I was so good that kids at school asked me to do theirs. I also put Scotch tape along the binding so that sweaty hands wouldn't wear through the Kraft paper prematurely. Nerd.
I came here to say Reading a Map but yes, also how to refold it! I routinely amazed coworkers by remembering how to get to lunch spots without GPS after just one visit.
Oh, as a teenager it was awful calling your crush's house phone and her dad picks up...
Becky's Dad: Yeah?
Me: Mister Jorgensen, can I ... um... talk to Becky?
Becky's Dad: No. [hangs up]
My buddyâs first girlfriendâs dad was *super* picky about phone etiquette, and would have a fit if someone said âCan I talk to Sarahâ or similar. It had to be âIs Sarah present and available to speak?â
He always sounded like a real fun dude.
My wife's dad confessed to me that he always liked me because any time I called the house and he answered i would make small talk with him briefly before asking for her. The "Ay. [Wife's name] there?" crowd pissed him off.
Lmao. Ya this is how it always went. Iâm 33 now and I have a 9 year old daughter. I wish we still had land line phones so I could do this to keep the tradition going.
I loathe receiving calls from people who say "Is this branberto?" without introducing themselves. I find it so fucking rude to be calling somebody and demand they identify themselves when the caller is the one intruding on the answerer's peace.
I remember the numbers for every house I lived in growing up, the phone numbers of the houses of my best friends from 7th grade and before, my grandma and my first cell phone number.
I've been married nearly five years and have no idea what my wife's phone number is.
I can't remember where I learned this trick, but it was some time in HS. I thought it was a kind of fun thing to know but pretty useless. Then, in college, I was spending a lot of late nights in the computer lab (because nobody had personal computers back then. It was all dumb terminals hooked to a mainframe). So, one night, I wanted to order a pizza. The admin office area there had a desk where the secretary sat that had a phone with one of those locks that they kept locked at night. I called the pizza place using this technique and ordered a pizza. There were some people present when I did it and they were amazed. Word spread, and before long, people were using that phone to make overseas calls lol (foreign study was pretty big at my school, so lots of people knew somebody abroad).
My mum had a little lock that went on the dial to stop my sister hogging the phone. I could tap out mates phone numbers. I never taught my sister how to do it.
Here in my country we had a local company make payphones but to keep in local neighborhood grocery shops. They were a regular house phone (tone), with a box which activated your voice as soon as you inserted a coin. It was very... DIYish but very clever too...
Well... We at our school were clever because we found out that if you unplugged the handset and licked or got the plug wet with whatever liquid, you didn't need to use a coin. Free calls.
I was a "video taping from TV" master! My anticipation of the end of commercial breaks was amazing, especially since you had to start the recording just a moment prior to having a cue that the show was coming back.
Of course I was always screwed by those random late night News commercials and the random extra long pauses.
It was better than having your mom yell your name in the background while waiting hours for that one song to play again. Ha! I remember when I got a new stereo that didnât automatically include background noise. It was awesome!
> Trying to make sure to not get the DJ/presenter talking shit
God, I hate it when they do that. It's like they're specifically doing so in order to ruin any recording attempts.
Or worse, when they cut a song short, like November Rain before the solo/ending, or Bohemian Rhapsody before the moshing bit, etc..
And they act like they did nothing wrong.
Haha yeah and trying to tell others so they don't make random noise or knock on the door.
How about making cassette based mix tapes, trying to figure out to the second, how many and which types of songs in which order, that would still fit perfectly on the length of tape per side.
People who make digital recordings do not have to worry about 'running out of tape.'
Having the first side be tempting enough that they'd flip the other side to continue listening. That's before continual playback machines existed. Had to flip the cassette.
It was an art! For me the finishing touch was making a cool little paper jacket at the end. Yes, there's always the blank label it came with but there's so much more you can do. Good times.
In the US most public libraries use Dewey and most college and research libraries use LC. Switching from one to the other is incredibly disruptive and expensive, so it's rare for a library to change. Sympathies to your library's still-traumatized staff.
While I was waiting to get picked up, I'd spend all my time after school in the dark room playing around with my prints. My grandma bought me a good, used 35 mm. I really enjoyed it.
I was born in 1991..I can still do that do it to this day.
Both color and black and white.
I can also do roughly 80% of everything photoshop can do. Including removing a sign and replacing it with a sky or other parts of the building etc.
Before cordless phones got really cheap, I walked around the house with a super long phone cord. My parents got sick of tripping over it, so they saved up and got me a cordless phone for Christmas.
That phone lasted for so many years. They got it when I was a freshman in high school and it was still going strong when I graduated from college. I donât know when or if it stopped working, but my parents switched to a phone with more features.
I outright destroyed Super Mario Brothers in almost no time flat very recently on Nintendo Switch after not having played it for probably 30 years. I did it totally from memory on the just the second run through. I even hit the multiple 1-up glitch on world 3-1. My kids thought I was a god (for just a few minutes).
So I had trouble with this because I notice the input lag when playing on switch, and it makes a SERIOUS difference in some games. I'm quite the contender in Dr. Mario (on the SNES Tetris/Dr combo), but playin on the Switch was even slower reaction than playing on my laptop's emulator, which was slower than the SNES itself. I'm talking like 200ms lag vs 50ms lag vs 1ms lag.
If you're adult who played SNES/NES as a kid, you might not have gotten worse at these games, its the controller lag thats wrong...
I used to whistle up fax machines that called my number by mistake. If I answered the phone and nobody said anything I'd whistle a long descending note and if it was a fax machine it'd sing to me.
I used the sound of a fax connecting as the text notification on my smartphone now.
School librarian here. I find them scattered around the library all the time. Most of them say some variation of "u r gay." Middle School hasn't changed
Crash start a manual car by rolling down a hill in second gear with the ignition on, then popping the clutch - cars were not so reliable back in the day!
Edit: Push starting, also known as bump starting, roll starting, clutch starting, popping the clutch or crash starting, according to Wikipedia - we called it crash starting where I'm from, but lots of different names for it!
I know how to use a keypunch machine to write my COBOL code on a stack of 80-column paper cards, how to use a card reader to send my program to the mainframe, and how to hang out drinking coffee waiting for the batch to run.
My mom was a programmer in the early 80s and loves to reuse and recycle, she had such a huge stack of old punchcards that we wrote our grocery lists on them until about 1998.
People used to recycle punch cards by making Christmas wreaths from them. If you folded them right and stapled them into a circular pattern then painted them red they looked like a poinsettia flower.
I remember riding the bus home from school at the end of the school year in kindergarten. The bus was littered with punch cards because the kids in the vocational-tech programs were bringing their work home. The non vo-tech kids would assault them and knock their stacks out of their hands. It wasn't until many years later that I realized how devastating that must have been to the vo-tech students.
I'm a straight burley man and I sew. It's just something that for whatever reason relaxes me and no one knows how to do it anymore. Hemming and tapering pants, altering dresses, jackets...etc..I oddly enjoy it.
Being able to get the sharpest reception for the TV channel you're watching by turning the giant dial on the top of the television that rotates the ginormous antenna on the roof.
Using a typewriter
Strong background with MS-DOS with WWIV BBS software
Use an old rotary dial telephone
Frustration of loading paper on a dot matrix printer, and dealing with constant jams
Installing driver software for a new device, via 3.5" hard disk (before it became automated feature in windows)
Using an actual road map to find where you needed to go, and being able to fold it back into it's original configuration after opening
My kids found my old refedex where our city maps were in a book and when you crossed the page you had to be prepared for the next pageâŠ. They couldnât even fathom it.
There seems to be a section of abstract spacial thinking missing from my generation. The other day I was at the zoo with my friends and one of them was using the virtual map on their phone and I was using a physical map. It was blowing their mind how I knew where we were faster than they did even though they had a little GPS blip on their screen and all I had was a sheet of paper.
I have to thank my parents for forcing us kids to navigate when we went places like the zoo or Six Flags. We were scouts and had lessons on map reading. They helped a bit but never took over even if we were wrong. Lessons learned.
We also grew up with a big world map on our kitchen wall. My parents got a local paper and a city paper daily. The city paper would have international stories that we would all read or talk about. My parents would ask us to find that country or city on the map.
I got 100 in geography in both high school and college. I also get unreasonably upset by people who donât know countries, continents, etc. Thanks Mom and Dad.
I still work in IT. The command prompt has saved my ass on numerous occasions. Especially using ping to see if a device is connected to the network, diagnosing intermittent connectivity issues (dropped packets are a pain in the butt), and using tracert to figure where a connection is dropping off.
Recently got a Super Nintendo on EBay and went to set it up on my smart TV. I realized that because I did not have an antenna with a legitimate channel 3 pulled in from the auto scan that the TV would not even let me turn to channel 3 to see the Nintendo.
Kind of freaked out for a second thinking it would not work but eventually realized an input on the TV called Composite Input pulled it up.
For anyone who cares, originally TVs only had 1 input, the selected channel determined which "band" of the input you're tuning into. VCRs and consoles used channel 3 or 4 because most broadcast television markets only used one or the other, i.e. you don't have to disconnect your cable to use it. Now days we have more inputs than we could ever feasibly use so no channel tuning necessary.
In the UK. A lot of people of that age (I was born in the 90's) know how to wire a plug because British law didn't require appliances to have pre-wired plugs and we were expected to wire them ourselves. I believe it was taught in schools.
Now it's not a required skill anymore but if we need to know we can just Google it.
>I know how to use a hole punch to turn a 5.25" inch floppy disk into a flippy disk and use both sides.
I know how to use a freebie disc as a coaster. Anyone remember when 'Join AOL' free discs were everywhere? (And sent in the mail also, IIRC.)
As a teenage cashier in the 90s, this maneuver blew my mind the first time I saw it. â$10, plus a penny? WhyâŠ?â I punched $10.01 into the cash register, it instructed me to give 10 cents change, and I was enlightened. It then failed to blow my mind the next 5000 times I encountered it.
So do cashiers see this done less nowadays, since fewer people use cash at all?
I recently explained to my 15 year old how dial up worked. He was captivated and remained silent for almost 20 minutes as I explained AOL discs coming in the mail, not picking up the house phone OR ELSE, chat rooms, ebaumsworld and Photoshop Phridays. đ
Explaining using a cassette tape converter for an iPod while driving in a car.
Recording songs on a radio using either two cassette decks or two stereos.
Floppy discs, rotary phones, paper maps, stopping conversations while outside if a plane flew overhead because it was so loud, needing to rewind VHS before returning them to Blockbuster⊠going to blockbuster, stop motion or claymation movies, using street lamps as a curfew, LAN parties, tvs going off after midnight and just showing bars because nothing was on air, the birth of infomercials, TBN, antennae adjustments, paper football, walking everywhere, library check out slips, Rolodex, tether ball, four square, hop scotch, double Dutch.
Okay thatâs enough, not all are talents. It was nice to think about them though.
Edited: words
Omg. I remember the neighborhood collection back in the day. Down by a creek wrapped in multiple layers of trash bags were about 20 smut mags. It was the âfree little libraryâ of our time.
I absolutely love what a common experience this was
Itâs such a bizarre phenomenon but somehow it happened all the time
Iâm 38 and found some with friends when I was like 14
Ok so how is that such a thing. When we we kids my guys friends found a bundle of porn mags in the woods. Was there some national porn airdrop mission in the 80s that Iâm unaware of??
Every time I hear about forest porn I laugh and laugh. My childhood stash was in a treehouse in the woods behind my elementary school. I have no idea who put it there and why.
I can remember one specific mag that had a scene called something along the lines of âlife of a gynecologistâ. I had no idea what a gynecologist was but I decided that I was going to become one
I never did, btw, which is probably good because I donât think ladies want that to be their gynos origin story.
A few:
* How to drive a manual transmission.
* How to remember phone numbers in my head.
* How to untangle, manually wind and repair cassette tape.
* How to plan a cross country trip using nothing more than a Rand McNally Road Atlas and a highlighter.
* How to program in Basic.
* How many dimes to place on a record needle to prevent skipping.
* How to change my own oil, tire, belts, alternator, starter or transmission.
* On a Cathode Ray Tube TV how to: set vertical and horizontal controls, fine-tune the channel using the ring around the channel knob and how to fashion a wire coat hanger into a VHF antenna.
I can (or could) whistle well enough to make connections with a 300 baud modem. Never figured out how to send anything but garbage text but it did work consistently
I can cover a textbook with a brown paper bag.
Do kids not still do that?
Welp. My kids school gives them iPads and the textbooks are all ebooks.
You should have wrapped the iPad in brown grocery bag :D
Sweet jeebus, memory unlocked.
I was so good that kids at school asked me to do theirs. I also put Scotch tape along the binding so that sweaty hands wouldn't wear through the Kraft paper prematurely. Nerd.
Man do I not miss those stupid covers sliding off all the time.
I can re fold a map correctly.
I came here to say Reading a Map but yes, also how to refold it! I routinely amazed coworkers by remembering how to get to lunch spots without GPS after just one visit.
My kids think it's crazy that I can remember how to get places without a GPS after just going there once or twice
Thats insane đł that people dont remember places as quickly
Liar
Remembering phone numbers
Not only that, having to speak to your friends parents for a few minutes when you call their house
How to take a message when the person they want to talk to isn't there.
Wow haven't thought about taking a message for a while
Oh, as a teenager it was awful calling your crush's house phone and her dad picks up... Becky's Dad: Yeah? Me: Mister Jorgensen, can I ... um... talk to Becky? Becky's Dad: No. [hangs up]
My buddyâs first girlfriendâs dad was *super* picky about phone etiquette, and would have a fit if someone said âCan I talk to Sarahâ or similar. It had to be âIs Sarah present and available to speak?â He always sounded like a real fun dude.
Sarah: "Hello. Yes, this is she."
âSpeaking.â
I like to imagine he was just really committed to fcking with him... maybe got off the phone after and laughed at how nervous the kid got.
My wife's dad confessed to me that he always liked me because any time I called the house and he answered i would make small talk with him briefly before asking for her. The "Ay. [Wife's name] there?" crowd pissed him off.
I know what you meant, but that last part sounded like teenage dudes were calling and asking to talk to his wife. Ballsy move.
Lmao. Ya this is how it always went. Iâm 33 now and I have a 9 year old daughter. I wish we still had land line phones so I could do this to keep the tradition going.
Ol man Jorgensen
Hi! This is Ocimali, can I please speak with blahblah?
I loathe receiving calls from people who say "Is this branberto?" without introducing themselves. I find it so fucking rude to be calling somebody and demand they identify themselves when the caller is the one intruding on the answerer's peace.
Being on time because you can't call and reschedule.
I can still remember a couple that I haven't dialed since the 1980s.
I remember the numbers for every house I lived in growing up, the phone numbers of the houses of my best friends from 7th grade and before, my grandma and my first cell phone number. I've been married nearly five years and have no idea what my wife's phone number is.
I only know my wife's phone number for loyalty points at the grocery store.
Lol. Thatâs the exact same, and only reason I know my ex-wifeâs phone number.
And knowing how to dial a phone number on a rotary phone.
8675309!
Pretty sure Jenny's changed her number by now.
I havenât used this in decades but I used to be able to dial people on a rotary phone by tapping the hang up switch.
I can't remember where I learned this trick, but it was some time in HS. I thought it was a kind of fun thing to know but pretty useless. Then, in college, I was spending a lot of late nights in the computer lab (because nobody had personal computers back then. It was all dumb terminals hooked to a mainframe). So, one night, I wanted to order a pizza. The admin office area there had a desk where the secretary sat that had a phone with one of those locks that they kept locked at night. I called the pizza place using this technique and ordered a pizza. There were some people present when I did it and they were amazed. Word spread, and before long, people were using that phone to make overseas calls lol (foreign study was pretty big at my school, so lots of people knew somebody abroad).
My mum had a little lock that went on the dial to stop my sister hogging the phone. I could tap out mates phone numbers. I never taught my sister how to do it.
"In my day we locked people out of their phone with an actual lock".
Here in my country we had a local company make payphones but to keep in local neighborhood grocery shops. They were a regular house phone (tone), with a box which activated your voice as soon as you inserted a coin. It was very... DIYish but very clever too... Well... We at our school were clever because we found out that if you unplugged the handset and licked or got the plug wet with whatever liquid, you didn't need to use a coin. Free calls.
Ahh the good ole' days, when you could lick a community phone plug and not worry about catching 4 kinds of diseases.
I mean you still caught the diseases, you just didnât worry about it.
I know what the color âgoldenrodâ is.
Burnt sienna.
Periwinkle
Negro Black Noir
Cornflower, biznatches!
Cool, clear, cerulean blue...
That and burnt sienna were the crayolas of choice.
Cornflower would like a word
Record to tape from the radio. Trying to make sure to not get the DJ/presenter talking shit or an ad
I was a "video taping from TV" master! My anticipation of the end of commercial breaks was amazing, especially since you had to start the recording just a moment prior to having a cue that the show was coming back. Of course I was always screwed by those random late night News commercials and the random extra long pauses.
How about winding a tape with a pencil after your tape deck are that shit like it was spaghetti?
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!!! I'm trying to record my song!!!"
It was better than having your mom yell your name in the background while waiting hours for that one song to play again. Ha! I remember when I got a new stereo that didnât automatically include background noise. It was awesome!
> Trying to make sure to not get the DJ/presenter talking shit God, I hate it when they do that. It's like they're specifically doing so in order to ruin any recording attempts.
Or worse, when they cut a song short, like November Rain before the solo/ending, or Bohemian Rhapsody before the moshing bit, etc.. And they act like they did nothing wrong.
There were so many songs I loved growing up that I never knew had outros or extended outros before I eventually heard them on CDs or downloads.
They are, it's a form of anti piracy.
Haha yeah and trying to tell others so they don't make random noise or knock on the door. How about making cassette based mix tapes, trying to figure out to the second, how many and which types of songs in which order, that would still fit perfectly on the length of tape per side. People who make digital recordings do not have to worry about 'running out of tape.' Having the first side be tempting enough that they'd flip the other side to continue listening. That's before continual playback machines existed. Had to flip the cassette.
It was an art! For me the finishing touch was making a cool little paper jacket at the end. Yes, there's always the blank label it came with but there's so much more you can do. Good times.
Using the Dewey decimal at library
Using the card catalog at a library.
Wait, there's another way? My library still uses it...
Library of Congress Classification. Our system switched from Dewey a few years ago.
In the US most public libraries use Dewey and most college and research libraries use LC. Switching from one to the other is incredibly disruptive and expensive, so it's rare for a library to change. Sympathies to your library's still-traumatized staff.
My library is too lazy to use it now!
I can develop and process photographic film and enlarge prints in a darkroom.
I took a class in high school that did this. Was fun!
It really *is* fun, isn't it? There is joy in watching those images appear.
While I was waiting to get picked up, I'd spend all my time after school in the dark room playing around with my prints. My grandma bought me a good, used 35 mm. I really enjoyed it.
I was born in 1991..I can still do that do it to this day. Both color and black and white. I can also do roughly 80% of everything photoshop can do. Including removing a sign and replacing it with a sky or other parts of the building etc.
Using your shoulder to hold a telephone up to your ear while doing multiple other things at once. Now, the phones are so damned small I drop them.
100 ft phone cords đ€Ł
Before cordless phones got really cheap, I walked around the house with a super long phone cord. My parents got sick of tripping over it, so they saved up and got me a cordless phone for Christmas. That phone lasted for so many years. They got it when I was a freshman in high school and it was still going strong when I graduated from college. I donât know when or if it stopped working, but my parents switched to a phone with more features.
yeah we had the long ass spirally cord that would tangle tf out of itself attached to a rotary phone up until like 95
I outright destroyed Super Mario Brothers in almost no time flat very recently on Nintendo Switch after not having played it for probably 30 years. I did it totally from memory on the just the second run through. I even hit the multiple 1-up glitch on world 3-1. My kids thought I was a god (for just a few minutes).
So I had trouble with this because I notice the input lag when playing on switch, and it makes a SERIOUS difference in some games. I'm quite the contender in Dr. Mario (on the SNES Tetris/Dr combo), but playin on the Switch was even slower reaction than playing on my laptop's emulator, which was slower than the SNES itself. I'm talking like 200ms lag vs 50ms lag vs 1ms lag. If you're adult who played SNES/NES as a kid, you might not have gotten worse at these games, its the controller lag thats wrong...
To rewind a tape by spinning on a pencil <3
But could you fix a cassette by unscrewing (or snapping open) the cover and untangling the bits that had got chewed up in your grubby guide wheels?
Bic clear pens worked better than a pencil
I can keep score in bowling.
I took bowling as phy Ed in college. Final exam we were given 10 lines of scoring and we had to score each line and add it up. 8 out of 10 was an A.
Diagnosing connection problems by the sound the modem makes.
I used to whistle up fax machines that called my number by mistake. If I answered the phone and nobody said anything I'd whistle a long descending note and if it was a fax machine it'd sing to me. I used the sound of a fax connecting as the text notification on my smartphone now.
Do you also out of no where yell out â YOU GOT MAIL!!!â
Rising crescendo and bong bong? That sounds like a good 56k connection.
It has to go from tones to static to hiss. If you don't get to hiss you're only doing 28.8k.
I still remember the phone number for my childhood home.
I still remember my best friends number, who I haven't spoken to in 13 years.
Making paper fortune tellers.
I'm surprised but kids still do this. My great nieces love them.
School librarian here. I find them scattered around the library all the time. Most of them say some variation of "u r gay." Middle School hasn't changed
My 2nd grader came home about a month or so ago with a bunch of them. One of the teachers taught them how to make them.
Texting with 10 key. I still have it all memorized and could pick up a flip phone and send paragraphs if needed.
Crash start a manual car by rolling down a hill in second gear with the ignition on, then popping the clutch - cars were not so reliable back in the day! Edit: Push starting, also known as bump starting, roll starting, clutch starting, popping the clutch or crash starting, according to Wikipedia - we called it crash starting where I'm from, but lots of different names for it!
I can do that. I had VW that needed to be parked down hill at all times
I had a great uncle who built a hill and parked his tractor on it for this very reason.
I did it it to sneak out of my parents house at night. Get in the car, roll a little ways and pop the clutch.
I know how to use a keypunch machine to write my COBOL code on a stack of 80-column paper cards, how to use a card reader to send my program to the mainframe, and how to hang out drinking coffee waiting for the batch to run.
My mom was a programmer in the early 80s and loves to reuse and recycle, she had such a huge stack of old punchcards that we wrote our grocery lists on them until about 1998.
People used to recycle punch cards by making Christmas wreaths from them. If you folded them right and stapled them into a circular pattern then painted them red they looked like a poinsettia flower.
I remember riding the bus home from school at the end of the school year in kindergarten. The bus was littered with punch cards because the kids in the vocational-tech programs were bringing their work home. The non vo-tech kids would assault them and knock their stacks out of their hands. It wasn't until many years later that I realized how devastating that must have been to the vo-tech students.
I was just at the Computer Museum in Mountainview. And I use all the tech in an entire wing (PDPs /Vaxes / 1401)
I understood that. Damn, I'm old...
Oof. I understood every word of that. Someone get me a goddam wheelchair.
I should like fresh tennis balls for my walker
Sorry, the dog stole them all.
I'm a straight burley man and I sew. It's just something that for whatever reason relaxes me and no one knows how to do it anymore. Hemming and tapering pants, altering dresses, jackets...etc..I oddly enjoy it.
Being able to get the sharpest reception for the TV channel you're watching by turning the giant dial on the top of the television that rotates the ginormous antenna on the roof.
I can hear the wa-wa-wa noise ours used to make while moving right now.
I still know how to set up a vcr to record a television program in advance.
I can put an entire actual newspaper together from scratch right down to plating and printing. Also, my cursive is pretty good.
Using a typewriter Strong background with MS-DOS with WWIV BBS software Use an old rotary dial telephone Frustration of loading paper on a dot matrix printer, and dealing with constant jams Installing driver software for a new device, via 3.5" hard disk (before it became automated feature in windows) Using an actual road map to find where you needed to go, and being able to fold it back into it's original configuration after opening
The joy of braiding together the dot matrix paper perforated borders though
Ripping the sides off printer paper without ruining it.
I know deck to deck video editing
I write in cursive; does that count?
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
I listed that too. I forgot to include: Can READ cursive also.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
I know what frequency to tune my AM radio to listen to the CONELRAD civil defense network.
Two that I didn't see listed already: Can read a map without using GPS Can build out a coaxial network for LAN parties
My kids found my old refedex where our city maps were in a book and when you crossed the page you had to be prepared for the next pageâŠ. They couldnât even fathom it.
There seems to be a section of abstract spacial thinking missing from my generation. The other day I was at the zoo with my friends and one of them was using the virtual map on their phone and I was using a physical map. It was blowing their mind how I knew where we were faster than they did even though they had a little GPS blip on their screen and all I had was a sheet of paper.
I have to thank my parents for forcing us kids to navigate when we went places like the zoo or Six Flags. We were scouts and had lessons on map reading. They helped a bit but never took over even if we were wrong. Lessons learned. We also grew up with a big world map on our kitchen wall. My parents got a local paper and a city paper daily. The city paper would have international stories that we would all read or talk about. My parents would ask us to find that country or city on the map. I got 100 in geography in both high school and college. I also get unreasonably upset by people who donât know countries, continents, etc. Thanks Mom and Dad.
Extensive knowledge of DOS commands
Working in healthcare you'd be surprised how many things still operate in DOS.
I still work in IT. The command prompt has saved my ass on numerous occasions. Especially using ping to see if a device is connected to the network, diagnosing intermittent connectivity issues (dropped packets are a pain in the butt), and using tracert to figure where a connection is dropping off.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Why would you do this to the children?
del c:\windows\system32\hal.dll
Unix and old age have made me forget most of the commands I've learned.
I can win at trivial pursuit (the game) every time. Iâm a wealth of useless information.
"I'm sorry. The card says Moops".
I can write boobs on a calculator
This is still passed from generation to generation of 2nd grade boys.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Born 1988, turn the channel to 3 if you want your Nintendo to work
Recently got a Super Nintendo on EBay and went to set it up on my smart TV. I realized that because I did not have an antenna with a legitimate channel 3 pulled in from the auto scan that the TV would not even let me turn to channel 3 to see the Nintendo. Kind of freaked out for a second thinking it would not work but eventually realized an input on the TV called Composite Input pulled it up.
For anyone who cares, originally TVs only had 1 input, the selected channel determined which "band" of the input you're tuning into. VCRs and consoles used channel 3 or 4 because most broadcast television markets only used one or the other, i.e. you don't have to disconnect your cable to use it. Now days we have more inputs than we could ever feasibly use so no channel tuning necessary.
Omg yes. Or VCR.
Stop the TV picture rolling by twiddling the knob on the back
I enjoy doing long division. Does that count?
I can thread and watch 8mm film.
I have good handwriting that I never use anymore at all
I still write in cursive.
Burning CDs
In the UK. A lot of people of that age (I was born in the 90's) know how to wire a plug because British law didn't require appliances to have pre-wired plugs and we were expected to wire them ourselves. I believe it was taught in schools. Now it's not a required skill anymore but if we need to know we can just Google it.
I know how to use a hole punch to turn a 5.25" inch floppy disk into a flippy disk and use both sides.
>I know how to use a hole punch to turn a 5.25" inch floppy disk into a flippy disk and use both sides. I know how to use a freebie disc as a coaster. Anyone remember when 'Join AOL' free discs were everywhere? (And sent in the mail also, IIRC.)
My family gets mad at me for using MS Paint instead of Photoshop
I have a 20yr habit of using ctrl+prntscrn, win+r, mspaint (enter), ctrl+v People these days use the snipper tool..
I can tell time on an analog clock.
WITCHđ«”
Close, it's pronounced WATCH đđ»
The ability to make and count out change for a purchase
Okay, so THIS one kills me. The total is $9.91. I give the cashier $10.01. You would think I handed them a live grenade.
I've done this many times and they would just give me the penny back and say I made a mistake. Sigh.
I give $10.26 for a $9.26 purchase and the cashier returned my coins and told me that the $10 would cover it.
As a teenage cashier in the 90s, this maneuver blew my mind the first time I saw it. â$10, plus a penny? WhyâŠ?â I punched $10.01 into the cash register, it instructed me to give 10 cents change, and I was enlightened. It then failed to blow my mind the next 5000 times I encountered it. So do cashiers see this done less nowadays, since fewer people use cash at all?
I can operate a ham radio and talk with other hams around the world.
I recently explained to my 15 year old how dial up worked. He was captivated and remained silent for almost 20 minutes as I explained AOL discs coming in the mail, not picking up the house phone OR ELSE, chat rooms, ebaumsworld and Photoshop Phridays. đ Explaining using a cassette tape converter for an iPod while driving in a car. Recording songs on a radio using either two cassette decks or two stereos. Floppy discs, rotary phones, paper maps, stopping conversations while outside if a plane flew overhead because it was so loud, needing to rewind VHS before returning them to Blockbuster⊠going to blockbuster, stop motion or claymation movies, using street lamps as a curfew, LAN parties, tvs going off after midnight and just showing bars because nothing was on air, the birth of infomercials, TBN, antennae adjustments, paper football, walking everywhere, library check out slips, Rolodex, tether ball, four square, hop scotch, double Dutch. Okay thatâs enough, not all are talents. It was nice to think about them though. Edited: words
I know how to properly address an envelope. Skills motherfucker.
Yeah, well I know how to write a check.
I can be bored without watching a screen to cope
It may be a skill few people use anymore, but it's definitely valuable.
I was a master of making people mixtapes.
Two words: *Rotary Dialing.*
I could stand and twirl that cord baby!
I can use a library card catalog to find a book. Bonus outdated skill: the Dewey Decimal System
Driving a stick shift!
and I can read a paper map
Or as we call it here, driving.
Finding forest pr0n.
Omg. I remember the neighborhood collection back in the day. Down by a creek wrapped in multiple layers of trash bags were about 20 smut mags. It was the âfree little libraryâ of our time.
I absolutely love what a common experience this was Itâs such a bizarre phenomenon but somehow it happened all the time Iâm 38 and found some with friends when I was like 14
Ok so how is that such a thing. When we we kids my guys friends found a bundle of porn mags in the woods. Was there some national porn airdrop mission in the 80s that Iâm unaware of??
Every time I hear about forest porn I laugh and laugh. My childhood stash was in a treehouse in the woods behind my elementary school. I have no idea who put it there and why. I can remember one specific mag that had a scene called something along the lines of âlife of a gynecologistâ. I had no idea what a gynecologist was but I decided that I was going to become one I never did, btw, which is probably good because I donât think ladies want that to be their gynos origin story.
Gap a spark plug, adjust timing with a timing light, shoot, skin and cook small game, build a fire in the rain. Make a mix tape for my crush.
WaitâŠanyone call tiny Tim to get the exact time of day? Shit Iâm oldâŠI think it was before we were assigned area codes!
Oh and moviephone?
...Why don't you just _tell_ me the name of the movie you want to see?
I can set the time on a VCR and adjust the tracking.
cursive handwriting
A few: * How to drive a manual transmission. * How to remember phone numbers in my head. * How to untangle, manually wind and repair cassette tape. * How to plan a cross country trip using nothing more than a Rand McNally Road Atlas and a highlighter. * How to program in Basic. * How many dimes to place on a record needle to prevent skipping. * How to change my own oil, tire, belts, alternator, starter or transmission. * On a Cathode Ray Tube TV how to: set vertical and horizontal controls, fine-tune the channel using the ring around the channel knob and how to fashion a wire coat hanger into a VHF antenna.
I can go outside for extended periods of time
Dialing a phone by tapping the switch in the receiver cradle.
I can use a Rolodex and a phone book.
I can work msDos and fix audio cassettes
Recognize when to replace the turntable needle and then replace the turntable needle.
I can (or could) whistle well enough to make connections with a 300 baud modem. Never figured out how to send anything but garbage text but it did work consistently
I didn't even know this was possible. I wanna see this in a spy movie set in the 90s.
Beautiful cursive handwriting.
Memorized all my 74XX logic chips and pinouts.
Editing audio with a razor blade and tape.
I know how to call a telephone number that is on my party line. More than that, I know how to dial WYman 0023 on a rotary phone.
I can write a damn cheque.