When I was young, you couldn’t call “abroad” without booking the call with a local operator with a phone that was attached to a plug socket and never moved. Today, I can watch a live feed from space via a camera attached to the Artemis2, looking back at the increasingly distant planet on which I’m sitting. On my phone. From anywhere.
10 Likes
…..And not every home had a phone or a dedicated phone line.
2 Likes
Actually I can hear 4 Yorkshiremen about to utter the word ‘Luxury’!
13 Likes
I was thinking just that last night. But we had no problems through social media!
I mentioned something similar a few years ago when my Grandfather passed. He was born a few days before the BBC made their first broadcast ( when it was still the Marconi company). Two days before he passed we were looking through a window together watching a the F1 race in Dubai. He was in bed and I was sitting with him in his residential home in rural Hertfordshire.
6 Likes
On a slight tangent…
20 years ago, a friend was at The Oval watching England v Pakistan and I was on a train to Newcastle. It was the infamous ball tampering incident. I had the internet on my phone, he didn’t.
When the Pakistan team refused to retake the field, there was utter confusion at the ground. However, I was able to update my friend (who was sitting just 50 yards away from the “action”) whilst I was passing through Grantham at 100mph. I always remember it as a bit of “lightbulb moment” as to the power of the internet / www.
5 Likes
Not just Boomer time scale. I’m late Gen X and loads of my mates “weren’t on the phone”. If you scrounged a telly for your room it was without exception a black and white fishbowl.
If I wanted to speak to them I had to walk there and knock on their door and hope they were in.
I remember I was one of only a about three kids in my year with any type of computer. If you wanted to play a game you put in a tape and waited 10 minutes for it to load. Walk through three screens and had to wait another 10 mins.
If I got home and didn’t have a key, I just had to wait in the back yard for 3hrs until my mum came home. If I wanted to reach someone I had to remember about 8 phone numbers they might be at. Nothing like calling three pubs and a load of acquaintances to see which one my mum was at.
Killing time meant reading from a massive stack of magazines I’d already read.
5 Likes
Man, life was good back then.
For real.
4 Likes
Well we were so poor we lived in’t cardboard box in middle of the road. My bed were a muddy ditch and for breakfast we ‘ad cold gravel.
It were twenty mile to school on’t back of a broken bike and it were uphill. Both ways!
When I got ‘ome it were dark and my da would beat me with a cricket bat and then cut my head off with a bread knife and dance on my grave…
If I were lucky!
7 Likes
Well I am not a Boomer, but apparently I am in the Gen X category… and I can just about remember vague impressions of staying up to see Neil Armstrong walking on the moon… if I am honest I can’t remember that - but can remember the constant build up commentary on the TV and not quite understanding why everyone was so excited and me feeling tired and bored.
I also remember acoustic modems for the teletype terminal in the ‘computer room’ at school that connected to the Hatfield Poly mini - it was 110 baud and you could squeeze 300 baud if you managed to get a good clean phone line… I got hooked!!!
Slightly later I remember the three day weeks - with the lights flicking three times before we were plunged into darkness.. clearly made an impression on me as a toddler.
2 Likes
I thought you were describing Covid lockdown for a moment there.
2 Likes
LOL, yes but I suspect for the Generation Alpha people in future years. lockdowns might be equally vivid.
1 Like
I remember when the first cash machine was introduced in Bangor in around 1980. It only dispensed £10, in 10 £1 notes, which were folded in half and inserted in a plastic holder. You took the cash and then put the holder in a little slot in the machine. Of course, beer was only 32p at the time, so the beer tokens went a long way.
3 Likes
When I was born music at home came via AM broadcast received by valve radios, or 78rpm fragile shellac records played with a steel needle tracking the groove and mostly reproduced purely acoustically via a horn, whether folded within a box or sitting visibly above the unit, albeit some people had electric (valve) amplification and a single loudpeaker within the unit’s large casing. Vinyl records had been introduced but not yet widely adopted, while stereo had yet to appear. Music on the move was only possible using a battery powered valve radio - I still have my dad’s, in the form of a small suitcase and requiring a 90v battery.
Now there is hifi in the many forms we know and love, from mini one-box systems to massove arrays, with music not only on vinyl but also CD and its variants, analogue and digital tape, data files stored ‘electronically’ in one’s own home or stramed across something called the Internet, etc etc.
And highlighted in part by that, computers were room-filling machines with capability not much more than basic calculators… Now a tiny device in my pocket, functioning as calculator, notepad, diary (with event reminder), magnifier, torch, map with GPS and personal location finder, compass, altimeter, language translator, portable music player capable of storing 100s of albums, book reader capable of storing dozens of books, sound level meter, alarm clock, stopwatch, snapshot camera. If I’m somewhere with wifi (I use PAYG normally without mobile data) I can access emails and browse the internet, access this forum, view satellite & aerial imagery, get news, get traffic and related information, get weather forecasts, view rain satellite tracking and nearby lightning, track aircraft flights, find a nearby restaurant, control my home music streamer, bank security device, etc etc. it can even make phone call!
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be………
10 Likes
Well there’s two types of nostalgia. Nostalgia for the past. And nostalgia just for being young. Which was also the past but not the same thing.
I remember being about 6 and when we went into Chipping Norton for a weekly shop thinking it was a “big crowded city”. Of course not one of those three words is true but it’s how I remember it.
I may have said this before, but I consider I had a lot more fun in the seventies than I’m having now in my seventies 
.
ATB, J
11 Likes
I was older - at school - and we’d come home in the dark to a house lit by candlelight and while we had no staircase that spiralled out of sight there were thermos flasks of soup my mother had prepped earlier so we could have something warm at least for our tea.
I also remember going to Douglas IOM aboard MV Mona’s Queen which was brand new but rattled, apparently because it had been rushed through build in Troon because of the 3-day week. (It was better the next year.)
Good times!
3 Likes
My memory of the first machines is going to take cash out on a Saturday morning and being very wary when the protective screen slid up, often revealing someone’s fish-supper or kebab from the night before.
G
3 Likes
Not going back that far to 1999 I had a Nokia phone and spending £40/50 a month on those top up cards. Thinking that was normal.
Now spend £4.99 a month and my phone does things that Nokia could only dream about.
1 Like