You Know you're getting older when...

[DrDln]

You still have old gramophone records stored in some box.

[xg4bx]

when a joke about fatty arbuckle or any other historical figure results in a blank stare.

when you remember when the news actually had news instead of being TMZ-lite

if you remember when food was triple the size and half the price it is now

when you refer to tv as "the idiot box"

you see people walking through the mall in pajamas and slippers and are aware that not too long ago people were wearing suits, ties and hats even to baseball games

remembering when people didn't revel in being ignorant. i'm sure theres always been some of that but lately its become perfectly acceptable to be dumb.

when you spell check and properly word text messages before sending them

when pop culture feels totally alien




for the record i'm only 34 but everything already feels completely different compared to when i was growing up.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by issybird

You know you've gotten old when people post about how they know they're getting older, and their reasons prove that they're mere children.

So many posts about electronics here

Originally Posted by issybird

You know you've gotten old when people post about how they know they're getting older, and their reasons prove that they're mere children.

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

So many posts about electronics here

Yes you truly know that you are getting old when you can recollect using one of these whenever one of the tubes in the T.V or radio went bad.



Also when 1.44 MB disks were part of the modern wonders. If you want to talk old in reference to computers talk to me about when you used one of these.



In order to produce a stack of these.

[afa]

When you die of old age...

[DrDln]

Originally Posted by afa

When you die of old age...

When you think more of dieing than living.

[Jewitch]

When some one looks at me blankly & asks "What are the Ramones?

[pholy]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Also when 1.44 MB disks were part of the modern wonders. If you want to talk old in reference to computers talk to me about when you used one of these.



In order to produce a stack of these.

Actually, that looks to be the new model 035 Keypunch... In my day, we had to use the IBM model 026... what a clunker!

[pholy]

From the too young page:

When you say something along the lines of, "Man, I love playing retro/classic video games like Super Mario 64!"

What about when you say "Man, I loved playing 'Sorry!', 'Monopoly' is too hard."

[Solitaire1]

...you used a state-of-the-art dedicated word processor that used 8 inch floppy disks and you had to store each page as a separate document.

...you have first-hand knowledge of how accurate "Happy Days" is.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by pholy

What about when you say "Man, I loved playing 'Sorry!', 'Monopoly' is too hard."

How about Candyland? Or Chutes and Ladders?

[red_phoenix]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

...you used a state-of-the-art dedicated word processor that used 8 inch floppy disks and you had to store each page as a separate document.

...you have first-hand knowledge of how accurate "Happy Days" is.

...you learned to type on a manual typewriter and used an electric typewriter with carbon paper for extra copies

[DrDln]

You don't feel comfortable with the word digital, whether digital watch or digital music or digital Tv...

Originally Posted by red_pheonix

...you learned to type on a manual typewriter and used an electric typewriter with carbon paper for extra copies

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

...you used a state-of-the-art dedicated word processor that used 8 inch floppy disks and you had to store each page as a separate document.

...you have first-hand knowledge of how accurate "Happy Days" is.

I typed the first draft of my dissertation on a manual Olympia typewriter. Much whiteout was consumed in that process. When I received that draft back from Dr. Gates with his comments, I passed that copy on, with my additional edits, to a woman who who did freelance word processing during off hours using her firm's word processor that was much like the one Solitaire describes.

The big inaccuracy with Happy Days (I assume you mean the TV program) was that even then Milwaukee was not the small town that it was portrayed as.


Here is another item from the past:



You are old if you recall using one of those. I can recall that in my second year of undergraduate university there was an ongoing debate in technical classes as to whether or not the few students that could afford the new hand-held scientific electronic calculators (this was around 1973 and Hewlett-Packard had just released the first mass produced model at a price tag of about $400, big money to a student back then) should be allowed to use these during exams when most still had to make do with slide rules.

If sometimes wonder if younger people who read older science fiction even know when characters in the stories who talk about using a slide rule what that character is talking about. Napier's bones.

[Roger Parkinson]

Originally Posted by pholy

Actually, that looks to be the new model 035 Keypunch... In my day, we had to use the IBM model 026... what a clunker!

Paper tape. I always bring up paper tape when people mention punch cards. I did use punch cards, but one of the machines I worked on (in fact the first one that I could claim some actual professional association with) used paper tape. Ghastly stuff.

The other story, which is much later, was about the Internet, although not the Internet we know today. I worked for Digital in the '80s and they had a private network connecting their offices using DECnet (gone now...). Our office in New Zealand were delighted when we got to connect to it via the Sydney, Australia office for just a few hours a day. Back then anything like this was a scarce resource. Soon after we got connected a colleague flew over from Sydney with a magtape (remember those?) of stuff to show us. But he forgot something and had to pull more stuff over from Sydney via the new network. He's sitting there tapping his fingers waiting, waiting, looking impatient. I said something like 'hey, this is actually really fast. Just last week this would have meant flying back to Sydney and fetching a new tape.' That would have been 2 days. This was under 10 minutes.

Sometimes I gripe about a slow connection, but then I remember that day.