Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[GrrlFriday]

I also really miss older ladies. I thought about it recently when I saw a woman who was easily in her late 50s wearing a tube top and shorts so short they looked like a bathing suit bottom. She wasn't on the beach. She was walking past Macy's in midtown Manhattan.

I know she was a freak exception (jeans, track suits, and the like are more common) but it made me long for my great-grand and her handmade frocks, wigs (she had lost most of her hair by the time I knew her), and matching belt, bag, and shoes.

Other disappearing objects:
- Metal lunch boxes
- Slips
- Televisions you had to get up to change the channel on. Also, rabbit-ear antennaes.

 

[The Sky Ranger]

I miss - typewriters. Writing with a computer is nice and easy, but it has no 'magic'.

And I miss - Fanzines. Whether cheaply printed, photocopied or even carbon copied, I love Fanzines. Or loved - since they are gone.
All those websites, weblogs and internet discussion boards are great and I love it. But nothing can be better than a good old fanzine: two or three times a year you got your copy of your favorite fanzine, you opened the envelope and then you had to read. The new letters, new stories and articles, whatever. Soon after that you'd be sitting at your typewriter, writing new stuff for the fanzine. And then, months later, you again get your new copy, just like all the other readers (usually some twenty or maybe fifty other fans) and proudly read your own words. Printed in a "magazine", read by just some few fans. But you know - it makes a difference.

Today? You write something "on the internet", thousands or tens of thousands user read it, but nobody really notices. It makes no difference.

Oh, I miss those fanzines.
If there was a "Fedora Lounge Fanzine", cheaply printed, photocopied or carbon copied, I'd immediately subscribe to it!

 

[Pompidou]

Cassettes/Tape players
VHS/VCRs
5.25 and 3.5 Comp Disks
The pink slip on getting fired
Analog
The videogame cartridge
The handwritten letter/paper

 

[1961MJS]

I miss the old ladies! When I was a little girl in the late 70s, early 80s, all old ladies had beautiful long white hair up in buns, and they wore lovely hats and gloves and powder and rouge. I always used to wonder if you turned 60 and were issued with instructions on how to do your hair like that. Now women of that age seem to wear jeans and tracksuits and it just isn't the same.

Hi

I do miss people dressing up to go out. I noticed that one of my bosses in Huntsville AL (1986) was out on a Sunday Morning wearing a track suit. That was a kind of a first for the South.

My Granny (Mom's mom) and Grandma (Dad's) both wore their hair permed and curly. Granny had her's "blued" with some harsh chemical so that her hair was the color of a Brillo pad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brillo_Pad

I kidded her about it for at least 10 years. I told her I was o.k. with her dying her hair, but I thought that she should spend the money to dye it a "hair color that actually occurs in nature."

Later

 

[LizzieMaine]

*bump*

This summer we said goodbye to one of the oldest surviving traditions in the movie business -- the humble metal shipping can -- when Technicolor Distribution Services discontinued using them for all new releases. Within a few weeks of their announcement, they had disappeared from the regional exchanges -- and now all commercially-distributed feature films are being shipped in corrugated plastic-board boxes.

Metal film cans were heavy and dirty, but that was part of their charm. Because they were made of solid metal, they would be used until they were covered in rust and grime and old shipping labels, but you could often still read the markings of studios that have been defunct for decades. Every now and then you'd get one stamped RKO RADIO PICTURES or UNIVERSAL INTERNATIONAL or some such, and it was like finding an Indian head penny in your pocket change.

 

[marcoshark]

Lizzie,
Even sadder is that I miss the old arc-light projectors!

 

[shortbow]

Manners and common courtesy.

 

[Pompidou]

Analog synthesizers have all but disappeared - at least in as much as new ones aren't really being produced. Unless you buy vintage, you're all but stuck with digital - changed the face of keyboards in music pretty drastically. I'd love to have a huge system like Herby Hancock.

 

[Yeps]

Analog synthesizers have all but disappeared - at least in as much as new ones aren't really being produced. Unless you buy vintage, you're all but stuck with digital - changed the face of keyboards in music pretty drastically. I'd love to have a huge system like Herby Hancock.

I have a vintage analog roland that I got for a couple bucks because it didn't have a power supply so no one knew if it worked. It was a simple matter to modify a plug to fit it, and now it is fantastic.

 

[Pompidou]

That's really cool. I've got a Yamaha Motif ES8 that was the flagship at the time, but is two tiers down now, and it's still way better than I'm entitled to. When I started buying instrument/voice packages for it, that's how I learned about the various vintage synths like Moog and Prophet and whatnot - Wikipedia mostly. Anything with tons of options and knobs and buttons is amazing to me. Especially if it's also loud.

 

[Silver Dollar]

I haven't had the time to read all 750+ replies but I don't think anyone would have mentioned this. Having been in dentistry since 1972, I remember during the 40's to the 70's we had the belt driven handpieces (drills ahg!) and the old robot unit with all the hoses and things sticking out with the big old gurgling spit bowl. It was the centerpiece of the room and what scared every kid that went in. I remember when the rope belt started to fray while the thing was going. The room looked like a feather pillow exploded in the room.

 

[PrairieSunrise]

I haven't had the time to read all 750+ replies but I don't think anyone would have mentioned this. Having been in dentistry since 1972, I remember during the 40's to the 70's we had the belt driven handpieces (drills ahg!) and the old robot unit with all the hoses and things sticking out with the big old gurgling spit bowl. It was the centerpiece of the room and what scared every kid that went in. I remember when the rope belt started to fray while the thing was going. The room looked like a feather pillow exploded in the room.

Horrors! I'm pretty young, but I remember these! The reason being, my mom used an old dentist (he was probably 60-70 when I was 6) and he had one of those. He was very old school, to the point that he drilled two cavities in my back molars without Novocain.... to this day I can not hear any high pitched drill without serious pain.

 

[MisterGrey]

The secretaries at my elementary school still used typewriters, and we had one at home that I learned to type on (in addition to some now-sorta-vintage Macintosh SEs that my school had in the burgeoning computer lab-- which had been the typing lab a short while before I started).

I dunno if other Loungers would consider it vintage or not, but the Model 2500 telephone. Remember those? Everyone I knew growing up had one. We had a sorta turquoise one. In the age of the twenty-button-multi-function-telephone, I sort of miss them.

 

[p71towny]

Hopefully mincemeat pie..blech! I think only people my grandparents age (mid 80s +) like em lol. Beef does not belong in a pie, unless it be pot pie. Oh, and I guess card indexes at the library. Hell, with computers libraries might be a thing of the past shortly.

 

[rue]

What has disappeared (or almost disappeared) in my life.... some already mentioned...

• rotary phones
• phones supplied by the phone company
• dialing 0 and getting an operator
• and for that matter getting a human being on the phone when calling companies or information
• busy signals
• getting letters in the mail (postcards too)
• Christmas cards are going away (I think I received 10 last year, because hardly anyone wanted to bother with them)
• encyclopedias
• flying in style... I remember getting to dress up to go on a plane and being served hot meals with real silverware by a stewardess (not a flight attendant )
• nurses in white uniforms
• smoking on planes, in grocery stores, bars, restaurants, etc and not being looked at funny
• smoking cars and bar cars on trains
• punch ball courts and jungle gyms
• metal Tonka trucks
• dolls that didn't look like hookers
• kids that respected their elders
• adults that dressed their age

Still thinking.....

 

[rue]

Oh and for those of you looking for pay phones in the USA and some other countries go here: http://www.payphone-directory.org/

 

[marcoshark]

oh yeah, another thing... Subway Tokens!

 

[Shangas]

# dolls that didn't look like hookers
# kids that respected their elders
# adults that dressed their age

I cannot tell you how much I would love all that to change.

Especially the bottom two.

 

[CharlieB]

Haven't read all the posts, so if I repeat any, I apologize in advance. Some of these are not quite gone, but I have trouble remembering the last time I saw them!

• "Instamatic" cameras with drop-in film cartridges
• Blackboards with real chalk, not erasable marker boards
• AAA "trip-tiks" (GPS has all but killed these)
• Paint-by-numbers
• Drive-in movies
• Cabooses on trains
• Kids with first names that aren't someone else's last name
• Adding machines

Oh the list could go on and on...

 

[Atterbury Dodd]

Remember when a toothbrush looked like one?