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Remember the good old days?

Started by richerthanyou, 26 January, 2016, 09:00:57 AM

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TordelBack

#15
Mmm. I hung onto a few old mixtapes, 'radio shows' my brother and I made, and gig bootlegs for sentimental reasons, but the rest of my tapes went straight down the charity shop the day I bought an iRiver. Probably still there.  Ugly finicky short-lived linear things, and as for rewinding with a biro to save batteries...

IndigoPrime

We had a ton of tapes in the loft, and then realised we have nothing to play them on. The only things I kept are my uni work, on Beta SP, with a view to digitising it at some point. Everything else went to charity or the dump.

CalHab

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 26 January, 2016, 01:14:46 PM
But tapes were always bloody awful: crap quality; horrible to use; irritatingly linear in nature; prone to getting eaten. I don't miss my stereo munching a favourite album at all.

I remember the annoyance of stretched tape on favourite albums. Eventually everything started to sound like My Bloody Valentine.

Dandontdare

I recall my first Walkman - you'd set out for the day with one tape in it, plus one in each coat-pocket - that gave you 4.5 hours of music (usually 6 single albums) which was plenty, you just had to choose your albums at the beginning of the day.

I've still got hundreds of tapes (I never bought records as my best mate's mum worked for a record company and he had thousands of albums and a good tape deck - I'd go round on a Saturday with a 10-pack of C90s and pick what I wanted and he'd bring them into school the next week) but most of them are unplayable now.

James Stacey

I recently bought a usb cassette player with which to digitise some old tapes. Only a tenner off amazon. Soon I will have some shit quality mp3s to listen too.

I miss nostalgia

ming

I miss (to some extent) the time before ubiquitous mobile phone coverage and wi-fi everywhere.  I remember being in Alaska in 1995 when mobile phones seemed to be just coming in and people were of the opinion "why the hell would I want one of those things?  I don't want people to be able to contact me at any time... etc." and I can entirely sympathise with this viewpoint. 

I see adverts on TV here in Norway, extolling the virtues of being able to browse Facefriend from your phone in the most remote corners of the country and I just think "Noooooo!"  I want to go to those places to get AWAY from the inane background chatter that has become our lives these days, but it's all morons with selfie sticks, isn't it?  Hopefully I can get my kids to view life and nature by actually looking at it, rather than taking pictures of it and putting them on Instagram and glancing at them later maybe.

Also: as much as email and whatnot is very, very handy I do miss putting pen to paper and writing yer actual letters and postcards.  I can do something about that at least, just requires a little more effort and juggling of time and kids.

/pipe and slippers mode

pauljholden

I miss being younger. But that may be about it.

pj

SuperSurfer

I miss having a bit more hair up top to play with but could be much worse in that department.

Apart from family and friends who are no longer around – I can't say there is much I miss.

Was going to say what DDD said: talk of old Nokia mobile phones and the like don't count. All mobile phones are a modern phenomenon. Shopping with the better half pre-mobile phone days was a pain. Nowadays it's a case of: "er, I'm still waiting for you, where are you?" "I'm in the queue for the changing rooms" "Ok, I'm off to Forbidden Planet – will call you in half an hour."

Guess I miss some of the simplicity of old times though what with info overload. But better to have too much info than too little as was the case way back.

IndigoPrime

A lot of modern issues are about habit formation though. People say they don't have time to spend on X, but they may have rewired their brains to expect certain things (or get that little 'hit' from completing a task, such as 'checking Facebook'). With a small amount of willpower, it's easy enough to avoid doing this. The flip side is how totally amazing modern mobile devices are. In your hands, you have a tiny computer that's as powerful as laptops were only a few generations ago. It's a games machine, phone, musical-making kit, art pad, journal, web browser, and far more, all in one. Modern tablets and smartphones are science fiction in the present. Just make sure you turn off all the unnecessary crap you don't really need.

I do also vividly remember the end of my 'holdout' time regarding mobile phones. I didn't have one, and was about to do a course in London for a couple of days. I'd been told I could crash at a house friends were renting in Ealing. As I got out of the Tube, it was pissing down. I walked the 15 minutes to their house. No answer, even though someone said they'd be in. I trudged back to the station and found a payphone. I got through to a friend's mobile. He was, of course, at the house, and had probably arrived there about two seconds after I'd left the street. He noted that I wouldn't have gotten soaking wet and had an entirely unnecessary 30-minute trudge had I been armed with a phone. That said, I never really did like the crappy Nokia I ended up with (nor, really, any phone until I got my first iPhone).

Hawkmumbler

I miss flipper dippers and tomato ketchup flavour walkers crisps.

And Firefly.

TordelBack

#25
Och yes, much as I hate impatient clients and debt collectors hounding me 24/7, life before mobiles was a nightmare. From 1989 to 1997 (when I finally caved), my life seemed to revolve around cycling or jogging miles to queue at a midge infested phone box to make or receive a call arranged by post a week previously, only to find change/card pouring through my fingers like water, trying to exchange angsty words of love or job applications while half the locality peered over your shoulder.  And send an email, despite having had an email address since 1990? Only on the college mainframe, son. I don't miss any of that crap one little bit.

My Nexus 7, bought a year ago for less than half of the price of a flight to London in 1989, is the answer to a lifelong prayer, what I always wanted from a Walkman,VCR, laptop, reference library and games console all in my jacket pocket. Miraculous days to be alive.

Mattofthespurs

On that subject; I miss telephone boxes.
Now there is never anywhere to have a piss when your desperate.

I miss being able to go to a football match at the drop of a hat and it only costing a quid or two. These days I have to buy my ticket, and train ticket six weeks in advance, at the cost of a couple of days wages, just so SKY can change the day and time of the match to suit lazy bastards who would rather sit at home and watch the game.

I miss proper cinemas where the film would start at the advertised time (not 45 minutes to an hour later) and they wouldn't turn the damn lights up as soon as the credits started to role.

I miss real second hand bookshops.

I miss being younger.

Daveycandlish

Quote from: Tordelback on 26 January, 2016, 03:48:47 PM
Och  my life seemed to revolve around cycling or jogging miles to queue at a midge infested phone box to make or receive a call arranged by post a week previously, only to find change/card pouring through my fingers like water.

I read that as midget infested, which I thought was a bit odd
An old-school, no-bullshit, boys-own action/adventure comic reminiscent of the 2000ads and Eagles and Warlords and Battles and other glorious black-and-white comics that were so, so cool in the 70's and 80's - Buy the hardback Christmas Annual!

IndigoPrime

Quote from: Mattofthespurs on 26 January, 2016, 04:30:07 PMI miss proper cinemas where the film would start at the advertised time (not 45 minutes to an hour later) and they wouldn't turn the damn lights up as soon as the credits started to role.
You have weird cinemas, although I do agree the pre-film stuff is getting out of hand. That said, our local used to be a place where you'd stand in the pouring rain, queuing for a ticket, then go inside to not especially good screens that had clearly seen better days. The one advantage over modern fare: the food was normal pricing, for the most part. Personally, I like our local Vue: I can book my seat online and show up dead on time, rather than showing up half an hour early, just to guarantee not being struck at the front.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 26 January, 2016, 05:51:51 PM
Personally, I like our local Vue: I can book my seat online and show up dead on time, rather than showing up half an hour early, just to guarantee not being struck at the front.

Yeah, I'm a convert to the online booking system at Cineworld. Book specified seats for myself, the missus, anyone else who's going, download the QR code to my phone and just turn up and walk straight in.

Cheers

Jim
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