You are too old if you remember.......

[Life in Paradise]

The Columbia House mentions prompted me to remember the ever-popular commercial from the late 1980s. TURN IT UP, MAN!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3CnvphQs04

You can get vibes like that when Whose Line Is It Anyway does their record spoofs with normally Wayne Brady doing all the made up songs.

[kphoger]

People only wore sweatpants inside the house

People didn't go to the mall in their pajamas and slippers.

I do remember some people (not many) wearing sweatpants to high school in the late 1980s. I tried it one time. Didn't do it again for several reasons.

Hot girl, huh?  The same problem can happen with swimsuits.

Every once in a while you saw people in the '80s wearing sweatpants and flip flops but that was a sign they were in deep poverty.

Or wealthy enough that the business owner welcomed his business no matter what he wore.

Wing windows on cars for ventilation before air conditioning was standard.

I once knew someone who locked his keys in a pickup with those vent windows.  He decided that, if he had to break a window, it might as well be the smallest one.  He later found out it would have been cheaper to replace the windshield.

[mgk920]

. . . stock market share pricing in binary fractions of dollars.

Mike

[GCrites]

^they kept doing that for way too long. Like into the 2000s.

[DTComposer]

I do remember some people (not many) wearing sweatpants to high school in the late 1980s. I tried it one time. Didn't do it again for several reasons.

I grew 8 inches in one year during high school in the late 1980s. I wore sweatpants all year because I was growing out of regular pants too fast. Had them in 7 different colors, made the fashion page in my yearbook ('bucking against fashion trends, setting his own style' type of thing.)

[KCRoadFan]

The following sentence making sense: "Get off the Internet, I need to make a phone call!"

[thenetwork]

The following sentence making sense: "Get off the Internet, I need to make a phone call!"

Worse if you were in the middle of downloading something and someone picked up the phone!!!

[ZLoth]

The following sentence making sense: "Get off the Internet, I need to make a phone call!"

Worse if you were in the middle of downloading something and someone picked up the phone!!!

I ended up getting a dedicating phone line just for the Internet, and the ISP I used to work for had "unmetered Internet" where, if you were connected for more than 12 consecutive hours, you got disconnected and could not reconnect for 30 minutes (dedicated Dial-Up Connections were extra). Now, we have dedicated Internet connections that have VoIP adapters for "landline" connections, and my mobile phone is configured to connect via WiFi.

Using a File-Transfer Time Calculator, transferring a 100 megabyte (MB) file over a 33.6 Kbit/s dial-up connection would take over 7 hours and 26 minutes. At that time, we joked that we would get a T1 if we won the lottery, and a T1 cost $2K per month in the mid-1990s. That T1 would reduce the transfer time to just over 9 minutes and 46 seconds. A few years ago, I have 15 Mbps ADSL connection, and that transfer would have taken just over a minute.

Nowadays, you have game downloads that are multiple Gigabytes in size. A relatively modest Steam download, Persona 3 Portable, is 7.414GB in size. It would take you about 23½ days minimum to download over a 33.6 Kbit/s dial-up connection, 12½ hours over a T1 connection, 1 hour and 15 minues over a 15 Mbps connection, or just over a minute on my Gigabit connection. It's not uncommon for many game titles to have double-digit GB downloads (include DLC), and a few in my collection have downloads in the 1xx GB size. Kinda surprising when we didn't even have large GB drives until the 2000s.

[1995hoo]

^^^^

Before we got married, my now-wife's options for what was then considered "high-speed" Internet were severely limited because she lived in a rented condo. She couldn't get DSL. I don't remember whether she could have gotten service through the cable TV company because she didn't have cable TV, wasn't willing to pay to subscribe to it. I had DSL at the time (fiber optic Internet became available here shortly before we got married). So when she needed a big download, I used to bring her tower PC over to my house, hook it up (wireless was impractical and unreliable), and download whatever she needed along with checking for Windows updates and the like.

Her Internet service at the time was AOL and this is now making me remember what a pain the arse it was that AOL would try to force software update downloads on you when you signed off, regardless of whether you had the time right then, and the only way to avoid it once it started was to disconnect the phone line from the modem. I don't miss those days at all! I was already spoiled because for my three years of law school in the 1990s, I lived in a university-owned apartment that had an Ethernet jack connecting directly to the university networks, so even DSL was slow compared to that service.

[ZLoth]

Her Internet service at the time was AOL...

That brings up memories... We were the only ISP that offered dial-in service to Rancho Murietta as the local dial-area was that community only. Everything else outside of that community was a "local toll" call with per-minute charges. So, we had customers that utilized our service for the Internet access, then used the "bring your own access" functionality of AOL.

[GaryV]

... the beeps and squawk sound of a modem connecting.

[1995hoo]

... the beeps and squawk sound of a modem connecting.

Said sounds got longer and more convoluted as modems got faster (or, in retrospect, "less slow"?). I suppose there's another question about what speed everyone's first modem was. Mine was 2400, an internal modem purchased in 1991.

[ZLoth]

I suppose there's another question about what speed everyone's first modem was. Mine was 2400, an internal modem purchased in 1991.

300 baud in the mid 1980s.

[bm7]

... the beeps and squawk sound of a modem connecting.

Because I never used dial-up I always thought the sound of a modem was just some stock sound effect people used to make something sound "technological" with weird noises and tones. It wasn't until I heard a fax machine at my work that I realized that was a real sound.

[kkt]

I suppose there's another question about what speed everyone's first modem was. Mine was 2400, an internal modem purchased in 1991.

300 baud in the mid 1980s.

mid-1970s in middle school, an elective course allowed us to use a TTY (yes, real castoff teletypes) and dial up at 110 baud to a computer that used only BASIC.  You could write longhand faster than the 110 baud characters appeared across the page.

[GaryV]

I suppose there's another question about what speed everyone's first modem was. Mine was 2400, an internal modem purchased in 1991.

300 baud in the mid 1980s.

I remember 1200; I don't remember if we ever had 300. And this was at work for a major auto manufacturer.

Related: if you can remember a computer without a mouse (and later, mousepad). When my coworker and I first got a mouse, we were horrified that we had to take our fingers off the keyboard every so often.

Another one, pre-WYSIWYG.

[Big John]

Another one, pre-WYSIWYG.

Letter quality

[kkt]

Related: if you can remember a computer without a mouse (and later, mousepad). When my coworker and I first got a mouse, we were horrified that we had to take our fingers off the keyboard every so often.

Funny you should bring that up today!  Apple's famous ad for the Mac aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, and the Mac went on sale two days later.  So 40 years ago exactly.  Xerox PARC invented the mouse, but was infamously unsuccessful attempting to market ANY of their great inventions in a way that made money for Xerox, and they allowed Apple to use their invention.

Yes, I am still mildly bothered by how often I have to move my hands off the keyboard to move the mouse.

[kphoger]

I am still mildly bothered by how often I have to move my hands off the keyboard to move the mouse.

Hotkeys for the win.

[mgk920]

Related: if you can remember a computer without a mouse (and later, mousepad). When my coworker and I first got a mouse, we were horrified that we had to take our fingers off the keyboard every so often.

Funny you should bring that up today!  Apple's famous ad for the Mac aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, and the Mac went on sale two days later.  So 40 years ago exactly.  Xerox PARC invented the mouse, but was infamously unsuccessful attempting to market ANY of their great inventions in a way that made money for Xerox, and they allowed Apple to use their invention.

Yes, I am still mildly bothered by how often I have to move my hands off the keyboard to move the mouse.

"Hey grampa, what's this?" (showing him an old large marble-sized mouse ball).

Mike

[vdeane]

I do remember some people (not many) wearing sweatpants to high school in the late 1980s. I tried it one time. Didn't do it again for several reasons.

I grew 8 inches in one year during high school in the late 1980s. I wore sweatpants all year because I was growing out of regular pants too fast. Had them in 7 different colors, made the fashion page in my yearbook ('bucking against fashion trends, setting his own style' type of thing.)

What happens when you wear sweatpants to school on a day other than Friday (even if they're all that fit):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_POt2KlfQ

[dlsterner]

I suppose there's another question about what speed everyone's first modem was.

My first modem was 300 baud, back around 1982/83 or so.  Internal modem for the Apple II+ which actually connected to the phone line rather than use an acoustic coupler.



I think it's in a box along with my 1200, my 2400, my 9600, my 28.8 K, my 57.6 K, and my old DSL modems.

[kkt]

I remember the first modem that I actually owned, that would do maybe 1200 baud.  Size of a shoebox and as heavy as if it was solid concrete.

[roadman65]

When cell phones were fastened to your belt as they were way too big to fit inside pockets. Plus you had to extend the retractable antenna to get reception.

[1995hoo]

When cell phones were fastened to your belt as they were way too big to fit inside pockets. Plus you had to extend the retractable antenna to get reception.

My father's first cellular phone (work-issued, as at the time he would not have bought one himself) was too big to attach to a belt—it was more like a small briefcase. Ok, not as big as a briefcase, but shaped sort of like one and slightly bigger in footprint than a desk phone. Looking at my iPad as I type this, I think its footprint was maybe slightly smaller than my iPad's is. That was definitely the era when nobody said "cell phone" yet because we called them "car phones" (see also Roger McGuinn's song of that title).

The other day I was behind an SUV that had one of the old cell phone antennas on the outside, the type with the curly part near the top. I had not seen one of those in a long time and it made me think of this thread, but then I forgot about it while driving the rest of the way home.