Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[Trenchfriend]

Cold and grim Octobers!

 

[LizzieMaine]

"It's ten O'clock. Do you know where your children are?"

National anthem at the end of the program day.

And finally all night:

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The original 1939 art for the "Indian Head" test pattern was found in a dumpster behind a former RCA engineering facility back in the '70s, and was subsequently rescued and restored...

All those lines and circles have specific meaning for television engineers in calibrating cameras and transmitters, and they can also be used to set up the height, width, and vertical linearity of your set at home. The specific purpose of the Indian head is to provide a detailed and stable greyscale image for adjusting brightness and contrast levels in the transmitted signal.

The purpose of the 1 kc tone is to wake you up when you fall asleep in front of the Late Show.

 

[Bugguy]

...and I believe it originated at the RCA plant in Harrison, NJ. Exactly and precisely where my butt is parked at this very moment.

 

[tonyb]

The smell of burning leaves around this time of year.

The practice has been banned everywhere I’ve lived for a good 50 years or more.

 

[MichaelRhB]

You can still burn leaves here. Smells nice this time of year.

 

[Trenchfriend]

German Grundgesetz. Was replaced by Infection Protection Law.

 

[CatsCan]

German Grundgesetz. Was replaced by Infection Protection Law.

No.

 

[Trenchfriend]

German Grundgesetz. Was replaced by Infection Protection Law.

No.

Yes.
Laws can't be "limited". Either a law is active or it is not active. Limited = not active. Germany is actually a dictatorship, not democracy.
All dark sides of Germany are back again.

As long as the Infection Protection Law cuts into our constitution, there's no democracy.

 

[CatsCan]

I am sorry to say this, Trenchfriend, but this is just not true. But aside from that, I hope we can keep our political statements in this honourable forum less extreme.

 

[BobHufford]

Kids "toilet papering" a house.

 

[tonyb]

Dialing (yes, dialing) a phone number to get a recording telling the time o’ day.

Maybe that service still exists, but I know of no one who uses it. Just about everybody carries a cell phone that displays the time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In the Era, that service -- MEridian 7-1212 -- was staffed by live operators, who sat in a booth for several hours at a stretch, reciting the time every fifteen seconds into a microphone. An excellent radio drama was written in 1939 about one of these operators -- whose brother was sentenced to die in the electric chair at the stroke of midnight -- and the lives that converged as that hour approached.

WEather 6-1212, the equivalent weather forecast service, was also a live operator up until recordings took over in the mid-fifties.

 

[Bushman]

Kids "toilet papering" a house.

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The harmless fun of yesteryear has now become felonies. Kids that try to pull the stuff their parents did will now find themselves seeing the inside of a courtroom on property damage charges. It's unfortunately the overly litigious we've found ourselves in.

Dialing (yes, dialing) a phone number to get a recording telling the time o’ day.

Maybe that service still exists, but I know of no one who uses it. Just about everybody carries a cell phone that displays the time.

Heck, dial tones in general! I remember when I was a kid, I would take the phone off the hook (another vintage thing that has disappeared) just to hear the lady say "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again" followed by the annoying beeping sound.

I remember when cell phones first started becoming popular with the general public, they were often used to dial somebody at home to let them know the phone was off the hook somewhere.

 

[LizzieMaine]

*Electromechanical* dial tones, created by vibrating metal reeds -- as opposed to the electronically-generated DTMF tone used today.

You could still hear the original system, which dated back to the introduction of dial service in the late 1910s, as late as the early 90s in some locations, but it's entirely extinct today. But you can still hear it here.

 

[tonyb]

Maybe there’s a better thread for this observation, but it really doesn’t merit a thread of its own, so ...

The Atlanta Falcons’ jersey, with “ATL” across the front, is just another example of a trend toward referring to U.S. cities and their metropolitan areas by their three-letter airport codes. This is attributable, I suppose, to our abbreviating just about everything we can; and the democratization of air travel, and hence the increasing familiarity with those codes.

Some are fairly obvious — SFO, ATL, SEA, LAX, DFW, DEN, PHL, MSP, etc.

Others we know because those airports handle so much traffic that most of us have at least seen their food courts and restrooms while killing time between flights there — ORD, JFK, LGA.

And others are used to distinguish those cities from ones they might be confused with — PDX and PWM, for instance.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That trend annoys me, but I don't know why. Now everything, not just airport codes, has to be a standard three-letter abbreviation: I first noticed it when baseball started standardizing team abbreviations in the 90s, and you never saw "Chic." or "Phila." or "Pitts." or "Cin'ti" on the out of town scoreboard anymore. "Cin'ti" in particular always made me happy. Hearing people refer to Major League Baseball as "MLB" or, worse, "the MLB," on the other hand, fills me with rage.

The three-letter trend reaches its pinnacle of obnoxious pedantry among Star Trek fans, who got into a ferocious debate over whether "Star Trek: Discovery" must be referred to as "STD" or "DSC." Fans who don't like the show insist on calling it "STD," which is about the kind of joke you'd expect from people who argue long Reddit threads about abbreviations. (The other required abbreviations are TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, PIC, and LDS. The last refers to the new "Lower Decks" animated show, much to the annoyance of Mormons.)

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
I find myself frequently looking up what certain abbreviations are supposed to mean. So the writer’s convenience comes at the expense of mine.

Communicating via text message is certainly a major contributing factor. I find myself abbreviating whole phrases by their initial letters only, but not to save keystrokes so much as to not quite swear. I think most people can figure out what “PITA” or “BFD” is supposed to mean.

 

[Zombie_61]

"Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put on K.P.."

Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

 

[Trenchfriend]

I will watch the next days, if instant tomato soup with rice, from Knorr or Maggi, is still available. That was my childhood stuff!

 

[Harp]

German Grundgesetz. Was replaced by Infection Protection Law.


Yes.
Laws can't be "limited". Either a law is active or it is not active. Limited = not active. Germany is actually a dictatorship, not democracy.
All dark sides of Germany are back again.

As long as the Infection Protection Law cuts into our constitution, there's no democracy.

As Dickens scribbled: "The law is a ass, a idiot..."

But not by my lights.

Constitutional law here in the United States can prove a complex mix of inane penumbra,
deceit, cowardice, heroism, vanity, and other such mercurial dice. The current Chief Justice the other
week left a Pennsylvania cert stand silent since Gentleman John could not bring himself to the truth
therein Article II which subordinates a state supreme court to state legislative primacy with respect
to enactment of election law, and correctly apply the law thereto said cert with appropriate instruction
to the idiots en banc in Philly.