Reader Jake T. sent me a link to '11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard' over at Mental Floss. I'll be darned if I couldn't remember every one of them! For example, I used rotary-dial telephones well into the 1970's, making this sound very familiar to my ears:
There are more sounds at the link. It makes me feel very much 'over the hill' to realize that younger people (including my lovely wife) have never heard many of them, and may recall others only very dimly from their infancy and young childhood, as they were replaced by more modern technology.
Gee, thanks, Jake. I feel old now!
Peter
5 comments:
Wow, what a walk down memory lane!!
The telephone reminded me of mine as a kid. The exchange was FOrest,and the last four numbers, 0366, later turned out to be my laundry mark in basic training (pre-Social Security Numbers as serial numbers). Heck of a coincidence. And yes, I still have that set of dogtags.
Oh dear, now that does make me feel very old, as I remember ALL of those sounds.. :P
I've heard all of those. And one of my unfond memories of grade school was trying to untangle and rewind 8mm films if the take-up reel had a problem. I swear, a three minute health film is as long as a Hollywood feature when you are trying to get it back onto the reel.
LittleRed1
The driveway bell is still available, and I've encountered a few in use in the last few years.
The article says "Those chunka-chunka push buttons were clumsy, but veteran cashiers could check you out just as fast with these old-style machines as their modern counterparts do with today’s scanners." I had a housemate who worked as a cashier during a local chain's transition, and the point of the change was not speed or efficiency in till operation but better control of what stock was needed. They needed far more cashiers after the transition to keep the same customer throughput, but were able to make it up on fewer stock-takers and much less spoilage.
My dear darling husband,
You might want to ask your lovely wife before you go accusing her of ignorance on your blog.
I grew up with a rotary phone, thank you very much. And I hunt and peck on a manual typewriter with the same manner that I use for the laptop. (Ok, the keys on the laptop don't jam together when smashed in frustration.)
If you think coffee percolators are out of use, you've never been in an Alaskan cabin, and yes, I changed that dial on the first tv I remember. I not only remember record players, but pulling the disc of whale songs out of the national geographic issue, and playing it, when it first came out. And yes, I've had the needle get stuck on a broken record.
Those pneumatic bells were still in use four years ago, in some shops - they're useful.
And we still used film projectors in school for a while - I remember when the cigarette burn marks on theaters was the signal for the reel to be changed.
Just because I don't remember flash cubes doesn't mean I'm ignorant.
-Your loving, amused, and mildly annoyed wife.
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