Things that are archaic
 

phone booths

I was watching a movie it had phone booths in it in Manhattan. There are no phone booths there that I recall....

I asked a friend's sixteen year old daughter if she had ever used a 'pay phone'. I had to explain what a pay phone was.


Archaic also rans:

rotary dial phone
film camera
"little black book"

knobs (like on a TV or radio, nothing has knobs anymore)

Also archaic, the phrase: "Don't touch that dial..."

"I'm a small black woman in a big silver box ..."

It's even rare to see payphones anymore. Where does Superman go to change these days?

We're a bit short on honest-to-goodness video arcades (not just a corner of the movie theater or a theme restaurant).

There are quasi phone booths in GCT, I think they only take cards or can make collect calls. I'll ask Mrs. Foot, she told me about them.

It just occurred to me that we may have lost phone booths because Americans have become too fat to comfortably fit in them?

Heck, you can hardly find a pay phone of any sort around here, let alone one in a phone booth. I blame the ubiquitous cell phone. Also, is this just my small town or are those big mail drop boxes disappearing elsewhere, too?

Night watchmen.

It's all done with video and cameras now.

elevator operator.

Why are sound effects people still using the vinyl record player scratch?

There are payphones at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. My kids had never seen them before. I called them on my cell phone so they could use one.

Dot matrix printer paper. My wife was volunteering at the elementary school the other day, and the librarian had her separating the sheets of old dot matrix paper so kids could draw on them.

I live in a small village and we still have the call box that was around when I was a kid. It used to be that the teenagers hung around scaring away the old folk who wanted to use it but now thanks to mobiles the coffin-dodgers get free run.

Don't they have the laugh-track people who made Dick van Dyke more amusing since we weren't sure where the funny parts in the show were laughing at jokes on current sitcoms? Those sound effects guys hold on to stuff forever.

Cassettes and cassette players; records and record players

Does anyone still use dial-up internet?

guilty pleasure song for me.

I LIKE it.... so fuck you. I slip from shadow to shaaaa ha dooow

is it me? I can't parse this, meow. You been hanging out with tw?

We still have plenty of pay phones here. Probably not as many as there used to be, but still plenty about.

Archaic are cars without power steering over here. The only one I know of that's still registered for the road is my fathers '76 land cruiser.

Just take a deep breath and try again ... laughtracks. Archaic. Still using the same recorded giggles as I Love Lucy. Now, look at UT's comment about turntable pop and hiss.

Do kids still plaster their walls with posters of their idols? Mine don't... but they could just be weird.

Millions of people do.

really? thanks. I did wonder that it wouldn't have disappeared, but here it seems there are discounts on bundles that make high-speed non-dial up "free" or cheaper. I don't know anyone who uses dial-up any more, even my friends who are so anti-technology they still don't have cellphones. But we are in a suburban college town.

and table cleaners at Horn and Hardart...

;)

not to mention the change girls.

Denial. Not just a river in Africa...

Our car doesn't have power windows. It's funny when we give rides to other kids. Some of them can't figure out how to roll down the window. They have to ask one of our kids how to do it.

one of ours doesn't. Thor was so excited to manually wind down the Window! (he's too little to sit in the front and it's a 2-door, so he was just passing time and wondering what the windy things were.... :lol:

The phone lines in my area only support dial-up Don't be hatin' ;)

the biggest thing for me in watching movies and such is the pre/post cell phone split. Mobile phones have changed our behavior so much.

Remember the scene in Lethal Weapon when Roger stops the car, and uses the "mobile" phone in the trunk of the car to complain about how crazy his partner is?

I was about to mention that very scene! The damn thing is bigger than a shoebox. :lol:

Speaking of archaic, has Urbane Guerrilla been about lately? ;)

Ditto the UK - I can see the one we used to use before we had a telephone from this very room.
I have never owned a car with power steering yet. Then again I sold my last car a good five years ago.
Yup. Just on Friday one of the boys was telling me about his new Ben 10 poster. We weren't allowed to put anything on the walls, but Dads made us two huge corkboards from leftover tiles. My sister's mostly had official posters of men she fancied, mine had poems, things I'd traced from '20s and '30s fashion magazines and pictures of models from Just Seventeen. And cats. In a film or a novel I would have become a stylist. Or a lesbian.

I had all kinds of random shite on my walls. Posters of stars, poetry, book covers that I thought were interesting. A whale and a bowl of flowers ala Hitchhiker's. The 'Atheist's prayer'. Some bull-fighting pictures.

The end third of the room was raised up on a platform, with steps up to it, like heavy wood decking. The bed was sunk into that and there was a beam overhead that marked the start of that little section, with the ceiling there high, and the rest of the room brought lower. It was like a little cave, with a big window. A bed sunk into the middle and a desk at one end. The entire thing pretty much was covered with stuff.


That sunken bed was awesome, but it was a motherfucker to change the bedding.


My nieces have a few posters up. And calendars.

The first thing I thought of when I read the Op was the difference between the pre-mobile phone world, and the post-mobile world. As has already been mentioned, narratively it has a profound effect on movies. It's one of my pet delights actually, spotting that kind of time-bound plot point.

Unions.

Well not quite, but soon to be.

Pagers

Johnny Fuckerfaster "jokes."

Darning socks

The toaster repair store.

I was a telesales assistant for a company providing alpha numeric pager systems to corporate and medical sectors in the 90s. I remember at the time that they had much better coverage than any of the mobile phone providers. Intercity Paging. Got took over by motorolla and our branch closed. Funny watching mobile phones become so ubiquitous.

One of the really cool things about working for that company, was that i had my own alpha numeric pager :0 Used to love it when it went off on the bus or train *grins* I liked the idea that people might think I was 'on call' :p Of course, most often when it went off it was cus J was messaging me to tell me to pick up more milk or whatever on my way home lol.

Typewriters, my sig not withstanding. I'm of an age when we still had to use typewriters my first couple of years of college - getting the footnotes right was a nightmare!

I held off on an electric typewriter for years. I used to do a lot of writing when i was in my teens and early twenties, and generally preferred to write by hand, but did get quite attached to my mum's old Adler typewriter. It was a bastard and it hated me (it musthave done, because it took great delight in skinning the tips of my fingers when they went through the keys). But, for some reason, i liked it.

I did break and get an electric typewriter when I was 21/22 ish. Was very cool, with its corrector ribbon and its little memory store.

That was like, a year or so before PCs began to really take off in the high street.

Phones: party lines, where you shared your line with one or more families. MAN that sucked and my 'rents got our own line when my brother and I became teenagers.

I tried to explain to my nieces about rotary dials phones. It was hard to sneak calls to your best friend when "you just saw her on the bus on the way home what could you POSSIBLY have to talk about?"

My mom had one of those big office electric typewriters on which I cranked out my 25 page history paper, with footnotes. Took me forever. Mom kept asking if she could type it for me, but I was writing it as I was typing it, pretty much (had all the research done, just hadn't plopped it all together. Got an A+ anyway!)

Then I got my roomies older electronic (I was a sophomore) when she got a new one because she typed papers for lawbags for money in college. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Another probably obsolete thing: making money for typing law papers for law students.

Acoustic Coupler Modems. 300 baud.

They are difficult to describe to kids who have only known 14.4K, DSL, or cable.

That kind of modem was very, very hobbyist here. I realise it wasn't exactly mainstream over there either, but in the UK our computer and comms development was on a very different path.

I never quite got over the disappointment of realising that my new Vic20 wasn't actually going to let me hack into anything, least of all the Pentagon.

14.4k was my first connection. Prior to that I was part of the great unconnected multitude, hawking my C64/Amiga to and from mates' houses to interact.

Needle and thread: I don't know if I could locate it in the house, don't know that I've used it in over 10 years. (but this may be a product of the fact that I don't dress nicely, ever)

Similarly, tying things together with *string* seems like an elegant way and yet I don't know what string is available here and whether I could find it if I needed it.

Just been sewing velcro onto a dress - I'll be attaching gold cardboard hearts to it tomorrow. I wanted to keep it as a potential vampire dress for the future, while still transferring it into the Queen of Hearts.

We have string in our house and I know where it is. I was looking for it just the other day but don't remember what for. It's usually used for the garden - tying things up and supporting them. I got a package from ebay wrapped up in brown paper with string. I was so delighted about it I mentioned it in my feedback :)

When I've needed string for a houseplant or something, I've twisted together a bunch of those paper-covered wire twisty ties, having been unable to find regular old string (like kite string.) There's something comforting about a ball of string, to me. That might be because I remember a book about a kid who was sick and home in bed and rigged up his whole room with string and I think some kind of pulley system so anything he needed he just pulled the right string and VOILA. (Never mind all the jumping around he did getting everything in place.)

I don't think the USPS lets us use string any longer, it gets stuck in the automated postal machines.

I have a ball of string, and I think there may be some twine lurking about as well.

Lil' Pete sewed her Jr Prom dress this year. It was lovely but I suspect that is the first and last dress project.

Isn't she pretty! She favors her dad, too! :)

I have a sewing machine, smaller needle/thread kit for things like buttons and repairs, and probably 3 different sources of plain string. But I really only use the sewing machine once a year or so for the kids' bigger costume projects.

Griff, your daughter is beautiful, and I'm sure you checked out her date thoroughly... but honestly, he looks old enough to be her father!

He's hot though.

I mended a swim suit with needle and thread during a meet on Saturday (not while the swimmer was wearing it). That caught people's attention. It was a practically new Speedo Endurance racing suit, but the seam had come apart.

I always have to re-sew the buttons on the new suits I buy.

If I lose a button, I may as well throw the shirt away. I am not sewing on a stupid button. I lost my buttoneer, and I hate sewing.

I'm such the anti-domestic. :(

Shawnee. I am disappoint.

I am too.

funny as hell.

Wow, Griff. She's mesmerizing. She's as gorgeous as her mom, so I expect she'll have an extra long walk through the snow when that time comes...;)

You people are the amuse.

SG has been on a tear, hasn't she? Exceptionally entertaining lately.