Yep! 
It still embarrasses me today thinking about when I had to stand in my parents lounge while making a call to said girlfriend via the land line. 
That took real b##ls.
Can you imagine a 15 year old today having to even think about that. 
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And have her dad answer the phone where you would then need to identify yourself and ask to speak to said daughter.
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You read my mind. Very awkward at the time and that age.
Character building though. 
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And i remember as very inappropriate to ring someone door bell without a call few hours or days before the visit. Going to school was a kilometres walk in snow or rain……But those were days when with a screwdriver or a pliers you could fix or modify anything right on knees……the moon landing on my father’s black and white television. I miss the new year’s day concert broadcasted from Vienna……
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You’re all missing the point.
I wasn’t being nostalgic.
I was looking at how far tech has come in such a short amount of time and the amazement I felt at where we are now.
And that includes being able to pull down amazing sound quality music from a planet-wide choice of millions of pieces of music seemingly from thin air, instead of dragging a nail across a piece of plastic.
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I agree with all you say, @MikeD, and by the sound of it I am of a similar vintage. There is no doubt that much has improved beyond recognition in our lifetime and I, as a streaming-only audio enthusiast, never cease marvelling about its wonders. While I recognise and celebrate the many areas where our lives have improved, what troubles me as I age is a tendency to fret about the things that I feel are getting worse in society. I am sure that at every point in time folk of our age have felt the same but I really fear growing old as a curmudgeon, worrying more about things that I think have worsened than treasuring all that has improved. My daughter - in her late 20s - is far more successful than I was at her age, has a better flat, a vastly better car, much more disposable income, a much higher standard of living with far more foreign travel but she has dramatically worse pension provision and … she lives not far from Clapham High Street.
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I achieved my “Old Curmudgeon” certificate some time ago.
Come on in, the water’s rubbish.
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My first ever pint (Barnsley Bitter) cost 15p. I remember it shooting up to the outrageous level of 17p shortly afterwards !
The good old days !!!
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So we weren’t all missing the point!
That rings a bell - plus the embarassed face when told ‘XYZ wants to speak to you’ then lots of questions ‘Who is she?’ afterwards.
Telephones - choice of one or two colours in one style, then that snazzy wedge shaped option came in. Booking with the ‘Post Office’ to arrange install several months hence.
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Yes, clearly not everything is better in the future… 
Lol, one of my first part time jobs was pulling pints in a local country pub, 1/10d (9P) for a pint of mild.
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A similar story…Boxing Day 2004 at 04:30 in the morning I get a text message from my daughter who’s in Thailand saying that there’s a lot of activity outside her apartment and doesn’t know what’s going on. I turn on the TV in the UK and see a warning of a possible Tsunami and tell her to get to get water and get to high ground as soon as possible. Safe, at a high point on the island, she watches as the first wave comes in, then the second wave washes her hire car, apartment and many friends away. The phones didn’t work but texting did, so I knew she was safe. Thank God for the WWW!
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I didn’t have that problem as my parents (like many households) didn’t have a phone. Arrangements with friends - romantic or otherwise - had to be made in person or prearranged time and place to telephone (and waiting outside a phonebox at the allotted time while someone else was making a protracted call was very annoying!). Being unable to contact somebody other than by meeting up or pre-arranged telephone call meant that people had to have a grip on their time organisation and planning!
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When was a small child we had no central heating and we pretty much lived in the kitchen, which was the only warm room because it had the coal powered boiler, which heated our water. Coal was delivered by the coalmen who put it in two huge outdoor bunkers under the kitchen window. We had a bar heater high up in the wall in the bathroom which was used rarely. Now, about 60 years later our house is powered for much of the time by solar panels and our heat pump means the whole house is cosy 24/7.
But back in the ‘60s our garden was teeming with birds and butterflies. These days there seem to be hardly any, which is really sad. While many things are better now, some are much worse.
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In my childhood (‘60s and ‘70s) my Dad’s family were on the West Coast of Ireland. The only way we could call them was to swap a series of letters agreeing a date and time, then call the phone box about a mile from the farm (to give an idea of the size of their community the number was Glenamoy 8). It was operator connected until the late ‘70s or early’80s, by which time the number of phones in the area had reached two digits.
You were lucky… we had a brick outhouse..
I have one memory that gives away my age, definitely not nostalgic. I was at school when a Britannia aircraft crashed just outside Bristol. We heard the impact and leaving at lunchtime saw the pillar of smoke.
In those days, many people to have a phone, had a party line, so you had to hang up quickly if the line was busy.
The nostalgia bit - dad worked for PO Telephones. He made the desk that the Queen used to make the first STD call. Of course as a lowly engineer and TU rep he didn’t get in the line up!
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I felt really old last night.
A scientist from Goonhilly Downs tracking station, here in Cornwall, was on TV talking about the important role the station was playing in the current moonshot.
Whilst not ancient, he was clearly no youngster, looking in his forties to me. He said ‘This is so exiting, it’s the first time anyone has been to the moon in my lifetime’.
I was two months short of my 14th birthday in July ‘69 & vividly remember how exited everyone was, young & old alike, about this fantastic adventure.
Half a century on, having seen it all before, I was slightly surprised at the high level of media interest in the mission until I realised that there are probably more people on the planet, like the Goonhilly scientist, who have never experienced a live moon mission before & are probably as excited as most of the planet was all those years ago.
To me, it appears that, given the similarities between the original moon missions and the current one, that either the original moonshots were incredibly advanced for their time or current rocket technology has not advanced as much as almost all other technologies in the past 50 years.
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With a scrubbed deal seat and newspaper.
Black newsprint the aloe vera of our day.
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