Things where you look back and think "that really was a different world"

[StealthPolarBear]

I am only in my early 40s so young and sprightly.
When I was even younger I had a job in a dentists office. Basically sending reminder letters out, printjng the letters, and addressing the envelopes. The dental records didn't have title on them so I asked what I should do. The response was i a woman's husband is also registered at the practice, she's a Mrs.
So I did that. Mrs for those respectable married women, and using my teenage innovation I decided any where I was unsure would be 'Ms'.
I got such a telling off. Apparently people complained as it looked like they were divorced.
There are times when the 90s seem only yesterday, and times like remembering that when they seem to have more in common with the victorian era than the present day!

@ItsRainingTacos

When I started uni in the mid 90s we were given all given an email address and login password. And we looked at each other and thought 'wtf do we need that for?!'...

Yes! 😂 you’d get about one email a week and you’d be so excited to see it 😂🤦‍♀️

I was born in the 1950s, in London. Abortion was illegal, tv was black and white and only had 2 channels, BBC and ITV.
Women had to get a male guarantor to sign credit agreements. It was legal to pay women less than men doing the same job. Men could legally rape their wives. There were no women’s refuges for domestic violence victims.
The contraceptive pill hadn’t been invented. There were no home computers, mobile phones or video recorders. London had only one airport, on the site of present day Heathrow.
There were no automatic washing machines, tumble driers, or microwave ovens.
I was three years old before Britain got its first motorway - a whole 8 miles long!
Yes, it really was a different world.

To be fair, February 2020 nowseems like a different world!

@irresistibleoverwhelm

I mean writing and sending one letter could literally take a whole day!

To be fair I work in a large central government department and this still happens at least once a week. The modern twist is various people making changes to a shared document. I’d quite like the ceremony of someone bringing me a red-penned printout to re-type.

My mum having a twin tub and helping her use it! Getting a freezer & video recorder. Also a cassette recorder rather than the huge twin reel tape thing.

I remember in 1997 I had to walk to the phone box to call my boyfriend. He had a house phone but I didn’t, so he was unable to contact me. In the end I bought a pager which could receive a text message. You had to call a number and give your message to a person in a call centre, who typed it and sent it to the pager. So he would “text” me and if I wanted to reply I had to call him back from the phone box. I found the pager in a drawer recently when my parents moved house. Was tempted to call the number and see if the call centre people were still there!

I remember the same year a friend of mine borrowed his dad’s mobile (which was like a brick) and we were all really excited. Everyone wanted to call their parents and say “eeeeh guess where I’m calling you from?!” He was constantly pulling it out and announcing that he had a signal (or not). Different world!

• Making mix tapes for mates
• At uni one phone box for around 50 people & mates used to ring it and ask for so&so from number 21
• writing letters to friends
• having no privacy as the only phone was in the hallway
• smoking on the bus/in cinema etc
• getting pissed & snogging someone with no photo evidence
• wearing leggings & DMs as a going out outfit
• everyone driving normal sized cars instead of SUVs
• no lip fillers or filtered photos
• my first office job had a post girl who just walked round all day passing notes between people & delivering letters & this was mid 90s

I miss the 80s and 90s

Funny I've just been watching The Royle Family and thinking it really was of it's time, especially Nanna with her perm and her 40s style dress, you don't get ladies like that anymore.

Ashtrays on the armrests in aeroplanes 😳

In the mid 90s going to university far from home and calling my parents once a week from a pay phone, if I remembered.

So different from a world of family WhatsApp groups and always being able to contact your teenagers instantly.

My parents could go for a fortnight without hearing from me without worrying unduly. My kids message me to let me know if they've sneezed.

We have long digital apron strings now. We we cut loose a lot younger in the past.

When you wanted to know an answer to a question you couldn’t just ask google or Alexa. I google so many random things but years ago so many of my questions would never have been answered.

In 1994 I took a typing class at school on a typewriter. By 1999 everything was computer based, but not necessarily online. By 2001, all online.
Such a rapid change.

When I was a child, we had a shared landline - with a neighbour. There weren't enough landlines for one per household (this was just after phones had changed from dialling via operator to direct dial). We had a 'trim phone' and there was an extra button on the base you pressed to check the line was clear (i.e. not being used by the neighbours) before you could dial out. The neighbours were elderly and rarely used the phone but because of their age, my mum was paranoid they might need to call a doctor/ambulance, so we were never allowed to stay on the line too long.

In a perhaps similar vein - dial-up internet connection. If anyone was on the internet, that engaged the landline - and this was in the days before everyone had a mobile phone. You were billed for time on the internet on your phone bill. Brrrr bdeeeep brrr brrr ...

@Thesearmsofmine

When you wanted to know an answer to a question you couldn’t just ask google or Alexa. I google so many random things but years ago so many of my questions would never have been answered.

Yes! The days when if you wanted to know something and someone in your house didn’t know and you didn’t have a book on it, you just had to wait until the next time you could go to the library and look it up…

I miss the sheer amount of headspace it was possible to have. A few years ago my smartphone broke and I didn’t replace it for a while, and oh my gosh it was like being back in a past time of wonderful mental space. (Sadly short lived, as my boss complained I wasn’t replying to emails fast enough for her - so much for well-being and work-life balance…)

More recent (2000), but listening to this made it seem a surprisingly long time ago!

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000zg54

The Millennium Dome, the first mayor of London etc.

Ha! I had DD1 in 2004 and the midwives and nurses kept calling me "Mrs Fortune" and I said "I"m Miss Fortune" and one said "We say Mrs out of respect" and I said "Well please don't as I'm not married."

1950s! That was only 17 years ago.

@irresistibleoverwhelm - you missed out the carbon copies! And how blooming awkward carbon copying made correcting typos!

@converseandjeans one of my first jobs "post girl" early 90's and I could absolutely fill a whole day/week/month just walking around the building delivering memos, letters etc to other people in the same company. Super busy on a Monday as we had all the post delivered in the 2nd post Friday plus Saturdays post to sort and deliver to the appropriate people

@SquirryTheSquirrel I still had dial up internet when I did uni the 2nd time early 2000's. The stress of losing the connection when I was trying to finish an assignment cos someone was trying to phone me!

1st time at uni was pre internet and I had an electric BUT not electronic typewriter - I had flipping shares in tippex at that point! Medical based degree so many bloody difficult to spell/type words especially when you're typing after a 10 hour ward shift!

9/11 was mentioned upthread and of course 20th anniversary sat. My dd is 20 her world is SO different to "my" pre 9/11 one. As we all do I remember learning of the event via tv rather than internet in any way. We had a computer but again dial up only, internet was expensive and charged per minute so we rarely used it being skint and busy new parents. Ex was army so it all went off for him that day especially as he was in a role related to organising who was meant to be where in certain types of emergency of which this was the biggest we've ever experienced. I'd no way of staying in touch with him as wasn't allowed to tie up his work phone line and they were all so busy anyway. Early on in the events that day we ordinary folk had very little confirmed info of what had happened.

@Graphista yes, I had fast Ethernet access free (was a grad student at the time), but the internet was unusable that day as everything had crashed from the traffic.

I remember getting back from lunch out and turning on my computer for an afternoon’s work, to find the internet had gone crazy. All the main news websites like CNN and the Guardian and BBC had completely crashed and had been taken offline - they just put up frozen splash pages with a basic headline.

My partner and I turned on our tiny television and watched the second plane hit I remember ringing my mum at her work, and telling her to get to the only TV in her building (in the entrance) ASAP

@ItsRainingTacos

Ashtrays on the armrests in aeroplanes 😳

New aeroplanes are still built with ashtrays. Not in the armrests but by the toilets/in them. People still attempt to smoke onboard and a 'safe' place to distinguish the fag is better than a bin full of toilet paper.

Walking into a restaurant and being asked "smoking or non smoking?"

Oh and I remember carbons from my mum using them, but in fact at my first job the secretaries had two of the four computers in the office so no carbons needed! They would wear dictaphone headphones, type up the letters in WordPerfect and print them out.

At school I was on the set which did an extra science GCSE instead of learning touch typing, presumably because, pre-computers, we were going to be Career Girls who delegated stuff like typing to secretaries. Little did I know that if I’d learned to touch type back then my life would have been immeasurably easier in a whole load of ways. I still resent whoever it was who decided we didn’t need to learn to type

I’m my first Finance/cashiers job in the 90’s processing piles and piles of cheques each week and mounds of coins from the car park machines. It’s all card payment now.
No computer at one site so everything was logged by pen and paper in a massive ledger.

I remember being awestruck the first time I used email instead of a fax. And ‘Ask Jeeves’ search facility on the internet!

I studied typing at high school & this thread has made me remember learning to re-ink & prepare the Gestetner machine - ink & mess everywhere usually. We had black fabric aprons over the keyboard to learn to touch type - our teacher used to walk around with a ruler & whack students across their hands if they made errors.
Many years later I was a mature student at Uni but had never used a computer or been online before then, so several heart stopping times when I hadnt saved or deleted course work.

We had a manual phone system too growing up where you had to turn a hand dial to connect to an operator who then connected you to a number - no private phone calls either with Mum & Dad in the sitting room right next to the phone.

I was working as an OT in a large hospital in the 80's. We wore culottes in a horrible burgundy colour and white blouses. The physios wore blue culottes. No trousers allowed.

The head of both the OT and physio departments were British trained, very late middle-aged, and went by "Miss.". This was in Canada.

They would stand in front of our staff meetings with their hands clasped in front of them formally as they addressed us about such matters as the colour of our "hose."

White was a no no. Only black and they had to be sheer.

Even then we had to choke back the giggles. It was like working in a girls' school.

@IdblowJonSnow

To be fair, February 2020 nowseems like a different world!

It does. It’s like the Edwardian era before 1914. The 2017-2019 period seems so bizarre. So recent and yet so very different!