memes

Hold on, I got to flip the tape over.

A cassette and a pencil.

A wire coat hanger shoved into the back of the TV to get it working

Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it

Being hyper aware of the current status of the street lights in summer evenings

Be kind rewind

Watching the Challenger burn up.

Nuclear war drills hiding under my desk.

Game related - monochrome monitors

Disk 13 of 18

To refuel your car, first flip down the license plate.

Needing to memorize the home phone numbers of all my friends

Jogging sucked because my music would stutter with every step.

TV had an end. After a last program or movie that ended after midnight, broadcast stopped and it only showed the test card.

9600, 8-N-1

I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.

You couldn't just listen to the same music track on repeat - you had to rewind at the end before you could listen to it again.

Abort, Retry, Fail?

"Sorry I missed your call: I was getting my emails"

I was a beta tester for AOL, so they’d send me all of those dumb discs. None of the actual software ever changed or improved. All they did was change the graphics around the guts of it. Their whole strategy was essentially fooling people via appearances. I liked collecting the discs though.

My first internet before AOL was Prodigy. I was in a DOS terminal when I was a kid.

When you bought a thing you owned it.

Adjusting the rabbit ears when you change channels.

There was a video game console that used clear colored plastic that you would stick onto the tv to show different colored areas on the screen. It also came packaged with dice and paper money.

Picking up the phone to make a call, and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not checking for a dialtone before dialling. Alternatively, learning how to screw out the mouth piece (muting the handset) and pick up the receiver without making a noise so I could listen to the neighbour gossip.

Channel 3 was an actual channel in my area, so we used the dip switch to select channel 4 instead.

Standing in line in the basement of the CS building at UofM to get access to a card punch machine and type up my Fortran 4 program.

You had to pay 25 cents to text.

Sometimes you'd go to pick up the phone to call someone but you couldn't because your neighbor was busy talking, so you'd have to put the receiver down gently in hopes they didn't hear it and think you were eavesdropping on them.

How to test vacuum tubes to fix the TV. Or maybe just watching black and white TV and I was the remote. Being able to buy bottled pop out of a pop machine for 15 cents AND it had Near Beer in it.

Address 220 irq 7 interrupt 1 V42bis modem

Be kind. Rewind.

Having to wait for the television to warm up after turning it on

You could get kicked off the internet if someone picked up the phone.

Connecting to the internet was loud and took a few minutes at best.

To watch different channels, you may have needed to turn a rotor to turn the roof antenna because the stations were in a different physical direction.

The sounds your computer would make if it was connecting to dialup Internet, or the sound you would hear if someone was using said dialup and you picked up the phone.

PC speakers and how they differed from regular speakers, or the fact that you needed a sound card if you wanted sound that wasn't just beeps.

It also had a switch to make it work on channel 4 if you, for some bizarre reason, were a weirdo and needed that.

I remember when printers would print without being sassy & extortionate.

Loading CD-ROMs into a cartridge before putting them in the computer

VHF goes CLIC CLIC CLIC, UHF is CRRRRRRRRRRRKK.