My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn’t be long distance (oh yeah here’s one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren’t calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you’re going through their city. It’s like, “Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper.”

Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.

For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?

when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who’s got that kind of time when you’re using a rotary phone?

That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.

Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you’re calling locally. The phone system will just assume you’re calling the local area code if you don’t dial one. In my area, it’s pretty easy because the only people who don’t have the local area code (there’s only one even though it’s far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.

Sure, if you were wealthy enough to have a pager.

Old anti piracy measure.

Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you’d have the manual. If you’re just playing a copy you wouldn’t. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.

wheel that came with monkey island

http://www.oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a-pirate

And then there was the worst sight in the world…

Old computers wouldn’t turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).

When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don’t really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is “off”.

The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn’t cause any damage to the system.

I’m not young enough to know what “cap” and “no cap” mean

Don’t forget the stickers to un-write protect it :-)

Chewing up a piece of paper and shove the goo into the holes of a casette you didn’t like so you could record on it

No joke. My parents are convinced I’m autistic because I used to read the yellow pages (British phone book) to calm down when I was little.

My wife tries, bless her spacially-challenged heart

I keep being told that the canals used to freeze over and people would skate on them.

It realy is.

I see this kind of realy devastating change in many areas in nature. There used to be frogs in our garden when I grew up, I would listen to them every evening right outside my bedroom window. Now they are gone.

I see it in the Forests, where huge swats of trees have died over the last couple of years. There are areas in our forests now, that look like war zones, because drouth followed by to much rain in combination with invasive bugs have killed or weakens them so much.

Going back another generation, my brother, who is 16 years older, told be about field hamsters who where so plentyfull in the fields, that the local kids would earn money by hunting them and turning their corpses in for money in the village center. In the 16 years between my bother and me the European field hamster has, consequently, gone almost extinct. I never have seen one in my life.

And while all this is by its nature very anecdotal, these are areas where climate change and the way we treat nature as something alien realy feels close to me. And to be honest: It fucking scares me.

This is a myth and has been debunked.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects

The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.

The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.