Things in living memory which seem very anachronistic now

[OhNoAPacer]

Switching on the television and having to wait for it to warm up.

 

[3141]

Sweets being “on rations”, who remembers ration books.

there must be someone on this forum older than me

But you haven't said how old you are! I was 85 last week, and I definitely remember ration books, and when sweets came off ration in 1949. But the demand for them was so great that shops often ran out, and they went back on ration till 1951 or 1952.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Aug 2024 ==

Using a starting handle to start a car. My first car, in 1963, was a 1949 Ford Prefect which had a starting handle, and it was very useful on a frosty morning when the starter motor might fail to get the engine going and you risked draining the battery (which was 6 volts on that model). By that time most new cars no longer had a starting handle, but the Renault 4 I bought in Zambia in 1969 still did. It was also useful if you were doing work on the timing and you could turn the engine to precisely the right point you needed.

The novel "The Well of Loneliness" by Radclyffe Hall is principally about a Lesbian woman growing up before and during the First World War, but it provides an interesting picture of upper class life at that time. In one scene, the main character is sitting in her car, thinking about various issues. She reaches a decision. "She got out of the car and started the engine", says the book. There was of course no self-starter, and you had to get out in order to start it, but it seems so odd when you read that. Cars like that are further back than living memory, but a starting handle as well as a self-starter are well within living memory (for someone like me!).

 

[OhNoAPacer]

Being able to just turn up and pay at the turnstile to attend a top flight football match.

 

[bearhugger]

I've just found this credit card sized electronic mini calculator in the bottom of a drawer we're sorting out. The calculator app on my phone can do so much more than what this can.

 

[jfollows]

Switching on the television and having to wait for it to warm up.

Still happens, it’s just that instead of warming up the same amount of time is taken by loading/booting Android or similar computer operating system.

 

[OhNoAPacer]

I've just found this credit card sized electronic mini calculator in the bottom of a drawer we're sorting out. The calculator app on my phone can do so much more than what this can.

View attachment 164109

My first electronic calculator cost about £22, not sure exactly when I bought it but would have been possibly early to mid 70s. It was a basic 4 function with a percent key.

 

[dangie]

Pretty much all of that can be applied to the old leather 'casey' footballs too! Whiplash &/or brain damage heading a wet leather footie.

Oh yes I also remember them. If you were the goalkeeper and had to take a goal kick, all the outfield players would gather on the edge of the penalty area, as that’s about as far as you could kick the ball. Getting it in the air was nigh on impossible. If it was muddy it wouldn’t even reach the edge of the box.

Out of interest I’ve Googled ball weight. Since 1937, the dry weight of the ball has been specified by Law 2: 14-16oz.
Note: That is dry weight. The old ‘casey’ would double in weight once it got wet.

 

[AM9]

Ah! The days when we made bus chassis and bodywork. There were some lengthy journeys for these chassis delivery drivers, such as Bristol Commercial Vehicles at Brislington to Eastern Coach Works at Lowestoft. AEC at Southall to Alexanders in Scotland can't have been much fun either.

I don't think that there a any coaches made today that have complete separate chassis, - most seem to have monocoque bodies and front and rear subframes. In London, RTs had a full chassis but RMs had two subframes and they were designed and built from the mid '50s until the late '60s.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Seaside donkey rides along the beach.

I still get those for my grandchildren in Scarborough.

 

[Class15]

Making a journey on a trolleybus.

I’ve done that in my lifetime and I’m not exactly old! In fact I went on a trolleybus a few days ago…

 

[Merle Haggard]

One hitch-hiking experience, maybe worth recounting, dates back to my (short!) uni days when my flat-mate (campus accommodation) organised a piano-smashing competition (in itself a candidate for the thread) for Rag Week. He'd given me the task of collecting one he'd located; I walked to the address, the owner was happy to part with it and I started to push it back but the little castor wheels soon expired. More in desperation than expectation I raised my thumb and, amazingly , almost immediately a lorry pulled up. The driver helped me to load it on the very back and then stopped at the Uni entrance but left me to unload it, which I did by pushing off - landing was announced by some chords. There was help from there, mission accomplished.

 

[Trackman]

I've just found this credit card sized electronic mini calculator in the bottom of a drawer we're sorting out. The calculator app on my phone can do so much more than what this can.

Physical calculators are still a thing and not obsolete. I had to buy a calculator for an exam about 3 years ago, obviously if you have an app you could be up to no good on your mobile.

 

[telstarbox]

I still like using my Casio scientific calculator at work even though I have a desktop PC, Excel, Google Chrome and two phones to hand!

 

[DelW]

My first electronic calculator cost about £22, not sure exactly when I bought it but would have been possibly early to mid 70s. It was a basic 4 function with a percent key.

My first calculator was a CBM Minuteman 3, four functions plus constant but no memory, £30 in 1974 which was over a week's salary as a student engineer.
It had a red LED display and the four small batteries only lasted a few hours so I bought a mains adaptor for another fiver.
In 1978 I saw in a shop a thin pocket sized Casio Scientific with an LCD display that claimed 2000 hours battery life (fx2000), which I promptly bought, again around £30. It put in many years service, got quite battered carried in pockets, but still works now, though the display is quite faint.
I've been through many more calculators since then in a long engineering career.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

I’ve done that in my lifetime and I’m not exactly old! In fact I went on a trolleybus a few days ago…

Well, the thread title does state the words "in living memory".

 

[AM9]

A few more random things that are no longer in my experience:
mangles
washboard, (except maybe as a musical instrument)
carpet beaters
Bel cream makers
carbon copy sheets
tea chests

 

[GordonT]

A few more random things that are no longer in my experience:
mangles
washboard, (except maybe as a musical instrument)
carpet beaters
Bel cream makers
carbon copy sheets
tea chests

Small Receipt Books are still sold which contain a suitably small sized loose carbon copy sheet which folk often forget to position correctly.

 

[AM9]

Small Receipt Books are still sold which contain a suitably small sized loose carbon copy sheet which folk often forget to position correctly.

Yes, I remember those but haven't seen one for at least 20 years. In my early days when offices had real typists, carbon was everywhere, (foolscap of course) and depending on how low down the distribution one was, determined how legible the message was on 'flimsies'.

 

[Ken X]

Yes, I remember those but haven't seen one for at least 20 years. In my early days when offices had real typists, carbon was everywhere, (foolscap of course) and depending on how low down the distribution one was, determined how legible the message was on 'flimsies'.

Me dear departed mum managed a typing pool for the Milk Marketing Board. (remember them?) Anyhoo, she could whack a typewriter with fearsome power to work through the many layers of paper and carbon. Trouble was she had no throttle so her first computer keyboard received the same treatment.

Didn't last long. Nor did several after. Eventually she toned down a bit but it took some time.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Large Post, Medium and Double Cap paper sizes in the printing industry were all replaced by a single A2 metric size.

 

[AndrewE]

Large Post, Medium and Double Cap paper sizes in the printing industry were all replaced by a single A2 metric size.

Not forgetting Quarto and foolscap - the paper sizes ordinary people were familiar with!

 

[bearhugger]

A few more random things that are no longer in my experience:
mangles
washboard, (except maybe as a musical instrument)
carpet beaters
Bel cream makers
carbon copy sheets
tea chests

Twin tubs washing machines & those upright spin dryers where you needed to put a bowl under the water outlet.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Pitch between the street cobbles that softened in hot weather and stuck to your shoes.

Horse manure droppings on the roads that you could shovel up and use as fertilizer in the garden.

 

[dangie]

Horse manure droppings on the roads that you could shovel up and use as fertilizer in the garden.

When I was a young child my older brother used to work on a farm. Once or twice a year my brother would come to our house with a tractor & trailer full of farm manure for my Dad’s garden. The manure would simply be tipped out onto the road outside the house where my Dad would spend all afternoon shovelling & wheelbarrowing it around to the back garden. Of course there was little traffic back in the 1950’s, but also no one would complain about the smell of 5 ton of cow/horse sh*t spread out on the road. How times have changed

 

[Harpo]

Switching on the television and having to wait for it to warm up.

Valves in domestic electrical equipment!

Switching the TV off and watching the little white dot disappear. That and needing to be a champion weightlifter to lift or move big screen CRT tellies. (As I found after declining a deliverer's kind offer to put one onto its base unit!)

 

[D6130]

Horse manure droppings on the roads that you could shovel up and use as fertilizer in the garden.

Still available in many rural areas. There's an equestrian centre up the hill from us and every Sunday morning a troop of horses and riders pass our house on a circuit of Hebden Bridge....pursued at a distance by keen gardeners equipped with buckets and spades.

 

[GordonT]

"John Bull" printing sets with individual letters positioned with tweezers onto small holders to compose (for example) your name and address which you then inked by pressing the letters onto a colour or black ink pad and stamping onto a blank paper surface.
Not unlike the real printing process before the emergence of the digital world I suppose.

 

[The exile]

Not forgetting Quarto and foolscap - the paper sizes ordinary people were familiar with!

Having just bought some suspension files, I was surprised to see just as many foolscap sized ones as A4. I suppose that the lifespan of foolscap sized filing cabinets is quite long - certainly longer than that of suspension files.

 

[AlistairCowell]

We had to wait for the hot-water boiler tank to heat up before taking a bath, until our boiler was replaced in March 2005, nearly 20 years ago now.

Had to put a CD-ROM in order to play a video game on PC. Had to do that with The Sims 2 game some 15 years back.

One thing children used to receive years back when they were naughty is chastisement, which included smacking, but that’s not allowed now.

 

[billh]

Co-op did "divi" stamps for a while, including the 40 for a full page stamp.

My old man did quite the mileage OCS but he got to keep the stamps, so lil bro and I competed to stick them into the relevant books.

Anyone remember the Festiniog trying to get enough stamps for a specialised type of mini-excavator for the Deviation / Moelwyn Tunnel ?

The Waterway Recovery Group, volunteer canal restorers, succeeded in getting, possibly more than one , excavator with Green Shield Stamps. The cost of the new machine then (early 1970s) was IIRC £1500, so that represented a lot of stamps. I'm pretty sure at least one of the machines still exists in working order.