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The Retro Club

rudi
Czech Republic

The Retro Club

Post by rudi »

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our new, highly anticipated Forward to the Past Club: no apps, no social media.
Hoverboards are allowed.
Here we can reminisce about the past and compare our high scores in Boulder Dash. We might also exchange interesting information about the latest Walkmen and modems and this new area called the Internet. (I don't think that will catch on).

So let's get started, folks! 8-)

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rudi
Czech Republic

Re: The Retro Club

Post by rudi »

First, I want to share with you a German documentary I watched lately about the co-founder of Sun. English subtitles are available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGtVPvkjEjM

This rather heartwarming documentary about growing up with computers in the 80s is unfortunately only available in German. But maybe the pictures, especially at the beginning, can tell you enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XiyVo_m3DQ

Paket Haken Satellit Dilettant Rhythmus Epidemie Hämorrhoiden Pubertät Gestalt Repertoire Reparatur separat Interesse Original Standard Stegreif - mehr?

Please correct me if I write something wrong. I will never take it as an offense. I want to learn.

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Rudi:

Thank you for this, I thought I was alone in my bubble of "old" but it's so nice to see others are also here with me. It's not that I don't appreciate that we can have tech, but I don't feel we should be sucked in by it and ruled by it. I still think people should limit how much they rely on tech. Here is my point:

I work and live in China and it's becoming more and more common not to use "cash" and do everything on your phone with an app. I don't use apps, my phone is very old but it's just a phone not a one stop shop. The other day one of my staff lost her phone and she was frantic b/c with the loss of her phone she no longer had a way to buy anything, navigate around the city, get a ride, call anyone, no photos, no anything b/c everything was on that phone. I thought to myself if I lose my phone, I lose my phone, I still have everything else. No one if they get my phone gets any of my personal stuff like bank info. I keep a back-up of the phone numbers on my phone so it will take maybe an hour to get them onto a new phone. It isn't the end of the world for me.

I like that example b/c it should help others to realize that having everything you do be "so" convenient may one day back-fire on you. Tech is good, but brains and common sense are better.

:)

lrai
what's your legacy
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rudi
Czech Republic

Re: The Retro Club

Post by rudi »

You're absolutely right. I don't know what to write because I would write exactly the same as you. A phone is a phone for phoning. (Thanks to you for the phrase "stupid phone"! (hey, where's the thumps-up-smilie?) )

It reminds me of the last picture (yellow background) in this post viewtopic.php?p=52640-have-fun-while-le ... man#p52640. Translated: This wonderful device remembers your phone numbers, guides you through traffic and captures your memories in pictures!
Subtitle: brain prosthesis

Another problem is the dependence on electricity. You need at least batteries or ssimilar. No electricity: no access to anything. I like to keep it simple and easy to use. Tech should help us and not make us dependant.

There would be so much to say but I think you know already.

And by the way, I'm still waiting for duolingo teaching BASIC. My commodore doesn't want to speak. It is very stubborn sometimes!

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Please correct me if I write something wrong. I will never take it as an offense. I want to learn.

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Corinnebelle

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Corinnebelle »

@lrai I've heard in China they use face pay?

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Corinnebelle:

I have not seen anyone with "face pay" but many people here use wechat pay or ali pay. I just find that cash still works. LOL

Rudi:

I like to say that I don't need a "smart" phone I just need to be smart!

lrai
what's your legacy
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Davey944676
Great Britain

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Davey944676 »

I had a sudden poignant yearning to play Elite all night on my big brother's commodore64 recently (plugged into the big telly in the living room as a special luxury). Does that qualify me as sufficiently ancient? :)

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Deleted User 4833

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 4833 »

How about playing Pong on a 1970s mainframe computer? :D

Deleted User 4833

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 4833 »

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Judi and Davey:

YES to both! I was just thinking today about how back in the day before we had so much tech we played games like "jacks". You know where you have small metal pointed things and you bounced a ball and then tried to pick up the metal "jacks" before the ball hit the ground again...boy was that fun and dangerous. LOL

lrai
what's your legacy
Image 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 Learning Yiddish, Chinese, Russian

Deleted User 4833

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 4833 »

I loved playing jacks. I don't recall it being dangerous though. I especially loved playing with a "superball" - you'd get a good bounce to pick up lots of jacks.

Also, pickup sticks.

Hopscotch and potsy.

And more.

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Corinnebelle

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Corinnebelle »

Does anyone remember those fuzzy screens where all those little bits of light blinked on the screen before you could see anything? I think those things were operated by valves or they had gas in the back. The monitors were a lot bigger back then, not like those flat things we have today. Cell phones were just digital numbers without colors, kind of like one sees on a digital alarm clock. I think those are ancient too now!

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Davey944676
Great Britain

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Davey944676 »

Corinnebelle wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 7:08 pm

...kind of like one sees on a digital alarm clock. I think those are ancient too now!

I remember when cheap mass-produced calculators (well, not that cheap compared to basic essentials at the time - still a bit of a luxury item for a kid but affordable for the first time to many schoolkids) came along. They had those bright red LED displays which would somehow manage to drain a relatively expensive nine volt battery after a day or two, and only did basic addition and division etc. You could also make rude words if you turned them upside down.

It showed the pace of tech in a simple way - it seemed like just a month or so later that you could suddenly buy a high end scientific calculator with one of those grey/black LCD screens that could run for ages on a tiny watch battery, or forever on about half a square inch of built-in solar panel! :)

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rudi
Czech Republic

Re: The Retro Club

Post by rudi »

JudieLC wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:55 am

To be honest, I've got a lot of different emotions here. First, it seems (...ok, it IS) funny to watch that cool, all-knowing teenagers to struggle with a simple device which we could operate in sleep.

BUT then I've got some compassion for the two. Because how did we learn it in our youth? Somebody told us. So we are not smarter then them.

On the other hand, it feels sad, because somehow I feel like something's lost throughout time. I rather like to dial numbers than touch them on a soon changing virtual screen.

BUT, again, then I think of me starting a car. To turn the keys. (Yes, no smart cards or keys or something, I'm a dinosaur again.) 100 years before, they started their cars with turning the crank at the front of the car to start the car engine. Would I like to have that back? No, I think, the keys are more comfortable.

That's probably the point: People like to have it comfortable. But there is a very, very thin line between comfort and dependance on tech which you can't control anymore. Do I know, which data is saved on that smart card? There is no ID or something on my key. That I'm sure of.

There is a interesting short story named "A locomotive for the Tsar" by Kir Bulytschow, who was a popular science fiction author. It's about a man from the future, stranded with his damaged spaceship, in the 60s. When the people realize he is from the future with a lot of yet unknown tech, they are enthusiastic. Because they think they can learn a lot about it and then invent a lot of new things. But the traveller can't explain them, how anything works. He states: "I just push a button here and there, and then this and that happens. I don't know how to repair it or how it works, we have specialized people for that!" Sometimes I wonder if the author himself was a timetraveller, for knowing so well how we do nowadays.

Anyway, you see, you sent me through a roller coaster of emotions and memories with you little video. Or maybe I'm just making to much science out of anything ;)

Paket Haken Satellit Dilettant Rhythmus Epidemie Hämorrhoiden Pubertät Gestalt Repertoire Reparatur separat Interesse Original Standard Stegreif - mehr?

Please correct me if I write something wrong. I will never take it as an offense. I want to learn.

rudi
Czech Republic

Re: The Retro Club

Post by rudi »

Davey944676 wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2023 4:11 pm

I had a sudden poignant yearning to play Elite all night on my big brother's commodore64 recently (plugged into the big telly in the living room as a special luxury). Does that qualify me as sufficiently ancient? :)

JudieLC wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:48 am

How about playing Pong on a 1970s mainframe computer? :D

Seems we need @uralicnomad and his commodore 64 for the members list, like he promised! It's getting full here :)

And @JudieLC - Mainframe, yes! I remember playing one of my first computer games. It was a Boulder Dash - Clone with little red devils. We could play it in the mathematics institute. I do not even know if it was allowed at all, when I think back of it...

Paket Haken Satellit Dilettant Rhythmus Epidemie Hämorrhoiden Pubertät Gestalt Repertoire Reparatur separat Interesse Original Standard Stegreif - mehr?

Please correct me if I write something wrong. I will never take it as an offense. I want to learn.

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Judie:

I didn't want to comment on the "video" before today b/c I needed some time to think about it. First, I feel bad that two probably bright kids were defeated by a rotary phone. Next, I feel that this totally validates the teaching of critical thinking skills in our public schools. While both boys did try to talk it over they kept making the same mistakes instead of using the ONE clue they were given. When it finally "clicked" the one boy gave up b/c time was running out.

While tech maybe how we will deal with our future, maybe we also need to teach "common sense" to go along with that tech. Just my 2 cents.

lrai
what's your legacy
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uralicnomad
Hungary

Re: The Retro Club

Post by uralicnomad »

Wow, this thread has been going gangbusters, so much old cool stuff to talk about. Though it's kind of sad kids today have no idea or interest on how we got here. I would have thought they have seen some old movie where they would be talking on the phone.

As for pong on a mainframe, the first family game console we had was a Hanimex TVG 8610 c .. released in 1977 had 10 variants of pong (hockey volleyball etc etc) it was awesome but at the same time it wasn't. I still have one working and one faulty, A few years later, the family chipped together and bought a Mattel Intellivision, once I got the keyboard attachment I started to learn basic.. it had 1 kilobyte of free ram, which i could create a sprite and move it any direction and still have memory left. Scary stuff when you look back. There's a funny quote from Bill Gates saying "64 kilobytes is all the memory you'll need" Hah!

I bought a Casio calculator watch for my brother for his birthday.. while a bit before his time, he's a bit of a hipster so it went down well. Novelty things like Hypercolor t-shirts, Key-tars, the professional wrestling boom in the 80's, board games (Simon!) made the world seem like this crazy creative place where opportunity existed on every corner and the iron curtain was a stone throw away from crumbling.

I remember one christmas a few kids had walkie talkie's as gifts, so they spent the entire holiday trying to travel as far apart from each other to talk over their radio's.. and inadvertently we discovered that some of these new fangled roll-a-doors had electronic remotes.. the beauty of the old analogue system, there wasn't really a standard for frequencies, so some of these radio's when you keyed up to talk would trigger garage doors and even unlock car alarm systems.
I won't even get started on what you could do with a gas heater clicker and an old rotary payphone heheheheh

That's enough of a ramble, I'm out of coffee :) Have a great day Retro dudez and dudettes!

Deleted User 4833

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 4833 »

lrai wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 10:57 pm

Judie:

I didn't want to comment on the "video" before today b/c I needed some time to think about it. First, I feel bad that two probably bright kids were defeated by a rotary phone. Next, I feel that this totally validates the teaching of critical thinking skills in our public schools. While both boys did try to talk it over they kept making the same mistakes instead of using the ONE clue they were given. When it finally "clicked" the one boy gave up b/c time was running out.

While tech maybe how we will deal with our future, maybe we also need to teach "common sense" to go along with that tech. Just my 2 cents.

Critical thinking skills are definitely needed in any case. But I don't think there was a lack of critical thinking skills here. The boys did the best they could based on what they know about phones. I give them credit that in the end they figured it out.

Along those lines, I've heard stories (perhaps apocryphal) of kids too young to remember floppy disks seeing a floppy and thinking someone had 3D printed the "save" icon.

Funny that we still use the image of a floppy disk to mean "save" and the image of a rotary phone set as the icon for the call feature on a cell phone, even though many kids have never seen a floppy disk nor a rotary phone.

Last edited by Deleted User 4833 on Wed Jun 07, 2023 6:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Jacko079
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Jacko079 »

I suppose this is more of an antique than a retro item…

My grandad had one of these:

I wanted to keep it, but when he died, it was sold.

Image

I’m sorry if this is disrupting the rotary phone flow of comments.

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Deleted User 4833

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 4833 »

Jacko079 wrote: Wed Jun 07, 2023 2:02 pm

I suppose this is more of an antique than a retro item…

My grandad had one of these:

I wanted to keep it, but when he died, it was sold.

Image

I’m sorry if this is disrupting the rotary phone flow of comments.

That is awesome. Sorry it was sold.

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Corinnebelle

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Corinnebelle »

@Jacko079 That's a real old phone!

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Jacko79:

Those were the best! You could do party-lines, wow pre-wechat times...LOL

I am sorry that you didn't get a chance to keep it, what a treasure. There are some you can find on-line and even some that are made to still work. I had what they called a candle-stick rotary phone and a bake-lite rotary phone, both had to be sold when I moved to China. Thanks for this memory.

lrai
what's your legacy
Image 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 Learning Yiddish, Chinese, Russian

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Just for fun and to see what these phones looked like; here are two links one for a Candle stick phone and the other old phones:
https://theoldtelephonecompany.com/anti ... ck-phones/
https://www.oldphoneshop.com/western-electric/

lrai
what's your legacy
Image 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 Learning Yiddish, Chinese, Russian

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Corinnebelle

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Corinnebelle »

Just wondering are there any of you who remember a horse and carriage as being part of normal life or the milkman or something like that. I suppose that is going past the point of retro. I've had the privilege of talking to someone who remembered that far back.

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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

Corinnebelle:

We had a guy who delivered eggs and another guy who brought us seltzer in the old spritz bottles does that count?

lrai
what's your legacy
Image 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 Learning Yiddish, Chinese, Russian

Deleted User 4833

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 4833 »

We had a milk man when I was a kid. He delivered the milk bottles into a metal container on the back porch of our house. It was unhomogenized milk so the cream was on the top.

A man used to come around the neighborhood periodically in a truck and he would sharpen scissors, knives, yard clippers, lawn mower blades, and the like.

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Davey944676
Great Britain

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Davey944676 »

@Corinnebelle As a kid I remember the "rag and bone man" going round with a horse drawn trailer. Don't know about the "bone" part (I think that part of the name was a hangover from earlier times) but you would give him old clothes or other cloth and he would give you a balloon!

That was a bit of an anachronism, though - even as a small child, fascinating as it was to see a real live horse plodding around the suburban roads, I wondered why he didn't just use a flatback diesel lorry (truck) like everybody else! It was rather like the British comedy "Steptoe and Son". :)

p.s. We still have a milkman who delivers it in glass bottles every morning, before most people are awake - but that has always arrived on a battery powered milk float - since I was born anyway. :)

(I'm in England, by the way :) )

Last edited by Davey944676 on Sun Jun 11, 2023 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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rudi
Czech Republic

Re: The Retro Club

Post by rudi »

As far as I know, the milkman never was a tradition in Germany, at least not the way like in US. A horse and carriage only my grandmother had. But the famous "Leiterwagen" (hand cart, literally translated "ladder cart" because of the ladder-like side panels) we still have at home, but not much in use.

But I can proudly state that we still have a "Scherenschleifer" (knife grinder) and a "Uhrmacher" (horologist) based in our little village. The Scherenschleifer will probably retire in the near future, but the Uhrmacher's daughter will keep this business going on. :) The last "Schuhmacher" (shoe maker; but he didn't make shoes but only repaired them) unfortunately gave up his business 30 years before.

Paket Haken Satellit Dilettant Rhythmus Epidemie Hämorrhoiden Pubertät Gestalt Repertoire Reparatur separat Interesse Original Standard Stegreif - mehr?

Please correct me if I write something wrong. I will never take it as an offense. I want to learn.

Deleted User 3754

Re: The Retro Club

Post by Deleted User 3754 »

.

Last edited by Deleted User 3754 on Wed Sep 06, 2023 7:12 am, edited 2 times in total.
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lrai
United States of America

Re: The Retro Club

Post by lrai »

okay this may have been a west coast thing, but when I was young we had the Helm's Truck that sold bread and baked goods. They made the best chocolate cake donuts ever! I remember that where my grandmother lived in east LA, they had knife grinder people, and watch-makers, and shoe makers etc. Those are now pretty much gone. Home delivery now seems to be anything you get from Amazon...LOL

lrai
what's your legacy
Image 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 Learning Yiddish, Chinese, Russian

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