Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Pompidou]

The good thing about rabbit ears is, if you can use those, you've got the right hook-up for an Atari 2600.

 

[St.Ignatz]

Good guess AET but.... The early RCA cordless remotes had a couple toggle like switches that would make a loud click when you operated them. They would sort of strum a bar that would turn it off/on and change channels. Flicking the teeth on a plastic comb would make it jump channels. I know what you mean about the channel click. You would see the selector turn as it selected channels. Just the channel selector mechanism was as big as the entire guts of today's boob tubes.
Tom D.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

I thought this picture I took for another thread was pertinent to this one.

Those rabbit ears are in use. I don't have Dish in that room, so it's the only way I can get TV, aside from the DVD player.

As Pompidou mentioned, one of the old Console TV's. I have one in 4 rooms in my house, and 2 more sitting in storage, not to mention 2 table tops with the wood veneer around them.

We had rabbit ears until I was 13. We moved into town and got cable, because we couldn't get over-the-air channels. That was in 2003. I remember on a good, clear morning, I could get Rockford TV stations all the way from where I lived.

We had a small, dial-type Television in black-and-white in our kitchen when I was a kid, which became my sister's bedroom TV. My brother was luckier, with a black and white 19" or so Zenith, from the 1960s (wish I had it now) and I had an early 70's RCA Dial TV, an XL-100, which I still have and use. It's been in my bedroom since the day I was born.

Black and white TVs were still kicking around when I was little. My first bedroom TV was a little black and white one, because I needed something for my Nintendo. I didn't miss it when color TVs of gradually larger sizes replaced it in subsequent years. Lots of our first TVs still had rabbit ears, and the family TV was one of those gigantic, living-room, wooden furniture deals from before TVs were solely electronic gadgets.

OH MY GOD!! Rabbit Ears!!

I remember those! We had them on our first television set. I remember as a kid, constantly tweaking them and fiddling around with them to try and get the best TV reception. Gosh I haven't seen a pair of those in years! I doubt anyone below the age of 20 would even KNOW what rabbit-ears are. Gosh...

Last time I had to fiddle with one of those things to watch television, I was...five years old.

 

[Pompidou]

Tom, that could very well be the exact same TV, coincidentally.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

What are the odds? lol They made SO many different consoles back in the day. I wish they still made just ONE that was affordable to the John Everyman.

Tom, that could very well be the exact same TV, coincidentally.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If you're really old, you remember wrapping the ends of the rabbit ears in tinfoil to improve the reception. Or making your little sister stand next to the TV holding the left-hand rabbit ear because that's the only way Channel 8 would come in.

 

[St.Ignatz]

If you're really old, you remember wrapping the ends of the rabbit ears in tinfoil to improve the reception. Or making your little sister stand next to the TV holding the left-hand rabbit ear because that's the only way Channel 8 would come in.

and don't forget paper clip garlands.
Tom D.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

What also works where my TV is located, I have a metal duct from my heater to the chimney right next to the TV. If I take tinfoil and use it to attach one rabbit ear to the metal duct, I can almost pull in stations from Atlanta (ok, I may be exaggerating lol)

If you're really old, you remember wrapping the ends of the rabbit ears in tinfoil to improve the reception. Or making your little sister stand next to the TV holding the left-hand rabbit ear because that's the only way Channel 8 would come in.

 

[Puzzicato]

If you're really old, you remember wrapping the ends of the rabbit ears in tinfoil to improve the reception. Or making your little sister stand next to the TV holding the left-hand rabbit ear because that's the only way Channel 8 would come in.

I was the youngest in the family so I was the one who had to hold the rabbit ear!

 

[Miss sofia]

How about the stick to change the channel on the telly. I remember that as i kid, (i was the eldest so i didn't have to hold the rabbit ear, my brother did, i got to be bone idle in the best seat and change channels with the stick)!

 

[Effingham]

Since we no longer have record albums (normally), there are two things that have gone away: the concept of "he's a broken record" and... you know that sound the record makes when you suddenly pull up the stylus? It's used now as a standard sound effect for when someone stops suddenly or is brought up short. I wonder how many people associate it with THAT alone, and don't think "record" when they hear it.

 

[Tango Yankee]

I'm a senior in high-school and I'm positive the majority of my class has actually seen/used a film camera. I find it difficult to believe that kids four or five years younger than me are completely oblivious to them. I believe you, it's just strange is all...

I don't know about kids four or five years younger than you, but I do know that when I take a photograph of a young child with a film camera it baffles them to not find a picture when they run over and try to look at the back of your camera to see themselves! lol It's not easy getting them to understand that they have to wait until the film is developed and prints made to see the photograph.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[Gregg Axley]

Effingham, I guess "glitched I-Tune" just isn't the same as broken record.

 

[C-dot]

I wonder how many people associate it with THAT alone, and don't think "record" when they hear it.

They're missing out on the great sound quality of vinyl, too - and not on a repro turntable! I've got one from 1966 and the sound quality just don't compare.

 

[LizzieMaine]

They're not completely gone, but they're disappearing fast: cue marks on 35mm film prints. They've been a fixture of moviegoing since 1930: those round flashes in the upper left hand corner of the frame that signal the projectionist to start the motor on the incoming projector and then to hit the changeover switch 3/4 of a second before the end of the reel. For decades these marks have been printed right into the film at the lab, but the last two prints I've had come thru haven't had them -- the result of most film being run nowadays on automated platter systems. I still run changeover, so I have to add the cue marks myself -- count out 18 frames from the end of the reel, scribe circles in four adjacent frames and then back another 168 frames and scribe four more circles.

(Contrary to what you learned from watching "Fight Club," no actual projectionist calls them "cigarette burns.")

 

[_Nightwing]

Interesting, because I always pay attention to those marks since watching Fight Club, and I've noticed that they don't appear at every theater I go to. Maybe they'll start artificially adding them back in on the reruns of old films, as is done with the scratching of records on certain music tracks. This also reminds me that Kodachrome slide film died in my lifetime, in case no one's mentioned that already. They stopped even processing it a year or two ago, and I still have undeveloped rolls. That stuff was amazing. When I worked at a photo lab a few years ago a woman brought in some Kodachrome slides of her husband from the early sixties. Over a half century old, and the prints I ran off from them looked like they were taken yesterday, only not actually from the day before because those prints all came from plastic lens cameras shot on low quality digital and looked awful. These were far, far superior. I still have a lot of developed Kodachrome slides that I shot though, of me and my cats in Asheville. We're living relics now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Interesting, because I always pay attention to those marks since watching Fight Club, and I've noticed that they don't appear at every theater I go to. Maybe they'll start artificially adding them back in on the reruns of old films, as is done with the scratching of records on certain music tracks.

At the moment, the trend seems to be to digitally *remove* them from DVD releases of vintage films, on the mistaken belief that they weren't part of the original presentation. Which, of course, is bunk -- they were on the films as they came from the lab, and were very much a part of what the original audience saw. In fact, if you were observant enough you could even tell what lab printed a particular film just by the style of the punch used to create the cue mark...

As for Kodachrome, I still have a spool of exposed K2 8mm movie film that was in a camera I picked up some time ago. It was half-exposed when I got the camera, so I shot the second half myself, but before I could send it out to be developed, the processing was discontinued. Supposedly it's possible to process Kodachrome into a black-and-white result using conventional methods, but I'm holding out hope that someone, someday, will figure out how to do it properly...

 

[_Nightwing]

Wow I'd love to see what's on that movie film. It could be something of great historical import, or even better a cat doing funny stuff in a little sweatervest. I'm holding out for someone to take up Kodak's process too, since they've abandoned everything that made them great. My hope is that someone like Ilford will work it out and launch it as a new product.

Removing the cue marks from vintage films seems like a good idea, because people into vintage hate stuff like that. Authentic stuff like that. We like colorized Casablanca and widescreen reformatted with crops and zooms.

 

[Kahuna]

We had a discussion around the campfire the other night. I did not realize that the free "time of day" phone number, the one that began, "at the tone the time will be...", has been discontinued in most places.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Steel guitar in Country songs has all but disappeared.