The "Good Old Days" might not have been all that good

[Snargfargle]

Things I remember from when I was a kid.

• Mumps was still a serous childhood disease and rheumatic fever from tonsillitis could lay you up all summer long.
• We all started working odd jobs like paper routes and mowing yards at age ten and were driving trucks and tractors for eleven hours a day in the summers at age 14.
• We watched the nightly reports of hundreds of servicemen being killed and looked forward to graduation, the draft, and being sent to Vietnam.
• People smoked everywhere you went. Most men died in their late 60s, which is why the retirement age was 65.
• There was no Internet. If you wanted to know how to fix something you either figured it out or sent off for a service manual.
• Cars were quite unsafe as they usually had hard metal consoles, no crumple zones or air bags, and few seat belts.
• Engines were generally worn-out well before 100,000 miles, requiring an engine re-build or swap.
• The fear of a nuclear attack was a real concern. Little known to most of the world, nuclear war almost began in 1962 when a US ship dropped flash-bangs around a Soviet sub to try to get it to surface during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was interpreted as an attack and the sub's commander and political officer ordered a nuclear response against the American fleet. It was only the negative vote of the boat's executive officer that prevented a nuclear war.
• Unless you were lucky enough to live "in the middle of nowhere" there were few air and water pollution laws and the air of the cities was so polluted that acid rain melted women's stockings and marble headstones and the rivers sometimes caught on fire.
• There was no air conditioning other than in a few stores. The sign "It's Kool Inside" was a big draw, until you actually got inside and couldn't breathe because of the cigarette smoke.
• Emergency medicine pretty much consisted of scooping you into the back of a local hearse that doubled as an ambulance and driving you to the hospital without much more than basic first aid.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 21, 2024 by Snargfargle

[Wolfswetpaws]

20 Things That Used To Be Science Fiction But Are Now A Reality
Brian Obudho May 26, 2017
https://www.theclever.com/20-things-that-used-to-be-science-fiction-but-are-now-a-reality/  
 

[Admiral_Karasu]

Still...

There's some things I'd be missing, like the Internet, which back then you didn't even know to miss. I could do without a lot of other things, though, to be honest.

[Wolfswetpaws]

10 minutes ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

Still...

There's some things I'd be missing, like the Internet, which back then you didn't even know to miss. I could do without a lot of other things, though, to be honest.

I like the notion that people in the past were thinking of how to make the future better.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

I miss the simplicity of 8-bit computing. 

I missed it so much I bought this: 

 

It's not a direct copy; there are no slots in the back for the old peripherals, and it's really just an emulator parked under a reasonable facsimile of the old keyboard. There's a modern back-end which mounts virtual disks for you and then you LOAD "*",8 to get the directory and continue programming in the good old fashioned way. It will even simulate a VIC-20 if you want it to. 

 

At risk of straying too much into politics: I don't miss the threat of being obliterated in a flash of white light, and I do hope the incoming US administration can cool things the f*** down. 

[Wolfswetpaws]

22 minutes ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

I miss the simplicity of 8-bit computing. 

I missed it so much I bought this: 

 

It's not a direct copy; there are no slots in the back for the old peripherals, and it's really just an emulator parked under a reasonable facsimile of the old keyboard. There's a modern back-end which mounts virtual disks for you and then you LOAD "*",8 to get the directory and continue programming in the good old fashioned way. It will even simulate a VIC-20 if you want it to. 

 

At risk of straying too much into politics: I don't miss the threat of being obliterated in a flash of white light, and I do hope the incoming US administration can cool things the f*** down. 

Yeah.
I prefer we don't have to play "Missile Command" in real-life.   
https://games.aarp.org/games/atari-missile-command  
 

[Snargfargle]

14 minutes ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

I miss the simplicity of 8-bit computing.

I had  C64 back in '82. I learned Basic and some simple machine language coding on it. It had a pretty good sound synthesizer and a simple graphics generator. Back then, there were no "downloads" -- games came printed in magazines and you had to enter the code yourself. I can't say that it was every "productive" but it was a lot of fun. The storage drive was a cassette recorder.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

30 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

The storage drive was a cassette recorder.

I started with that. After about a year, maybe two, I twisted my parents'... er, I mean Santa Claus's arm into adding a 1541 disk drive to the mix.

When we first went computer shopping, they had a thing called an SX 64 - with a tiny screen and a built in disk drive. By no means could it be called a laptop, because it was too long and heavy among other things, but it was self-contained and portable if you had a table to put it on and a wall socket to plug it into. It was also VERY expensive - I think they wanted AUD $2000 for it. 

There were IBM PCs which were being sold with less up-front RAM than the C64 had, and far less sound and graphics capability, at a much higher price. The one thing that really held it back from being taken more seriously and being an even bigger seller than it already was, was lack of an inbuilt machine language monitor. In that respect alone, the BBC microcomputer (which used the same processor) was leagues ahead - it could integrate machine code with BASIC - but the 64 blew almost everything else away in sound and graphics terms. 

Then again, the IBM PC had much more "stretch" built into it. Beyond a certain level - and it was a reasonably high one for amateur programmers just cutting their teeth - eight-bit just can't compete, especially when you only have one accumulator register to play with. That being said, the 6502 chip is STILL being made in updated versions today - the 65C02 has some added commands, while maintaining almost* complete back-compatibility.

 

* The unused opcodes in the 6502 processor usually cause the machine to crash horribly, but some of them turned out to be stable enough for programmers to actually make use of. The 65C02 nominally has all the unused codes set to NOP - no operation - so they won't do stupid sh**, but it does mean that programs which relied on the pseudo-opcodes will no longer work. Since the 65C02 is used in some medical devices (that don't need anything more than a very well documented and understood 8-bit processor), this is probably a good thing.

Edited December 22, 2024 by Ensign Cthulhu

[Asym]

On 12/21/2024 at 1:07 AM, Snargfargle said:

Things I remember from when I was a kid.

• Mumps was still a serous childhood disease and rheumatic fever from tonsillitis could lay you up all summer long.
• We all started working odd jobs like paper routes and mowing yards at age ten and were driving trucks and tractors for eleven hours a day in the summers at age 14.
• We watched the nightly reports of hundreds of servicemen being killed and looked forward to graduation, the draft, and being sent to Vietnam.
• People smoked everywhere you went. Most men died in their late 60s, which is why the retirement age was 65.
• There was no Internet. If you wanted to know how to fix something you either figured it out or sent off for a service manual.
• Cars were quite unsafe as they usually had hard metal consoles, no crumple zones or air bags, and few seat belts.
• Engines were generally worn-out well before 100,000 miles, requiring an engine re-build or swap.
• The fear of a nuclear attack was a real concern. Little known to most of the world, nuclear war almost began in 1962 when a US ship dropped flash-bangs around a Soviet sub to try to get it to surface during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was interpreted as an attack and the sub's commander and political officer ordered a nuclear response against the American fleet. It was only the negative vote of the boat's executive officer that prevented a nuclear war.
• Unless you were lucky enough to live "in the middle of nowhere" there were few air and water pollution laws and the air of the cities was so polluted that acid rain melted women's stockings and marble headstones and the rivers sometimes caught on fire.
• There was no air conditioning other than in a few stores. The sign "It's Kool Inside" was a big draw, until you actually got inside and couldn't breathe because of the cigarette smoke.
• Emergency medicine pretty much consisted of scooping you into the back of a local hearse that doubled as an ambulance and driving you to the hospital without much more than basic first aid.

Yes, ^^^^^ most of that were real for me as well. 

• Yes, we watched Walter Cronkite every night and took copious notes as to what new weapons the bad guys had and how to duplicate them !
• Yes, many of us, Pre-OSHA, went to work on Saturday Morning with our Grand Dad's to experience what they did and to introduce you to the skills needed.  Both worked at a steel plant...  I had my own hard hat, my own steel tipped boots and safety/blast furnace glasses...
• Yes, in the Library, books actually got worn down from use...  Some, simply "vanished" and returned years later.
• Yes, we had "BB" gun wars and made our own grenades and bobytraps (Again, thank you Walter Cronkite !) and shot at each other !
• Yes, I rode Horses and had the opportunity to learn saber drill from two WW1 Cavalry veterans and I have the 1906 Cav Sabre I used to remember them by.....
• And, I remember the day Kennedy was killed....  The Air Raid sirens went off and one of our Mom's, since most families had one car, came screaming up to the school where we were playing tackle football at a recess !  To this day, I will never forget the terror in her eyes...  We were glued to our B&W TV's and our Father actually came home before 6PM !  With a WW2 soldier's game face on and the stored weapons came out....
• Yes, we shot competitively and I do to this day.
• Yes, I lived in an upper middle class suburbs - one of the first in the Nation no less.....  The Wonder Years was un watchable...
• Yes, I learned to Hate the M1 Garand and had scars on my right thumb....  (which is gone....  I am hand impaired...)
• And, we were exposed to the future technologies well before they became commercially available because our Dad's and their friends were working at IBM and Bell Labs and Westinghouse's think tank.... 
• You knew where every boy was on the Thursday evenings in 1966.

[Admiral_Karasu]

@Snargfargle @Ensign Cthulhu I had both the cassette recorder and the legendary 'toaster' too. I also learned how to double the storage space on those floppies.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

51 minutes ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

@Snargfargle @Ensign Cthulhu I had both the cassette recorder and the legendary 'toaster' too. I also learned how to double the storage space on those floppies.

I had the specialist snippy hole punch to do just that. 

[Snargfargle]

22 minutes ago, Asym said:

Yes, ^^^^^ most of that were real for me as well.

My previous list was a list of the not-so good (or perceived not so good) things about the old days. I could go on and on about the good things. Growing up in a Kansas farming town of 350 people, I had an almost perfect childhood. If you want to know how I grew up, just look at Norman Rockwell paintings. The only real scare I had was when I caught rheumatic fever. Grandpa came out to see me one last time because he just knew I was going to die because rheumatic fever was a death sentence in his day. Fortunately, by the early 60s penicillin was readily available. I was laid up most of the summer though. It felt like all of my joints were full of red-hot sand. It started when I caught strep throat after having my tonsils taken out. I "forgot" to tell the Army that I had rheumatic fever in case it might have put a damper on my enlistment because I really needed to get the GI Bill if I was going to go to college.

 

[Snargfargle]

1 hour ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

@Snargfargle @Ensign Cthulhu I had both the cassette recorder and the legendary 'toaster' too. I also learned how to double the storage space on those floppies.

I still have a hole punch somewhere down in the basement, though I took my old 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks to the dump long ago.

[Asym]

2 hours ago, Snargfargle said:

My previous list was a list of the not-so good (or perceived not so good) things about the old days.

Ooops !  And yes, never volunteer heath information.  After all, back then, there was not way to "discover" and our family doctor was a WW1 veteran.....so.......

The only really "bad thing" that happened was winning the only Lottery of that time !  Yes, it was the Draft lottery;  and,  my birth date was the first ball out.....  Now, I was already headed that way;  but, we'd lost two older, childhood friends over there and we had a Disabled Vet as a rifle coach...  So.......my mom wasn't a happy camper.....for several weeks....   I suspect she wanted me to work at the steel mill.....  NO.........nonononono.

We were very lucky in SAW, WW1, WW2 and Korea:  no one was killed.  They did some crazy stuff but, survived.  Viet Nam simply wasn't that kind of war for my parents....we lost a distant cousin..... 

Edited December 24, 2024 by Asym

[Gillhunter]

1 hour ago, Asym said:

Ooops !  And yes, never volunteer heath information.  After all, back then, there was not way to "discover" and our family doctor was a WW1 veteran.....so.......

The only really "bad thing" that happened was winning the only Lottery of that time !  Yes, it was the Draft lottery;  and,  my birth date was the first ball out.....  Now, I was already headed that way;  but, we'd lost two older, childhood friends over there and we had a Disabled Vet as a rifle coach...  So.......my mom wasn't a happy camper.....for several weeks....   I suspect she wanted me to work at the steel mill.....  NO.........nonononono.

We were very lucky in SAW, WW1, WW2 and Korea:  no one was killed.  They did some crazy stuff but, survived.  Viet Nam simply wasn't that kind of war for my parents....we lost a distant cousin..... 

I won the same Lottery. Received my draft notice when I was in boot camp in the Navy. 

[Snargfargle]

2 hours ago, Asym said:

Draft lottery

My grandpa's grandpa fought in the Civil War, a more distant relative fought in King Philips's War, and I had a handful of great uncles and cousins who were in WWII. One great uncle was recalled for Korea too. After that, however, though everyone was drafted, nobody turned 18 when a war was going on. Most of my uncles and Dad missed Korea by a year or two, my youngest uncle was discharged just before Vietnam. I just missed the draft on the other side but enlisted anyway, the only one of my generation to serve. My cousin's two youngest boys served in Iraq and Afghanistan though. One made a career of it, even though a land mine almost took him out. Last I heard he was a senior NCO in the 3rd and 75th but he may be retired now.

Edited December 24, 2024 by Snargfargle

[New_Jersey_prpr]

I‘m still too young to miss "the good old days" unlike you guys lol.

imo the only old day thing worth missing is cars from 2000s~2010s. They are modern enough to have most technology equipments needed for driving, yet don't have those complex systems that bring constant problems and lowers dependability.

[Snargfargle]

2 hours ago, New_Jersey_prpr said:

 the only old day thing worth missing is cars from 2000s~2010s.

I have a "Second Generation" Toyota Tacoma. I thought I'd probably buy a "Third Generation" Tacoma when they came out but found that they actually had decreased in quality, which is a first for Toyota. I've driven Toyota trucks since the late 70s and they always got better each generation until he 20-teens. From what I hear, the "Fourth Generation" Tacoma is no better.

There are already significant problems with the transmissions on the new models. "Owners with automatic transmissions have reported sporadic problems. In response, the company has reportedly begun replacing problematic transmissions entirely under a TSB rather than a recall." These are 2024+ model year vehicles.

Edited December 26, 2024 by Snargfargle

[Wolfswetpaws]

4 hours ago, New_Jersey_prpr said:

I‘m still too young to miss "the good old days" unlike you guys lol.

imo the only old day thing worth missing is cars from 2000s~2010s. They are modern enough to have most technology equipments needed for driving, yet don't have those complex systems that bring constant problems and lowers dependability.

From 2000 to 2016 I owned a Hyundai Elantra station-wagon.
2.0 Liter engine.  5-speed manual transmission.
Versatile cargo-space.
Good aerodynamics.  Good/predictable handling in winter conditions (which improved when I mounted snow tires).
As a daily-driver/commuter car, it fulfilled my needs for over 175,000 miles.
Yes, I had to perform routine maintenance and had to perform some unexpected repairs on a few occasions after 100,000 miles (replaced the clutch, replaced shock-absorbers, replaced three out of the four window-regulators at different times, replaced the camshaft position sensor, replaced water-pump as a preventive maintenance peace-of-mind service at 150,000 miles, replaced brake pads/rotors/calipers [edited to add:  had some body-work done to fix rust issues]).  
The only thing that I couldn't replace, after it failed, was the tailgate latch mechanism.  Parts were no longer available in 2016.
I needed a working tailgate.  
So, that was my motivation to replace my 2000 Elantra Wagon with a 2016 Kia Soul (base model).
Both are good cars, in my opinion.  

It irks me sometimes, when I think about government regulations and other market forces that incentivize manufacturers to stop producing an otherwise good car and replace it with a car that complies with new government regulations, but is merely newer and more expensive instead of actually being a better & more-reliable performer while offering a better value. 
Safer in a collision?  Perhaps.

Edited December 26, 2024 by Wolfswetpaws

[Snargfargle]

57 minutes ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

The only thing that I couldn't replace, after it failed, was the tailgate latch mechanism.  Parts were no longer available in 2016.

My Dad flew on an old C-47 once during maneuvers in Germany. He was the last soldier on the plane and the crew chief shouted up to him to wire the door shut with bailing wire before he took his place with the rest of his unit. Dad knew his way around bailing wire. He used to bale hay back in the days when kids rode on the bailer and tied the wires by hand.

I just used a cabinet latch to close the door on my old '51 Willys.

The tailgate on Dad's Chevy truck wouldn't latch one day. I finally traced the problem to these two tiny plastic clips. Without them, the latching rods would slip off the latch handle levers and render the whole thing useless. They would break every couple of years so I bought a bag of them. I still have a few left over in my shop.

[Wolfswetpaws]

6 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

My Dad flew on an old C-47 once during maneuvers in Germany. He was the last soldier on the plane and the crew chief shouted up to him to wire the door shut with bailing wire before he took his place with the rest of his unit. Dad knew his way around bailing wire. He used to bale hay back in the days when kids rode on the bailer and tied the wires by hand.

I just used a cabinet latch to close the door on my old '51 Willys.

The tailgate on Dad's Chevy truck wouldn't latch one day. I finally traced the problem to these two tiny plastic clips. Without them, the latching rods would slip off the latch handle levers and render the whole thing useless. They would break every couple of years so I bought a bag of them. I still have a few left over in my shop.

That's nice.
Keeping my tailgate closed wasn't the problem.
It wouldn't unlock & open after being shut.

To fix my problem, I would have needed ...
1.  A new part
2. A working used part
3.  The blueprints and the money to hire someone to fabricate a replacement part from scratch.
4.  The blueprints and the money to hire someone to fix the worn part.
5.  A new car.

I went with the fifth option, due to scarcity of replacements and the financial and fabrication obstacles being more than I could handle at the time.

[Snargfargle]

Now, you probably could find the part you needed back then. However, this is due to Chinese companies re-manufacturing large numbers of replacement parts for the repair after-market. Most of these are from OEM blueprints and many are even made by the same manufacturing plant that made the OEM parts.

 

[Wolfswetpaws]

1 minute ago, Snargfargle said:

Now, you probably could find the part you needed back then. However, this is due to Chinese companies re-manufacturing large numbers of replacement parts for the repair after-market. Most of these are from OEM blueprints and many are even made by the same manufacturing plant that made the OEM parts.

 

Yeah.  Timing matters.

[Snargfargle]

Just now, Wolfswetpaws said:

Yeah.  Timing matters.

I wish I'd not sold my old '51 Willys as I now know enough to fix it, not to mention the fact that I could easily find the parts via the Internet. However, back in 1979 I didn't. I did fix up Dad's old '50 Desoto. I wish I still had it too but I couldn't afford to buy it from my brother and sister after our parents passed. I used up most of my money buying the house that Dad and I built. In a few years I might not even be able to keep it. Taxes are currently $6000 and have been increasing a $500 a year for the past five years. I have to pay the government $185 a month for Medicare I don't use too because if I don't they will charge an additional 10% for every year I don't pay, and that applies to the rest of your life.