I used to think the comment “do you remember when” and “back in the day” was exclusively the province of the elderly. Thinking back, “I can remember when” as relatively young men we used to reminisce about days gone by. I find when talking to friends, we will often dredge up events and people from the past. I can actually remember when crisps actually had a blue paper twist in them containing salt , not a sachet, but a bit of twisted blue paper. I even remember my very first packet and coming across this contrivance, having to be shown what to do. Untwist, shake the bag, of course with the level of motor control of a very small child, this usually ended badly. Within a very short period they changed to “ready salted”…and innovation, then came flavours, starting with salt and Vinegar…which I swear tasted better than todays artificial version. Or perhaps you remember the time when gas cookers had a pilot flame (permanently on) in the centre and a little gas wand on a tube (clipped to the side of the cooker) with a button. You lit the wand from the pilot and then used it to light the oven or overhead grill. Incredibly dangerous, especially as it was coal gas, but no one thought anything of it. As a small child I wasn’t allowed to touch the gas wand…My mum had a Parkinson Cowan like this, right up to about 1975,

God, this thread is made up for old timers! I can remember when a Mars Bar was 2d and you needed two hands to hold it. The chocolate was soooooooo thick! My neighbour (I was around 4 or 5) used an Isetta Bubble Car for her everyday drive. In winter, you woke up (pre central heating) to chipping ice from the inside of thesingle glazed windows and you wore jumpers indoors. You ran downstairs when it snowed to find the bloody Blue Tits had pecked through the silver top milk bottles and had stolen the inch or so of cream that used to settle on the top. I remember watching the first episode of a new cutting edge drama, Z Cars…….I could go one and on! Tell you one thing though, life was simpler but were they really the good old days?

dfk41 Definitely remember the ice on the inside of the windows and as a kid dragging my cloths into the bed to warm them up. Big old cottage with no central heating brrrrrrrrr.

Do you remember Spangles? When Curly Wurlys were massive, you could use them for a ladder. Bri Nylon shirts. Nylon bed sheets! Some shops still had Lamson pneumatic tube systems that would shuttle away your payment and bring back your change.

Gagaryn Do you remember Spangles? Bri Nylon shirts. Nylon bed sheets! 3.Some shops still had Lamson pneumatic tube systems that would shuttle away your payment and bring back your change. Spangles, yes..my favourite sweet, I like the old english ones too, but only certain flavours…the red one was to die for.. Mum thought it was a brilliant idea for school, I hated them. I think it was the stain resistance and one shake they were dry. Remember the little blue sparks that came off them in a dark room in the morning. Nope, I refused to sleep in those…absolutely refused…used to make me itch like mad all night Bentalls used to have those back in the day, always fascinated me as a kid. Shluwooop, pshhhhh. I always wondered where they went and they used to come back with the recpt as well I think. We had another shop near us, Digbys general store, like something out of 1920…used a system of wires, The stuff was put in a tube on the wires, then a sharp pull on a handle, and it went flying across the roof of the store. Those cheap bastards kept the store the same and the system going until the mid 60s..open sacks of flour, beans, tea in large cases, butter pats etc.. Can you imagine how well that would have all gone down now.

Gagaryn If ever you go to Beamish Museum, my friend provided the tube system they use in the shop. To carry on, card with starter handles although by my time they were more of a standby than actually needed on the modern car. Telephone kiosks with the old A & B system for putting your money in (ask your parents!), bus conductors!

Sharing your phone line with the neighbors “party line” I think it was called. Picked the phone up and you caught half their conversation - nuts!

Lake_M Sharing your phone line with the neighbors “party line” I think it was called. Picked the phone up and you caught half their conversation - nuts! As a kid my parents had one…It always puzzled me how both phones didn’t ring when an inbound call came in, and it was only years later I found out how they did it.

Does anyone remember these…. Once a month a man would come round and empty it and if there was more than what the monthly payment was, my mum would get back what was over. It was the only way we could afford to have a telly. Mind you, it was a bit frustrating when you’d be watching a really good programme and the chuffin thing would click off because the timer ran out, and mum and my older brothers would be scrambling around to quickly find a two shilling piece (two bob bit) to put in it.

We had a telly like that but mercifully without the prototype pay per view box! Old English flavour Spangles were the best boiled sweets ever. Nobody ever knew what actual flavours they were but they were the best variation of Spangles for sure. I liked the light brown opaque one and the deep red translucent one best but they were all nice. I had a ‘piggy bank’ from Lloyds that was a black plastic horse head. 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?

Down Memory Lane

DavecUK

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?

Norvin

DavecUK

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.

Rob666

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…

Hotmetal

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.

Elcarajillo

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🤗

Pompeyexile

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!

Elcarajillo

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.

CafeNoir

Pompeyexile Oh dear lawd, talk about a blast from the past!! My first car too….1967 model IIRC, knocking CV joints and all

Dumnorix

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!

DavecUK

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!

Lefteye

Dumnorix my dad had a marina too. Brown. Leatherette retractable sunroof that leaked a bit I seem to remember. Also lovely velour seats. I remember he upgraded the car aerial to a remote one with a switch he’d wired into the dash. Took about 2 minutes for the aerial to go up and down.

Meldrew

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.

Waitforme

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 🤔

CafeCalando

Anybody remember buying loose biscuits from the Coop? And being able to buy a bag of broken biscuits for a penny?

Elcarajillo

CafeCalando Yes remember them very well, at that time most ‘grocers’ sold biscuits from tins about a foot square, standing on an inclined rack👍

LMSC

My first experience with computer was Cray X-MP in 1985 in my graduate school. We wrote programs in Fortran and Pascal. It was then IBM PC/2 with a unix OS. We used LATEX for word processing. In late 1990s, HP Compag, HP Pavilion, Dell P4 in 2003, and HP workstation XW 8600.

The Dell and HP work station are still with us in good working order.

Hotmetal

My first job out of school mid 80s was at a research place that had a badass computer called a Vax mainframe. You logged on using dumb terminals, which IIRC were called DEC VT220 or similar, basically a chunky keyboard and green text only screen. All the processing was done on the Vax which was in a bunker somewhere. The boffs used it for rocket science. I used to play Snake on it at lunchtime. Many years later when I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia 3210, finding the Snake game on it was a blast from the past, in the past!

Then years later Vax became a wet n dry vacuum cleaner. Now it’s an injection. I wonder what Vax will mean in another decade?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220

-Mac

I learned to program on my cousin’s ZX81 (1K, no expansion pack), then got my own Spectrum 48K for Xmas 1982. I was always a Spectrum boy, never a Commodore boy, so I went for an Atari 520STFM (sold the ZX to help my Dad fund the Atari) after that rather than an Amiga. From there, went to a Sega Megadrive and on to my first video game development job with Attention to Detail, making games for Atari Jaguar CD ROM, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, etc.

Doram

-Mac I learned to program on my cousin’s ZX81 (1K, no expansion pack), then got my own Spectrum 48K for Xmas 1982.

My father got me a ZX81 kit when I was 12. After successfully completing radio transistor and digital clock kits, he over estimated my skills. I made a mess of the soldering and it didn’t work, so it had to be posted for fixing. He then took me with him to pick it up from Sinclair’s headquarters in Cambridge.

Once the computer was up and running, my dad would read to me from the Basic manual that had a spiral binding.

I could speak English at the time, but couldn’t read it. I remember my father reading the instructions to me. Every few sentences he would stop and comment: “I have no idea what they are talking about!”, and I would ask him to continue reading because it was all so perfectly clear. It never occurred to me that one day I will be the same with my children…. :-)

My first program on the ZX81 was a game: a character appeared on the screen for a random amount of time, and the player had to guess how much time that was. I think this pretty much used all the available memory - 1kb. To save the program I had to use a simple tape recorder, which somehow converted the software to squeaking sounds - a remarkable thing, and an absolute miracle when it worked!

For my 13th birthday my dad got me the 16kb memory extension pack which was plugged to the back slot of the computer - a massive upgrade! My uncle bought me the printer: It had a 10cm-wide silver paper role that was etched with heat or something like that (aluminium coating would evaporate and reveal the black paper underneath it). The printer connected to the slot at the back and had a pass-through for the memory extension. I printed the Thank You notes for my presents on this printer and posted them in the mail.

-Mac

Does anyone else remember the smell of stale coffee in 1970/80s Italian restaurants (or anywhere that they sold oodles)? I always loved the smell but could never associate it with coffee until I started drinking coffee in my 20s. There was one place in particular (a cafe at a nearby country park) that absolutely reeked (in a good way, c.f. diesel fumes from ice cream vans, stale beer smell from 70/80s holiday camp bars, purple duplicated copies of paper in primary school). Smell is definitely the most potent memory jerker of the senses.

I was so happy when I worked out what the smell actually was and lay that ghost to rest, but it’s getting harder and harder to find these days.

DavecUK

-Mac Does anyone else remember the smell of stale coffee in 1970/80s Italian restaurants (or anywhere that they sold oodles)? I always loved the smell but could never associate it with coffee until I started drinking coffee in my 20s.

The first exposure I had to the smell of coffee was at around 2.5 to 3 years old. My mum used to shop at Sainsbury in West Byfleet (long gone now). In those days the store had wooden floors, sawdust and separate counters for everything..no self service like today. I always remember walking up to the store and on many days there was the smell of roasting coffee from an old gas trentate roaster, vented out of the window….you could actually see it operating. The smell was absolutely fantastic and with the wind in the right direction was detectable from a great distance. I think it formed part of the draw to bring customers in…..

Then the world turned to…..instant, a few years later.

Lake_M

Doram

Almost exactly the same story as mine! My Dad did the soldering on the kit and cocked up the TV RF bit somehow. Took him days and days to figure it out, with me pestering the life out of him to get it up and running. Got there in the end. Ah the joys of 1K programming, and the sheer excitement of getting 16K expansion pack. From the ZX81 I went to an Atari 400, then the one with the proper keyboard (bliss!!!) before jumping ship to Amiga 500.

SiblingChris

Doram I think you meant 16kb sir for your zx81 expansion! If you so much as breathed on those to disrupt the connection into the back the machine would crash…and after you’d waited so long to load something from a cassette tape! So frustrating!

Hotmetal

I lived in Watford in the 80s and there was a coffee shop called “Importers” that sold beans and they vented their roaster out of the front window onto the lower High Street. Not sure that would be allowed nowadays but it used to fill the lower high st with the smell of dark roasted coffee and a not inconsiderable amount of smoke! Everyone either loved or hated it. I was all for it personally.

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