Showing my age

[packsaddle]

Kendall Oil, Gulf Oil, Atlantic Oil, Humble Oil, Cities Service, Pure Oil...."you can be sure if it's Pure". Oil in cans, the cardboard came years later. A full set of new tires for $60. All gasoline was leaded except for Amoco 'White Gas'. Gasoline for 20cents a gallon. Wizard outboard motors. The air 'breathers' for the engine air intake that sucked the air through a pool of oil. Filing the points to give them new life. Driving around the entire United States on a 6-week family camping trip...no interstate highways, no KOA, camping in whatever wayside spots we could find.

We had no TV but an AM radio with two stations that I knew of. Saturday morning I listened to Gil 'Who' Mahoney and his magical Leprechaun band. The first TV was a 12" Motorola, B&W, and there was one station (CBS) - Andy Devine's gang "plunk your magic twanger, Froggy" (sponsored by Buster Brown shoes), Captain Midnight (sponsored by Ovaltine), Boston Blackie, etc. A few years later a second station started up (NBC) - Sky King, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Cisco Kid. I remember electric trolleys, wiggling my toes in the fluoroscope in the shoe section of the department store, 5 cents for a coca-cola and outraged when they went to 6 cents. Getting my polio shot and a couple of years later getting the oral version as well (required by the government for every student for you anti-goverment persons).

Wood and canvas canoes at scout camp. Real canvas tents with no mosquito netting, no floors. No such thing as a pack frame if you didn't make it yourself. Sleeping bags stuffed with Kapok. Life preservers with cork. Making my own fishing lures from wood and feathers and catching saltwater trout with them.

I remember Eisenhower running against Stevenson and later Eisenhower giving THAT speech. I remember my cousin going to Korea, I remember having to take a ferry to Sanibel Island...and once we got there, almost no people. I remember the small of DDT, the rainwater cistern and drinking it with mosquito larvae in it. I remember the puzzlement of adults when I couldn't tan but rather would get blistering sunburns time after time. No such thing as sunscreen.

I remember the wringer washer on the back porch and pants stretchers as clothes hung on the line. I also remember getting my arm caught in that wringer and being saved at the last moment by my mother.

 

I remember taking a 14' skiff out to the mouth of Shark River and camping on a trapper's roost. I remember a no-limit catch for cutthroat trout out west. I remember when there was a small, unassuming visitor center for Mt. Rushmore, when Bedloe's Island had the Statue of Liberty and Cape Canaveral was just another spot on the Florida coast.

I remember when snuff was a fine powder of flavored tobacco which was mostly used by women whose spit aim was astounding (they nevertheless had a permanent brown stain around one side of their dress) and it was aggressively advertised on TV "...if your snuff's too strong it's wrong, buy Tube Rose, mild Tube Rose..."

And I remember an escalating series of changes in society that got meaner and meaner as the civil rights movement built its momentum. Not all memories are all that great.

[SSScout]

Try again.

 

Clear channel AM radio... WLS... WJZ... WWVA..."Ici SayBaySay, Raadeeoh Canadah... Toorontoo" On the long trips back and forth to school in Indiana, late night radio...

"CHICKENNNN MAN! He's everywhere he's everywhere da-dadadaDAH!"

No modern auto radio has a AM receiver that will receive any but local stations anymore. Why is that? Another conspiracy to require the purchase of Sirius radio? Where is my Armstrong Superheterodyne?

[CalicoPenn]

Oh, we started with punch cards alright - but we were fortunate to upgrade to paper tape in my sophmore year.

 

As for AM radio signals - it's just a vast government conspiracy to let local radio station owners reach their audience in their own towns - its not that the radios can't receive stations from out of state, it's that during daylight hours, most of the "superstations" (those that have a license to transmit at greater than 50K watts) have to drop down their transmission strength because the frequency they're using in, say, Denver, is being used by a different radio station in Chicago during the day. I use that as an example because we have a "daytimer" local AM station that has to sign off when darkness falls because the Denver station sharing that frequency is allowed to crank up to 50K at nightfall - yes - I can get the Denver station (a right-leaning talk radio station) just fine with my modern automobile radio at night (the irony here is the daytimer station is a progressive talk radio station).

 

You might not be able to get WGN Radio (out of Chicago) at noon if you live in Boise, Idaho, but you may be able to get it at 11 PM. Some may remember the Art Bell show - he was on in the early morning hours (midnight to 6 am or something like that) - he was well known to night denizens around the country - but he wasn't syndicated to all that many radio stations - he was heard all over the place because the radio station he worked for was a night-time superstation that got to crank up the wattage when he was on the air.

[Stosh]

5 digits? Heck, I had to crank the little handle on a box on the wall and then say a 3 digit number. If you couldn't remember the number you just said their name, the operator knew the number. I even remember once saying I want to talk to my mom and the operator put me through to the grocery store where she had last seen her go into.

 

What's really neat is when I was first learning to use a cell phone, I always had to have someone dial it for me took a lot of ribbing for that. Finally got one and whenever these young whipper-snappers would want to borrow it, I simply suggested they use the rotary phone on the wall. Touche!

 

Stosh

[OwntheNight]

'Fish

Thought you could get by with a Tommy TuTone reference without anybody noticing? (Jenny, I got your number.....)

 

I still like to tell my boys about having to actually going to the library and going over to the reference section and the large stack of books called encyclopedia's to get information for the last year. Or, at the book fair every year, the book I looked forward to getting before anybody was The Guinness Book of World Records. Not this whole internet thing, where information is a click away on your phone. I even tell them that TV was never on 24hrs a day. If I was hearing the Star spangled banner, I knew I was up way too late, or I was being woke up by the long beeeeep after the SSB. Go into the living room, turn the TV off, wake Dad up and tell him to go to bed.

 

Sorry, Not old enough to remember punch cards and tape, our school was the first to have Apple II' s (Thank You Steve Jobs, RIP) if you were real lucky, you got to use the color monitor to work on your graphics program and then save all your work on the big 5 " floppy. The irony is, my oldest uses an IMac in school in 7th grade. It wasn't until high school that I could get into the programming class to learn DOS. EXE

 

I do remember sitting in my bed with my transistor radio listening to the AM side, and being able to catch WGN faintly (from Kansas City) or Cardinal's baseball in St.Louis. Of course, there was always Wolfman Jack or Dr.Dimento to listen to on the weekends!!! Or even Kasey Kasem's long distance dedication on American Top 40 on Sunday mornings.

 

 

[SSScout]

Programing? Ha! WITRAN,, FORTRAN,, COBOL,,

 

Anybody out there have a Sinclair 1000? Plugged into your TV set. You could balance your checkbook with it, that's about all.

I ordered a radio from a Boys' Life ad, . It was a small red box with a screw thing on one end, a long wire and a earphone out the other. No batteries, it was a crystal-diode receiver,, You turned the screw thing to adjust the frequency, I could receive two strong local stations with it. My dad had strung some wire around the ceiling of my room to hang my model planes from, so I attached the antenna wire to those, and presto! I received two more stations at night.

[packsaddle]

I actually do have one or two of those Clive Sinclair machines someplace. I added 64K of RAM and a custom interface with a small 12V monitor so I could use it in the field, powered by a car battery, to log data from a thermal array. I programmed it using machine code to automatically log data at chosen time intervals and then I'd 'write' the stored data to the tape drive and print it later. I also have the Sinclair printer. The biggest challenge was programming the 12bit A/D I built to convert the signals and embedding that within the timing loops. Gad, I can probably still operate that thing!

 

I never got around to writing a driver for anything like a disk drive but I understand that a few others did. We also had similar setups with Commodore 64's, but I preferred the code for the Z80 as opposed to the 6502. Talk about wasted youth!

I was looking at my old slide rules just yesterday. Two of the Rolls Royces (the K&E and the Post) and a Chevy (the Pickett). Still work as well as new.

 

If you'll send me a PM with your address, I'd love to unload all that junk to a loving home. I'll throw in the shards of some really old Apple products as well. I think I still have a 5.25" floppy drive someplace.....some old XT keyboards...a mini-solid state XT...a lot of sensors and photomultipliers...some old cases, who knows what's in them. I'll keep the slide rules.

 

Edit: I mowed lawns for an entire summer to earn enough money to buy a 6-transistor radio ($25). And then broke it within a month. Also had the crystal radio set (actually still have a version of that using a precision crystal now - it's called a receiver). Drove a school bus in high school a the age of 16. I was paid $20 per month. I was in HS when court-ordered busing began in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. Interesting times.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

[Tampa Turtle]

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80 you had to build. Cassette player storage, membrane keyboard, TV monitor. Learned Basic on it. "Upgraded" to the 16K memory expansion pack...That was before the big fancy Vic 20.

 

I remember no VCR's and only 4 channels + UHF. And this was a big city (Miami). I remember the family watching a lousy show sandwiched before too good ones because no one wanted to get up to change the rotary channel knob. Was nice when there was a big show or event because next day at school most kids had watched the same thing or knew they missed it --the shared cultural experience. I recall we got out first color TV in 72 --big Magnavox console with the phonograph in it --thought we were rich!

 

I am an old airline brat (National, Pan Am). The new show Pan Am makes me a little nostalgic--even if it is very fictionalized. I am just old enough to remember when flying was glamorous and you wore a suit and tie to get on the plane.

 

 

 

 

[Gunny2862]

@packsaddle I have a Sterling on my desk for when it's faster than typing into the TI-83+ and/or I don't need 6 or more decimal places. If you're seriously giving a working K&E away I'd like to be considered...

[packsaddle]

Hey man, you must have missed that part about me keeping the slide rules. Sorry.

But you're welcome to the computer junk.

 

Tampa, that thing was sold under both Sinclair and Timex brands but they were the same computer. $99 for a working computer (sans monitor). Not bad. It needed accessories (like that tape player) but it worked. And it had BASIC built in too. I remember visiting a colleague at UVa. He had adapted an IBM Selectric typewriter to one of those Vic 20's. I was incredibly envious. Got a couple of old Selectrics too! Continued to use them even after getting the daisy wheel.

 

Our dept chair decided he liked the old Ohio Scientific computers, back when every brand had their own proprietary version of DOS. So I got one of those as well. At that time, EVERYONE had a version and they all had some kind of compatibility problem with the others. What a mess! Bill Gates was sucking profit from them all. Gotta give the guy credit. He worked that system masterfully.

 

But most of my serious work was done on a terminal to the mainframe. Serious stuff, you know, like the Startrek game in which there were no graphics at all. You had to use the slide rule to quickly calculate the predicted position of the Romulans in 3D and then to target them with the right dispersion of photon torpedos. Gad, I can probably still do that too!

[ghermanno]

Hmmm.... (remembering)

 

Shell "Answer Man". Three gas choices "Regular" "Super" & "Eythl" (sp?)

 

Computers... Everybody had thier own DOS, "high speed "birpie" tape readers (paper tape with holes), card puches and readers (I maintained both), Nixie tubes and vacuum areas on the magnetic tape readers for the cp-818 computers, adjusting current for the memory cores....

 

Tube radios... Reparing both radios and tape recorder/players (real - real) that had tubes to operate. (plate/grid/heater)

 

Art Linkletter on tv with Uncle Milti (Milton Bearle), Abot and Costello, Drive-in Movie theaters,...

 

"Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end....

 

My $0.02

 

Nostagicly,

 

Rick

[SeattlePioneer]

>

 

 

 

When I built my novice CW radio transmitter, I bought a junk television chassis at a thrift shop and used it for tubes, transformer, capacitors, resistors and a variety of other parts for the new equipment.

 

This was in 1970.(This message has been edited by seattlepioneer)

[CalicoPenn]

I gave one of the Sinclair machines to my father for Christmas one year - though it was the Timex brand. I remember them being very small, and very cheap. My Atari 2600 game console was more powerful (and I had the Basic Programming cartridge with keyboard controller).

 

The first computer we had at home was a PET 2001 my dad had somehow finagled from work. The writing was on the wall even then - it had become out-dated within a year of being released.

 

My first personal computer was a Commodore VIC-20.

 

I remember playing the Star Trek game from a terminal as well - except we used calculators, not slide rules.

 

I remember the first desk-top IBM I used - as I recall there was a lever that you had to engage to lock down the hard drive before moving the machine, so you didn't damage the disks.

[Horizon]

I have an association with academia, so every year before I plan a guest lecture to undergrads I check the Mindset List from Beloit.

 

http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2015/

 

So, for the class of 2015 (those boys who just aged out of your Troop, but are still in your Crew or one your Ship):

 

Andre the Giant, River Phoenix, Frank Zappa, Arthur Ashe and the Commodore 64 have always been dead.

 

Their classmates could include Taylor Momsen, Angus Jones, Howard Stern's daughter Ashley, and the Dilley Sextuplets.

 

There has always been an Internet ramp onto the information highway.

Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents.

States and Velcro parents have always been requiring that they wear their bike helmets.

The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major league sports.

There have nearly always been at least two women on the Supreme Court, and women have always commanded U.S. Navy ships.

They swipe cards, not merchandise.

As theyve grown up on websites and cell phones, adult experts have constantly fretted about their alleged deficits of empathy and concentration.

Their schools blackboards have always been getting smarter.

Dont touch that dial!.what dial?

American tax forms have always been available in Spanish.

More Americans have always traveled to Latin America than to Europe.

Amazon has never been just a river in South America.

Refer to LBJ, and they might assume you're talking about LeBron James.

All their lives, Whitney Houston has always been declaring I Will Always Love You.

O.J. Simpson has always been looking for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Women have never been too old to have children.

Japan has always been importing rice.

[sailingpj]

Speaking as a representative of the class of 2015, it would be AWESOME to have Ferris Bueller as my father.