Great. As if I need to feel any older at 6:24 AM...

Ooh! I remember those air pop popcorn poppers. I'll crave popcorn all day long!

hln

Returnable bottles netted enough to buy the cards

Microwave ovens weren't

The Pinto

Party (shared) lines

Turning the TV antena to get that 4th station

8 Track tapes.

Putting a penny (or a quarter) on the arm of the record player to keep a record from skipping.

Buying 45s.

Being able to walk to the store without being kidnapped.

You young folks don't know how lucky you are. Why, when I was your age, a computer took up a two-acre, heavily air-conditioned room, was approachable only by white-coated acolytes, and had about 256K of memory in total. The only programming languages were FORTRAN, COBOL, and PL/I. Debugging was a matter of inserting print statements (logical unit number 5 for the card reader, 6 for the line printer) at strategic points in your program.

Disk space? What's that? All our mass storage was on tape. We handed card decks across a counter to a sneering operator, and counted ourselves lucky to get a printout back three days later.

We had to memorize oddball acronyms, too. QSAM. CICS. JCL. CCP. I once spent three weeks debugging a CCP program. No, you don't want to know.

I even wrote a poem about it:

SYSABEND DUMP

On either side o'the printer lie,
Twin stacks of paper six feet high,
That stun the mind and blur the eye;
And lo! Still more comes streaming by:
A fresh ***SYSABEND DUMP***.

Ye printer clacketh merrily.
Completion code X'043'?
Whatever can the matter be
That caused ***SYSABEND DUMP***?

My TCAM hath no MCP?
My data cannot OPENed be??
Consult my neighborhood SE???
The Devil take thy dam and thee!
Thou vile ***SYSABEND DUMP***!

Assemble modules on the fly,
And link for yet another try.
With SUPERZAP, a patch apply.
This time, thou shalt not dump!

On either side o'the printer lie,
Fat stacks of paper TWELVE feet high,
That blow the mind and blast the eye.
Gadzooks! How shrill yon varlet's cry,
As sixteen megabytes go by,
On yet another dump.

Oh, and you could get a really big milk shake for a nickel, too.

Not quite THAT old Francis but I remember in college watching a guy cry because he dropped his shoebox full of keypunch cards and it was just ONE program.

Do you remember slide rules? Can you use one? I still have mine and it got me through physics and chemistry.

Do you remember the Dart? Falcon? Corvair? How about the Nash Metro? Studebakers?

Who can place the Nairobi Trio?

You're not old, Steve. You're just "experienced."

My two phones are black rotary dialed, only they used to be owned by UTS not AT&T. UTS sold them to renters one year in return for a monthly phone bill reduction.

Let's see, I have a hot air popcorn popper in the garage, that I use to thaw bicycle derailleurs in the morning.

There's a 200bpi BCD tape in the closet. It's a poor memory that only goes back to the 360, in my opinion.

Nairobi Trio: that was the best music on TV, in the opinion of one with the taste of a kid of course. The best comedy was the tilted library reading-room bit, on Ernie Kovacs.

Charlie Chaplin's skating rink scene topped it, but that was hardly live at the time.

hey, until three years ago, I had a station wagon... My wife drives one today, a '99 Taurus! Station wagons are old?