity, or the journeys of Mary Slessor, plus archaeology adventures rivalling Indiana Jones', nurses saving the day, ballet dancers, and adventurous schoolgirls (from which I learned how to smash a window silently with the help of brown paper and a squeezy tube of condensed milk. There was a character rather like Flash Harry at St Trinians.) My sister had Swift, and the youngest Robin, from the same stable. Swift had a story in which we were all informed how to know if a tsunami was approaching, and what to do in that case, and also how to get an elephant out of a crack in the ground by pouring in rice and water!
When I was off school ill, my Dad would go to the newsagents and stock up with back numbers of Girls' Crystal and School Friend (on newsprint), and, joy of joys, the Eagle, with Dan Dare.

Sometimes I wasn't really ill. Just unable to cope with another day of Miss Merry. I never realised at the time that she hated me. She thought, and told anyone who would listen, that I was lazy, and I don't know why. I finished everything she gave me quickly, and got everything right. I wasn't as neat as others, I think.

[ 01. February 2016, 21:02: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Come the Collapse of Civilisation, one of the skills I have to offer is the ability to lay a fire properly. One hindrance though is the lack of broadsheet newspapers - you need a couple of sheets that size from which to make an impromptu bag in which to carry the ashes to the bin. It would also be good if post-apocalyptic fireplaces came with those swivelling trivets for putting teapots/small saucepans over the fire.

Posted by basso (# 4228) on :

First television: I think I must have mentioned here that we got our first television the day after JFK was killed. I remember going downtown (a couple of miles away so we rarely went there) with my dad to buy it. Some of my clear childhood memories are of watching that TV for the funeral services. And I was lying on the floor watching when Oswald was killed.

Posted by Amorya (# 2652) on :

quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
One of my first girlfriends, her telephone number was 782.

The house I lived in as a child was Bridgemere 347.

That house was a bit of an anachronism in many ways. Despite being the late 80s, we had an outside loo, the coal fire in the living room heated our hot water, and it was located in a tiny hamlet with a bus to town once a week on market day. When we moved (in 1993) to a house with central heating and fitted carpets, it was like moving to the future!

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amorya:
That house was a bit of an anachronism in many ways. Despite being the late 80s, we had an outside loo, the coal fire in the living room heated our hot water, and it was located in a tiny hamlet with a bus to town once a week on market day. When we moved (in 1993) to a house with central heating and fitted carpets, it was like moving to the future!

Outhouses. Which my father called the kybo. A few places had 2-holers, which made for some odd conversations. Outhouses made for some retentive discomfort when it was -40°C or F for 6 weeks.

I'm also reminded of being lined up and given cod liver oil in the winter.

[tangent]
I grew up in Saskatchewan, where the provincial government decided to nationalize all of the basic utility services in the middle of the 20th century. Thus electricity, telephone, natural gas and (sometimes) water and sewer mains became part of a socialized plan to bring basic services everywhere where private companies refused as uneconomic. Mandatory to tie into the mains. So we got most services to rural areas in the 1960s. Urban centres subsidize rural. We're still doing it, more recently with government-owned cell phone, internet and TV cable. Co-op grocery and hardware stores, and credit unions instead of banks, are part of the legacy. Thank God for pinko socialism in this form.
[/tangent]

Posted by jacobsen (# 14998) on :

Our local parade of shops had a butcher - half pigs hanging from the ceiling, and a cask of butter on the counter. The shopkeeper would hack out the butter and shape it into a vaguely brick-like shape before weighing and wrapping it in greaseproof paper.

This was long before the superstores, of course.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

When I was about 8 I got Enid Blyton's 'Sunny Stories'. Quite dramatic, because they came from England, and it was wartime, so none would arrive for a time, and then several together. I think they were (supposedly) weekly.

Farms had meat safe, where butchered meat (for the family, or just for the dogs?) was hung under a tree to be cool in the shade/breeze, and some sort of mesh kept the flies out. Every house we lived in would have a safe on the cool south side, to keep milk, meat, butter etc fresh. Not for deliveries, though: it only opened inwards.

I remember a family friend keen on photography, who would process his negatives and then put them in a wooden frame in the sun, with sensitive paper underneath, for the picture to be developed by the sunlight. I don't understand the process well enough – he must have known how long to leave them to get the right exposure before taking them in and fixing them, but I do remember a row of them along the foot of the wall on a sunny day.

GG

Posted by Eigon (# 4917) on :

We used to have all our holidays at a caravan site just outside Blackpool. No electric - there was a coal bunker at the back of each caravan, and we got water in buckets from a tap. The lights were gas mantles. There was a wash house with white wood draining boards and big sinks - and mangles. Me and my sister used to fight for the honour of turning the mangle handle!
Later, my gran (who looked after us at the caravan) decided to get her own mangle from a junk yard a short bus ride away. We couldn't take the frame on the bus with us, so she trundled the rollers home in her tartan shopping trolley while me and my sister carried the frame, which was unwieldy, but light.

Having no electric, we also had no TV - but the caravan in front of ours did. I remember creeping up their steps one evening so we could listen in to Star Trek. They heard us scuffling about, and opened the door very fast. I went flying backwards onto the concrete path! When they realised it was us, and what we were doing, they invited us in to see the rest of the episode, but I was too upset. Not hurt, particularly, just shaken up and horribly embarrassed at being caught.

Posted by Beenster (# 242) on :

The rag and bone man, horse drawn cart and all!

And the telly, banging on the top to get the picture, getting up to change channels.

The chimney sweep and running outside to see the brush come out of the chimney.

Frost on the windows in the morning - or rather - ice - and drawing smiley faces in the window.

Sherry. Every day, my father would come home from work and say to my mother "shall i pour us a sherry" and she would say "oh what a lovely idea". As if it was a novel idea.

Headscarfs. My mother always had a headscarf. Tied under the chin.

I do remember faxes in my first job. It was an international company so after we had left on a Friday evening, the faxes would come in from the US and then arrive from Tokyo on a monday morning. And do you remember the random cutting of pages, so some pages were longer than A4 and others only a few lines long. And the writing just faded in the sun. I had to quickly photocopy these curled up pages on a Monday morning before everything faded. That was hugely difficult.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

Ah, telly. We actually got one in about 1972 and after spending some time tuning it in, gathered round to watch the Andy Williams show, in black and white. What a novelty.

Once we moved, there was all the fun of trying to find the correct position for the indoor aerial. Some nights it ended up on top of a statuette perched precariously on the far left of the tv casing. Other nights the statuette needed a pile of precisely placed books under it. On really bad nights we had to move the television in a westerly direction so the aerial could hang from the end of a nearby bookshelf, but we then sometimes got French television which was so full of static that it wasn't worth bothering.

The radio was fun. We had my grandparents' set, which had to warm up a bit first but then we could tune in to whatever was going. The front of the radio panel had the names on, so you knew where to find them: Athlone, Hilversum, Luxembourg, as well as the more usual Home Service and Light Programme.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

The fax machine paper makes me recall the innovative IBM Selectric™ typewriters with daisy-wheel™ printer balls. My first secretary got one of these, and then an upgrade. They both had unscrewable printer balls which meant that she could change fonts from Times to Helvitica. The second one had a little wee screen which didn't actually type until the second line showed up in the viewer. Carbon copies with carbon paper naturally, copy to send, copy for the file. The viewscreen meant less use of whiteout.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I am a big fan of the "make a family live like their ancestors hated living". Currently watching "Back in time for the weekend", which is all before my time, but only just.

They have just shown a 16YO a carpet sweeper. She was scared to touch it. I remember them, although we usually had a vacuum as well.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Originally posted by Ariel:

quote:
The radio was fun. We had my grandparents' set, which had to warm up a bit first but then we could tune in to whatever was going. The front of the radio panel had the names on, so you knew where to find them: Athlone, Hilversum, Luxembourg, as well as the more usual Home Service and Light Programme.

I "inherited" our old family radio in 1988 when my parents moved into a flat. Ours was a Ferguson. I remember the mains hum as the valves warmed up. When the valves were almost hot enough the hum would fade out and the voices or music would gradually fade in. The sound quality was very good.

In 1989 I used that radio to tune in to Cologne when the Berlin Wall fell. Berlin was also marked on the tuning but I couldn't get a signal. The long wave reception from Cologne was quite good in London and the old valves coped very well.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
IBM Selectric™ typewriters with daisy-wheel™ printer balls.

The Selectric printer balls were more properly called "elements". The IBM repairman used to have a hissy fit when we called them "balls".

Daisy wheels were something different. They were the print element in daisy-wheel printers. They were called that because the letters radiated out from the center, like the petals of a daisy, and the whole thing would rotate until the correct letter was positioned in front of a little hammer, which would then strike and push the letter onto a ribbon, and then onto the paper. Sounds implausible, but they were very fast (and noisy!) for their time.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

ABR: evidently I have conflated two different things.

The next innovation was dot matrix printers, which I recall got used with with a word processing language-type thing called "Runoff". The documents had to have code inserted to some out right, much like the UBB code used on this forum's software. Word*star was the next step up from that, which I think would take us to the mid-1980s.

On another old thing, how many of us ate off of Melmac dishes and plates. Definitely pre-microwave, because they melt.

I'm also remembering standard-8 and super-9 movie film. I still have a silent movie camera I bought in the mid-1970s. 4 minutes a film and them mail away for development.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I'm also remembering standard-8 and super-9 movie film. I still have a silent movie camera I bought in the mid-1970s. 4 minutes a film and them mail away for development.

When I was working on my masters degree, one of the courses I took was a communications course. Once the instructor arranged a telephone interview with the media guru philosopher Marshall McLuhan. I remember that during the course of that interview he predicted that in a generation or two everyone would own a Super 8 movie camera and that home-made films would be ubiquitous.

What would he say to YouTube?

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

It was one of my aspirations to have a golfball typewriter. Not that I ever did. I can still remember a group of us standing around watching an electric typewriter regurgitating a letter that someone had typed into its tiny memory. The keys went up and down by themselves. "It's haunted," someone said and we giggled, a bit nervously.

Photography was still mostly black and white in my childhood. It was, however, a change from the monotony of sepia which many a photographer in an earlier generation had found frustratingly limited. There was no point in taking pictures of pretty garden scenes until colour film became more widely available, and suddenly black and white was out of favour and an expensive option for the arty-minded. And you had to get your photo right first time, no digital editing.

Snapshots of family holidays, with pronounced colour casts developing over time (blues would leach, photos often gained a reddish or yellow tint) had to be handled carefully by the edges so you didn't get your fingerprints spoiling the shiny surface. But wedding photos looked quite a lot better.

Posted by Amorya (# 2652) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
Daisy wheels were something different. They were the print element in daisy-wheel printers. They were called that because the letters radiated out from the center, like the petals of a daisy, and the whole thing would rotate until the correct letter was positioned in front of a little hammer, which would then strike and push the letter onto a ribbon, and then onto the paper. Sounds implausible, but they were very fast (and noisy!) for their time.

And you could print two copies at once by feeding two sheets of paper plus one sheet of carbon paper into the printer!

Posted by Beenster (# 242) on :

Cameras! And sending off the wretched film to Truprint or similar and waiting a few days to get 1 decent picture and a heap of awkward shots! But it was still exciting waiting for the envelope.

I remember my first watch. It was a wind up Sekonda. I was so proud to wear it, I felt very grown up.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
There was no point in taking pictures of pretty garden scenes until colour film became more widely available, and suddenly black and white was out of favour and an expensive option for the arty-minded. And you had to get your photo right first time, no digital editing.

Unless you had a darkroom at home and did your own processing. Color film was very sensitive to the temperature of the developer and the time you left it in; black and white much more forgiving of both. And you could crop the print under the enlarger and also jiggle with "dodging and vignetting" -- basically exposing parts of the print for different times to overcome exposure problems and to achieve special effects.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

Camera: Asahi Pentax Spotmatic. Single lense reflex, i.e., no viewfinder. I actually found it on a park bench, turned it into the police, who called me about a year later and said the rule on unclaimed things was that I could have it if I signed a form. Which I did. I paid to develop the film in it, but is was blank. I am trying to recall the year, maybe 1968. It was like Christmas in July, such a good camera, which I still have. It was the older screw on lense model and I managed to put a flash holder for it, for a Sunpac flash, which I also have. I have many fond memories of using it. I could usually get 37 photos on a roll of 36, and this extra was always a free one when developing films. My previous camera was a little Brownie made of bakelite I think.

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

When I was about 10, so about 1981, I went to Holland with my junior school. My folks lent me an aged brown plastic / bakelite Brownie which took B&W pictures on what was by then ferociously-expensive 12-shot 126 roll film. I think I was scared to use it.

Now I find the techno-apathy which my parents espoused, is mine too. My kids despair of me.

Posted by Pulsator Organorum Ineptus (# 2515) on :

In the days before refrigerators became common, my grandmother had something called a "meat safe". It was in effect a wooden cupboard with metal mesh sides (to keep the flies off. She kept it in the coal cellar. And, yes, she kept raw meat in it.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

My first camera was a box Brownie, with 120 film. You held it against your body and looked down into a viewfinder which reversed the picture. 8 exposures like that don't half teach you composition.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

When I was a child we used to hear the dawn chorus. As soon as the sky started to lighten the birds would begin to sing, and by the time the sun came up there would be literally hundreds of birds of all types singing their hearts out, claiming their nesting territories. It was deafening, wonderful, and used to last for about 20 minutes at full volume before gradually dying away. Every morning, from mid-January until the end of the nesting season in late June.

Behind our house there was an unused pasture which was slowly tumbling down to woodland. In late summer flocks of hundreds of sparrows would roost there and they made a terrific din settling themselves in the evening. So we had a spring dawn chorus and a late summer evening chorus.

The birds still sing at dawn in the springtime but there are hardly any birds now. I feel sad that today's children and young people will never hear the dawn chorus.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Very true, Chamois. Sparrows were so common, that they used to jump up on the tables in outdoor cafes, looking for crumbs. They used to roost in our ivy, hundreds of them.

In fact, I remember when birds such as corn bunting were singing at every field corner, plus of course, turtle dove, cuckoo, tree sparrow were abundant. What the hell have we done?

Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
What the hell have we done?

We've destroyed their habitat, and then we've brought in cats and allowed them to run loose.
[Mad]

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

And produced CDs of birdsong and waves so that people can relax to them.

Even acknowledging all of the amazing and wonderful things that have been developed and discovered in my lifetime, I am still of the opinion that, as a species, we are total fecking idiots most of the time.

Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :

Amen.

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Bloody hell, it makes me feel sad. I mean, the disappearance of birds. We used to get turtle doves in our hedge in the garden, making their lovely purring sound. Now if I see one in the whole summer, I've done well. Ditto corn buntings. Ditto a ton of stuff.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mark_in_manchester:
When I was about 10, so about 1981, I went to Holland with my junior school. My folks lent me an aged brown plastic / bakelite Brownie which took B&W pictures on what was by then ferociously-expensive 12-shot 126 roll film. I think I was scared to use it.

Now I find the techno-apathy which my parents espoused, is mine too. My kids despair of me.

Thanks for remembering the 126 size for film for this. I couldn't recall it, but recognise the size as you posted. My father had a box camera which took 620. Have no idea why I recalled one number and not the other.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

I think, now, that my sister's camera had 120, and mine 126. The one I bought more recently had 620, I think. I used it at school to show children how to fake fairy photographs and ghosts in the classroom, a venture which appeared in a memory on Friends Reunited. Although they had seen how it was done, they were still shocked by the one with a transparent girl by the piano.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Pre-decimal (UK) currency. Oh the difficulty of primary school maths! 12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in the pound, learning the 11 and 12 times tables by heart and all the calculations in 3 columns for pounds, shillings and pence with different rules for carrying over.

I sometimes still dig up pre-decimal coinage in my garden. Mainly ha'pennies, sometimes a penny. Recently one with Queen Victoria's head on it. When I started school my bus fare was 2d each way so I used to set off in the morning with four big pennies in my pocket. I can remember playing with them on the kitchen table, lining up the pennies with the queens' heads and the pennies with kings' heads. The best thing was finding a penny with the head of young Queen Victoria before she was widowed. They were very rare.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Do you remember those wonderful sets of tables of money, weight, distance and so on that were on the back covers of exercise books - complete with the mysterious little box in the corner that said "Troy Weight"?

They still exist, but current ones are but a pale reflection of pre-decimal, non-metric glories.

Posted by Offeiriad (# 14031) on :

Hogsheads and Firkins! I remember those tables!

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

There's a song with those in it, I think. With an ever extending chorus going down to the nipperkin, and finishing, I think, with Good Luck to the Barley Mow.

When we did cookery at school, we had measuring jugs in gills and half gills.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I was slightly too young to use a slide rule in school, but I did used to know how to use one.

I did have to use log tables. Calculators were just about coming in, but I can probably still use log tables. I am not sure whether kids today would believe having to use them to do multiplications.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

Then there was the 16 times table for ounces ad pounds, and the 14 times for – what was it?

Insurance. Travelling in Europe in 1959 or maybe 1964 I was taking a photo out of a train window and knocked the detachable lens hood of my camera. I'd only just bought it; insurance paid for a new one, a few quid. Nowadays you'd have an excess of what – £100 or so?

GG

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

I remember when calculators first came in. There was some discussion amongst the teachers as to whether we ought to be allowed to have them, then it was decided that we could. The books of log tables were thankfully put away.

I can also remember teachers discouraging us from using ballpoint pens because they wouldn't do our handwriting any good, and encouraging us to stick to fountain pens.

I loved the old currency. My father had built up a collection of shillings, one for each year since 1900, with only a few gaps. Sadly he was never able to complete it. The pennies were a decent size and reflected the days when they were worth something, and you could buy a pennyworth of something. I had a Victorian penny in my change one day, very worn but still recognizable, with the date of 1890-something, which was very pleasing.

I liked the Irish pre-decimal currency best. Each coin had a well-known animal on it. It always used to amuse children that the word for "pig" in Irish was "muc".

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

My Dad collected pennies for each year (except 33) in the last century up to decimalisation simply from his change and mounted then on a card divided into squares. It gave a great sense of history that one could find coins of such age in one's change.

(Did anyone have to write a composition on "A Day in the Life of a Penny" at school? I developed a feeling that teachers used it when they had run out of ideas. One of my fictional ones fell down a drain soon after being given in change... Curiously, I never thought of the obvious twist.)

[ 05. February 2016, 18:17: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I was slightly too young to use a slide rule in school.

We used to wear them on our belts, much as people wear cell phone cases now. It was quite the status symbol.

Posted by Carex (# 9643) on :

Slide rules were OK for science classes, but not precise enough for some other fields. I worked summers as a surveyor during Uni, and we used Curta Calculators, wonderful little hand-held mechanical adding machines from Liechtenstein, along with a book of trig tables for when we needed to multiple by the cosine of an angle. You could hear the gears whir as you added numbers, and they really got busy when subtracting.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

I remembered: 14 pounds 1 stone. But I'd forgotten 2 stone 1 quarter, four quarters 1 hundredweight, and 20 cwt 1 ton.
Let's not get into yards, chains, furlongs and miles, though the etymology in interesting.

Biros were banned for a while, but they did tend to be blobby. Dip'n'scratch and ink monitors were a long way back.

GG

Posted by Lothlorien (# 4927) on :

GG, every year when school went back after the holidays, we each had to subscribe a penny for the roll teacher to buy a bottle of ink. Kept in the teacher's desk at the front, it was used for refilling fountain pens.

I had a lovely deep red Sheaffer which had an extendable nozzle for filling so the pen body did not have to be dipped in ink.

This was all fine unless the pen needed filling in maths class. "Your pen has run out? You had better run out too and chase it, " would be the response of the maths teacher I had for five years. A strong advocate of planning and being prepared.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

We had to use fountain pens, and they were a pain. Normally we used cartridge pens, so running out was less of a problem.

I hated them. My writing was (and still is) utterly appalling, and a proper pen didn't help. We did get permission to use Pentel pens, which had real ink. They were better, but I was still like a drunken spider.

Biro's were not allowed. These days, I very rarely wrote at all.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

My first fountain pen was a small grey marbled Waterman, when I was about 9, and I treasured it. Until, at the superior private school where everyone was so much "better" than I was, it disappeared. I'm not sure what I used after that until I was given the navy blue Parker Lady at secondary school.

That disappeared at college, and I had to buy a new one. Curiously, at the end of my stay, when I was there after the rest, and took it upon myself to tidy the mess my friends had left in the sitting room in hall, I found my pen at the bottom of the heap. Curiously, because it had disappeared befoe we had that room to hang out in.

Something that is bothering me at the moment is that I have developed a wish, sixty years on, to add a grey marbled Waterman to the two fountain pens in the bureau. I can clearly recall the feel of it in my hand. I have a search set up on ebay. I did deliberately miss the end of an auction on one (it was in the States). This seems a little weird. It wouldn't be the same one, as the horrible little person responsible for it's loss will have dumped it long back, and probably completely forgotten the matter.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Electronic calculators weren't allowed in A-level or university exams until my second year at university. They were extremely expensive when they first came in and the authorities weren't convinced it was reasonable to require every student to have one.

For my first year university maths course in numerical analysis we had to buy 5-figure log tables to get enough precision in the calculations.

I've still got my old slide rule. It's a very sophisticated "scientific" calculator with scales for sines, cosines, logs and other functions. Nowadays if students have heard of slide rules they assume they are for measuring, like rulers. I showed my slide rule to some students recently and they were fascinated by the idea of a mechanical calculator. I had to demonstrate it and they were impressed by the speed - but I'm nothing like as fast with it as I used to be!

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

I just missed learning to use slide rules, which I consider a serious omission. Don't know why.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

I could never get the hang of slide rules - in particular, I was constantly dropping or adding decimal places.

But I was an absolute whizz with logarithmic tables and the like!

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Yes, with a slide rule you had to keep track of the decimal places separately. Our A-level physics teacher taught us to start by writing all the numbers in the calculation in scientific notation, e.g. 124 is written as 1.24*10**2 and 0.124 is written as 1.24*10**-1. When you did this it was relatively easy to estimate the answer you would get if you ignored all the powers of ten, and then at the end you just added up the powers of ten separately.

That sounds complicated, but once you've grasped how to do it is's quite easy.

Happy days!

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
Electronic calculators weren't allowed in A-level or university exams until my second year at university. They were extremely expensive when they first came in and the authorities weren't convinced it was reasonable to require every student to have one.

Yes, I remember wondering if I could afford £30 to buy one - that would be equivalent to over £400 today, which buys you an infinitely more powerful laptop. I didn't take the plunge!

We had to learn simple Fortran which we then transferred to a stack of punched cards and handed in to the folks running (wait for it) the University computer in the basement of the maths block. It took a day or two to get back the results.

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

Although the Fortran I learnt in my first year in '89 was typed in on a green-screen terminal rather than needing to be processed on punch cards, the computer (actually, there were 5 of them) was still in the basement of the maths block. Graphical output (usually ASCII characters forced to appear in dodgy text-based simulations of graphical output!) was collated there for us to collect after a day or two.

By the time I graduated in 93, it was PCs all round, WYSIWYG graphics, desktop printers. And by postgrad study in '94, the internet. Amazing how suddenly that techno-splurge came on.

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

Where to start? Well I remember the squaddies billeted at our home after, I assume, Dunkirk.

And, after the first, temporary, removal of sweet rationing, buying a Mars Bar (from Sam's in Broad Street Teddington).

Then, five years in the early fifties in Gothic Cottage (really), in rural Hampshire - outside loo, no electricity.

And when we moved to a house with electricity, television at last - Frank Tyson in the 1955 series against South Africa. J.B.Priestley presenting with the new medium at the end of his career.

Computers? Learnt Fortran, and how to machine code the IBM 1401, about 1961 I suppose.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I still remember seeing adverts from Oracle for "TLO" - The Last One, the last programming language you will ever need.

They got that wrong. The development of computer systems has moved beyond anyone's ideas since I started. I do wonder what will happen once I give up, and whether I will have any clue as to what is happening.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Dad would buy us one Mars bar and slice it up on a melamine plate for us to share the slices between us.

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I was slightly too young to use a slide rule in school.
We used to wear them on our belts, much as people wear cell phone cases now. It was quite the status symbol.

Texas Instruments calculators were the geek style. I remember Fortran as well. Used it for SPSS, with Emac editor after we stopped doing punch cards and tapes. Computer was a mainframe Tops-20.

I went away to intern, and was able to remote into the mainframe ot the univ using Netnorth which was the Canadian deployment of Bitnet. 300 baud dialup cradle modem (modem sound link). Spent a lot of nights looking for usenet and posting to rec.arts.startek. There was a newsgroup for Episcopal, can't recall what it was called; never saw an Anglican one. Used to post on it daily in the 1990s. Usenet was dropped from most ISPs sometime in the last decade I think. Too bad. Largely untraceable, and easy to swap ideas and data sets.

Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on :

We had to use dip pens - a shaft with a copper nib and an ink well. Fountain pens weren't allowed until we had mastered the business of using the dip method - basically what a 16th century scribe would use but without the more aesthetically pleasing goose or swan feather.

Much later (1980 +/- 2) I worked in a place that was part of the UNIX world-wide laboratory experimenting with what we then called a modem link - which later went on to become the internet. Far from using this fantastic new tool for anything earth-shattering, the most common traffic was recipe swapping, in particular the recipe for the 'perfect' chocolate brownie.

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

We had dip pens at my primary school, too. Each dip in the ink well was enough for three letters: the first came out blobby, the second came out right and the third came out scratchy because the ink was running out by then. Ink stains everywhere - and they wouldn't let us use biros because they sometimes leaked.

My first encounter with an internet precursor was Starlink, set up by the astronomers for distributed computer processing. That would have been in the early 80s I think. It became part of JANET (joint academic network) which is the origin of the .ac domain names. I remember working one Saturday and seeing workmen installing a satellite dish on the top of the computer laboratory for the first computing satellite link in our university. Can't remember when that was but it must have been pre-1988.

Posted by Doone (# 18470) on :

My career was in Further Education and in the late 1980s I had to teach IT [Ultra confused]

! In those days hardly anyone in FE was qualified in anything to do with computers, apart from programming, so guess who drew the short straw for teaching word processing, spreadsheets and databases! I started teaching using BBC computers (yes, really!), moving on to Apricots, then Amstrad. For ages any program needed a floppy disk to run. Commands to search or sort in 'dbase 2' needed a line of programming typed in to work. Does anyone remember Wordstar, Framework (one of the first integrated packages) or SuperCalc?

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

If Wordstar was the one that needed an extra chip fitted in the BBC, it ate my homework.

Whichever wordprocessor it was, it required the user editing their work to load up a page at a time to the monitor, and then save the edited page to a new file. It proceeded automatically through the document until finished, leaving the file the document had come from empty.

I had been working on a 2000 word piece for the OU on the possible reopening of a gold mine in Wales. Part of it was on paper to start with. I borrowed the school machine on several occasions. The keyboard/computer part, and the monitor - huge cubic thing - and anything else it needed, like the printer, and lugged the lot upstairs to my living room.

I had set up two files, "gold" and "mine", and worked from one to the other in turn. At 11.30 pm, the night before the assignment was due in, I inadvertently asked it to work in the wrong direction, and to my horror, saw it load the empty file into the full one. Unlike doing things with jugs of liquid, this resulted in two empty files.

Working frantically from the paper draft I got up to where that finished by the small hours. Woke early, lugged everything back to the small room in the school it lived in, and spent every spare moment recovering from the wetware what I had done the night before. I did manage to do it, and drive it to the tutor's home in the evening, but that was my BACKUP!!!! lesson learned. And taking note of where everything is.

(I had wangled to be the ICT person, so I could be a bit cavalier with the equipment, in order to familiarise myself with it.)

[ 07. February 2016, 13:33: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

I was just thinking of the time my teenage best friend and I spent the afternoon at her newly married sister's house. The sister and husband were out at work but they'd said it was fine for us to cook ourselves lunch so long as we cleaned up afterwards.

She had a freezer and a microwave. I'd heard about these but it was the first time I'd ever seen one. We picked out lunch from the freezer and heated it up in the microwave in seconds. Quite incredible. No more leaving stuff out overnight to defrost and cooking it the next day.

I was also amazed to discover that instead of taking hours to steam a Christmas pudding, it could be done in literally seconds in a microwave.

There were of course scares about irradiated food and radio waves giving you cancer, but the microwave seems to have settled in as an essential part of the British kitchen these days.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

Remember writing term papers for school?

You used the encyclopedia as a starting ground (Americana or Britannica, please -- World Book was infra dig) -- and then branched out to books suggested by the encyclopedia entry.

Perhaps you consulted the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature to find some recent magazine articles on your topic.

And finally you found a pithy epigram or two in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations to introduce your paper.

Nowadays it's Google and Wikipedia.

[ 07. February 2016, 15:33: Message edited by: Amanda B. Reckondwythe ]

Posted by Lothlorien (# 4927) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Doone:
My career was in Further Education and in the late 1980s I had to teach IT ! In those days hardly anyone in FE was qualified in anything to do with computers, apart from programming, so guess who drew the short straw for teaching word processing, spreadsheets and databases! I started teaching using BBC computers (yes, really!), moving on to Apricots, then Amstrad. For ages any program needed a floppy disk to run. Commands to search or sort in 'dbase 2' needed a line of programming typed in to work. Does anyone remember Wordstar, Framework (one of the first integrated packages) or SuperCalc?

I used Wordstar and whatever the other word processing programme was called. However, floppy discs were a vast improvement on trying to load such a programme from a cassette. Programme would have been saved several times in the cassette. What loaded one day, may not have worked the next. Sheer bliss was the later development of a plugin with the programme on it.

Posted by sharkshooter (# 1589) on :

The first laptop I had for work was a T1200 .

quote:
The Toshiba T1200 was a laptop manufactured by the Toshiba Corporation, first made in 1987. It was an upgraded version of the Toshiba T1100 Plus.

It was equipped with an Intel 80C86 processor at 9.54 MHz, 1MB RAM of which 384kB could be used for LIM EMS or as a RAMdisk, CGA graphics card, one 720kB 3.5" floppy drive and one 20MB hard drive (Some models had two floppy drives.) MS-DOS 3.30 was included with the laptop. It was the first laptop with a swappable battery pack. Its original price was $6499.

I was lucky, I got the one with the 20MB hard drive. [Smile]

I remember a friend in high school (1976) bought a new calculator - an HP67. Learned to love Reverse Polish Notation! This calculator sold for about $450 and actually read a magnetic card, on which you could write programs.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

In the mid-eighties, we could borrow an Acorn Electron for a week from our public library.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

Someone's friend came round to our college in a Sinclair C5 electric car one day. It ran out of charge when he got there and it was stranded on the quad for nearly a week.

Electric cars still haven't really taken off.

Posted by Stercus Tauri (# 16668) on :

It was like Liberation Day when we were all given IBM PS2s at work, complete with WordPerfect 5.0. Freedom from the tyrannical secretary at last! Very useful for producing a good looking CV, too. I finally threw out my own WP discs and manual a few weeks ago.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Lothlorien:
However, floppy discs were a vast improvement on trying to load such a programme from a cassette. Programme would have been saved several times in the cassette.

My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, which used a cassette. I wrote a little program in BASIC to help me balance my checkbook. It saved checkbook entries as DATA statements in the program itself, rather than to a separate file.

At the end of the month I would write out checks to pay my bills, and then save the program while I walked out to the mailbox (some distance from my apartment) to post the checks. When I got back, the program was still saving!

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:

At the end of the month I would write out checks to pay my bills, and then save the program while I walked out to the mailbox (some distance from my apartment) to post the checks. When I got back, the program was still saving!

I had a friend with a Commodore 64 - the only child we knew with a computer. (At the time, I think my school owned a grand total of two BBC micros, used mostly for writing LOGO to control a turtle.) We used to go to his house after school to play games, set the game loading from tape (twinking screen 'cause the tape driver used the video memory as a buffer), and walk to the supermarket to buy sweets and fizzy drinks. Sometimes when we got back, the game had loaded. Other times, there had been some data corruption and we'd have to rewind the tape and try again.

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

I used to use my Mum's 'Pye' radio-cassette to load games onto a Dragon 32. The setting of the 'tone' control was crucial!

That sound - (low)waaah-(high)BAP; (low)waah-(high)waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..............

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

We started with an Atari 400. I formed a company called Classroom Computers (about 1983) and demonstrated them in school staffrooms. Didn't sell many as teachers at that stage just wanted to know what a computer was, and I met older staff who couldn't be persuaded to touch the thing.
A year or so later the high school where I was a relief teacher engaged me to teach the English Dept staff word processing on their newly acquired Apples; I also taught Logo to a night class.
It was a few years later thatI supervised a double period in a room full of PCs when the computers had been made available for any kids who had work to complete on computers. Five minutes before the bell there was a power glitch – I bet none of those students ever forgot to SAVE regularly again!
Bt that time a teacher with a year two class would have a computer in the classroom and a 6-year-old who knew better than the teacher how to handle it.

GG

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

Of course now they all have their own laptops, and nothing's as simple as it was 30 years ago.

GG

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

When I was doing my first year of sixth form, a group of us self-taught our way through O-Level computer science (mainly - we had one teacher who helped and supported us and gave us some of the structure). We knew more than the teaching staff by a long way.

We all passed of course.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Someone's friend came round to our college in a Sinclair C5 electric car one day. It ran out of charge when he got there and it was stranded on the quad for nearly a week.

Electric cars still haven't really taken off.

Not sure, I saw an electric van in use delivering food yesterday.

Jengie

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

When I was very small and we lived way out in the country my Dad had a big square Rover car. He was the young schoolteacher who did all the maintenance on his car himself and was rumoured to have done sixty miles an hour on the K*******n straight. Unsealed roads, of course

As long as he had it, I travelled sitting on a cushion between my parents, in the middle of the front (bench) seat.

GG

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Dad's first car was a Hillman Husky, which he had as part of his work involved driving round to farmers to advise them on their accounting systems. It came somewhere between a van and an estate car, and was up to unmade up farm drives. (One piece of advice was that there were tax breaks for farmers tarmacing their drives!) He had to keep scrupulous records of business and personal use. The back seat was a bench one, and the three of us daughters would sit on it - except when we were driving my mothers' parents in it, when two of us would cram into the space behind the seat!

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

So who remembers simulcasts -- when you tuned your FM radio to a certain station and positioned it to the left of your TV set so that certain special broadcasts could be heard in (gasp) stereo!

Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:
... I travelled sitting on a cushion between my parents, in the middle of the front (bench) seat.

The first car I remember my dad having was a Singer Gazelle estate with a bench-seat in the front, and my seat was on the arm-rest. No straps, no restraints ... [Eek!]

Elfin Safety would have a pink fit. [Big Grin]

Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
... the microwave seems to have settled in as an essential part of the British kitchen these days.

It was just becoming that when we got married (1988) and we bought one with some of our monetary wedding presents.

As I recall, its chief use at first (apart from de-frosting) was baking potatoes, and one evening I had just put a couple of potatoes in to bake when we had a power cut. The house had a coal fire (the only time I've ever lived in a house that did) and I wrapped the potatoes in a couple of layers of tin-foil and put them in the embers underneath.

They took quite a while to bake but they were delicious - much nicer than they'd have been from the microwave.

[ 12. February 2016, 14:43: Message edited by: Piglet ]

Posted by Amorya (# 2652) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
There were of course scares about irradiated food and radio waves giving you cancer, but the microwave seems to have settled in as an essential part of the British kitchen these days.

When we finally got a microwave when I was young, we kept it in the garage. Which was its own building some distance from the house. All the convenience was outweighed by having to put shoes on and fumble with the key, etc…

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

That Singer was a close cousin of our Husky - I didn't post image links because I couldn't quite get my mind about their period appearance. Clunky, weren't they? We went on to Minxes, and I did my driving practice on one with American type wings.

[ 12. February 2016, 15:41: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by Carex (# 9643) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
So who remembers simulcasts -- when you tuned your FM radio to a certain station and positioned it to the left of your TV set so that certain special broadcasts could be heard in (gasp) stereo!

Our local Public Broadcasting station was TV Channel 6, which was just below the FM broadcast band. Once my father had upgraded to a stereo receiver, they would tune the radio down to the far left end of the dial and pick up the TV audio directly, with much better sound than what came from the small speaker on the front of our TV.

Posted by Eigon (# 4917) on :

My dad's first car (he was a policeman) was an ex-police car painted white. Police cars in our area were white with an orange stripe along the side, and were hence called "jam butty cars" because they looked like jam between two slices of white bread.
No idea of the make, but it did come complete with the "Police Stop" sign in the back window, which still worked. There were odd occasions when dad was driving us to or from the caravan site where we had our holidays and, when another driver particularly annoyed dad, he was known to draw ahead of the annoying one and flash the "Police Stop" sign at him - to the bemusement of the other driver, since dad's car was also loaded up with luggage and with two little girls in the back!

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

This may be the wine speaking, but your dad is cool.

Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :

It probably wasn't all that long ago, but today I was remembering airline tickets, often hand-written, with red carbon paper between the copies. And if you happened to lose your ticket or show up at the airport without it, heaven help you! It took much time and a hefty fine to get a replacement.

Now I'm old fashioned because I print out my boarding pass at home. More and more people just flash their smart phones at the scanner.

Posted by Kittyville (# 16106) on :

Funny you mention that, Pigwidgeon - a friend pointed out that it wasn't sooo long ago that we had those paper tickets, when I was complaining earlier this week about checking in online and having to print a boarding pass, because the website wouldn't send it to my phone. It also makes me think of the old lottery of trying to check in early enough at the airport to get a decent seat, instead of just preselecting one online.

Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :

I've still got the wodge of little ticket booklets from my round the world trip in 1998!

Posted by Palimpsest (# 16772) on :

Carbon paper, whiteout correction fluid, and old manual typewriters with metal rims on the keys that would hurt if you hit them wrong.

Card decks, paper tape, 8 inch floppies and 18 inch hard disk cartridges.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I am watching Saturday Kitchen, and they have just had a food sieve thing that squashes food through a sieve. It sat on top of a bowl, and you turned a handle to squash the food. I have no idea how to describe it any better.

We used to have one. I suspect my mum still does somewhere. I used to love using it when we made soup.

Posted by ThunderBunk (# 15579) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I am watching Saturday Kitchen, and they have just had a food sieve thing that squashes food through a sieve. It sat on top of a bowl, and you turned a handle to squash the food. I have no idea how to describe it any better.

We used to have one. I suspect my mum still does somewhere. I used to love using it when we made soup.

I think it's usually called a food mill in English, which is a near-translation of its French name, a mouli-legumes. It's a French gadget, originally made by Moulinex, whose original gadget it presumably was.

Millions of babies have been fed with them. I use one to make mashed potatoes - you can get different sizes of holes, and the coarser one makes fabulous mash. Finer one for true purees and for smooth soups.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

ThunderBunk - yes, that is it! What struck me is that the one shown is identical to the one my mum had. I guess it might have been a wedding present, making it 55 years old.

How many gadgets today would last that long?

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
ThunderBunk: I think it's usually called a food mill in English, which is a near-translation of its French name, a mouli-legumes.

Mwah.

[ 13. February 2016, 12:03: Message edited by: LeRoc ]

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

Remember when railroad conductors punched your ticket, each conductor having a punch that made a unique cutout? I can't speak for European railroads, but on Amtrak they simply scan the ticket electronically now.

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
I can't speak for European railroads, but on Amtrak they simply scan the ticket electronically now.

Our local commuter rail still uses physical punches.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

On one line I'm a regular traveller on, they still scribble on your ticket with a pen as they don't usually seem to have hole punches.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

And, while you're about it, conductors with ticket machines on London buses.

Posted by TonyK (# 35) on :

Sorry, Baptist Trainfan - I go back further...
Conductors used these! Sorry I couldn't just get the picture.

I remember the new machines coming in and thinking how neat they were.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

Just watched BBC2's "Back in Time for the Weekend", which was focusing on the 1960s in this episode. The teenage daughter and her brother discovered a phone box and how to make a call.

What surprised me was that it was one of those where you just put money in the slot, and apparently this cost sixpence. My memory of phone boxes from the era was of phones that were a bit more complicated, with Buttons A and B, and you had to get the sequence right of dialling, pressing and putting money in, or you lost your money. I don't remember it costing sixpence, though perhaps it did. I used to turn up to phone boxes in the 70s with a handful of copper coins - though that of course was after decimalization.

The other thing that surprised me was that apparently women didn't wear knickers with their miniskirts. I never heard that before. Some probably didn't but I'd be surprised if that was universal.

Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
The other thing that surprised me was that apparently women didn't wear knickers with their miniskirts. I never heard that before. Some probably didn't but I'd be surprised if that was universal.

I certainly, as did everyone I knew. And we wore pantyhose (aka tights) in cool or cold weather. I think miniskirts became popular when pantyhose replaced stockings and garter belts (aka suspenders), so shorter skirts were possible.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

So did I. Remember the person who claimed no knickers was Sandy Shaw, in show business, not exactly like the rest of us.

Briefly, before tights, there were things like cycle shorts made of Bri-nylon jersey and in fancy colours, which covered the gap above the stockings. I had a pair with a tartan pattern on - what was I thinking? Couldn't wear miniskirts with them, though.

The phone box thing - I once missed a train at Liverpool Street and had to ring the college to alert the tutor on duty to my late arrival. I had to amass 2/6 worth of change, and put it in after she had lifted the phone, and press button B. And the ******** woman had put the phone down. And I had no more change. Just enough to call again from Colchester. (The rest of that night and morning are etched on my memory, and may have influenced my college career.)

And they never read books, and they never listened to the radio in the 50s, and the company insisted that they SMASHED A PIANO. Well done the family for leaving it to Coren.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

And as for the only evening entertainment available for women in the 60s being bingo or else being chained to the kitchen sink - what rubbish. I never knew anyone who went to bingo. Most people I knew went to the cinema. The Sixties had a spate of good films at reasonable prices. And they were in colour, and not played deafeningly loud.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

I think there is a class issue being played out, with their data set being derived from the working class.

Board games, Hornby, Meccano (with Dad "helping"), reading, Women's Institute. Townswomen's Guild, the Cinema. Reading, reading, reading. The radio.

My mother wouldn't have dreamed of going to bingo!

Had a discussion with a fellow retired colleague - like the friend I watched the 50s with - rubbish. Why don't they ask the people who were around? We aten't dead yet.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

quote:
Briefly, before tights, there were things like cycle shorts made of Bri-nylon jersey and in fancy colours, which covered the gap above the stockings. I had a pair with a tartan pattern on - what was I thinking? Couldn't wear miniskirts with them, though.

Would that be Witches' Britches?

Wasn't it Button A to talk if you got through, and B if you didn't and could get your money back?

I remember in the UK, probably 1958-59 or 5 years later, if you were waiting at a railway station where there were banks of phone boxes, you went along pressing Button B in case someone hadn't done it. Sometimes we got lucky, and even collected half-crowns.

GG

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Well, whichever button it was, I pressed it, and heard all my small change dropping through, and then was connected to nobody. I then had to sprint to the train.

At Colchester I got through, and informed the tutor of my problem, then walked over to the bus station, and got the last single decker to Clacton. It wound round all the villages, picking up and dropping drunks, until it finished at the Clacton bus station, on the edge of the town. I hefted my luggage along through the town, having to deal with a kerb crawler, until I got to the house of the landlady where I had been put. She had a number of girls billetted on her in half of a large pair of semidetached houses, the other half of which was used for holiday makers.

I went in the door and aimed for the phone to report in, but was grabbed away from it by an older student and hauled into the kitchen, where I faced a situation like that painting of "When did you last see your father". The large figure of the landlady sat on the other side of a large kitchen table, flanked by the other students.

I was told that under no circumstances was I to phone in. The ********* tutor had rung the place IMMEDIATELY after my call from Colchester and asked if I had signed in. Without checking the book, and because I was always in on time, the student at the phone had said that I was! The ****** tutor had then instructed that I was to see her first thing in the morning.

The landlady was desperate that she not be exposed as not checking the book, because she would not be able to afford to live without the income from housing students. They had cooked up a story that I had been seen by her daughter and given a lift from Colchester, and insisted that this is what I told the tutor in the morning.
Which, I am sorry to say, I did, because of the concern for the landlady, and it was perfectly obvious that I wasn't telling the truth.

Nobody ever challenged me, but I fear that this lay behind the attitude of the staff to me afterwards, and the suspicion that I was up to no good, the placing of me next to a tutor (got out of that one), and the Hall Tutor listening outside my door when I read a letter from my mother to a friend.

Nothing was written in the records I finally got hold of, but they had been weeded. so I still hear those coins dropping fatally in the phone. I can't remember the name of the ******* idiot tutor.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

The back in time series take a particular image and perspective of times. It is interesting to see how some people lived - my family didn't live quite like that, but as it gets to times I remember, I can relate.

The phone box was far too new - it should have been one of the old ones. I don't remember the Button A/B thing, but then we had a phone in the house, so I didn't use public phones until later.

Sandy Shaw may not have worn knickers, and I am sure there were many others who didn't. That doesn't mean it was universal. It is all a snapshot.

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:

Sandy Shaw may not have worn knickers, and I am sure there were many others who didn't. That doesn't mean it was universal. It is all a snapshot.

What I do remember about Sandie Shaw is that she wore no shoes. Maybe that helped keep her skirt in place.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

I don't know anyone who has thought the programme got it right. In RL or online.

Posted by Doone (# 18470) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I don't know anyone who has thought the programme got it right. In RL or online.

Me neither.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

It rather casts nasturtiums on other programmes where we don't know the source material from first hand.

Posted by Wesley J (# 6075) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
[...] (Did anyone have to write a composition on "A Day in the Life of a Penny" at school? I developed a feeling that teachers used it when they had run out of ideas. One of my fictional ones fell down a drain soon after being given in change... Curiously, I never thought of the obvious twist.)

Forgive me: What is that 'obvious' twist for your composition?

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Wesley J:
Forgive me: What is that 'obvious' twist for your composition?

Who was that addressed to, Wesley?

Posted by Wesley J (# 6075) on :

This, from a few days ago. Ehem. You see: I'm just catching up. No really, I am...! [Paranoid]

Posted by Doone (# 18470) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Wesley J:

quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
[...] (Did anyone have to write a composition on "A Day in the Life of a Penny" at school? I developed a feeling that teachers used it when they had run out of ideas. One of my fictional ones fell down a drain soon after being given in change... Curiously, I never thought of the obvious twist.)
Forgive me: What is that 'obvious' twist for your composition?

Oh yes, I did, though I remember more clearly doing the same as a postage stamp on a letter. We had to describe its journey [Ultra confused]

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

Remember when commercials were an integral part of the TV program in question, read and acted by the principals of the show?

The George Burns & Gracie Allen Show was sponsored by Carnation. Whenever I pour myself a beverage of any sort, the picture comes to mind of Gracie Allen mixing a glass of Carnation instant milk, drinking it, and smacking her lips as though she really thought it tasted good.

[ 15. February 2016, 14:10: Message edited by: Amanda B. Reckondwythe ]

Posted by Chamois (# 16204) on :

Originally posted by Ariel:

quote:
What surprised me was that it was one of those where you just put money in the slot, and apparently this cost sixpence. My memory of phone boxes from the era was of phones that were a bit more complicated, with Buttons A and B, and you had to get the sequence right of dialling, pressing and putting money in, or you lost your money. I don't remember it costing sixpence, though perhaps it did.

Yes, this was certainly the case in the 60s. I was a Brownie from 1964 until 1968. Part of "Being Prepared" was that you were supposed to have two pre-decimal pennies in your uniform pocket at all times, this being the price of a local phone call. And we had to practise - Button A to connect the call when the other party answered, Button B to get your money back if nobody answered. The buttons frequently didn't work properly and you lost your money.

I have clear recollections of the new phones, without Buttons A and B, coming in while I was in secondary school. So that would have been in the 1970s.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Two pennies? By the time I went to secondary school, we needed to keep four to hand!

By the way, everyone waxes lyrical about old-fashioned telephone boxes, but I hated them: they smelt of stale cigarette smoke and urine, the directories were usually torn or burnt, and they were generally grubby. Oh, and the doors were very heavy.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:
Remember when commercials were an integral part of the TV program in question, read and acted by the principals of the show?

Most Brits won't remember them, but we actually had
advertising programmes on commercial television for a while.

This was the exact opposite of "Blue Peter" on the strictly non-commercial BBC, where the old washing-up liquid bottles and cereal packets were artfully disguised so you couldn't see the brand - we usually guessed though"

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
By the way, everyone waxes lyrical about old-fashioned telephone boxes, but I hated them: they smelt of stale cigarette smoke and urine, the directories were usually torn or burnt, and they were generally grubby. Oh, and the doors were very heavy.

Yes, the inside was usually filthy. There was also the social pressure of people forming a queue outside waiting for you to finish your call, sometimes yanking the door open to ask impatiently if you were going to be much longer.

Having said that, back in teenage days, I still used to manage to phone my best friend with a 2p coin from a phone box. She would then phone me back, and those interminable teenage conversations were punctuated with her getting the portable record player and playing the latest hit singles down the phone to me, until her father got the phone bill and asked her to limit phone calls to half an hour max in future. Which was very decent of him.

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
By the way, everyone waxes lyrical about old-fashioned telephone boxes, but I hated them: they smelt of stale cigarette smoke and urine, the directories were usually torn or burnt, and they were generally grubby. Oh, and the doors were very heavy.

They did have the advantage, however, of keeping the rain off you while you phoned.

Moo

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

I met my sister today, and rather curiously, she raised the subject of the day in the life of a penny compositions, and asked if I ever made myself the subject. It arose from her talking about an author who had written about the story of an accordion, and that arose from our discussing the history of some of our furniture. But it was odd seeing her arriving at it, when I had not thought about that penny falling down the drain for decades. Over half a century, probably. Until the other day.

[ 15. February 2016, 21:27: Message edited by: Penny S ]

Posted by John Holding (# 158) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Chamois:
Originally posted by Ariel:

quote:
What surprised me was that it was one of those where you just put money in the slot, and apparently this cost sixpence. My memory of phone boxes from the era was of phones that were a bit more complicated, with Buttons A and B, and you had to get the sequence right of dialling, pressing and putting money in, or you lost your money. I don't remember it costing sixpence, though perhaps it did.
Yes, this was certainly the case in the 60s. I was a Brownie from 1964 until 1968. Part of "Being Prepared" was that you were supposed to have two pre-decimal pennies in your uniform pocket at all times, this being the price of a local phone call. And we had to practise - Button A to connect the call when the other party answered, Button B to get your money back if nobody answered. The buttons frequently didn't work properly and you lost your money.

I have clear recollections of the new phones, without Buttons A and B, coming in while I was in secondary school. So that would have been in the 1970s.

I arrived in the UK in the autumn of 1969 and never encountered Button A and Button B, though many people were only too glad to tell me about them.

What I do remember, and take to be a left over from Button A was the habit of answering the phone with a loud proclamation of your own phone number, presumably so that if the caller had dialed the wrong number, s/he could save the pennnies. It was just 10-12 years ago that I noticed this habit had finally died out, though it may actually have disappeared before I noticed.

John

Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :

That's a good point - I wonder if it started to die out when telephone numbers became so unwieldy? I think I gave it up once our own number (without the area code) went from five digits to six (when we lived in Northern Ireland).

By that time, telephone calls were becoming much cheaper anyway, so it seemed to matter less.

I have (not quite fond) memories of my dad standing at the sitting-room door telling my mum to "get off that phone"* when she was talking to my sister or brother who lived 300 miles away (making it a "trunk" call).

* back in the days when houses only had one telephone, and it was in the hall, presumably to discourage loitering as it was cold out there. [Eek!]

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Piglet:
I wonder if it started to die out when telephone numbers became so unwieldy?

Perhaps. In Britain it may have been dealt a blow when "Area codes" were replaced by "All-figure numbers" - although, in many cases, the actual electronic digits were the same.

I think the real culprits, though, were (i) mobile phones - with people both changing them often and not knowing their own number; and (ii) the availability of "caller display" technology - not that we've got it.

There was a certain "melody" to giving your number. A friend of mine always said "NINE - five-two; three-five-six-eight" with a particular inflection.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I remember when you had to pay to get on the main ship boards. So I contributed to Small Fire instead.

Happy times. Or not.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

Saying your phone number on the phone when you pick it up has not died out. I know a practitioner of it to this day.

Jengie

Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :

quote:
Originally posted by John Holding:
the habit of answering the phone with a loud proclamation of your own phone number, presumably so that if the caller had dialed the wrong number, s/he could save the pennnies. It was just 10-12 years ago that I noticed this habit had finally died out, though it may actually have disappeared before I noticed.

Its not dead yet. My parents still answer the phone that way. It's such a habit that last time I was visiting them, the phone rang and I picked up the phone and announced their phone number. Only it was the old number - the one they changed 25 years or so ago.

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Saying your phone number on the phone when you pick it up has not died out. I know a practitioner of it to this day.

Jengie

I still do it unstead of saying my name - to avoid giving info. to scammers

[ 16. February 2016, 18:35: Message edited by: leo ]

Posted by Rev per Minute (# 69) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Saying your phone number on the phone when you pick it up has not died out. I know a practitioner of it to this day.

Jengie
I still do it unstead of saying my name - to avoid giving info. to scammers

But many scammers use random dialling - so by giving your number, you confirm one piece of information they didn't previously have. In the same way, when someone says they dialled a wrong number and asks you to tell them your number, the right answer is not 'Barchester 1234' but 'What number did you dial?'

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Baptist Trainfan:
Perhaps. In Britain it may have been dealt a blow when "Area codes" were replaced by "All-figure numbers" - although, in many cases, the actual electronic digits were the same.

Yes, you can't now answer the phone with "Whitehall 1212" (or similar) any more. (Remember when phones had dials with letters of the alphabet on?)

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Where we used to live in West London, the old codes RIVerside and SHEpherds Bush translated directly into the new codes 748 and 743. My childhood code of MILl Hill became the unrelated 959.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

In US cities, the old name exchanges on phone numbers lent themselves to being status symbols. In New York, it was quite prestigious to have a BUtterfield or MUrray Hill number. WAtkins less so, as I recall.

In Philadelphia, PEnnypacker had all the status. MUnicipal didn't.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Yes, you can't now answer the phone with "Whitehall 1212" (or similar) any more. (Remember when phones had dials with letters of the alphabet on?)

Our phones have both. I remember my son's number as 3 digits then (as it happened) his nickname.
So, of course, has my cell phone – how else can you text?

GG

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

quote:
Galloping Granny: I remember my son's number as 3 digits then (as it happened) his nickname.

Wow, I'd like to calculate the odds of that.

quote:
Galloping Granny: So, of course, has my cell phone – how else can you text?

With all due respect, the more recent cell phones have a different way of texting [Smile]

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Yes, you can't now answer the phone with "Whitehall 1212" (or similar) any more. (Remember when phones had dials with letters of the alphabet on?)
Our phones have both. I remember my son's number as 3 digits then (as it happened) his nickname.
So, of course, has my cell phone – how else can you text?

GG

Your cellphone has a dial? Wow - hipster retro
[Snigger]

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:

quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
Yes, you can't now answer the phone with "Whitehall 1212" (or similar) any more. (Remember when phones had dials with letters of the alphabet on?)
Our phones have both. I remember my son's number as 3 digits then (as it happened) his nickname.
So, of course, has my cell phone – how else can you text?

GG
Your cellphone has a dial? Wow - hipster retro

'Our phones have both' – numbers and letters, landline and mobile. Not dials.

Well, I have a Granny phone, which I use for phone calls and texts and as an alarm clock – bought in the UK as cheaply as possible in 2011. So I didn't know about newer ways of texting. Must get one of the family to show me. They get these deals that involve a new phone each year and spending the next few weeks getting the hang of it.

Thank you, LeRoq, for bringing me up to date.

GG

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

The local code for Putney was 788, but also 789 and a few others when they ran out of 788 numbers.

Someone we were dealing with still had that format in their headed notepaper WIM 3456, or whatever, after letters had disappeared from any phone I was using. Trying to contact them one day, I guessed - something like 946, and managed to get the unlisted number of some belted earl, possibly the Duke of Argyll, and an interrogation as to how I had obtained that number.

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

In Arlington, Virginia in the 1940s, people with CHestnut numbers had unlimited calls, while people with GLebe numbers had to pay for calls over a certain amount. There were also EMerson numbers, but I didn't know anyone who had one.

Moo

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

quote:
Originally posted by leo:

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Saying your phone number on the phone when you pick it up has not died out. I know a practitioner of it to this day.

Jengie
I still do it unstead of saying my name - to avoid giving info. to scammers

I like the Kinky Friedman approach, to say "Start talkin'" when picking up the phone. After all, the caller has interrupted your chain of thought/reading/snooze, so it's good to put the onus back on them.

Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :

I don't remember it being a thing in the UK, but over here it's quite common for the purveyors of those items that you never knew you needed (sets of stackable Tupperware boxes, painless hair-removal systems etc.) that are advertised on TV* to have a phone number with appropriate words incorporated into it, like 1-800-123-RIPOFF**

* BUT WAIT!! Call RIGHT NOW and we'll DOUBLE your order!!!

** OK, I made that one up, but you know what I mean. [Big Grin]

Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :

In the U.S. it has been common even with legitimate companies, but as the letters have gotten smaller on phones, it seems to be dying out. For example, FedEx lists their number on their webpage as 1(800)463-3339 -- it's still 1(800)Go-FedEx, but they don't show it that way anymore.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
I like the Kinky Friedman approach, to say "Start talkin'" when picking up the phone.

He calls it the blower, too, doesn't he?

Posted by Offeiriad (# 14031) on :

I remember being baffled for some time as a teenager by a languid English cleric who, when his phone rang, answered it by saying ears [Eek!]

Posted by basso (# 4228) on :

Many exchange names were used in several cities, but there were a few that were unique to a town.

I grew up with a DUnlap number - you could use that information to look up my home town.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Offeiriad:
I remember being baffled for some time as a teenager by a languid English cleric who, when his phone rang, answered it by saying ears

I thought my Dad was saying "Aye there" when he answered the phone but it was really "Are you there?" – which doesn't seem logical somehow.
In a country town, early 40s, no Google, an argument about facts in the pub sometimes led to ringing the headmaster – shades of Oliver Goldsmith's Village Schoolmaster!* I remember Dad being asked which was the world's longest river, and whether there were polecats in New Zealand.

GG

*And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew"
(Yes, of course I had to look it up.)

Posted by Huia (# 3473) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:

Well, I have a Granny phone, which I use for phone calls and texts and as an alarm clock – bought in the UK as cheaply as possible in 2011. So I didn't know about newer ways of texting. Must get one of the family to show me. They get these deals that involve a new phone each year and spending the next few weeks getting the hang of it.
GG

I just bought a new phone having dropped the old one -and all I can say is to think very carefully before you get a smart phone, unless you have a geek on hand. I bought mine from a major retailer who have half an hour free training sessions for the technologically challenged.

My Uncle used to say, "Are you there?" It was listed in the phone book as one of the phrases you should use - which never made much sense to me either. I always wanted to answer "No".

One good way to score money to spend on sweets was to go into a phone box and push button B. It was amazing how many people just hung up if the call wasn't answered.

Huia

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Huia:
One good way to score money to spend on sweets was to go into a phone box and push button B. It was amazing how many people just hung up if the call wasn't answered.

Virtually everyone who uses our local Hospital car park ticket machine presses the "coin return" button to see if anything comes out ... and sometimes they get lucky!

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