I Remember When

[WhoDo]

To do things on the school computer if you were in the computer club, you punched the programming in as holes in a piece of card.

Your school HAD a computer?

first home computer was a TRS-80. It had 16k of memory. You bought software in magazines and TYPED it in, and saved it on the same sort of cassettes you bought your music on.

Mine was a Dick Smith VZ-80 - same deal only not from Tandy.

Lollies were two for 1 cent.

Hmmm ... cents came in in 1966. By then I was almost finished high school!

You ran out of the house the moment you were out of your school clothes (which were all uniform) and covered the whole town with friends on bikes, built forts at the river, made flying foxes from old rope with a notch in a stick to ride down on, and didn't come home till the street lights came on, but you sure had to be home soon after.

Sounds familiar, only we didn't have a river, so we used the water supply pipeline from Sydney's west to the City. It was "cowboys and indians" or "wars" with broomsticks for guns AND horses!

Oh, and my first camera was a 110 and also used weird cassettes for the film.
Life was good.

I had a little Hanimex but the novelty wore off because it could take weeks for the negatives to be developed. There were no street corner fast photo labs then; your film was sent away to be processed by the film company ... Kodak usually ... if you didn't have the kit to do it yourself. When I got my first Polaroid Instamatic it was a whole new ball game, but the results were ... um ... excremental!

And for all of that I agree, Life was indeed "good" ... very, very good. Anyone got an old DeLorean they're not using? I wanna go back!

[William]

Did anyone have a birds egg collection? I had special trays filled with saw dust , All the eggs were layed out in order of size , Oh , Dont forget stamp collecting either , For the younger members this was all before TV , We used to come home from school and listen to Serials on the Radiogram , Ours even had Shortwave Radio

[WhoDo]

I can remember when floppy drives hadn't even been invented, and that the first ones were around 30cm square and only held 640k's!

BZZZZZZ! Faulty memory card, Benny! There were 8 inch floppies first (256kb I think), then the 51/4" versions to which you refer held 360kb before they went high density 640kb ones. The only thing that hard disk drives was a mini or a mainframe, and those were interchangeable. Then Mountain brought out an external 10Mb hard disk drive for the IBM PC (the first serious business desktop PC) and we all thought "You'll NEVER fill that thing up!" Wrong.

Before the external hard drive, if we wanted to do some word processing on the computer, you loaded the operating system (DOS 2.1 I think) from the floppy drive, swapped in the WP program (WordPerfect in our case) and loaded that THEN swapped in the storage diskette to back up your work to before printing. Sheesh! What a nuisance that was! The IBM PC operated at 4.77MHz (not 2.4GHz) until the "Turbo XT" boosted that to 8MHz and then 10MHz ... WOW! Greased lightning!!!

What did we do before the PC? Accounting was done on a machine called a Comptometer that used punch cards; a huge mechanical calculator that required a specialist operator. My mother, God rest her soul, was one of those for a firm called Wood Coffell (sp?) Word processing was done on typewriters for most businesses, but Solicitors and Lawyers were rich and usually had a dedicated word processing system based on a bespoke mini-computer like the Wang! Multiple copies were produced on a line printer using carbon paper. Everyone else used account books, pens and paper.

Pardon me while I go take my nana nap now ... zzzzzzzz

[WhoDo]

Did anyone have a birds egg collection? I had special trays filled with saw dust , All the eggs were layed out in order of size , Oh , Dont forget stamp collecting either , For the younger members this was all before TV , We used to come home from school and listen to Serials on the Radiogram , Ours even had Shortwave Radio

OR ... listen to Smokey Dawson and Jingles before school. Then came Sammy Sparrow. The radio serial was the highlight of the night, after the news for Dad, when the whole family would sit around the sideboard-sized tube radio and get themselves scared silly by some spooky music and sound effects. If there was a problem, dad would pull it out from the wall and check that all the valves were lit. If we stayed quiet and out of his way we could even see all the innards, too! I heard about John F Kennedy's assassination on that old radio because TV (we had a 1958 Admiral B&W with a nearly square tube) didn't start that early in the morning and shut down at 7:00pm for bed time! In between times there was nothing but static until the test pattern came on 30 minutes before the opening greeting and first show of the day/night.

I never had the egg collection, Bill, but stamps were one thing and cereal box cutouts were another. Remember the cardboard masks you cut from the back of the cereal box and used elastic bands to hold them on your head? Two holes for eyes and one each for nose and mouth. The bit near your mouth got soggy after a while so you'd dice that one and look for a new one on the next cereal box! The best thing you could get for Christmas was a Superman or Batman cape to match your cardboard mask. Then you were the REAL deal!

[WhoDo]

Oooh! Oooh! I just had another flashback! When I'd visit my father's work (Anthony Hordern and Sons Brickfield Hill store), the sales dockets were sent to accounting using a pneumatic tube system with little round message boxes with felt at either end to seal the tube and allow them to be pushed through the system. I used to love seeing one of those containers dropped into the tube and whiz off at what seemed like the speed of light!

I'm going to have my Bovril and go to bed now. I'd take a Bex or a Vincent's APC powder but they don't exist any more. They did, however, give rise to the expression "Take a powder"!

[William]

Smokey Dawson was cool yep I remember the cut outs as well , Did you ever collect the cards that came in little blocks of Cadbury's chocolate, You had to send away for the Album to put them in , What about the Phantom, O ghost who walks comics , I had a couple of the rings that you could send away for , A gold one with ruby eyes, A silver one with luminous "Glow in the Dark" eyes , And of cause the ring with the rubber skull stamp , BTW what ever happened to "Guy Falkes" night 5th Nov , Penny bungers were like sticks of Dynamite

[WhoDo]

Smokey Dawson was cool yep I remember the cut outs as well , Did you ever collect the cards that came in little blocks of Cadbury's chocolate, You had to send away for the Album to put them in , What about the Phantom, O ghost who walks comics , I had a couple of the rings that you could send away for , A gold one with ruby eyes, A silver one with luminous "Glow in the Dark" eyes , And of cause the ring with the rubber skull stamp , BTW what ever happened to "Guy Falkes" night 5th Nov , Penny bungers were like sticks of Dynamite

Yep, I used to collect those cards, too! I loved the Phantom and had a "gold" ring with ruby eyes. Never got the rubber stamp one or the silver glow-in-the-dark though. We were pretty poor back then.

We used to just call it "Cracker Night" ... never referred to it by the original tradition of Guy Fawkes ... I guess it was a NSW thing. Jumping jacks, penny bungers (later tupenny bunters), throw downs, sky rockets, roman candles ... loved em all. Especially enjoyed the metallic "Ting" when a tupenny bunger blew up in a tin mail box! Talk about "all bent outa shape"! One year my brother and I each had an airline bag (plastic of course) full of crackers and started roaming the street with our friends, as you did then. My brother accidentally dropped a hot match into his bag and the lot went up in one go!!! I'd never seen the little tacker move so fast! He got his own back on me for laughing though, cause mum and dad made me split my share with him. Rats!

What happened to it? Some do-gooder decided to save us from ourselves and stop shops selling them. You now need a permit to display fireworks and it has to be done to a safety plan approved by some bureaucratic functionary or other.

[mikew09]

Oh yea Bill, before our first TV we used to sit on the verandah and lisen to the old valve radio that had to be turned on a few minutes before the show so it could warm up. It was a timber cabinet about the size of a meat chest and us kids were not allowed near it in case we turned the dial and lost the radio station it was tuned to.

We used to listen to serials. I am not sure if it was a rerun or the original but my dad used to love listening to the goons ( I think it was called), with Spike Milligan and some others and

I remember when if we were on the veranda early pop would let us shoot tins off the front fence with his 22 pump action.

[William]

Jeez you guys are old Mike every kid that I hung around with had A Slug Gun or .22 cal Rifle , When I say kid , I mean 12yr olds , But there was plenty of bush in those days , No one got hurt either

[WhoDo]

I am not sure if it was a rerun or the original but my dad used to love listening to the goons ( I think it was called), with Spike Milligan and some others

Definitely the original, Mike. Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. One of the silliest radio shows ever, but most loved the nonsense of it. From wikipedia:

Milligan and Harry Secombe became friends while serving in the Royal Artillery during World War II. Famously, Milligan first encountered Secombe after Gunner Milligan's artillery unit accidentally allowed a large howitzer to roll off a cliff - under which Secombe was sitting in a small wireless truck: "Suddenly there was a terrible noise as some monstrous object fell from the sky quite close to us. There was considerable confusion, and in the middle of it all the flap of the truck was pushed open and a young, helmeted idiot asked 'Anybody see a gun?' It was Milligan."[11] Secombe's answer to that question was "What colour was it?" Spike met Peter Sellers after the war at the Hackney Empire, where Secombe was performing, and the three became close friends.

Typical! Neddy Seagoon (Secombe) was my favourite but Eccles, Bluebottle and Moriarty were among the cast of thousands ... er hundreds ... er hundreds and thousands ... er, no a few!

[WhoDo]

Jeez you guys are old

Who "we" white man ... allegedly spoken by Tonto to the Lone Ranger (radio serial version) when the latter suggested the two of them (we) "should ride down into the shooting mess of the town and clean it up for all the decent citizens" or words to that effect! "Me no think so, Kimosabe" ... not sure what that means.

[mikew09]

Hahahahah - yes, I remember a skit with Moriarty. Ahh Moriarty. There was also one that was a favorite when I was a kid, it started something like "Step out onto the limb Jim", it was hilarious. Remember bits and pieces of those days.
Crikey, those were the days. Most had a rifle mount on the back shelf of the old ute and would leave it there when going into town and no-one would give it a second thought and nothing would ever get stolen and coppers didn't have pistols in those days over the west.
My pop hated car key so set his ute up so you didn't need a key, just turn the ignition. Never locked it when in town and and nothing ever got stolen. In some ways I miss those times.

[outstar79]

Yep, I remember when I was fit enough to climb a coconut tree:

When I used to think, moving the controller made a difference on the super-nintendo!

And when I had my first car accident - ouch!

[mikew09]

PRICELESS

[jwheat65]

And when I had my first car accident - ouch!

Ouch indeed!
Not much room for your head.

[outstar79]

Ouch indeed!
Not much room for your head.

No, I was very lucky (or so the tow truck driver said) Believe it or not only came out with small cuts to the hands, none that required stitches. It was on the Canning Stock Route.

[Roo]

When I used to think, moving the controller made a difference on the super-nintendo!

you were just a pioneer for todays Wii

[outstar79]

you were just a pioneer for todays Wii

Too right, must have been ahead of my time

[ricktas]

I remember the round washing machines with the two rollers over the top that you squeezed the clothes through, by turning a handle to 'wring' them out, before hanging them on the line.

Listening to "Bell Bird" on the radio

[jwheat65]

I remember the round washing machines with the two rollers over the top that you squeezed the clothes through, by turning a handle to 'wring' them out, before hanging them on the line.

I remember these but our one was motor driven. You fed the clothes out of the machine through the wringer into the rinse tub. I think the rinse tub had Bluo in it. And then out of the rinse tub through the wringer again and into the washing basket.

Bluo was also good on bee stings... !!