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Post by rikita on Aug 24, 2016 11:07:20 GMT
i remember when no one i knew had a mobile phone.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 13:31:25 GMT
True !
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 24, 2016 14:57:01 GMT
I remember when people didn't think their mobile phones were as crucial as their livers or hearts.
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Post by onlyMark on Aug 24, 2016 15:24:28 GMT
I remember not having a phone at all. In the house or on my person. The red box on the end of the street had A and B buttons.
Later we had a 'party line' phone in the hall. You shared the line with someone else and would often pick it up to make a call and could hear other people having a conversation.
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Post by rikita on Aug 24, 2016 22:44:11 GMT
we didn't have a phone in the house until i was fifteen. when i was thirteen or fourteen and started listening to pop radio stations i found it very unfair that whenever you could win concert tickets or anything, you had to call in ... but it was useful to be able to tell a guy i wasn't that much into, that i couldn't give him my phone number because i didn't have one ...
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Post by questa on Aug 24, 2016 22:47:51 GMT
My parents were real estate agents with a large clientele and Dad was the Mayor of the shire. At home we only had a party line for many years. But then we had a twice a day mail delivery, including Saturdays! It still must have been difficult for them.
My first contact with mobile phones was in Indonesia. As the country had virtually no telephone networks...posts and cables...they skipped that stage and went straight to cell phones with Govt subsidiary to keep peoples costs down. We often hear people say 'these refugees all have cell phones, can't be all that poor' without realizing that this is often all they have.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 22:54:12 GMT
Of course mobile coverage was/is still spotty in a number of places, and I will never forget when I took the boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. It took a few hours on the river and clearly the first bridge in the Phnom Penh suburbs was the landmark, because the moment it was spotted, every single person on the boat whipped out their mobile phone.
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Post by rikita on Aug 24, 2016 23:12:39 GMT
in the village where my dad has his holiday house, the phone reception isn't good. when i want to make a call from there, i have to go up to the football field.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2016 23:29:51 GMT
The cabin my husband built is a faraday cage. Because of the sort of insulation and building techniques used, you have to go outside or hang out the window to have good reception.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 9, 2016 12:31:58 GMT
I remember when erasers in school had one pinkish end and one bluish (smaller) end. The blue end was supposed to be able to erase ink but we all know it was only good at digging a hole in the paper.
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Post by patricklondon on Oct 10, 2016 10:42:09 GMT
Hah. I remember being the ink monitor at primary school. Yes, children, once upon a time, 7- and 8-year olds were taught to write with metal pen nibs from inkwells let into their desks, and it was the (child) ink monitor who went round filling the inkwells from a big bottle. And oh, the fun the rotten kids had dipping the unpopular child's nib into the fish-oil capsules we were given every day, just to see what happened when the nib wouldn't take the ink. My blog | My photos | My video clips"too literate to be spam"
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Post by bjd on Oct 10, 2016 11:21:03 GMT
No fun being old, is it Patrick? I learned to write with one of those metal nib pens too. If memory serves me well, the teacher had a kind of coppery pot like a watering can to refill the ink, but that might have been in Canada.
I think girls with braids also had the ends of their braids dipped into inkwells if they had to misfortune to sit in front of a boy.
We weren't given fish oil capsules at school but I remember my mother giving us cod liver oil in Manchester (not much sun there in winter!).
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Post by Deleted on Oct 10, 2016 11:37:11 GMT
When I went to school, we had already moved on to those fountain pens with plastic cartridges. Plenty of room for accidents with those, too!
I did see old desks in a few places with the hole to insert the inkwell.
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Post by htmb on Oct 10, 2016 11:56:32 GMT
We had a few boys in class who were adept at flicking those cartridge pens just right so they'd send a fine splatter of blue ink across the backs of our white uniform shirts.
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Post by questa on Oct 10, 2016 13:05:57 GMT
The ink for our inkwells was a powder called 'Quink'. Teacher mixed so many spoons full to so much water and stirred it up in the big kettle with a spout. Two kids would take it round filling the inkwells. Another had the nib box and dispensed these. Metal nibs were expensive late 50s so if someone was breaking too many of them the teacher would supervise their writing technique and pen pressure. The sticks of chalk were scarce also and we were not allowed to touch them. The nicest teachers would give us the stubby ends to draw up our hopscotch areas on the bitumen playground.
Oh, Kerouac, the coloured end of the eraser would rub out ink if you licked it and only rubbed one way, very gently. If you rubbed back and forth you got holes in your work. But you know that.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 11, 2016 21:45:57 GMT
I remember when homeless people did not have mobile phones. I remember a time when there was no homeless people (at least in my town) apart from the odd tramp.
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Post by questa on Oct 11, 2016 23:31:39 GMT
Oz had its swagmen...fellows who walked from town to town doing odd jobs for a meal or a place to sleep. Their possessions were wrapped in a blanket (swag) carried on their back and their billy can, to boil water or cook stews, attached to their swag. They were independent, sometimes well educated but had no desire to settle down. I have wondered if the ending of the 1850s gold rush, the massive shearers' strike of the 1890s then post WW I, and the Depression...all of which saw an increase in swagmen on the road, were the era's way of dealing with PTSD.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2016 0:28:03 GMT
I remember a critical phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict involving Israel (of course), Egypt and the Soviet Union. The Israelis had shot down Soviet aircrafts and the Soviets Israelis aircrafts (Dassault Mirages) It was around July, August 70. I was 12, I was picking potatoes in the fields with my mother and and my brothers. The farm workers said that with the Soviets involved, the Americans would not fail to intervene and all of this might turn into a third word war. They seemed very impressed the Israeli army. I may be wrong but I think that the French had a very good opinion of Israel back then, maybe the same as that of the Americans today.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2016 0:40:28 GMT
Swagman.. un chemineau in French. I bet not even one French on thousand knows what it is/was. I knew one when I was a kid. Le Père Jouard. He walked from a village to another. He was drunk most of the time, or maybe he had some mental illness. I really don't know what he lived on.
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Post by questa on Oct 12, 2016 3:47:21 GMT
Australian national song (not anthem) is "Waltzing Matilda" which is the story of a swagman setting up camp beside a waterhole. but is found by troopers (police) and the land owner. They find a stolen and butchered sheep in his food bag and try to arrest him, but he gets away from them by jumping into the lake and drowning...but his ghost haunts the waterhole now.
The song has so many words in Oz dialect that I have avoided using them and just told the tale. It happened in Queensland during the Shearers Strike. Wikipedia has a good entry for the translation of the lyrics.
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Post by whatagain on Oct 12, 2016 16:26:17 GMT
I drank the ink from the pot that was put in the hole of the desk.
some years later I bought such a desk at a 'brocante' (flee market) one of the only items I ever bought on such occasions - I hate fleemarkets. But no ink, thanks. I have had my first mobile phone in the year 2000 or 2001 - seems so long ago yet 'only 16 years max. Autonomy was one week if I kept it shut. Goal was to be able to call if my car shut down. Was a shitty car, that one. Old and battered - and never broke down.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 20, 2016 19:01:51 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Oct 20, 2016 19:04:27 GMT
Disembarkation cards
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Post by mossie on Oct 20, 2016 21:09:34 GMT
Having to carry a gas mask in a cardboard box everywhere.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 20, 2016 21:40:32 GMT
You have come up with a memory that I cannot even imagine.
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Post by mossie on Oct 21, 2016 18:14:48 GMT
Just before the 39-45 war started the whole population of the UK were issued with gas masks in expectation that the Germans would attack us with it. We were told that there would be massive air raids that would wipe out whole areas, plus some bombs would contain gas. For a period one could be fined for not carrying the gas mask.
I also remember going to a demonstration of how to deal with incendiary bombs. Hilarious, they nearly burnt down the cricket pavilion where the demo took place. Push them into a bucket of sand, and every household was encouraged to have one ready, it was common to see them in public places.
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Post by whatagain on Oct 21, 2016 18:40:54 GMT
It was standard use in the german army to have a gasmasker. put into a cylinder made of aluminium. Never been used... millions produced for zero use. Same went with Zimmerit : it was a paste put on the late panzers. Goal was to negate magnetic bombs. That only germans had.
My in-laws' parents had a shelter made had the end of the garden where they would rush when RAF bombers would obliterate towns in the hope of destroying some german targets. It is said that once they couldn't enter their own shelter because the neigbours had come with their sheep. (or goats).
It was a time when zero casulaty and surgical attacks didn't exist... we got bombed and yet welcomed the aircrafts. Difficult to explain in our times.
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Post by chexbres on Oct 21, 2016 19:36:39 GMT
Kind of puts rolls of duct tape and plastic sheeting to shame, doesn't it...
I remember when there was no Teflon-coated anything. I don't remember anything sticking together too much, either.
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Post by questa on Oct 22, 2016 0:26:36 GMT
Can you imagine the difficulty in trying to get little kids to keep a gas mask on? Or the sheer terror of kids looking to mum and dad for reassurance and seeing those horrible masks instead of their faces?
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Post by mossie on Oct 22, 2016 18:36:00 GMT
One was taught to exhale strongly so one felt the air puffing out past the cheeks.
I don't remember any worries, I think we were more stoical then. I was only 7 at the time, but was brought up fairly strictly and never to make a fuss. We had to beat the Jerries, and remembered the old saying "The only good German is a dead one".
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