Tell me what it means

Once a person left the house, you couldn't reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.

It is now safe to turn off your computer

Flying being a really fun and nice experience.

You could walk your family members/friends right to the gate without going through any screening. As a bonus, everyone wore shoes and not their worst clothes too.

My first flight I was by myself before I was even a teenager yet, and the airline had a specific flight attendant watch after me until my grandparents picked me up on the other side. She was awesome and I kept the flight wings the captain gave me for decades. It was not unusually good customer service.

In fact, before MBAs McKinsey'd the world, interactions at most businesses were actually pleasant... Nearly every restaurant or store actually cared about customer satisfaction in the before times. I can't tell you how nice that was having a social contract. It was a genuinely nice thing (*racial and gender provisions apply, offer not valid in all areas) Instead of expanding the umbrella to everyone, we drained the public pools and now it's normal..

I think I see boobs!

To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.

This station now concludes its broadcast day.

That's right. At a certain time of night, TV stations would just stop showing things until morning.

Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.

My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.

Driving long distances to places you had never been before usually involved books of maps, pre-planning, a navigator, and help from strangers.

You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.

Flip the plastic chicklet in your floppy disk so you dont accidentally erase it.

Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.

Of course, you'd copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.

Hit the coin return button on everything and randomly get lucky once in a while.

When you call someone it was normal for someone else to answer and you had to be careful because they could be listening to your call.

My speakers used to be able to let me know I was about to receive a call on my cell phone.

• Receiving junk mail Internet CDs
• Waiting patiently to record a song you liked
• Setting the clock and a timer to record something on your VCR
• The planet Pluto
• Wax lips and candy cigarettes
• Tang
• Translucent electronics
• Cheat Code books
• 1(800) COLLECT & "00 it's magic!"

MTV only had music video

It's a US thing, where the glory of SCART was unknown thus they had to continue using the antenna input of their TV to connect their consoles to, also, as far as I'm aware only NTSC has fixed frequency assignments. Elsewhere in the world you just programmed the TV to display the console's output on whatever number you wanted, or, if you had a proper input for non-antenna signals, switch the TV to "AV".

A stack of 15 floppy disks for one program. Please insert the next disk to continue (I can't remember the exact wording). Command prompt to A:\ and having to see what the install program might be called. Bring amazed that CDs could autorun programs.

I would go to the video rental store to play video games.

The random one that I remember and don't see anywhere, is the tv getting staticky whenever we ran the microwave

Want to kmow the weather, lottery results, TV channel program for the day and other info? Go to your TV and check the teletext

Smoking or non-smoking?

Failing at a pc game wasn't necessarily on you. It could also be on the dirt gathered by the ball inside your mouse. Later, of course, you realized it was on you all along.

I remember summers without smoke.

Using a hole punch to make 5 1/4" disks double sided! Saved a lot of money!

Y'all remember the turbo button?

OTA TV stations used to have an end to their broadcast day, and they'd play the national anthem before going to color bars until morning.

screeches in dial up internet sound effects

Sticking my finger into the coin return of every pay phone, and if there was a dime, checking the date on it because silver coins were still floating around in circulation.

Same thing every time one of us got our hands on a quarter. If it was silver, we'd all fight over it.

I don't remember any of us ever cashing one in. If we found one, it would just go into a shoebox, ultimately getting lost to time.

LOAD "*",8,1

Game consoles didn't come with a storage card, so you had to keep the game running or restart every time.

"At the tone, it will be 8:45 exactly." Beep

Oh man… I said “box art” the other day and my buddies daughter pointedly asked what I was talking about :-)

1-800-CALLCOLLECT "imatthemallatboscospickmeup" and then get your dime back

Watching the Challenger burn up.

Nuclear war drills hiding under my desk.

Game related - monochrome monitors

You could only program like 9 phone numbers on your phone because it only had 10 buttons for it and one of them was reserved for 911. All other numbers you either memorized, wrote down in a book or on cards, or dialed 411 to talk to a stranger whose job was to provide you with the contact information of people and businesses.

Most of "The Anarchist's Cookbook" wouldn't work today because of the Internet and electronic receipts.

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

Hold on, I got to flip the tape over.

Be kind rewind

When you bought a thing you owned it.

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

Disk 13 of 18

A cassette and a pencil.

Needing to memorize the home phone numbers of all my friends

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.

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

Jogging sucked because my music would stutter with every step.

"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.

Adjusting the rabbit ears when you change channels.

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?

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.

You had to pay 25 cents to text.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Address 220 irq 7 interrupt 1 V42bis modem

Be kind. Rewind.

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

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

VHF goes CLIC CLIC CLIC, UHF is CRRRRRRRRRRRKK.

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

"I know accounting needs this on the 2nd Floor but that pile of papers is too big to fit in the tubes in one go"

Drive-thru bank pneumatic box slot

Edit: ok so apparently everyone except me is somehow stuck in the 1980s. And presumably buying betmax players so they can watch Robocop

My first game controller only had one button.

Sundays were awesome because you got to read comics!

Buying the car kit so I could connect my CD Walkman (with 15 second ESP) to the cigarette lighter and cassette deck in my first car.

pulling over at a gas station to ask for directions

& optimizing emm386 & himem.sys

Let’s go one deeper… you couldn’t play games without sliding a switch

I was recently at a party with a SNES connected to a noisy channel-3 RF modulator because the TV couldn't switch to its composite input via the front panel buttons, and they didn't have the remote. I wandered the house until I found a universal remote, then programmed AUX to match the TV and switched inputs. Just things you learn in the '90s.

I still have a distinct memory of trying to get on the Internet and then hearing my dad's voice coming through the computer speakers. He'd been on the phone with someone.

Loading games from audio cassette.

Using floppy disks in grade 2, then dvd+r in grade 4 and finally flash drives in 6+

Coffee and cigarettes, indoors, at a cafe, on lunch break in highschool.

"Mom I'm playing Starcraft don't pick up the phone!"

I experienced the ashes of Mount St Helens

The best selling video game was all text with zero graphics; Zork.

Type LOAD "", press RETURN, press PLAY on the cassette player, wait 5-10 minutes, enjoy.

Using pencils to manually rewind cassette tapes.

Computer and console games came exclusively on CD before the switch to DVD. When you bought a triple AAA title for console,you didn't have to spend 3 days waiting for day 1 patches to install. You could probably fit the entire game library of your favorite console back in the day on a thumb drive nowadays.

not getting an answer to a question for days or more

"Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!"

I saw "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" on TV.

I had a game destroyed because the recorder ate the tape.

dot matrix with stereo sound

"Slave drive" maybe.

I mean, they'll think it means something totally different.

I'm older than that, but it's definitely something a zoomer wouldn't understand immediately.

Poke 53281,4

There were red pages in the phone book that had a number you could call and enter a four-digit code to hear movie showtimes or the Joke of the Day.

Load “*” ,8,1

I caught 4, maybe 5 channels with a coax cable taped to the wall, in just the right position

Or 4..

Oh, you have satellite tv? Let's see what's on...
Channel 113, 114, 115, 116, 116West, ...
The 19ft 📡 in backyard: wrrrrrrr rrrr...
...117, 118...

Having to hook up my consoles to a VCR.

IRQ 5, DMA 1

Yeah I remember getting all excited the day we had a TV with a RCA/AV jack and thought, damn I'm going all kinds of hi-def now!

I actually know what this means, from getting my mom’s Atari to work on my grandmother’s TV

I think it was channel 2 for that one though, idk. We switched to using the flatscreen because of the annoying high pitched noise. (To the annoyance of all retro gamers who read this)

Me at the zoo

Let's listen to this radio station play an unholy noise for about 30 minutes, record it in a cassette tape, and play the game recorded in those BAUD BOIS

I had (and still have) a Teddy Ruxpin.

I had to fast forward or rewind a cassette tape to a specific time to play a game in the computer.

C:\park.exe

Blowing the cartridge may or may not work.

My first one was wood grained

You had to empty the bit bucket once in a while.

You used to have to print out a document and then scan it into another machine that would use landlines to send it to another printer so someone, somewhere else, could have the document.

Can someone explain this to me pls?

Let me just call someone if they're still at home on this payphone to look it up in the encyclopedia that was printed 20 years ago

"You have mail"

Please insert disk 10/12

I still dream in black and white.

If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.

Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.

Bullshit they could work on channel 4 too; the NES and the SNES both had a switch in the back for that, I assume the Genesis and TurboGrafx16 did too

I had a couple of magazine CDs that I got from a trial subscription.

https://archive.org/details/launchcdmagazine

AOL zines were pretty neat.

https://medium.com/s/requiem-for-an-internet/how-aols-tween-zine-scene-pioneered-the-digital-self-9f2e261a6d2a

Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)

Lawn darts.

The top dial on the TV had the VHF (lower number) stations. The bottom had the UHF( higher number) stations. In spite of all those channels being available, many places only had three, maybe four that had a station in range to be received intelligibly.

My childhood was filled with clear plastic, I kinda hate those cause half of em were of questionable quality.

yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:

Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.

I used to dial POP-CORN to get the time.

My first console was the Nintendo DS. My first PC was a Windows XP one. We still used VHS, CDs and DVDs at my parents place

If you got one question wrong in Bamboozle, you had to start all the way from the beginning.

I stood on a sawhorse and touched the light bulb's base. My brother stood on the ground, touched the light bulb base, and shocked himself silly. It hung from the ceiling, just the way it was.

Looking up a showview code in a tv listing mag to program the vhs recorder.

1060 West Addison.

PO Box 963, New York City, New York State 10108

I would probably be old enough to get this line if I had grown up in the place where video games worked on channel 3...