30 Facts From The ’70s And ’80s That Seem Unbelievable Now, Shared In This Online Thread

Yay! This! It’s like Stranger Things

Trawling through the library index first to find the right encyclopedia / reference publication then building your footnotes / bibliography to support your submission. Roughly 30 minutes for per reference...

well then...

We made those for our dads, for mom we made potholders.

I remember when there was only BBC and ITV

This was "normal" in the UK in the 80s and 90s. Uniform was a skirt for the girls. In winter they simply wore woolly tights, which was also part of the uniform and had to be a certain colour. Boys wore trousers and it was only if it was really hot we could wear shorts and very occasionally it would be declared a "no tie" day.

You think that's bad. When I was a university, I didn't have a phone and used the public call boxes at the end of the street. Doesn't sound too bad until I say that I lived in the red light district and got propositioned whilst on the phone to my mother! LOL

The amount of times I would burn my hands on the monkey bars from the hot Aussie sun 😤 the blisters! But my god was it fun!!!

My English teacher could have thrown a board rubber for the olympics

Ha. There was one bus stop in the entire village. Apart from the one and only school bus, the remainder of the bus service flipped between one an hour to two busses a week! I walked to primary school, including on my own from about aged 7 or 8, and cycled to secondary school which was 3 miles away in the nearest town. This is probably why I have such little patience with the Chelsea tractors (SUVs) doing the "school run".

Smoking “sections” on airplanes!!

Exploring outside for hours on end was the best.

The one I remember was mostly a toy: molded plastic seat, one inch plastic strap with a buckle, and a plastic steering wheel with a squeeky horn button.

That was a student prank. Our chemistry teacher had some mercury in a beaker and we stuck our hands in it. Not sure that touching it is a big deal, but you don't want to ingest it.

Thank god!

Hamburger jail was awesome!

AND you could pick up the phone and listen in on their conversations!

Katy McMouse

Katy McMouse

Community Member • points

posts

comments

upvotes

FollowUnfollow

Premium

Premium user. Get details.

Probably because they were hunting rifles, used for hunting and not assault rifles, used for God knows what.

Whiskey on teething baby’s gums

Omg the warning notice is full on

Katy McMouse

Katy McMouse

Community Member • points

posts

comments

upvotes

FollowUnfollow

Premium

Premium user. Get details.

Wow! Look at the leg room.

" I Thought He/She Was With YOU ! "

There is one of these near my sisters, in a park, it is 3 feet wide. Spin on that fast and you will vomit and feel ill for the rest of the day.

Fortunately, the jet injectors do no use a needle, but instead use a high pressure spray that penetrates the top layers of skin to deliver the vaccine. They used to be used for mass vaccinations, but now only a fraction of people in the States use it for insulin.

Well at least the nurse tried to calm her down, though a newborn should not be near smoking!

Buying smokes for my grandpa. 43 cents a pack! Now almost $20 here.

"most" :-(

We had Nitty Nora the head explorer. You were treated then and there. The shame of going back to class was dreadful.

I'm also from Raleigh. My second grade teacher's wooden paddle was made by her husband and he'd even done fancy burn in lettering to put her name on it. Good times

That would have been quite a trick in the 70s and 80s, since Netflix wasn't even founded until mid-1997.

I still get DVDs from Netflix because I can't stream here in rural Virginia

Netflix? Hahaha.. we would go down the road to rent VCR cassettes.

Sent in the mail??? I had to actually walk, a good long walk uphill both ways ;), to the video store where we rented VHS tapes. And that started when I was about 13, before that you either saw it in the theater, or waited until it was on HBO or Showtime, before that u had to wait until 1 of the 3 networks or however many UHF stations u got showed it with a whole bunch of commercial breaks!!!

Um...wrong decade, kiddo.

That's not the 80's. Get out!

I remember the dvd delivery. Those were the days!!! My family would watch little house on the prairie

I still get dvd’s from Netflix.

THE VIDEO STORE. we lucked out as weirdo teens bc there was a cool guy who ran the cinema in the big city and he got all sorts of demented stuff on tape : ) and then a pretty cool store in our town where my bff worked, and her boss would get us stuff too. lucky duckys

This whole post makes me feel young 🤗 as can't comment on most of it. Fascinating nonetheless!

Lord, were Netflix DVDs that long ago already?

This one does NOT qualify LOL. Leave this topic to your elders, youngin'

No cellphones either, my mom had an old rotary dial phone and she had the lock for it when she didn’t want us to use it!

Netflix didn't exist until 1997, and DVDs didn't become a thing until around1998.

Netflix still does that.

Netflix didn’t start mailing DVDs until 1998

I work with a woman who is 'grandfathered in' to the Netflix DVD by mail thing. She doesn't have the streaming part.

VHS was available in the late 1980's, but not dvds

Netflix didnt exist until almost the 2000s, we are talking about a time before internet was a regular houshold thing

Blockbuster

I had to go to my friend’s house to watch vhs tapes her sisters had taped off of fuzzy broadcast tv.

Not from the 70s or 80s