Asking
Only logged in members can reply and interact with the post.
Join SimilarWorlds for FREE »

Remember way back when...

If you needed to know the time you called the operator.

Your phone was on a party line so when you picked up the receiver you could hear other conversations.

When you turned on the radio you had to wait for the tubes to warm up.

Pop came in glass bottles and you could get a selection in a cardboard case with a handle.
...
This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »
ArishMell · 70-79, M
1) Or looked at the clock or your watch (I still do). We did though have the "Speaking Clock" service, which was automatic: dial its number and you heard the time read as a recorded message.

2) Party-lines were dying out in the late 1960s but it should not have been possible to overhear conversations on them. That sounds like a fault.

3) Well, we do call 'em "valves" over here, but I don't recall our wireless sets taking more than a few seconds to come to life. I think televisions were slower though.

4) I don't remember selection cases of pop, but we could buy "Corona" brand drinks in glass bottles, whose their price included a deposit for the returnable bottle.

.......

Some from me:

1) Buses with the door at the back, and a conductor to take the fares. The driver sat in splendid isolation in his cab. (Modern buses are front-door entry and you pay the driver, or pay electronically on a card-reader.)

2) Trolley-buses. Stretching my memory a bit. I think Bournemouth was the last British town to use these electric vehicles, powered from overhead wires. I saw them but never travelled on one.

3) Gas-holders (commonly and wrongly called "gasometers") in most towns of any size. They were reservoirs for the town-gas supplies... until natural-gas, the gas was derived from coal in the adjacent "gas-works".

4) Daily doorstep delivery of bottles of milk, carried on battery-electric "milk floats". The practice has all but died out, due to the crushing competition from supermarkets but also to all-too-common thefts.

5) Steam traction on the national railway network ended in 1968 (excepting occasional "heritage" specials).

6) Pay-On-Answer public telephones. You put the coins in, but paid only when the called party answered, by pressing "Button A". At the end of the call, pressing "Button B" returned any unused coins. Dial telephones, of course; but connected to Automatic Telephone Exchanges that were already moving from electro-mechanical to solid-state electronic switching in the early-1970s.

7) Pre-decimal currency: 12 pennies = 1 shilling. 20 shillings = £1.
£1.1s.0d = one "Guinea", apparently still used in horse-racing circles though now £1.05.

8) Imperial (Pre-metric) measures: we still use the Mile and Yard for road and railway distances; the pint for draught ales and ciders in pubs. Some building and engineering materials are still made in Imperial dimensions.

8) Compound Arithmetic - for calculating commodity prices in those quantity and currency units. Taught in Primary Schools, which continued from Infants' School in teaching 'Arithmetic' I think they pretentiously now call "Mathematics".

9) Logarithms and their Slide-rule cousins for multiplication, division and power calculations; pre- electronic calculators. Logarithmic laws are still important in certain technical applications.

10) Gents' "barbers" who only ever knew one hair-style: 'Short Back & Sides'. Finished on request by rubbing on a dollop of greasy "Brylcreem", whose artificial gloss lasted only until you went to bed and the goo transferred itself to the pillow-case. They only ever knew two topics of conversation, too: the weather (well, this is in Britain!) and last night's boxing or football. Allegedly, these barbers were also among the only respectable family-planning places in town; as a discreet "Anything for the weekend, Sir?" was a euphemism meaning "Packet of condoms, Sir?" - presumably discreetly palmed over with the change and any requested 'Styptic Pencil' coagulent for shaving cuts. I say allegedly because by the time I was old enough for such things the "unisex" hairdressers had arrived, with much better service!
robb65 · 56-60, M
@ArishMell My great aunt had a little country store. I can remember as a kid picking out an empty cardboard carton and filling it with drinks, either from the cooler or from the cases in the storage room. It wasn't that unusual to put in a bottle of something my parents normally would not have bought, like maybe 5 cokes and 1 RC cola. I suspect this was what was meant rather than than the drinks being bought in prepackaged mixed assortments.
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@robb65 Oh, I see! Thankyou!
Tastyfrzz · 61-69, M
@ArishMell Never heard of condom sales at the barbers over here.
Tastyfrzz · 61-69, M
Where did the guinea come from?
TheThinker · 56-60, M
@Tastyfrzz From auctions. The extra shilling (5p) would be the auctioneer's commission. So if you bought something for 100 guineas, you paid £105, the buyer would get £100, and the auctioneer would get £5.
Tastyfrzz · 61-69, M
@TheThinker ?¿ so why didn’t they just write it up that way?¿
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@Tastyfrzz I am not sure of it over in this "here" either, which is why I said "allegedly". I never tried it and was never offered any! :-)

It was though a common belief that the barbers sold condoms, as well of course as the pharmacies, so some may well have done. I noticed condom-vending machines in the gents' toilets in pubs and the like, in the 1970s; but have not seen any for a long time now.