Vintage things that have REAPPEARED in your lifetime?

[Trenchfriend]

^^^^^
I hear that those Swiss Army knives come with a blade just for this purpose.

A small cheese knife? Never heared of that. But who knows, what the XXL ones come with....

I had an average Victorinox knock-off in the 90s.
It had a nail file, a bottle opener, I think the usal medium screwdriver, a corkscrew, the main knife, a small knife for nail cleaning, a saw, a nail scissors and if I'm remembering right another small hooked knife and whatever else.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
What? No kitchen sink?

 

[Trenchfriend]

^^^^^^
What? No kitchen sink?

Nah, it was just the medium swiss knife.

 

[BobHufford]

I think Emmentaler was a character on Breaking Bad.

Perhaps you’re thinking of Jemma Teller in “Sons of Anarchy “.

 

[Bugguy]

Well ... sorta.

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My favorite from my mis-spent youth...

I think the term was "rippled out" for the night I woke up on the roof of a two story house in Michigan City, Indiana. I remember crawling back into the window and laying on a bed that wouldn't stop moving. I think I only felt worse after I over-indulged with slivovitz. Funny how 50+ years later the gastrointestinal memory is as fresh as yesterday. Several stories for another day...

 

[tonyb]

Rubber stamps.

A few months back I had a local outfit make three rubber stamps for my business — one with the street address, one asking to handle with care, and the other with my company logo.

They were much less costly than stickers would have been, let alone proprietary packaging. And what I offer harkens to a time when rubber stamps were ubiquitous, so they, like my product, are in keeping with the spirit of those times.

 

[LostInTyme]

You get my 'stamp of approval".

 

[tonyb]

Home vegetable gardens.

They certainly didn’t go away entirely, but I’m seeing more and more springing up around here, where gardening of any type short of xeriscaping is a challenge.

The stay-at-home years contributed to it, I’d imagine. All sorts of domestic activities — baking, sewing, home “improvements,” etc. — saw significant growth over that span. And I suspect that an aging population has something to do with it, too. A large segment of the population is of retirement age now (and for that reason has time to tend a garden) but is still young enough to perform most gardening tasks.

There’s little parallel in this to the WWII Victory Gardens. Truth is, if you want less expensive produce, you’ll likelier find it at the local supermarket than in your backyard garden, at least for the first several years, until the cost of equipment and soil amendments and all the other things that go into a productive garden is recouped.

But it’s still cheap recreation.

 

[Turnip]

Logging horses currently have an accelerating comeback at this end.

 

[tonyb]

Logging horses currently have an accelerating comeback at this end.

Any speculation as to what that might be attributed?

Back 50-plus years ago the cattle ranch I occasionally worked for kept a pair of Clydesdales to pull the buckboards on skis because they handled the snow-covered ground as well or better than mechanical contraptions. But the rancher just liked having them around, it seemed. And his main hand in the operation, a wiry Indian fellow, was a horseman whose experience included breaking entire collections of the animals at a time. He took them to school, brought ‘em along as a group, until they were all ready to be ridden. I witnessed this. It was a thing to behold.

 

[BobHufford]

Logging horses currently have an accelerating comeback at this end.

You see more mules around here.

They are much less impactful on your property. A skidder running round in the woods with the goal of speed harvesting really tears the place up.

 

[Turnip]

Yes, that is exactly it. And they’re often the better choice in difficult terrain.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The skidders I remember seeing were a lot more homebrew than that. Most of them seemed to have started out life as Model A Fords.

 

[tonyb]

Yes, that is exactly it. And they’re often the better choice in difficult terrain.

As to difficult terrain …

In the Seattle area, where Himalayan blackberry is a terribly invasive species and the land is quite steep in places, goats have proven a better way of addressing the problem. They eat just about anything, they can scale nearly vertical terrain, and they leave a good soil amendment behind. Both private property owners and public agencies hire goatherds to clear out the thickets.

 

[Rmccamey]

Similarly, in my rural area, it seems quilting and sewing circles are all the rage.

Home vegetable gardens.

They certainly didn’t go away entirely, but I’m seeing more and more springing up around here, where gardening of any type short of xeriscaping is a challenge.

The stay-at-home years contributed to it, I’d imagine. All sorts of domestic activities — baking, sewing, home “improvements,” etc. — saw significant growth over that span. And I suspect that an aging population has something to do with it, too. A large segment of the population is of retirement age now (and for that reason has time to tend a garden) but is still young enough to perform most gardening tasks..

 

[Fifty150]

As a fat old man, I can remember the days of carrying a beeper. Then came the cellphone. Because of the rate plans, many people kept their beepers, and used them with a cell phone. Alphanumeric beepers were sophisticated enough for messages to be sent. You got your messages on the pager system, then used the cell phone to return only the most important calls. Cell phones were charged with a flat fee just to have the phone turned on, then you still had to pay by the minute.

By 2001, the shift was to cellular phone only. Motorola stopped making beepers altogether. Soon thereafter, commercial beeper service disappeared. Cellular phone service contract rates were still very high, but people had become accustomed to using mobile phones. In that era, I was using a brand named Nextel, which allowed for cellular phone service, and a two way radio. Nobody needed to send a text message. All that they had to do was activate the Push To Talk button and talk to me in real time. I still have the pagers and Nextel radios sitting in my garage. Actually, I've still got a complete 800 mhz radio dispatch system in my garage. When armageddon occurs, I will power it up.

The year 2002 brought us the iconic Blackberry. The smartphone era began. Text, fax, web browsing........ it was better than sex. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone. 2008 brought the first Android in the form of the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1. Today, children have smartphones with more computing power than The Moon Mission........ if you actually believed that man went to the moon with almost zero technology, then declared that there was no reason to keep going back, and hasn't been able to do anything remotely close to that for over half a century.



Vintage Technology has returned. Along with "vintage" pricing. When you roll the calendar back to The 80's, I cringe at how many thousands of 1980's dollars I spent for technology. Today, I can get a free mobile phone, and it only costs $20 a month. For less than an hour's wage, I have telecommunications. And it's only 1/3 of the cost of a landline telephone from The Phone Company. No wonder ATT stock keeps plummeting.

 

[LostInTyme]

My first cell phone was a bag phone. I felt like Maxwell Smart (He had a shoe phone, "Get Smart" And there was a cone of silence, something we could all use today.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

Notary Seals.

I'm a notary myself, and have the regular squeeze-press seal to impress on documents -- but when I had to go get some papers notarized for myself the other day I noticed the notary was using a special rubber stamp instead. No seal, it wasn't even round. She tells me the requirement for having a seal has been abolished, apparently as a consequence of the rise of e-notaries. First I've heard about this, but I'll hold onto my seal as long as they let me. There's something very satisfying about the official "crunch" into the paper that just isn't there with a rubber stamp.

 

[LostInTyme]

I always liked the "Seal". It was like getting a lawyer on the cheap.

 

[tonyb]

…

Vintage Technology has returned. Along with "vintage" pricing. When you roll the calendar back to The 80's, I cringe at how many thousands of 1980's dollars I spent for technology. Today, I can get a free mobile phone, and it only costs $20 a month. For less than an hour's wage, I have telecommunications. And it's only 1/3 of the cost of a landline telephone from The Phone Company. No wonder ATT stock keeps plummeting.






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Prices on consumer electronics are a small fraction (in adjusted dollars) of what they were. Same with airfare.

Housing, on the other hand …
and automobiles.

The days of the serviceable beater that could be had for less than a workingman’s week’s pay are long gone. As is the time when it was typical to pay less than 20 percent of one’s take home pay on housing.