What do you remember- seems impossible now

[Rishile]

Yes I remember all those ^^^ too!  Although I had forgotten about Gestetner copiers til you mentioned it!  They worked by typing onto the special paper (which was actually very thin wax) on a typewriter with no ribbon so that the keys cut little stencils of each letter!  If you made a mistake you had a little bottle of liquid waxy stuff to paint over the error so you could re-type that letter once it had dried.  The waxy liquid was a fluorescent pinky/orange colour I recall 

When I first started working as a secretary for a solicitor we used to have 'live' conversations over the telex machine between the London and Reading offices.  Normal practice was to type your message offline and cut a ticker tape so that once the message was finished you could transmit it faster than normal typing.  I remember loving the live conversations - my first experience of Instant Messaging!   (this was in about 1981).

Oh the revelation of being allowed to type Board Meeting minutes on the senior secretary's word processor once a month!  Saved so much time and stress as typing on special quality foolscap paper and taking several carbon copies without making any typos was horrible    The machine was an ICL8801, a huge monster built into its own special desk that was about  a yard and a half wide!

Office workers today don't know they're born!     But then again in those days your work wouldn't be stopped for two days by a computer virus 

Heather

Oh, the good old days   

[angelfish58]

         Gestetner machines: in my early working days in hospitality, used to type
                                  restaurant menus from typewriter onto paper, then place
                                  it into a Gestetner - basically wrapping the paper around
                                  a drum and turning the handle which would print the
                                  menu off onto pre-loaded card at the bottom of the
                                  machine.

Thank you,my husband was trying to remember what they were called 

[jaybelnz]

I remember my brothers & myself having loads of fun with my nanny's gramophone! Winding it up was great fun when the old 78 rpm record was slowing down!!   Then 45's, 33's.  Since then it's been record players,huge tape recorders,  radiograms, stereograms, surround sound.  Then the smaller tape decks, transistor radios, boomboxes, TV, then video, then CD's, now DVD's.  And there's probably quite a few I've missed out!   

And now something new nearly every day in the computer and digital world, business and personal communication, entertainment!  Help!!  Can't keep up!

Wonder often what my Grandma would have to say!  She couldn't cope with the idea of my dishwasher in the 70's (she was in her nineties) - told her sisters I had a magic cupboard!   I suppose to her it WAS magic!! hehe

[mike175]

I love the idea of the Magic Cupboard

I guess our ancestors from a few generations back would see most of our kitchen appliances in the same way . . . Cooker, Fridge, Washing Machine . . .

[Charlesworth]

Had to laugh at an earlier poster's mention of "using WordPerfect instead of MS Word"... until I read she was 31.  When I started using PCs in 1981 we used WordStar.  And does anyone else remember using acoustic couplers  to attach to mainframe computers (pre-Internet)?

Nick

Must admit I did chuckle too (Sorry!) Although it was the 1996 mobile phone being compared to a brick that did make me smile - I remember my mobile phone in 1996 was positively svelt compared to the phones of the '80s!

Yes I remember WordStar too, all those ruddy dot commands!

And before the internet, how we used to look things up in books - when we were kids we were really fortunate, thanks to my mum, to have what was probably the equivalent of the internet - the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so we actually had to read stuff rather than copying and pasting as my students usually would. Sigh!

[LoneyBones]

I remember the freedom from worry..... after school my kids went out to play and came home at tea time. I had a fair idea of where they were, I only had to call from the back door and if they weren't within hearing distance someone was and would pass on the call, "Yer Mum's calling you lot."  My kids had a freedom that their kids don't have and their kids can't believe that.

[meles]

I remember my brothers & myself having loads of fun with my nanny's gramophone! Winding it up was great fun when the old 78 rpm record was slowing down!!   Then 45's, 33's.  Since then it's been record players,huge tape recorders,  radiograms, stereograms, surround sound.  Then the smaller tape decks, transistor radios, boomboxes, TV, then video, then CD's, now DVD's.  And there's probably quite a few I've missed out!   

I remember BetaMax!    And that huge Philips disk video system 

meles

[jaybelnz]

What about those huge floppy discs??  And the early computers?

In my twenties I worked in the first bank in NZ to trial main frame computers.  Took a whole new dust free building to hold the thing.  The branch I worked in was one of several local pilot branches - hooked in by telephone. 

Couriers still had to come around at end of each day and collect the actual transaction documentation (cheques, deposit slips etc) although these were encoded at each branch, and of course we had to balance up each batch before it could leave the office.  The teller's cash had to balance with it as well before all the stuff could leave the branch!  Led to some great overtime and tea money (another thing of the past methinks!! 

The next morning it all came back, manual settlement/transfer of other banks cheques, so running all around the 5 different banks in the town - and then we still had to post the transactions to the customer statements in the ledger as usual.   Great huge noisy Burroughs book keeping machines clanking away all day.  (I just remembered those LOL)

[mrs.tenacious]

Proper wage packets -

small, square brown envelopes with actual money inside them