Things we did before the internet and smart phones

Menas

We had one channel when I was a kid. RTE.
We did at one stage have the english channels but they put a blocker in, on the border, to stop us getting the signal.
So we did not really need a remote control until cable arrived in our town in 1983.

cloud493

Sit in a cinema screen and actually watch the movie.

chewed

Trawling the Irish Times recruitment pages on a Friday and then posting out your CV (printed roughly on a dot matrix printer) in an envelope and waiting patiently for days, weeks, months.....years, for a response!

Or going to the library to do research, instead of Google and Wikipedia.

Masala

- Waiting from Thursday to the following Thursday to see who was No.1 in the Charts
- turn on the Radio for either RTE1 or 2FM
- dial your friends number in public phone box by tapping out the digits on the little push-down things (and using 0 on the dial for 0!!) cos you had no money to call - or the bloody slot thing was jammed with an English 10pence!. And auld wans looking in at you messing!

Ruu

Listen to Atlantic 252. :cool:





Just me..oh.

Grayson

cloud493 wrote: »

Sit in a cinema screen and actually watch the movie.

After you looked up the time the film was showing in a paper.



I remember queueing for ages in the rain to call home when I was in college.

smash

Masala wrote: »

dial your friends number in public phone box by tapping out the digits on the little push-down things

Buttons?

Masala wrote: »

(and using 0 on the dial for 0!!).

Grayson

Ruu wrote: »

Listen to Atlantic 252. :cool:





Just me..oh.

between 7 and 10 on a Saturday.

DEFTLEFTHAND

lol I still do things mentioned here like read books and newspapers, keep a planner/diary, buy and listen to physical copies of music recordings.

Masala

smash wrote: »

Buttons?

......if you have to ask....you're too young!! You had to be there really!!

eviltimeban

KKkitty wrote: »

Had only about 2 or 3 stations on the TV. Had no remote for the TV so actually having to get up and change the volume or channel. Rewinding vhs tapes cos someone else didn't. Passed notes to each other in school.

Would the internet and smart phones help with that?

smash

Masala wrote: »

......if you have to ask....you're too young!! You had to be there really!!

I'm in my 30's.

Masala

smash wrote: »

I'm in my 30's.

Hey Smash... did you ever use the OLD Black Phone and the circular dial!! The standard issue public home when I was a young lad. You'd be lucky if there was 2 in a town .... and that 1 actually worked!!!

smash

Masala wrote: »

Hey Smash... did you ever use the OLD Black Phone and the circular dial!! The standard issue public home when I was a young lad. You'd be lucky if there was 2 in a town .... and that 1 actually worked!!!

Yea. I'm fairly sure my granny still has one.

whisky_galore

Make mix tapes off the radio, sweet Jebus.

smash

whisky_galore wrote: »

Make mix tapes off the radio, sweet Jebus.

The DJ always talked over the end of the song... bastards!

Masala

whisky_galore wrote: »

Make mix tapes off the radio, sweet Jebus.

You were a legend if you had a Tape to Tape player. Closest we came to piracy...and we felt bad that it was 'stealing'

eviltimeban

Choose which CDs / tapes to bring with you on a long journey (I suppose this is an iPod related point but close enough)

valoren

Rewind Video tapes before returning them.


wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzz...*clunk*

SpaceTime

You had to use actual keys in the car doors!
No parking assist radar.
You had to bring films to the chemist and pharmacy and wait days or if you were loaded, use a Poloroid camera which cost about €10 per selfie in modern terms.

Twitter was done using a pen and scribbling on the wall in toilets.

You stored all your music on a shelf!

smash

Masala wrote: »

You were a legend if you had a Tape to Tape player.

Remember copying commodore 64 games?

ffocused

played Battleship with nothing more then a pencil & a piece of paper. get your heads around that kids!

SpaceTime

I just remember the environmental damage.

Bins were thrown outside houses often in black bags that were torn up by roaming dogs. Plastic bags in the trees.
There was no recycling, no wheelie bins.

Dublin and Cork sat under a thick haze of coal smoke and you'd constantly have chest or ear problems as result. Even your laundry got soot on it.

I just remember being a kid and absolutely choking on coal smoke all winter.

The major urban rivers had raw sewage in them and would turn your stomach with the stench. I remember seeing clumps of toilet roll floating down the Lee!

It was a bit of a kip to be honest.

AllGunsBlazing

Notorious97 wrote: »

Am i the only one who still uses teletext and aertel? Ive a smart phone etc i just use it still haha

I can still get the old school Aertel on my UPC cable connection.;)

Not a fan of the new digital teletext at all tbh.

SpaceTime

Teletext was always digital. Just it transmitted each the 1s and 0s using smoke signals.

SpaceTime

Remember if you called someone abroad you'd need to remortgage the house.

anncoates

Called a girl on the landline to ask them out and waited a horrible eternity as their Ma or Da went off and found them and the phone was finally picked up.

AllGunsBlazing

Watching MT-USA of a Sunday and video taping your favourite songs. My sisters compiled a near library's worth of material over the three years it was on.

SpaceTime

If you wanted a thread like this, you had to write a letter to the editor and wait 7 days to see if they'd publish it and then another week for each post.

strobe

Spoke to strangers.

I do feel sorry for young lads growing up now. Any girl on her own waiting on a bus or in a cafe or whatever will be on her phone and seem very unapproachable, must be a lot harder to meet girls outside of the pub/club context now.

... but then again, I guess they just pop onto Tinder these days instead?
(I actually think the tinder concept is great though, 'traditional' online dating is deeply flawed imo, all this profile stuff to wade through and people end up exchanging messages for weeks or even months before meeting, and end up going on dates with people they don't even fancy all that much as the profile stuff makes them seem so 'compaitible' (if you don't want to tear their clothes off anytime you look at them, you're not compatible) which is always going to be ultimately pointless. Tinder's much more suited to how we're wired up. See someone. Decide if they're ridey. Let them know you think they're ridey. They let you know they think you're a ride back. Ride each other. Much more natural.

... what was I meant to be talking about? Crisp sandwich cafe?)

StereoSound

Spent a good bit of time on my Amiga and reading Amiga magazines. I didn't have the net so I could only use magazines to get updates in the technology world. Use to cycle a lot with friends and sit around the park chatting. Bought choc ices a lot too. Then Indiglo started offering cheap dial up internet so my dad got us a new windows 95 PC which we paid for on the old ESB bill monthly and everything changed forever.

AllGunsBlazing

Gerry T wrote: »

Got off the couch to change the TV channel, no remote control back then !

As the yougest in my house I was effectively the remote control. Standing beside the telly manually flicking through the channels waiting for my dad to happen on a show he liked.

Thank fvck we only had the six channels at the time....

coffeepls

SpaceTime wrote: »

I just remember the environmental damage.

Bins were thrown outside houses often in black bags that were torn up by roaming dogs. Plastic bags in the trees.
There was no recycling, no wheelie bins.

Dublin and Cork sat under a thick haze of coal smoke and you'd constantly have chest or ear problems as result. Even your laundry got soot on it.

I just remember being a kid and absolutely choking on coal smoke all winter.

The major urban rivers had raw sewage in them and would turn your stomach with the stench. I remember seeing clumps of toilet roll floating down the Lee!

It was a bit of a kip to be honest.

I always think of that song - you know the Bagatelle (!) one 'Summer in Dublin' - where it says 'the liffey it stank like hell' - omg did it stink. On a summer's day it was vile. It sometimes had a greenish hue to it as well. Sure there was every bit of gunk and rubbish going into from factories and god knows what. We used to joke that you wouldn't so much drown in the liffey as be killed by the toxic fumes in the water...

castletownman

Before smart phones, in the event of an emergency/accident/row we would evacuate/intervene/help out, not get out the phone to record everything and make it go viral.

LoganRice

not pay the new water charges

zcorpian88

Hovering over a ghetto blaster waiting for the radio DJ to shut the f**k up when wanting to record whatever was number one in the charts!

Buona Fortuna

Masala wrote: »

Hey Smash... did you ever use the OLD Black Phone and the circular dial!! The standard issue public home when I was a young lad. You'd be lucky if there was 2 in a town .... and that 1 actually worked!!!

Phoning London in the 80s. You had to go into the post office and tell the woman behind the counter the number. Buy £5 of 10p coins from her. Go outside to the phone box. Pick the reciever and wind the windy handle. Speak to woman in post office and tell her again. She connects you and then as you're speaking jam the 10p s into the slot (about one every 4 seconds).

Some things are definately better.

Augmerson

Used to watch the Italian soccer show on Channel 4 to see what was going on in Serie A (when it was the good)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAo7TrQ0aXw

Now just go onto Youtube or Daily Motion or something, can stream matches live. Before you'd be on Teletext or looking up tables in the papers.

I remember the sound of old dialup too. Connecting at 33k or 56k. Except you never got exactly 56k connection. The highest I got was a 48k connection once I think, I took a screenshot of it. I was very proud of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Nobody being able to make calls while you were on the internet. Lifting up the handset while you were playing Counter-strike - "ah **** SAKE". The internet had loads of Geocities and Angelfire fan websites on anything and everything. People put hours and hours of work into, what looked like then, the pinnacle of webdesign.

zcorpian88

Listening to your elders telling you if you put to put a telecom eireann card in the freezer that it would give the card full credit. Didn't try it but the myth goes that it worked, had to be bulls**t!

At the tender age of 7 I was entrusted with the intelligence and responsibility of recording Glenroe when my parents worked Sunday nights, didn't even have to be shown how to do it, felt like a right clever clogs!

Having a wind up clock next to the bed that used to rattle off the bedside locker and make a racket and scare the b'jesus out of me every morning.

Figuring out the pin to the sky decoder that my parents set and being able to watch stuff I shouldn't have been watching.

Son Of A Vidic

My best mate had family in Holland and went over for a few weeks every summer. So inevitable, he would come back to Ireland with a generous supply of reading material. Every summer we eagerly waited for Santa's return.

Augmerson

zcorpian88 wrote: »

Listening to your elders telling you if you put to put a telecom eireann card in the freezer that it would give the card full credit. Didn't try it but the myth goes that it worked, had to be bulls**t!

At the tender age of 7 I was entrusted with the intelligence and responsibility of recording Glenroe when my parents worked Sunday nights, didn't even have to be shown how to do it, felt like a right clever clogs!

Having a wind up clock next to the bed that used to rattle off the bedside locker and make a racket and scare the b'jesus out of me every morning.

Figuring out the pin to the sky decoder that my parents set and being able to watch stuff I shouldn't have been watching.

Nothing signified the spiritual death of the weekend like the end credits to Glenroe, jesus the depression.

AllGunsBlazing

Augmerson wrote: »

Nothing signified the spiritual death of the weekend like the end credits to Glenroe, jesus the depression.

Oh feck! I still haven't done me homework!!!!:eek:

mrsbyrne

Sitting upstairs on the bus smoking Silk Cut snd listening to Bat out of hell on my walkman.
Ringing home maybe once a week , 3 minutes only, from the payphone in the hall and just not even wondering how everyone was/who was dead/ what time they ate the dinner at until the next call.

DazHeath

Colour between the lines

SpaceTime

The bliss of being able to let people 'fade out of your life' when you moved on.

Now you collect friends and they're on Facebook 10 years later and you've no idea who they are anymore.
Then you take them off Facebook and they suddenly appear on Twitter or worse, LinkedIn!

keano25

Carried a 20p on a string for pay phones!

zcorpian88

Augmerson wrote: »

Nothing signified the spiritual death of the weekend like the end credits to Glenroe, jesus the depression.

Straight to bed after Glenroe haha, hated that show when I was a kid because I had no tv in my room then.

"Would ya like a cup of tea Miley?" "B'gor I will Biddy and then I'll go feed the cows!" Riveting stuff!

BeepBeep67

Used to get the bus into town on a Saturday and spend all day going through records in the sound cellar, freebird and the Georges St Arcade, finding something interesting, checking if it was in good condition and getting a few tracks played before deciding whether to buy it or not.

Links234

BeepBeep67 wrote: »

Used to get the bus into town on a Saturday and spend all day going through records in the sound cellar, freebird and the Georges St Arcade, finding something interesting, checking if it was in good condition and getting a few tracks played before deciding whether to buy it or not.

I can't go to Dublin without at least sticking my head into Sound Cellar

monflat

Watching the beat box on telly of a Sunday. Around12 ish before your dinner served on table !!!