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

[WelshBluebird]

In terms of printers, I haven't owned one for around 5 years, and if I did need to print the odd thing off I would just do it at work.
But since I've been working from home since last March, and since the Post Office near me and the local delivery office near me have been a pain to use during the pandemic, we ended up getting a printer mainly just so we could use the Royal Mail's online postage service which meant we were able to pay for postage online, print out the details, stick it to the package and then drop the package in the parcel mail box near the flat. Sounds like a very niche use cache - but more than proved its worth at Xmas!
I'm also on the HP x pages per month thing mentioned earlier in the thread, but as I use it so little I am actually on the free plan. I think it is just something like 15 pages per month, but as long as I don't go over that (which I really don't see me doing) then I don't have to pay for ink refills which is nice!

 

[gg1]

Coal fires, woodchip wallpaper,

Wallpaper generally is far less popular that it used to be, in my mid 40s I think I'm right on the dividing line, most people I know older than me have wallpaper, most people younger than me tend to have painted walls.

 

[takno]

Wallpaper generally is far less popular that it used to be, in my mid 40s I think I'm right on the dividing line, most people I know older than me have wallpaper, most people younger than me tend to have painted walls.

Textured wallpaper, and particularly woodchip, was always used on rubbish plaster that was too messy to paint. Even rented places tend to have good enough plaster to paint these days. In terms of doing whole rooms in patterned wallpaper, I don't think it's been particularly fashionable since the 60s or 70s tbh.

 

[py_megapixel]

I think quite a lot of modern homes have rooms with a single "accent wall" with either a patterned wallpaper or a distinctively coloured paint, and then the rest of the room is done in neutral colours. But I agree, it isn't really fashionable to do an entire room like that.

 

[dgl]

Inkjet printers are terrible. Not sure I've ever seen an inkjet in perfect working order, ever... they're also terribly wasteful and the manufacturers have some dubious business practices.

Lasers are far superior for everything but photo printing. And it's not like photos printed on them look awful, it's just that they don't play nicely with photo paper. However, unless you're printing a large number of photos it works out less hassle and better value just to order them to be professionally printed.

That leads to another product, the portable photo printers, the ones you could connect directly to the camera using pictbridge or some could take memory cards directly. Some used inkjet technology so weren't the best quality though other use dye-sublimation technology as used by the commercial photo printers which doesn't use dithering to create colours but can layer different intensities of the ink ribbon and as such can do millions of colours per spot.
We still have a couple and because they are the dye-sub one that use ribbon they don't dry out so last for a while. The cost per page for the dye-sub ones was sometime more than their inkjet equivalent plus you could only use the manufacturers paper/ribbon sets, and some could use a print's worth of ribbon on power up.
Great for doing your own postcards on holiday as you could buy paper kits with postcard templates on the back.

 

[birchesgreen]

Inkjet printers are terrible. Not sure I've ever seen an inkjet in perfect working order, ever... they're also terribly wasteful and the manufacturers have some dubious business practices.

Lasers are far superior for everything but photo printing. And it's not like photos printed on them look awful, it's just that they don't play nicely with photo paper. However, unless you're printing a large number of photos it works out less hassle and better value just to order them to be professionally printed.

Yes i have a cheap little Brother laser printer, much better than an inkjet

 

[Westcountryman]

Two pin electrical plug sockets in the UK (and not just the ones for electric shavers).

When my daughter went to University in 2006 I was amazed that the residence still had 5 amp round pin sockets. Something you rarely see except perhaps on Homes Under the Hammer.

I must admit, I don't know how anyone can survive without a clock radio. I've relied on one all my working life !

Alexa, set an alarm!

 

[najaB]

Printers? Virtually nobody I know has one anymore, and of the one or two that do, they're gathering dust.

I agree that people print a lot less, but they're not that uncommon. As others have said, if only for the scan/copy function.

 

[birchesgreen]

Alexa, set an alarm!

Yes though to be honest i'd rather not be dependent on an internet connection and a big internet company for such basic functionality.

 

[trebor79]

Inkjet printers are terrible. Not sure I've ever seen an inkjet in perfect working order, ever... they're also terribly wasteful and the manufacturers have some dubious business practices.

Lasers are far superior for everything but photo printing. And it's not like photos printed on them look awful, it's just that they don't play nicely with photo paper. However, unless you're printing a large number of photos it works out less hassle and better value just to order them to be professionally printed.

This is how I persuaded work to invest in the laser. My third inkjet in 4 years stopped working properly after the first cartridge change, and didn't work at all after the second.
The only decent inkjet I've ever seen was an HP Pagewide machine in an office I used to work in. Big tanks of ink with a static print head the width of the paper. Astonishingly quick and high quality printing. But even that has a limited life span as the nozzles eventually clog, and once all the redundancy is used up you start getting streaky prints.

 

[philjo]

Tea Strainers, whistling kettles, pie dishes with that funnel thing you put in the middle that goes below the pastry into the meat.

We have several tea strainers, 2 of which are used daily. We tend to only use loose leaf tea nowadays.

Talking of phones, who had a party line? When I was a child we shared our phone line with a neighbour in the street behind our house. Quite often mum would want to make a call and pick the receiver up only to hear someone gabbling away on the line.

My grandparents had a party line. There was a button on top of the phone that had be pressed to claim the line before you could get the dialling tone. I think they got a cheaper line rental.

 

[Onslaught]

Tin ban in the cellar hanging on a six-inch nail.

 

[ABB125]

This is how I persuaded work to invest in the laser. My third inkjet in 4 years stopped working properly after the first cartridge change, and didn't work at all after the second.
The only decent inkjet I've ever seen was an HP Pagewide machine in an office I used to work in. Big tanks of ink with a static print head the width of the paper. Astonishingly quick and high quality printing. But even that has a limited life span as the nozzles eventually clog, and once all the redundancy is used up you start getting streaky prints.

My dad had an HP Officejet 7310 4-in-1 printer (quite expensive at the time) given to him in around 2007/08 by his then-employer, which went under the radar when he left. It still works fine, although there are a few minor issues that irritate me (such as the ~1.5cm unprintable are at the bottom of every page). I even managed a few years ago to make it run as a network printer rather than a USB plug-in one a few years ago (although it really was a struggle, trying to combine a decade-old printer with modern network equipment). Furthermore, one day a few years ago I had to print something from an ancient laptop running Windows XP (used by the school robotics club because they were the only devices with the necessary software on; they weren't even attached to the school network!); I downloaded the driver software, and then, to my amazement, the document I was printing printed double-sided automatically! After a bit of research I discovered there was a menu box to check saying that the auto-duplex unit was installed (which it had been all the time!). So, it's an excellent printer given its age.

Although a colour laser would be better...

 

[Trackman]

My grandparents had a party line. There was a button on top of the phone that had be pressed to claim the line before you could get the dialling tone. I think they got a cheaper line rental.

Thank you, you have saved an old mystery for me. Always wondered what those buttons were for. Even some non-party line phones had them and others just had it sealed off on the casing.

 

[Class800]

People

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I think that the wire was the only thing shared - you both had separate numbers so presumably the billing was based on the telephone number.

Talking of phone lines. Not strictly in the house, but worth a mention...back in the 70s not everyone had a phone. And I have many memories of the walk down to the phone box at the end of the street with my Mum, and then queuing outside the phone box whenever she wanted to make a phone call.

 

[Mag_seven]

My grandparents had a party line. There was a button on top of the phone that had be pressed to claim the line before you could get the dialling tone.

Yes we had a party line in the 70s. On the odd occasion the other "party" would forget to press that button and you would pick up the phone and hear them talking.

 

[dgl]

Talking of phone lines. Not strictly in the house, but worth a mention...back in the 70s not everyone had a phone. And I have many memories of the walk down to the phone box at the end of the street with my Mum, and then queuing outside the phone box whenever she wanted to make a phone call.

 

[Jon_jpwh]

Soda Siphons
Coal fired built in cooking range in the kitchen
Electric iron plugged into a socket in the ceiling light

 

[takno]

Electric iron plugged into a socket in the ceiling light

Did they have those in real houses? I've only ever seen them in fire-safety films

 

[Gloster]

Did they have those in real houses? I've only ever seen them in fire-safety films

Indeed they did, although I don’t think the iron was very powerful. I suspect that they were usually replaced as soon as possible with an iron that did the job properly. Not that I ever bother to iron my shirts.

 

[trainophile]

Dark wood writing desks with a drop-down front that you could sit at to do your letters. Sideboards on legs. Leather pouffes.

 

[Jon_jpwh]

Did they have those in real houses? I've only ever seen them in fire-safety films

I definitely remember seeing one of my relations using an iron like this. I think it was my grandmother, probably in the 1950s or 1960s. The iron had a bayonet plug which you plugged into a double bulb socket so you could still have the light on.

 

[PeterC]

Did they have those in real houses? I've only ever seen them in fire-safety films

I have even seen a splitter that you could plug into the light socket so that you could do the ironing with the light on.

 

[trainophile]

Or earlier still, irons that you heated on the grate in the fireplace. Come to think of it, coal fires were very common back then - my first bedroom in the 1960s had one, also the kitchen and the sitting room. Wasn't called the lounge then, it was the sitting room and the dining room. And the kitchen had a small scullery, which I presume was the predecessor of the modern utility room.

 

[yorksrob]

Does anyone still have electric appliances that plug into the light fitting ?

Going back a couple of thousand years, how about pigs and other livestock ?

 

[trainophile]

My OH went with a friend to the friend's grandfather's (very rural) place in Ireland in the 60s, and there were pigs and sheep in the kitchen. It was commonplace then.

 

[yorksrob]

My OH went with a friend to the friend's grandfather's (very rural) place in Ireland in the 60s, and there were pigs and sheep in the kitchen. It was commonplace then.

That's interesting. A sort of descendant of the Viking longhouse perhaps.

 

[Journeyman]

Printers? Virtually nobody I know has one anymore, and of the one or two that do, they're gathering dust.

I use mine all the time. I've got an old dot matrix as well, that I occasionally use with vintage computers.

 

[dgl]

Does anyone still have electric appliances that plug into the light fitting ?

Well a bulb could be called a lighting appliance
Plus a smart bulb has a computer inside, so you could say you have a computer powered by the light socket.