Once a person left the house, you couldn’t reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you’d copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
Flying being a really fun and nice experience.
You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.
My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.
In fact, before MBAs McKinsey’d the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant… Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can’t tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it’s normal…
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
Snow. It used to last the whole winter and not just 2 days here and there.
Buying the car kit so I could connect my CD Walkman (with 15 second ESP) to the cigarette lighter and cassette deck in my first car.
I love how the title is “Tell me what it means” and then 747 replies later, no one has done that.
It is now safe to turn off your computerI’m not old enough to know this one.
Old computers wouldn’t turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).
When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don’t really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is “off”.
The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn’t cause any damage to the system.
I’m not young enough to know what “cap” and “no cap” mean
Same
This station now concludes its broadcast day.
That’s right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.
Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
Huh? What does this mean?
Old anti piracy measure.
Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you’d have the manual. If you’re just playing a copy you wouldn’t. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
When you turned the TV on you had to wait a minute for it to ‘warm up’. The black and white image would slowly emerge out of the darkness.
And then it made that “warm up” sound, like a “klank!” Or something clicking inside the tv
I remember when printers would print without being sassy & extortionate.
Big caveat, printers have always been unholy hellish abominations that sense your fear and exploit it right before delivering that so important THING you need to print
Macdonalds and burger king Pokemon toys were actually of decent quality
