8-track? I remember when cars did not come standard with radio and heaters- these were optional accessories. My phonograph records were 78 rpm. When I went away to college 45s were becoming a craze and I bought a player and a friend helped me add a phono input.
I started modeling before plastic models. Flying models were balsa and tissue, static scale models (we called them solid models) were balsa, basswood or pine. The wings and tail were sawn to planform, we carved and sanded airfoil into them Fuselage was sawn to profile, and better kits were sawn both to profile and planform. We had to carve to section, but the kit provided cardboard templates.
I remember listening to the Pearl Harbor attack announcements on our floor model console radio. It remember family driving downtown in Detroit to celebrate VJ day.
I remember my first control line plane, a Goldberg Nifty with a Forester 29.
My first plastic model was a P-80, second was a Lindberg GeeBee.
Built my first scratch built model, a Curtis P-6E. Later built a scratch built !/2A freeflight.
When I moved to Minnesota, weather not conducive to flying models, switched to static scale full time (well, I occasionally build a rubber model just to prove I can).
Landmark technologies- internal cockpit detail, full interiors, resin aftermarket, flat model paints, photo-etch, DIY resin casting.
I can remember all that stuff, but not where I laid the X-acto knife 30 seconds ago!
We all also survived riding our bikes without helmets. I remember every time I did something stupid, it hurt, and I didn’t do it again…at least not the same way, anyway. LOL [cwby]
My first computer was a Commodore VIC20 with a 5K memory. Still remember the TV commercials for it, with William Shatner as the spokesman.
My first car was a rust covered Olds Cutlass. It probably lost a pound of rust everytime you slammed the door shut. My parents paid $250 for the car. It had an 8-track and I got the car in the winter of 1983.
The first thing I did was get the cassette adapter for the 8-track tape player.
The car’s driver window had some issue with it and would not roll up if you rolled it down. My mom neglected to tell me this because it was winter and I wouldn’t need to roll the window down.
Well, I was returning to college from Vermont to Long Island in February. I-95 is a toll road with 35¢ tolls through Connecticut and upstate New York with my last toll being the Throgs Neck Bridge.
So I pay the first toll and can’t get the window back up. I drive the remainer of the trip (about 200 miles) in a slushy February with my window about halfway down. I eventually went to a junk yard and got the part I needed for my window.
My first computer was the Commodore 64 but I didn’t have the persistant/tape storage so I would tinker for hours, get something working and shut it off…lol
They’re still being printed and you can get them from the bank. But they need to special order them and they come in a stack of fifty (aka hundred bucks a stack).
Last ones I got took about a week and half to get here. I ordered two stacks (100 $2 bills for an exchange of $200 from my account).
Keavdog, In the day, I got my protein powder from GNC and it tasted like powdered chalk. My buddy and I ,trying to gain weight for lifting weights, drank a gallon of milk a day, one dozen eggs a day, and countless cans of tuna fish. Life was so simpler back then.
I ended up getting a C64 later on with the tape drive. Then I bought a 1541 knock-off…I think it was made by Blue Chip. Not a bad floppy drive when it worked. That was all when I was 15, I think, which is when I got my first job. Oh, and I bought the Blue Chip at LaBelle’s. Remember that place?
Oh…and how about the VicModem 1600? I was on the internet (Compuserve) before Al Gore invented it. [proplr]
My favorite “Back in my day…” story to tell all the guys in my shop is that when I started working at Centennial Airport here in Colorado, Arapahoe Road, with its sprawling shopping complexes and luxury homes and apartments…was a dirt road, surrounded by nothing but empty grassland as far as the eye could see in every direction but west.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80. The tablet-sized one that was basically just a circuit board in a vacuum-formed plastic shell, that you had to plug into your TV as a monitor…and whose cutting-edge data-storage system was your own plug-in cassette recorder.
Taught me the basics of programming…though probably in a language that was only valid for about 15 seconds.
Yup. I remember those little RF converters that you’d attach to the back of your TV with the little fork terminals. Those casette tape drives definitely taught you patience, with some programs taking more than 30 minutes to load. I learned to program in BASIC, and later dabbled in machine language a little bit, and haven’t used any of it since.
My brother used to ask my dad “Did you see many dinosaurs when you were a kid?” One day his son asked him the same question. He didn’t think it was very funny.
