Back in my day, we only had one computer in the whole house. And we couldn’t use it if anyone was talking on the telephone! The world around us is changing at an incredible pace, and it’s extremely easy for young generations to forget or simply be unaware of what our grandparents experienced growing up.
So to remind ourselves how different the world was back then, one Reddit user recently asked older adults to share their favorite “pieces of trivia” that people their age know but younger generations might not. Below, you’ll find some of their most fascinating responses, so enjoy scrolling through. And keep reading to find a conversation with Jean Mader and Laura Bettinger of the OK Boomer podcast!
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Phone numbers were memorized, and there was no speed dial, caller ID, or voicemail. I still remember my home # and my best friend's # from 50+ years ago.
I can still remember my friends phone numbers for being in my early teens. Am 46 now
The world was way more colorful.
Cars were cool colors, not just gray, white or black. Like, a mall parking lot would look spectacular.
Now it seems like everywhere is just a ubiquitous, low profile, architecturally acceptable sea of blah.
That when you watched TV you had to watch what was on and if you wanted to watch something in particular, you had to wait for it to come on.
When I was a kid we only got three channels through the antenna and one of them was PBS.
To gain more insight on this topic, we reached out to Jean Mader and Laura Bettinger, co-hosts of the OK Boomer podcast. They were kind enough to provide some examples of things they remember that Gen Z might be confused or surprised by. "We all had a crush on Little Joe on Bonanza, watched in black and white," Jean revealed. "[We were] excited to get the annual big phone book and peruse the yellow pages (old books used as handy booster seat for kids)."
The hosts also provided a long list of things Gen Z might not be aware of: Princess style landline phones, typing on typewriters and using whiteout, getting blue fingers from carbon paper to make copies, using World Book Encyclopedias instead of Google, giant paper roadmaps you could never properly refold, and trading Beatles cards. Jean also pointed out that men would hold doors open for women, open car doors, and walk next to curb for women. "Always!"
Not that long ago, but you no security screening at airports. You could literally walk the person to the boarding area and watch them board the plane.
When the internet first came out, you couldn't talk on the phone and be online at the same time.
My boss blew my young co-workers mind the other day when she explained that there is a special kind of black paper, that you can put between two regular pieces of paper, and when you write on the top one, it shows up on the bottom one!
Jean also reminded us of 3.2% low alcohol beer, diets from 1980's like the Cabbage Soup diet and Grapefruit Diet, huge Hi Fidelity furniture like stereo record players, metal lunch boxes, riding in the back of station wagons facing backwards with no seatbelts, view finders, video stores, Swanson TV dinner nights, arm wrestling to settle disputes, nobody wearing sunscreen, fallout shelters and houses with coal chutes.
MTV was all music.
Dude! I miss that so much. Reality TV is GARBAGE. I want the Music back in MTV.
Tv stations used to just go off at midnight. They would play a test pattern and a tone until resuming broadcasting around 6am.
That it was normal for an entire household to share a single phone number.
We also asked the hosts if they happen to miss any of these things from the past. "Do not miss encyclopedias," Jean shared. "Google at our fingertips is amazing (although with this, we lost the ability to spell on our own). Truly thankful for GPS, but miss a map here and there to get a true perspective as to where things are. And a good arm wrestle is always fun and handy."
My 20 yo son liked this one:
When driving to anywhere new, you had to get directions or stop at the gas station and ask for them…
Or you could buy a map/atlas.
I had the atlas. I could figure out the miles, how long a trip could take, possible shortcuts. I loved that thing
There were telephones EVERYWHERE. Streets, shops, sidewalk corners, etc., etc.
You paid for calls with COINS.
The struggle to find a working phone or having coins...or have to stop in the middle of no where and try to find a phone...I'm so glad that we have a phone that we can use anytime...and we have GPS...my worst nightmare was to try to go to a certain address using a map, without having no one to help me...dear lord...
We used to make our Christmas or birthday wish list from looking in a Sears & Roebuck (or other store's) catalog. You could actually order and pay for things via snail mail, and it was safe to do so.
And when it comes to things we do today that future generations might be shocked by, Jean predicts that because AI will take over, they may be shocked that we ever had to creatively write anything! "Will cars all be automatic and they will be shocked we used our hands to steer?" she asked. "Robots will clean our houses, and they will chuckle at the fact that we actually moved a vacuum."
If you'd like to hear more from Jean and Laura about life "back in the day," be sure to check out their podcast, OK Boomer!
My adult children and all their friends didn’t believe me when I first told them that married women weren’t allowed to have a credit card in their own name until 1974. Before that, they could only have one through their husband.
Yeah, I didn't quite believe it when my mum told me that mid 70s (ten years before I was born) the bank wouldn't let her have a chequing account without dads approval. In their words "husband, boyfriend or father". Seriously so long as their was some random p*nis owner next to her they were happy. So dad went in with her, closed their account and told them why (their treatment of mum) (Edit: they technically could legally have chequing accounts, but the bank had every right to decline women or impose these requirements. So the closing of the account did mean something, as he found a bank that would be fine with mum having free reign as much as he did)
There used to be a phone number you could call to get the time. It would update every 10 seconds. “At the tone the time will be…”
And the temperature! For some weird reason I thought that was so cool as a kid
There use to be 411 operators that looked up phone numbers for you too! I worked for GTE doing it for 5 years!
I remember just calling "0" for The Operator for that.
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Me too. POP and any four digits would work though, so we kids had fun using dirty words to get the time.
Load More Replies... I wonder if this is maybe still around? Maybe the service was never turned off?
Thank-you Wikipedia: it seems Austria, Canada, China, Finland(?), France, Italy, Netherlands (4 million calls per year), New Zealand, Russia, Spain, Sweden (2000 calls a day), S. Africa, Ukraine, the UK (30 million calls a year) and the US all still offer this service!
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...seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip. On the third stroke the time sponsored by Accurist will be seven twenty-seven and six seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip. On the third stroke...
I can literally hear this in my head, with the man's voice and exactly the way he used to say it!
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Lily Tomlin doing Ernestine (telephone operator), "One ringy-dingy..."
In Australia it was 6074 for the time or 6076 for the weather. This changed to 1194 and 1196 at some time in the 1990s, and was discontinued in 2019. Refer: https://nxk.io/2019/09/30/the-last-day-of-the-1194-time-service-and-1196-weather-service/
In Philadelphia )PA, USA!) the number was TIme 6-1212 and weather was WEather 6-1212
Late 80's, you could call a number and they would tell you a story or a joke.
On the third stroke, the time sponsored by Accurist will be ten oh six and thirty seconds. Beep beep beeeep. On the third stroke, the time sponsored by Accurist.......
Lol. I used to call time and temperature in the middle of the night out of boredom.
There still is a number in Oklahoma that you can call for time, date, temp and weather forecast. For those curious it's 1-405-599-1234 and yes it's a legit number.
For some reason, the Time number where I lived would have the time, but behind it was a party line. We'd call Time then chat with and meet people. Don't know if that happened everywhere... this was central California in the 70s.
I think that was WWV, the National Bureau of Standards. I remember calling a 303 number whenever I was running master control at the TV station. Gotta keep that studio clock accurate. "...16 hours, 22 minutes and 10 seconds, Coordinated Universal Time . . . bip!"
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That number still works, but you have to listen to a commercial before they tell you the time.
816-844-1212 or any last four #s still exists. It has ads now.
We used to call the library Ready Reference Desk for information about a subject.
All of us kids, as young as toddlers, used to pile into the open bed of a pickup truck and just be driven all over hell and gone by adults who didn't even have seatbelts in the cab. No one ever questioned this. It was a perfectly legitimate method of transporting small kids.
I was still doing this as a teenager working construction. Me and the rest of the laborers got hauled from jobsite to jobsite just like that in the 90s.
Ashtrays everywhere. Homes, businesses, restaurants, hospitals, malls, schools (designated area), etc. Even if you didn't smoke you had ashtrays, at least on your coffee table, for guests.
Would you like to sit in the smoking section, or directly next to the smoking section?
No ATM or debit cards. You would have to withdraw enough cash to cover you for the weekend, since the banks were closed.
Cigarette machines pretty much everywhere, as long as you put the money in you could get a pack of smokes no matter what age you were
Italy and other European countries still have those, but you need some form of ID to be able to purchase.
Leaving kids in the car to run into a store was no big deal.
Where I grew up (NI in the early 70's), you HAD to leave someone in the car, or it would be removed & blown up.
(M69). Gas station attendants would put gas in your car, cleaned your windshield, and check your oil as a part of buying the gas. Then you paid him through your car window without getting out of your car.
Pop / soda came in glass bottles.
Grocery stores only sold food and the stores were about a quarter of today’s sizes.
When you needed wood and such for a home project, there was no Home Depot. You went to the lumber yard for wood and anything else, a small local hardware store.
And the pop bottles were generally re-fillable. You'd go to the store with a six-pack of empties, and come home with full bottles, save on the 2-cent deposit charge. And the Cub Scouts would go from door-to-door collecting bottles to generate money for trips, picnics, and courses.
At one time, Top 40 radio was comprised of real musicians and singers.
People used to actually write letters, put a stamp on them, and mailed them to their friends and relatives! As a kid, I would write letters to my school friends over summer break just to tell them how my summer was going and most would write back telling me how things were with them.
I still remember when stamps went from 18 cents (US) to 20 cents and my Grandma complained about how outrageous that was. Today a first class stamp is 66 cents, and I only mail Christmas cards and thank you notes nowadays.
We had a Tylenol scare where several bottles were tampered with. Those that took them died (if I remember that correctly).
Until then, nothing was ever protected. So you could open any bottle or box from drug store items like Tylenol all the way to food and drink.
I told this to my 34 year old daughter and she was shocked that there was a time when we didn’t worry about such things.
There was a room called the “coal room” in the basement of our house. We’d shovel coal from that room into a coal furnace to heat our house. The coal was delivered by a truck that had a coal chute that was inserted through a basement window in the coal room.
Our house had an autostoker so you only loaded the hopper up once a week. We's buy a dump truck load a year. Blue Mountains so long winters.
A 15 minute phone call coast to coast was about $12 in 1977. Equivalent to about $60 today.
We could only ring our grandparents in the country on Sundays because it was cheaper.
When you went to a concert, you made sure to take a lighter — even if you didn’t smoke.
Drunk driving wasn't a serious crime until a group of moms got together and advocated. (MADD).
I'm just old enough to remember smoking on planes. It still blows my mind that that was a thing!
They used to refresh/cycle the air on aircraft. Now they are just smoke-free flying petri dishes
That "Help wanted" ads in the back of the newspaper were a good way to find jobs, and they were segregated by sex.
Not my first job but my second. I went to work for Pizza Hut by answering a newspaper ad.
Houses in the same area had to share a telephone "party line". And you could listen in to their conversations.
Unless you sneezed or something...
Whenever you wanted to download something online, you'd have to basically threaten everyone in the house with their lives if they picked up the phone during the amount of download time it took. It would take hours to download a game or an image, and if someone used the phone, the download would START OVER from the beginning. Plus, in the mid-'90s, you'd have to pay by the hour.
This is why you collected links during the day and did your downloads after 11pm, when everyone had gone to bed. If you didn't, you should have.
There was such a thing as penny candy. A store near my school sold lots of it. Little Tootsie Rolls, many flavors of gumballs, and lots of other tasty things. A group of kids could come away with a big haul if one of them had a quarter.
Every year I teach my students about Y2K and they think it’s hilarious.
It was a real threat, but the reason we think it was dumb was because the world did unite to prepare for the problem and the software people were successful. Now if the world could just unite and plan for global warming...
Milk was delivered to your house every week in a gallon glass bottle.
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What kind of content would Boredpanda be making if Reddit didn't exist and Americans didn't post stuff there? 🤷🏼♂️😁
I grew up in New York City in the 1940s; we locked our apartment doors with several locks.
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I remember the days when little kids were offered a phone book as a booster seat. Didn't work very well if you were in a small town.
Concerning the headline. I am an English teacher (English as a second language). Lately, one of my most talented students, who picks up most of his English on the internet, insisted that the word "shook" is the past tense of "to shock". These days, there seems less and less purpose in trying to teach kids grammar when they pick up the fast-spreading substandard grammar so easily.
I guess over time, it happens in Etymology. Example: 'Thou/Thee' used to be the informal.
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Most of these are very well known by younger generations. And then you wonder why we don’t want to go back to “the good old days”.
There is no good old times...We remember the freedom we had cause we were young and didn't have to take care of cold war, lung cancer,lead in furnitures ,car crashes or asbest in buildings. The older you get, the more difficult you adapt to changes..and the world seems to get more insecure and complicated every day Do I want to get out of our social and financial crisis? ?Yes, for sure Do I want to go backwards? No the world will change like it always have done.. And even if we rant about the stupidity of youth spreading on social media, we are aware how many of them fight for a better tomorrow,how smart some of them run businesses at twentyplus
Load More Replies... As gen z, I just want to say I know about all these things. Payphones? Ashtrays/Cigarettes everywhere? Most of this list is some version of "There were no smartphones" and "Everything was dangerous"
I remember how my Commodore64 loaded up games by a cassette tape. Sometimes the load would be faulty and I had to start it all over again. I can stil vividy lear the loading theme music from Platoon in my head.
Supersonic flights on Concorde. You get looked at by some as if you are from another planet.
Around 2000 when you still paid for a phone call per minute there were pre-selections that changed on a daily routine. Very helpful especially when you called someone abroad. It was a lot of cheaper
Oh everything was sooo much better. Who do we blame? Totally not you and your peers who made it like this! Nooo it's the stupid kids and teens who don't get to experience real joy! And then adults laugh at them for thinking they were born in the wrong time.
Looking over human history, the division you feel is somewhat human nature. https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/amp/ Additionally, I wrote essays about rainforest deforestation in the 90s. Made my class sign anti chicken cage farmng forms (which is banned in my country now). But much of my generation is like yours: stuck, as no one will let go of the reins they hold above our heads. Housing etc, at least where I live. It changed under our feet too.
Load More Replies... What kind of content would Boredpanda be making if Reddit didn't exist and Americans didn't post stuff there? 🤷🏼♂️😁
I grew up in New York City in the 1940s; we locked our apartment doors with several locks.
Load More Replies... I remember the days when little kids were offered a phone book as a booster seat. Didn't work very well if you were in a small town.
Concerning the headline. I am an English teacher (English as a second language). Lately, one of my most talented students, who picks up most of his English on the internet, insisted that the word "shook" is the past tense of "to shock". These days, there seems less and less purpose in trying to teach kids grammar when they pick up the fast-spreading substandard grammar so easily.
I guess over time, it happens in Etymology. Example: 'Thou/Thee' used to be the informal.
Load More Replies... Most of these are very well known by younger generations. And then you wonder why we don’t want to go back to “the good old days”.
There is no good old times...We remember the freedom we had cause we were young and didn't have to take care of cold war, lung cancer,lead in furnitures ,car crashes or asbest in buildings. The older you get, the more difficult you adapt to changes..and the world seems to get more insecure and complicated every day Do I want to get out of our social and financial crisis? ?Yes, for sure Do I want to go backwards? No the world will change like it always have done.. And even if we rant about the stupidity of youth spreading on social media, we are aware how many of them fight for a better tomorrow,how smart some of them run businesses at twentyplus
Load More Replies... As gen z, I just want to say I know about all these things. Payphones? Ashtrays/Cigarettes everywhere? Most of this list is some version of "There were no smartphones" and "Everything was dangerous"
I remember how my Commodore64 loaded up games by a cassette tape. Sometimes the load would be faulty and I had to start it all over again. I can stil vividy lear the loading theme music from Platoon in my head.
Supersonic flights on Concorde. You get looked at by some as if you are from another planet.
Around 2000 when you still paid for a phone call per minute there were pre-selections that changed on a daily routine. Very helpful especially when you called someone abroad. It was a lot of cheaper
Oh everything was sooo much better. Who do we blame? Totally not you and your peers who made it like this! Nooo it's the stupid kids and teens who don't get to experience real joy! And then adults laugh at them for thinking they were born in the wrong time.
Looking over human history, the division you feel is somewhat human nature. https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/amp/ Additionally, I wrote essays about rainforest deforestation in the 90s. Made my class sign anti chicken cage farmng forms (which is banned in my country now). But much of my generation is like yours: stuck, as no one will let go of the reins they hold above our heads. Housing etc, at least where I live. It changed under our feet too.
Load More Replies...