"The house I grew up in had an intercom system."
"Wired intercom systems could also play AM and FM music to all the rooms, and they were a big fad in '70s home construction."
"The mechanical address book."
"The VCR recording clicker to pause the recording during commercials."
"Phone lines that you share with a few neighbors. It was called a party line. Don't confuse this with the party line of the '90s where people could talk with several strangers at one time."
"Those GIANT projection TVs the size of a closet that only looked good if you sat in the EXACT right spot in front of it. That one kid whose parents let him hook up his Nintendo to it was king."
"An actual carbon sheet that was placed between two sheets of paper to carbon copy the bottom paper from the top paper."
"The switch on the back of the TV that would let you play a video game."
"VHS rewind machines."
"Film canisters. To young people, they look like tiny Tupperware containers."
"Magazine holders and magazines next to the toilet. While younger generations recognize magazines, they may not realize that before smartphones, it was those or the shampoo bottle to entertain you while you poop."
"The car phone. Like, an entire corded telephone that plugged into the cigarette lighter."
"Library card catalogs and microfiche to look at archived magazines and documents. Electronic catalogs, e-books, web articles, and Wikipedia are absolutely wonderful compared to those dinosaurs. I saw the change by my college years, and most of my classmates were still using the print versions."
"Rotary phones. I had to explain them to a younger colleague and I'm convinced that conversation was why my body hair started going gray."
"Ashtrays being EVERYWHERE. On the tables of every restaurant and in your car; if it was a fancy car, it had multiple in the front and back. Little metal ones, big ceramic ones...shoot, kids made them in scouts and at school to give as gifts to parents and grandparents!"
"TV Guide magazines."
"Phone cord extension reels. They gave you 50 or 100 feet of phone line so you could go throughout the house. They had a handle and you would wind the wire back into it once you were done."
"Reader's Digest Condensed books."
"A church key with a can piercer was a very common tool in the kitchen."
"A neck phone holder."
"A caller ID box."
"Manual credit card machines, or imprinters."
"Central vacuum."
"Flashcubes for cameras. First they blinded you, then they fell out, sizzling and ready to burn the flesh from your fingers if you picked them up too soon."
And last but very much not least: "Viewmaster."
• Don't insult other visitors. Offensive comments will be deleted without warning.
• Comments are accepted in English only.
• No swearing words in comments, otherwise such comments will be censored.
• Your nickname and avatar are randomly selected. If you don't post comments for 7 days, they both are reset.
• To choose another avatar, click the ‘Random avatar’ link.
Great memories
This was the only one that I neither had nor saw
So then I got to explain why the on-hook and off-hook buttons on her smart phone look the way they do.