Things in living memory which seem very anachronistic now

[Shaw S Hunter]

Sounds like my experience trying to buy a sandwich in Pisa Airport.

Seems relatively common in Italy. Results in much finger pointing by non-Italian speakers.

 

[aar0]

Asbestos mats in the school science labs.

Having worked in schools and now working in science I was amused when an inquisitive teacher discovered that quite modern heat mats were also asbestos containing! This made the news and we had the university ones checked, and ours were asbestos too.

 

[Merle Haggard]

Rotary dial telephones - having to wait for the mechanical dial to return to the original position for every digit of the phone number. A really tedious process if you needed to dial a number with the area code, even more so if you made a mistake and had to start again.

You could 'dial' much more quickly if you tapped out the number on the handset support...

 

[Ken X]

You could 'dial' much more quickly if you tapped out the number on the handset support...

This also bypassed the dial lock fitted by a parent to prevent overenthusiastic use of the phone by the offspring.

 

[Ashley Hill]

I can't find it now, but I have seen a video where several teenagers have to use a rotary phone to ring a number in order to be let out of the test room. It was about an hour long....

Well I wouldn’t know what to do with an X box so I suppose it’s swings and roundabouts.

 

[MotCO]

Saturday evening papers with the football results.

On the previous subject of the test card, there was a method to get a hidden testcard to appear on some Freeview TVs and set top boxes by pressing a certain sequence of buttons on the remote control, can’t remember the sequence offhand nor if this method still works.

What about the 'Video +' numbers published in newspapers which simpliied recording of tv programmes on your VHS player. I never understood how these numbers were chosen - and sometimes they were re-used every 6 months or so.

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Eeee! that sounds like 'Capstick Come Home'.

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Snap! I also mix in a few memorable postcodes, - useful for login passwords that insist on numbers/letters/caps and 'special chracters.

Is AM9 part of your post code?

 

[jupiter]

Four digit telephone numbers. Poole 3801 my first shared house after uni.

 

[MotCO]

Four digit telephone numbers. Poole 3801 my first shared house after uni.

My grandmother's was BATtersea 6197, which was translated, somewhat naturally, into 228 6197. (B = 2, A = 2, T = 8)

 

[jfollows]

Poynton 3161 until 1976

 

[Western Lord]

90s baby here but a number of things have already died out:

Dvd Box Sets
Blu-Ray
"And tonight a double-bill"
Telextext
Being excited in general as a child to find a hotel room has a TV
Areas in London being "rough"
Apple being a weird and niche brand of computers
Celebrity Culture in general
Telling your friend to wait by the phone at X time so they're parents don't answer when you call
Greasy spoons/sandwich bares being more common
Graffiti on trains (now unfortunately coming back)

If you think that blu-rays, or DVD box sets, have died out you should check out the Blu-ray.com website, or the appropriate section of Amazon or even visit an HMV store.

 

[Alex McKenna]

78 r.p.m. records. The first LPs went on sale in Britain in 1950. Or even 80 r.p.m., records which Columbia (The Columbia Graphophone Company) were issuing between the World Wars, and which, if you had a gramophone, you might well still be playing later. Many popular songs (not to be confused with "pop" songs) were composed so as to fit on one side of either a ten-inch or twelve-inch record.

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And Betamax tapes. Also the various incarnations of the videotape system developed by Philips and Grundig.

I've just been playing a couple of 8 inch 78s.. one on Edison Bell Radio label and the other on Broadcast. These little records were popular in the late 1920s and early 30s.

 

[JamesT]

What about the 'Video +' numbers published in newspapers which simpliied recording of tv programmes on your VHS player. I never understood how these numbers were chosen - and sometimes they were re-used every 6 months or so.

The Video+ numbers used an algorithm to encode date, time, channel number, and programme length. So if two programmes had exactly the same details (and I think it would have to be yearly rather than 6 months) then it would have the same number.

 

[dangie]

When I was a child in the 1950’s the telephone number for Joules Brewery in Stone Staffordshire was Stone 1 (one)

 

[gg1]

Saturday evening papers with the football results.

They went relatively recently compared to most other things in this thread, late 00s I think.

The Sports Argus was the Birmingham/Black Country area one, amazed me how in pre internet days they managed to get the results and league tables for literally hundreds of matches from a few dozen divisions collated and printed within an hour or so of the full time scores. As well as all the league results and the higher levels of the non-league pyramid nationally, it also included a plethora of minor local leagues.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

If you think that blu-rays, or DVD box sets, have died out you should check out the Blu-ray.com website, or the appropriate section of Amazon or even visit an HMV store.

Certainly have gone out of common usage. I brought a Blu-Ray recently to make a point of buying one. But had I not done so I would have watched what I wanted to see on streaming. Whether that's a better form of media consumption is another question.

 

[Ashley Hill]

The Grandstand teleprinter with the football results.
Staverton station was a three digit phone number until the late 1980s.

 

[gg1]

Certainly have gone out of common usage. I brought a Blu-Ray recently to make a point of buying one. But had I not done so I would have watched what I wanted to see on streaming. Whether that's a better form of media consumption is another question.

The problem with streaming services is they frequently change their content, there's no guarantee a particular film or series will be available when you want to watch it. Not something you have to worry about if you own the physical media.

 

[GordonT]

Not by any means extinct but a couple of things which are in gradual decline:

Traditional picture postcards especially those featuring localities which are unlikely to be any longer on many bucket lists. Silloth might be such a case.

"Old fashioned" pocket diaries which, at one time at least, had a small handy pencil secreted down their spine and a little ribbon acting as a bookmark. The classier ones had a lot of "useful information" outwith the main diary section. The diary itself showed you things like the state of the moon (full or otherwise) and specific days with a notation of being a holiday or attributed to a particular saint etc.

 

[D6130]

Four digit telephone numbers. Poole 3801 my first shared house after uni.

Poynton 3161 until 1976

When I was a child in the 1950’s the telephone number for Joules Brewery in Stone Staffordshire was Stone 1 (one)

When I was a teenager in Scotland in the early 1970s, the telephone number for Kyle of Lochalsh station was Kyle 2. (Not surprisingly, Kyle 1 was the post office!). Living in a slightly larger settlement, our home phone number at this time was Rhu 512.

 

[najaB]

Lunchtime drinking then going back to work!

Still happens up here... unofficially, of course.

 

[GordonT]

When I was a teenager in Scotland in the early 1970s, the telephone number for Kyle of Lochalsh station was Kyle 2. (Not surprisingly, Kyle 1 was the post office!). Living in a slightly larger settlement, our home phone number at this time was Rhu 512.

Not much further down the road from Rhu 512 I was at Helensburgh 1404.

 

[jupiter]

When I was a child in the 1950’s the telephone number for Joules Brewery in Stone Staffordshire was Stone 1 (one)

This is most unusual and exceptional. “One” was reserved for telephone services such as the operator, 100 etc. The first numbers allocated to subscribers were 2 something. I’d love to find out more about this.

Incidentally with rotary phones, adding additional digits at the end of a number didn’t matter, they were ignored, and I understand “99” would have got you through to the emergency services operator if you’d tried it.

 

[AM9]

Is AM9 part of your post code?

No, it's the original class designation of what was the best EMU on BR in the '60s, i.e. the Clacton Electrics class 309. My current postcode is part of AL (St Albans).

 

[The exile]

Or you could phone Directory Enquiries or plunder the huge collection of phone directories at your local public library.

Or indeed consult the one in the nearest phone box!

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Foyles bookshop in London in the 1980s had an owner who didn’t trust counter staff to handle money, so she inflicted three queues on each customer purchase:

1. Queue with the books you want to buy, to hand them over to counter staff and be given a paper invoice in return
2. Queue with the invoice at a special cash desk (of which there were not many) to pay, and to be given back a suitable marked invoice denoting that payment has been made
3. Queue at the counter again before exchanging the marked invoice for the books you previously saw a while ago

I think it was only on the owner’s death that a more normal method of payment was introduced. Why Foyles didn’t go bust because of the system, I don’t know - perhaps because it held better stock of books than its obvious competitor (Dillons), indeed Dillons eventually went bust and was taken over, in the end by Waterstone’s I believe.

When I first lived in (West) Germany in the late 1980s, getting money out of a bank (even a small suburban branch) required you to visit 3 separate counters. One was to do the paperwork and the final one was the cashier who actually had the money. I can’t for the life of me remember what the third one was. ATMs (completely normal in the UK by then) had yet to make their presence felt

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Not by any means extinct but a couple of things which are in gradual decline:

Traditional picture postcards especially those featuring localities which are unlikely to be any longer on many bucket lists. Silloth might be such a case.

Curled and slightly faded (or even black and white) having been sitting in the display rack since bought in bulk in 1960-something!

On the phones theme - having a “party line”, or getting the message “All lines to Bristol are engaged, please try again later” (both 1970s phenomena encountered when phoning my grandmother - who didn’t live anywhere near Bristol, but the call was obviously routed via the Bristol exchange)
Or local dialling codes (which I think survived till “phones day” and the addition of the extra “1” in about 1994)

 

[AM9]

I well remember those. There were at least two old established shops in Reading which had these, one was a shoe shop (which also had an X-ray machine to see how well a pair of shoes fitted one's feet!) and the other was Jacksons department store. Although Jacksons used a vacuum tube system the concept was exactly the same.

I remember the foot _-rays that were in many shoue shops, including where parents took their children to get well fitting shoes. All of a sudden all the X-rays viewers disappeared, probably when somebody realised that uncontrolled exposure to X-rays was not good for anybody, let alone young developing children!

I also remember the cash despatching system in a local store, (in my case it was Moultons in Ilford High Road consumed by the Harrison Gibson's fire in 1959). The Moultons system was operated by sending the cash carrier across the shop along a taut wire to a raised cashier's 'crows nest'. I imagine that it was spring propelled.

 

[LWB]

Having to book a long distance phone call ahead of time and await the operator phoning you back to tell you your call is ready.

 

[The exile]

Having to book a long distance phone call ahead of time and await the operator phoning you back to tell you your call is ready.

Presumably that stopped with the advent of direct dialling as the 60s progressed.

 

[swt_passenger]

I didn’t think I’d see a thread like this again…

Things that used to be common place in people’s homes, from Jan 2021

Things that used to be common place in people’s homes

A few days ago I noticed when looking at homes for rent that on had a TV in the kitchen. Something I remember most people having however nowadays it’s pretty rare. It got me thinking of other items you used to see in everyone’s home but are now quite rare such as vhs players, vinyl record...

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Things that you don’t see outside anymore, from Dec 2021:

Things you don’t see outside any more

Following on from the ‘Things that used to be commonplace in the home’ thread, shall we continue with the nostalgia? This was inspired by this quote: Ah, the pissoir. Something that used to provide a whiff of old France, although that wasn’t the only thing it provided a whiff off. and I...

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Things that were commonplace in the workplace, from Nov 2022

Things that used to be commonplace in the workplace

Following on from the long-running and now locked thread on things that used to be commonplace in the home at https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/things-that-used-to-be-common-place-in-people%E2%80%99s-homes.212936/ I thought how about a similar thread on things (facilities, pieces of...

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I think it’s remarkable how often the same or similar subjects come round again…

 

[Hadlow Road]

This is most unusual and exceptional. “One” was reserved for telephone services such as the operator, 100 etc. The first numbers allocated to subscribers were 2 something. I’d love to find out more about this.

Incidentally with rotary phones, adding additional digits at the end of a number didn’t matter, they were ignored, and I understand “99” would have got you through to the emergency services operator if you’d tried it.

pre-automation numbers started at 1, although occasionally using 0 for fire services etc, and just carried on. Brown’s of Chester rejoiced in Chester 1 and had the Telegraphic Address of “Progress, Chester.”

1 was used for short assistance codes, indeed it still is, with subscriber numbers beginning with 2 and so on, depending upon the size of the automatic exchange.

99 would, generally, only connect you with the emergency operator if you were on the main exchange. On satellite or dependent exchanges the first 9 took you to the main exchange, the second 9 to the next piece of kit and the third to the emergency operator. On manual exchanges there was a separate button in the call offices (pay phones) for the purpose of attracting the attention of the emergency operator(s).

 

[AM9]

Having to book a long distance phone call ahead of time and await the operator phoning you back to tell you your call is ready.

To my surprise, operator intervention survived in the US way beyond the full roll-out of STD calling in the UK. In 1990, I was away on business in Chicago when having had a weekend 'road trip; realised that we would be late arriving back in the small hours of Monday morning so decided to alert our host to let him know that we might present for work later than normal that morning. We had to speak to the local operator, (I think it was Louiville Ky.), who chwecked the coins imnto the box, and then dialled the number. We only had cash for about 90 seconds, but when the call was answered, the recorded message from our hot droned on for over a minute with various alternative contact detailes, and we only had a few seconds to tell him that we might be late.