Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 06, 2017

Sold my old Trooper to a friend, his granddaughters were fascinated by wind up windows, and windwings!

“And if you missed a phone call, you could ONLY hope they called back…or you would NEVER KNOW someone called you!”

We had FOUR channels, in living black and white. Meanwhile my phone is still plugged into the wall.

And to change the channel you had to get up, walk over to the TV and turn the dial.

Oh and while you’re there you want to tweak the the V Hold?

Back in those days, a station would cancel a show if it got a rating that is considered a smash hit these days.

Now we have a 1000 channels and still nothing to watch.

And TV was only black and white!

Our phone was not only plugged into the wall, we shared that phone with two other families. No, we didn’t live in a tenement in New York City; this was a house in a suburb in Los Angeles. It was called a “party line”, and each family had an individual ring pattern. You weren’t supposed to listen to other people’s conversations but there wasn’t any way to prevent it.

and if we wanted to TEXT someone, we sent a telegram through our version of 1-0’s, Morse code.

I recently introduced some nieces and nephews to a phonograph. Cool they said.

…and the phone had no buttons to enter the number. You had to put your finger in the correct hole in a dial and pull it around in a circle, one at a time for each number!

We had FOUR channels…. PBS counts, damnit….

How about no microwave ovens, no internet, no smartphones, no electronic gaming, I could go on and on.

@Tripwire: Gambling was also illegal (except in Nevada).

And the 3 stations went off the air every night and put test patterns on when there was no programming.And mail meant writing on paper, putting it into an envelope, putting a stamp on it and putting it into a mail box.And there were things called public phones that you have to have pocket change to use and sometimes came in phone booths.And the only way to play music without an instrument or a radio was to put large vinyl disks (unless they were 45s) on a turn table, and position an arm with a needle on it.And drying clothes often meant hanging wet laundry outside on a line using clothespins.And there were no blow dryers for hair and no microwave ovens.

And get this. Shows lasted 30 minutes and had three whole minuted of commercials. We were told that when cable came along, that since you pay for it, there would be NO commercials.

Does anyone remember having to dial the operator to place other than a local call? Or how about exchanges that started with two letters: ours was NE for Neptune.

I remember my gramma using a phone you had to crank on the side to get an operator

We would just sit and watch the test pattern for there was little content. But boy that first TV was enchantment in the 1950’s.

Actually, there were more than 3, if you count PBS & the UHF channels

There were 3 networks available, but we could only get 2 of them on the set with the 6" screen.

We were lucky in New York, we had three networks, three locals, and PBS (which was called “NET”).

But late at night (I swear I am not making this up) TELEVISION STOPPED.

Wow! This strip brought out all of us old geezers. Thanks Wiley!

Speaking as an old geezer, our old rotary dial, black bakelite phone was equipped ( thanks to a friend at the phone company ) with a cord long enough that the phone could be carried to any room in our house.

When my Dad finally caved in and bought a television back in 1955, it was ( of course ) black & white, and could only pick up 3 channels clearly, after much adjustment of the rabbit ears ( antenna ) with tin foil flags.

My grandson ( now 22 ) wouldn’t watch any movie on T.V. that was in black & white. He thought they were " for fake ".

Well, we had social media in the 1950’s. If you picked up the phone and dialed your own number, you got a busy signal. But you could talk to all the other kids who did the same thing by talking real loud over the busy signal.

Nightmare on Tweet Street

Toon would also work with grandpa as a shaman traditioning tribal lore among his aboriginal kinsfolk. (Which is what I thought before seeing the campkids.)

We had 4 channels (2 English, 2 French). Phone sat on a “phone table” in the living room. I was not allowed to make or receive phone calls “because I saw my schoolmates during the day and had no reason to talk to them in the evening”. If the phone rang after 6PM, it was either a family emergency or a wrong number.

Thanks folks, for the trip down memory lane! I’m going to be late for my meeting, but it’s worth it!

Ah, them were da days. . .

yeah yeah yeah, but Dick Van Dyke show cast-mates Rose Marie, Carl Reiner, and DVD his-self are still alive, and host twitter accounts. ie, https://twitter.com/rosemarie4real

And what about when the radios and televisions were so big that they were actually quite nice looking pieces of furniture. We had one that had a record player built into it.

Ooooh. And remember the stereos with an 8 track where you had to fuss around to find the one good song on it?

The days when ordinary cars actually were works of art with nice lines. Gas guzzling beasts that were unsafe as all hell, but they looked fabulous.

Three channels. And if the President was on TV, he was on all three channels.

And let me tell you something else….if you missed an episode, there was no way to record or rewatch it. You had to wait for a little thing called “reruns”, and those could take a year to come on.

Our phone is still plugged into the wall and there are only 3 TV channels worth watching.

When I was growing up, we only had 2 channels.

My mom once told me a story about the first time she encountered a telephone. It was one of the wooden boxes mounted to the wall with a mouthpiece sticking out of it. Her dad had called home, and when my grandmother put her three-year-old daughter (my mom) up to the phone, she freaked. “Mommy! Daddy’s in the wall! Get Daddy out of the wall!”

Nobody had computers at home. I think the “360” in the IBM 360 meant for the amount of square footage it took up.

A working flashlight?

go comics, aka old farts on parade…

We still have an old fashion phone with an answering machine, no cell phones. Our TVs are the old fashioned kind too. So works for us and saves me money. Oh and no cell phones either. When power goes out there their cell phones don’t work but our phone does.

My family didn’t have a TV until I was 10, and there were only two channels. A third channel started up about 5 years later, but it was on UHF and 20 miles away, and the UHF tuners on most TVs turned out to be ineffective at that range.

Clothes washers were necessary appliances, but dryers were a luxury. As for dishwashers, there were me and my two little sisters. Microwaves were what relayed the TV signals from the networks to the little stations in our town, way out in the sticks. A computer cost 5-6 figures (and those were much less inflated dollars than these days) and required a large, excessively air-conditioned room. Almost no one had air-conditioning in their homes, and it certainly wasn’t in the schools.

And finally, a long-distance phone call cost around a dollar a minute, with a 3 minute minimum – and minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. It took 2 hours of washing dishes at Katy Shield’s restaurant to pay for a 3 minute call to my girlfriend in the next county.