The Old Folks Home

[unclevlad]

18 hours ago, Bazza said:

Telephone booth. 

 

For that matter, pay phones generally.  There's some left but few and far between.  

18 hours ago, Pariah said:

Fifty cent pieces and Eisenhower dollars.

 

Pennies that were made from copper rather than zinc.

 

Susan B. Anthonys too.  The Sacagawea golden dollars weren't a lot better.
I never even realized there was a series of Presidential dollars...

 

 

[death tribble]

The half penny piece in Britain

[rravenwood]

15 hours ago, Old Man said:

Door to door salesmen.

 

Unfortunately they're still around and knocking on doors.  Not in the old Fuller Brush Man sense, but the parade of (usually) young folks with clipboards trying to interest you in things like solar power installations, home security systems, "your neighbors are having a big pest treatment done and thought you might want to join in" etc. keeps going, and going, and going...

(And in these times of COVID, it seems like most of them aren't bothering to wear masks...)

[Pariah]

1 hour ago, rravenwood said:

 

Unfortunately they're still around and knocking on doors.  Not in the old Fuller Brush Man sense, but the parade of (usually) young folks with clipboards trying to interest you in things like solar power installations, home security systems, "your neighbors are having a big pest treatment done and thought you might want to join in" etc. keeps going, and going, and going...

(And in these times of COVID, it seems like most of them aren't bothering to wear masks...)

 

Yeah, we had one of those show up last spring. I stood there, dumbfounded, listening to his sales pitch. At last I managed to say something like, "I'm sorry, we're in the middle of a pandemic right now. Could you come back later please?"

[BoloOfEarth]

Had a laugh while watching Thunder Force last week, when they showed the classroom with a sign saying that if miscreants (their term for supervillains) were sighted, "DUCK AND COVER!"

[Bazza]

6 minutes ago, Pariah said:

 

Yeah, we had one of those show up last spring. I stood there, dumbfounded, listening to his sales pitch. At last I managed to say something like, "I'm sorry, we're in the middle of a pandemic right now. Could you come back later please?"

 

My science teacher from middle school told us he told door-to-door salespeople (either selling goods or religion) they were satan worshippers. Seemed to do the trick. 

[Cygnia]

$2 dollar bills w/Jefferson

[Pariah]

54 minutes ago, Cygnia said:

$2 dollar bills w/Jefferson

 

My credit union gives me one of these every year on my birthday.

[Cancer]

4 hours ago, unclevlad said:

 

For that matter, pay phones generally.  There's some left but few and far between.  

 

Susan B. Anthonys too.  The Sacagawea golden dollars weren't a lot better.
I never even realized there was a series of Presidential dollars...

 

Actually, I encounter those frequently, or did before the pandemic kept me off campus.  When you put $5 bill into a soft drink vending machine where the bottles are $2, you get three dollar coins in change.  any of the Anthonys, Sacagweas, or presidents.

[Pariah]

35 minutes ago, Cancer said:

When you put $5 bill into a soft drink vending machine where the bottles are $2, you get three dollar coins in change.  any of the Anthonys, Sacagweas, or presidents.

 

Getting dollar coins as change is the main reason I buy drinks from the machines in my school.

[Cygnia]

[Duke Bushido]

11 hours ago, Cygnia said:

$2 dollar bills w/Jefferson

These still exist.

 

I used to get a hundred or so of them to pass out to kids at Christmas time, particularly those I could hear asking their parents if I was Santa.

 

The last printing was 2003, but they have not been removed from circulation, nor are there any announced plans to discontinue them.  They aren't seen often because they are only about 1/1000 of the bills in circulation.  Given the relative "uselessness" of the dollar note at today's prices, I would have thought them to have become much more common by now.

 

[unclevlad]

11 hours ago, Cancer said:

 

Actually, I encounter those frequently, or did before the pandemic kept me off campus.  When you put $5 bill into a soft drink vending machine where the bottles are $2, you get three dollar coins in change.  any of the Anthonys, Sacagweas, or presidents.

 

Ahh...well.  I can see that.  Last time I bought a soft drink from a vending machine...gee, 8 years ago or so, more or less.  And for several years before that, it would've only been from the machines in the break room, which were $1.  

 

And $2...that's crazy.  Which shows my age, I'll admit....  The flip side of this thread is the things that us older farts just can't wrap our heads around because they're SO out of whack compared to our (even younger adult) memories.  Was it REALLY that long ago that you could still find 50 cent soft drink vending machines?   

 

Yes....yes, it was...

 

Oh.

 

Another example...fast food.  Had to stop doing the Full Monty of burger, fries, drink back in 2014 due to diabetes, but the combos were pushing $10.  A Whataburger green chile double (yum...still treat myself to one every now and again) is now over $7 alone, with taxes.  Delivery pizza...specials could net ya a large one-topping for $7 net.  Reasonably often, too.  Or later, maybe that'd just be a medium.  I thought about doing that for grins, during the first week of the NCAA tournament.  IIRC, for a medium 3 topping...was gonna be $19.  (In part because the delivery fee was, IIRC, $4.)  GAH!!!  Couldn't pull the trigger, because it just felt so extremely high.  

Welcome to future shock.

[Pariah]

There's a vending machine in my school where you can buy a 12-ounce can of soda for 50 cents.

 

It's in the faculty lounge, though. 

[Cancer]

Heh.  In grad school, the canned sodas were 40 cents from the vending machines.

 

You were having a bad day when you put your dollar bill in, you got your soda, and the machine was out of quarters in its change unit so you got 12 nickels, one at a time.  Had to wait a while.

[Pariah]

I remember vending machines that didn't take dollar bills.

[Cygnia]

In high school (in the 90's), the bill changer would spit out Anthony dollars for the vending machines.

[Cancer]

Heh.  I remember the day when the dollar changer at a vend-o-mat gave me a 1943 Walking Liberty half dollar (this was circa 1969) with the rest of the change.

[Cancer]

3 hours ago, Cygnia said:

 

I got on the WWW about the same time as every astronomer alive at the time, when the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were about to fall into Jupiter in July 1994.  The Web offered something new: a way to hang your data out there for the rest of the world to see, without them needing passwords, or being sent a magnetic tape, or anything.  It was breathtaking and utterly unprecedented, because for the first time people around the world were changing their observing program based on your own assessment of things other people had seen and posted 12 hours before.  Prior to the web, people on different telescopes at the same observatory could do that from face-to-face conversations in the cafeteria, but unless you were willing to pay the long distance charges and telephone an individual expecting your call, there was no way to do that, and you certainly couldn't show them what you'd got.  IAU Telegrams had long existed for breaking events like that, but those were monocase text-only things and the information content was sharply limited.

 

The oldest sites still existing that I remember from shortly after that era are the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and the predecessor to the still-existing Insect Recipes site at Iowa State, which I found only because when I searched for "cottage cheese" on Altavista that was the only hit.

[Bazza]

@CancerI was on the Web/Net March-June 1995, so about a year after you. 

[archer]

21 hours ago, rravenwood said:

 

Unfortunately they're still around and knocking on doors.  Not in the old Fuller Brush Man sense....

 

My father-in-law made his living selling Fuller Brush door to door for over 50 years. It was fairly easy in Kansas because he lived in a rural area and it was a real chore for most people to drive to a store. Door to door is quite a bit different when people are happy to see you show up.

 

He became the model for "Delbert, The Fuller Brush Man" for hobbyists who build model towns with quarter inch tall residents.

 

(Personally, I'd rather do Civil War or Napoleonic battles if I were into models but who am I to criticize other people's hobbies?)

 

 

[Bazza]

Hub & Garth McCann ensured door-to-door salesmen became extinct in Texas. 

[Old Man]

35 minutes ago, Bazza said:

Hub & Garth McCann ensured door-to-door salesmen became extinct in Texas. 

You’d think the salesmen would have been given endangered species protection before they were hunted out. 

[unclevlad]

3 hours ago, Bazza said:

@CancerI was on the Web/Net March-June 1995, so about a year after you. 

latecomer, huh?

 

1993.  Mailing lists and bulletin boards.    Happened to get a freakin  MOTHER LODE of Magic 1st edition boosters...7 of em...2 moxes, black lotus, time walk, time twister.  Used em for one event at Origins...any deck you could build.  Had to kill your opponent before he could play a card...as many times in a row as possible.  Then sold em through a message board.  Also remember the VERY old gg-l M:tG rules mailing list.  Individual emails...no board structure or anything.

Actually, I was on AOL long before that.  I remember vividly, I first learned about OKC...oh, a day or two afterward, I think it was.  Then going online catching up on the details.  Neverwinter Nights Online...NOT a good idea when you'd picked metered local service on your phone, cuz, well, you didn't think you needed much minutes.  (I changed that after one *hefty* tab.)

[Duke Bushido]

As long as we're doing things from way back:

 

S&H Greenstamps  and the various dishes and cook pots that entailed.

 

When I was a kid, my mother had this brass grocery list.  No; seriously: it was two brass plates riveted together, sandwiching a hinge pin down each side.  Along the length of the hinge pins were tin arrows that folded out away from the body of the piece, or flat into arrow-shaped reliefs in the face of it.  When folded in, each arrow pointed to a staple good you might go to the grocery store to buy:  eggs, milk, flour, aspirin, etc.  You made your shopping list by cruising the pantry and flipping "out" the arrow for anything you wanted to remember.  As you picked them up around the store, you folded the arrow back into its relief.  When all arrows were folded in, you had all your staples.

 

Now this wasn't a one-off thing, either.  My grandmothers each had one (also brass), and I have seen them in tin, and in the late seventies I saw a few in plastic.

 

But I haven't seen one since '81 or '82, and they were pretty rare then, now that I think about it.

 

 

Given the way my memory is going these days, I sort of wish they'd make a comeback!