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"Mom, What Was it Like in the 1900s?"


Hockey Mom
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I then told dd about getting the first strip malls, which might be 3 or 4 businesses together (we thought that was a wonder).

 

 

OT -- a vocabulary howler from my past. When we moved to Alabama in 1985, a number of local speech habits tripped me up for a long time. Sometimes it was I who befuddled the Alabama folks. When I would refer to a "strip mall" or to a "strip center", some of the facial responses were markedly peculiar!

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I was telling the children about using a card catalogue at the library. I remember using them, but I cannot remember how anymore. I also remember paying .10 a page to use the library's typewriter.

 

I was mad about 12 years ago or so when they took out the card catalog from my local library. You then had to have the librarian look up books for you on their sole computer. That was a pain. Even now, there are only 3 computers that are available for patrons to use to look up books. I try to do my searching at home before I go there.

 

Wow! Our library still has at least some of its card catalogue. It's not the primary way to look up a book, of course, but it's still sitting on an upper floor. I made sure my daughter knew how to use one, just in case she ever needed to do some kind of esoteric academic research that might require it. I haven't made my son learn, but this reminds me that I probably should.

 

And our libraries, even the smaller branches, have computers all over the place for patrons' use.

 

Thanks for the reminders to appreciate our local library system. Every now and then, I forget how good it really is.

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Ok this is obviously cultural and not decade related but the books thing is just really, really weird! I remember reading something as a preteen, perhaps Judy Blume that mentioned the protagonist walking home from the bus carrying her books. I thought "I wonder why she didn't take her bag?" but it never occured to me that no-one had a bag/backpack. I was born in 1976 so yep, backpacks were everywhere by the time I started high school but even my mother had her old satchel style schoolbag in the garage.

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Hey Jeannie in NJ - my Dad sold those IBM computers back in the late 50's early 60's.... they took a whole room, and needed HUGE a/c units! He took us to work once and fed some of those punch cards into the thing and a paper came out with lots of tiny x marks that turned out to be a large Mickey Mouse head....made of tiny x marks. We were so impressed!

 

We got Pong, too, when it first came out.

 

I remember as a teen fan setting up my Super 8 camera on a tripod in front of the t.v., and clicking on my cassette recorder, to copy for posterity my (then) idol singing on t.v.

 

I remember reading in the newspaper one morning about this thing called a Betamax that would be about $700. The movies came out on tape - about $69 each at first.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

I have a huge box of 8mm and Super8 b/w films from Blackhawk Films (now defunct) - a couple even with magnetic soundtracks - of Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Which I laboriously earned with baby-sitting money (about $20 for a 20-minute reel). And now I can't even give them away! I have the same films on a few dvd discs now.

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JFSinlL, thanks for backing me up on the huge computers. When I told my dd that they took up an entire room, I am not sure that she believed me lol and now she just uses her iphone, amazing how things have changed.

 

When I lived in Hollywood in the mid and late '70's there was an old movie theatre that showed only the old original silent movies with music and sound effects. My roommate and I used to go there, it was quite interesting.

 

also it took me years to finally convince dh to throw out his Beta vcr and then a couple more years to throw out his Beta tapes. I told him BETA IS NOT COMING BACK, DEAL WITH IT

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It used to amaze me that my grandparents were born within 40 years of the Civil War.

Dot, my great grandmother ( I was 6 when she died in 1959,) she was in her late 80's so what must have been born in wow, I just figured out if she was 88 when she died she would have been born in 1871, wow. No wonder she had an outhouse at her little wooden house where we would go viist her . Even tho I was younger than 6, I still remember her outhouse and also her wonderful peach orchard and lots of land.

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I remember our first dishwasher...we got it just when my brother was old enough to start doing dishes and I wasn't hardly home anymore to do them. I remember tv being black and white with rabbit ears and aluminum foil. I remember pre-seat belt laws and riding in the back of an old chevy truck. I remember when kids could smoke on the school patio during lunch. When we got our first home computer (courtesy of stepdad's job...few families had them) and he brought home a card reader. Hanging out with friends all summer, pre-teens and teens in charge of younger kids, no adults around, riding bicycles, occasionally coming into the a/c for a few minutes on the atari or the (then new) nintendo...but outside was always better, going to the library, week long monopoly games, roller skating with old metal, adjustable skates, playing war and hide and seek and kick the can, going loose change diving at the local car wash and then hitting the Five and Dime candy store, walking five miles to the park and only having to be home by the time the street lights came on, and having to talk on the phone at the dining room table as it was hooked to the wall right there...so there were few secrets in the house. Heavens, I remember having pen pals!

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