Teachers smoking pipes in class
Down Memory Lane
I remember my grandad having a washing machine with a powered mangle above, all the grandkids were warned it was the most lethal thing in the house and would rip your arm off. I was born mid 70s, grew up in a house with no telephone, a black and white TV that had to be hidden from licensing, no central heating and it was ****** freezing in winter. Think my parents got their first car early 90s, telephone about the same time.
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“Vinyl car seats that would give you second degree burns on summer days”
Haha yes - Red Hillman Avenger “Sport” with black vinyl roof and black vinyl seats. Air con?,,,,,Ha! It had a horizontal speedo that juddered a lot - you could be doing 30, 40 or 50 mph you had to take the average!
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dfk41 Share then
fotr the phone is was tip and root earthing of the phone to the ring wire and the exchange could decide which one to make ring by earthing the exchange end for the ring signal of one hpne, vs sending it down the line for the other. very clever really. But you could only hold one conversation at a time.because you both shared the connection to the “linefinder”, as they were all on old Strowger electromechanical exchanges.
Hotmetal Anyone remember those ‘chocolate vending machine’ piggy banks where you loaded them with Neapolitan sized chocolates and had to put a coin in to get one out?
yes, always wanted one, never got one….I think they might still make something similar.
How about an 8 hours drive to Woolacombe in the Ford Anglia!
This thread is bringing back memories of so many things I thought I had forgotten!
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OK we never had a Ford Anglia thankfully but we did have a Triumph Herald. That had leg burner seats IIRC and of course as a nipper in the 70s had to wear shorts to school, remember hating the summer for getting picked up in the car.
The caretaker at our school had an Anglia, with its wrong way round rear windscreen. The headmaster had a DAF Variomatic belt drive car that AFAIK basically had the same transmission as the pillar drills in woodwork room!
BBC Micro. We were lucky, had the “model B” which had 32kB (yes kids, kilobytes not gigabytes). My dad hoped I would learn programming but I just copied the BASIC for games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Scramble and Defender. After hours of typing you had to save it to a C15 cassette tape. Saved the C60s and C90s for taping songs off John Peel on the radio.
Hotmetal BBC Micro. We were lucky, had the “model B” which had 32kB (yes kids, kilobytes not gigabytes). My dad hoped I would learn programming but I just copied the BASIC for games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Scramble and Defender. After hours of typing you had to save it to a C15 cassette tape. Saved the C60s and C90s for taping songs off John Peel on the radio.
rrrrrrr, eeeeee, rrrrschhrrr, chrrrss. wheee, boing
I do remember, I couldn’t afford a BBC, but I had a Spectrum 48K. I think I threw it out many years ago, but might be in the eaves storage?
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48K? Luxury, I used to dream of 48K, I had to make do with the 16k version.
I had a friend that worked in a London Poly as a programmer. I used to go in with him on Saturdays and he would sit me in front of a terminal so that I could play Adventure! That would be about 1978. I’m not even sure that there was a screen, played via keyboard and printout. I used to come home with reams of print out. I later got to play it on the Spectrum at home and thought that was bloody brilliant. I must have been a very early gamer.
DavecUK They could be extremely lethal, many years ago I would go from work, get something going for my evening meal (tea or dinner ?) in this case a chicken curry, have a shower while it cooked. On this occasion I came from the shower in just jeans, drained the rice (thinks) put it on a plate in the oven to keep warm.
Opened the oven door–to a huge bang& flash and the smell of burnt pig and singed hair, I was also covered with embed rice.!!!! ***. The pilot was alight but the burner wasn’t= coalgas +air =😵.
It had removed the hair from my chest, arms and eyebrows ,fortunately no real burns. Just some clearing up🤗
Remember the Austin 1100 with the speedo that was a red strip? That was my first car.
I also had a Wolsley Hornet which I had to bump start every time come rain or shine, because there was a tooth broken off the starter ring
….I now drive a e-niro all electric…..Oh how times have changed.
My first bike had hard tyres which in the summer freewheeling down the steep Portsdown Hill road made them smoke. My favourite toy was a Johhny Astro…
Oh, and born at home in Portsmouth for the first 6 years of my life, we only had an outside loo in the back yard and when at that age you are scared of spiders and of the dark, you learned to hold it in… a lot!
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DavecUK My first computer was a second hand ITT2020, the UK version of an Apple II. I had a spectrum - briefly and sold it very quickly. Also had a BBC B thanks to a staff purchase scheme. Never got on with it. Next came an Atari 1040 which was used a lot. A Mac Plus followed and then a Mac IIF which I sold for roughly what I paid for it. From then on it was PCs all the way starting with a Gateway tower, which is still in the loft somewhere…
I remember a road trip to Italy in the 80s in my dad’s Morris Marina- it was sprayed 3 different shades of orange. We were going through the Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland-I believe one of Europe’s longest road tunnels- and the temperature gauge was getting closer and closer to the red. No sooner were we out the other end than my dad pulled over and there was a spectacular radiator eruption. The car finally died in Lugano on the Swiss/ Italian border- right next to the forecourt of an AA approved garage!
Dumnorix I remember a road trip to Italy in the 80s in my dad’s Morris Marina-
Wow, I didn’t think they could go that far without a problem….they were British built you know….and I am sure owned by the great British Leyland at that time….a truly wonderful company!
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DavecUK rrrrrrr, eeeeee, rrrrschhrrr, chrrrss. wheee, boing
You win the Internet for best impression of early data storage and transmission sounds. Definitely nailed it! Like when you dial a fax machine number. The worst thing was, if you turned it down it didn’t work. That was when data speed was measured in baud, 1 baud was 1 bit per second for a binary signal IIRC.
I remember burning my finger on one of those little always-on pilot lights on a gas stove as a kid.
Eye level grill was what we had where I lodged (and made my first ‘espresso’) until I moved into my own house. I remember the landlady’s son coming home from the pub and making a bacon sandwich before passing out. I was asleep on the 2nd floor and was woken up by smoke. Went to the kitchen, he was unconscious on the table. Eye level grill full inferno! I could not rouse him so I put him in the garden for air and left a note saying “I’ve saved our bacon, yours was too far gone” and went back to bed.
I remember the good old steel bath which we had our bath in in front of the open fire. The treat was going down to the local public baths in Fulham Broadway for a proper bath. My first car should have been a Triumph Herald but it fell apart before my Dad could pass it on to me so I ended up with a Ford Anglia which had more filler than metal.My first computer was a IBM which had 4gb memory can’t remember what size hard drive but it did come with a floppy drive. Mars bars Milky Way and crisp packets were all bigger in the good old days we were spoilt.
I wonder how one of the kids in the bath above got just one arm so dirty, and why isn’t the other kid screaming with its hair being on fire 🤔
Anybody remember buying loose biscuits from the Coop? And being able to buy a bag of broken biscuits for a penny?
CafeCalando Yes remember them very well, at that time most ‘grocers’ sold biscuits from tins about a foot square, standing on an inclined rack👍
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Pompeyexile I had the MG version, bloody rot box, you had to be careful when you jacked it up in case
the cill gave way and went into the door. Had to replace cill’s , subframe and heel board on mine amongst other items.