"Mom, what was it like when you were a kid?"

Well, I grew up in Yonkers, a city that is a suburb of NYC. We had a rotary dial phone, but it was easy to make a call. I used a typewriter until I was in grad school and knew all about carbon copies and white out.

But I spent summers as a child in the Catskill Mountains. We had a party line and you dialed the number you wanted to call and the operator came on and asked you number please and that meant your party line number, not the number you were calling. It was awhile before we had TV and that was with an antenna up on the hill above us. We played records on phonographs.

The way I feel old is that I learned to program on cards. I implemented software on mainframes for large corporations who could afford it. When I continued in the computer business, I couldn't really believe how easy it was to use client-server technology with an easy to change the user interface and the database technology. Now I feel behind because I don't do web design but I never wanted to do that.

I am still getting over records vs. CDs.

I still have my turntable from college and about 50-60 albums!!

Originally Posted by StarryEyedTiGeR

If it makes you feel better Alycia- i'm only 23 and my 13yr old niece thinks i'm ancient

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There is a little girl who is only 4 yrs old that comes to visit her grandmother one the weekends, she lives behind me. She asked me once "How old are you?" I told her "29". She gasped and said "WOW! I hope I don't get that old" and smuggly walked away.....

OK, here goes...who remembers wringer washers? I do.

I'm only 24, but I'm sure kids would consider me ancient. It's funny how age is all relative. Like a 4 year-old has only lived four years, and those four years were probably reallllyyy long. But to someone who's 50, I bet a year flies by super fast, since it's just one of 50.

I watched a show about time the other day on the Science Channel. Apparently it's not time that speeds up as we get older. WE actually slow down. So our perception of time changes. The world around us seems to go faster, as we age.

Sorry to go into all that, I just thought it was pretty interesting! Probably the oldest thing I can remember is records, I had a kid's record player when I was a kid.

Originally Posted by owenj

I'm only 21 and sometimes I feel old when I look at all the new stuff popping up and replacing the stuff I grew up with. Heck, I used Apple II computers in elementary school. You know, with no hard drive and the 5" floppy disk. And I bet I could ask a fifth-grader today what a floppy disk is and get a blank stare in response.

I get all kinds of 90s nostalgia

and now all that stuff is old.

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The first "personal" computer I ever used was a TRS-80. You may be in awe, now.

We had a desk-top computer in college that cost $13,000 and all it could do was mathematical operations, controlled by punch cards.

And I still have an IBM personal computer that came with one floppy drive and 16 kb of memory on the mother board, expandable to a whopping 64 kb. We bought a Tallgrass 20 mb hard drive for it, which cost $3,000 and was the size of a breadbox.

Here's a video of a wringer washer:

Wringer Washer Demo

In actual use, you would put the water and detergent in the washer, put in your cleanest dirty clothes, then wash. You would have the washer next to a double wash-style sink, ideally. When the clothes have washed enough, you put the wringing in the proper place to wring the sudsy water out, with the water going back into the washer and the clothes falling into the first (right hand) sink full of hot, clean water for a rinse. After stirring the clothes around in the clean water, you move the wringer so that it is over the rinse sink, then wring the rinse water out of the clothes, which would fall in the empty left-hand sink. Then you would take them outside and hang them up.

In the meantime, you would be washing the next load. You work steadily to the dirtiest clothes, so you wouldn't have to change your wash water after each load.

Originally Posted by laureen227

well, i know what they are - but i don't think i've ever seen anyone use one!

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My mother always hated automatics and preferred a wringer washer. And in this day of economizing, they might make a comeback! I've even seen gasoline powered versions.

In fact, the first car I ever bought was a 1941 Chevrolet that I bought with my mother. I paid $65 for it, out of my pay for working on local ranches and with a beekeeper. I was 14 at the time. We used it a year later to move to Arkansas from Colorado. Then I went back to Colorado to work on a ranch. While I was there, my mother got the car stuck in a big mud puddle, burned out the transmission, and traded the car for a wringer washer.

My maternal grandmother used a wringer washer. I remember we (my sis and I) were pretty young and we would help her by trying to turn the handle!

Originally Posted by rapunzel47

OK, here goes...who remembers wringer washers? I do.

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I do! We had one way back when in the basement. When Mom went back to work after I started school, Dad said we could save time and money by going to a laundromat. So we gave it to his mom and she used it regularly.

Dang, now I remember home milk delivery and the bread man. Where's my Geritol...

I'm 21... but my dad insisted on teaching me about stuff he grew up with.
I moved into a boarding house in March and we had a rotary phone. When everyone else moved in, they switched out the rotary phone because it was inconvenient. At least with the rotary phone I knew where it was.

We had a wringer washer, Dad got a good deal on it. It was his form of punishment.

I do. My mother used one when I was a kid that was her mother's, because she couldn't afford to get the other kind.

Wow, you've got me beat on the wringer washer! I never actually saw one in use.

But I remember being awakened on summer mornings by the clip-clop of the horse that drew the milk wagon down my grandparents's brick-paved street... and the Fuller Brush man and the Charles Chips delivery guy... and the ammonia smell of mimeographed tests in school.

When I went to work at the TV station in Austin in 1977, they were still using a mimeograph for some things, but it was already archaic. They also had a hidden-away room full of IBM punchcard machines, where a strange, obnoxious old lady in bedroom slippers did data entry. (She must have been something in her day, though -- her name was [read this in a Barry White voice] Delilah!)

And I have a little collection of audio systems:

- My old Sears Silvertone foldaway portable stereo, which plays 16 2/3 rpm, 33 rpm, 45 rpm, and 78 rpm.

- Two reel-to-reel recorders, one that runs at the right speed on American electricity and one that runs right in Europe.

- A modular eight-track player.

- A similar player that's set up especially to play commercial carts (cartridges), from when I worked in radio (it eats regular eight-tracks).

- Cassette and microcassette, of course.

- A digital voice recorder.

- And a fabulous Marantz turntable with strobing pitch control... and what my father always jokingly called "vicious damped cuing" (actually "viscous," of course).

I love old stuff.

Originally Posted by laureen227

i wouldn't call it 'ammonia' but i LOVE the smell of mimeograph solvent! most kids did - if the teacher handed out a freshly mimeographed paper, all heads went down to sniff!

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Oh, yes, well do I remember that!!