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!

Love this thread!
Remember walking around bottled water and takeaway coffee like an accessory in the 90's 😂
Phoneboxes that you could send texts from late 90s
Pre mobiles arranging to meet at certain places always the clock tower in town
Smoking in nightclubs, smoking everywhere!
When I became vegetarian my family thinking a meal with the meat picked out was fine
Taping the top 40
Using encyclopedias for homework
Ladettes
Football pools in late 80s
Massive excitment over the national lottery starting

@StillWeRise

NO Ms was always intended as equal to Mr, a title that did not indicate marital status. It was never intended to indicate being divorced.

This is right. I remember it being invented. The idea was that women, like men should not have to reveal marital status through their title.

Cars without seatbelts

DH had a shared typist from when he started work in 1994 up to her retirement fifteen years later. She typed out letters from dictation. Her name was Beryl, she had a motherly attitude towards "her boys", and indeed it was very important to remember her birthday. Even then it seemed pretty archaic.

One boss in the nineties "couldn't type". He had a secretary in another building (another motherly woman called Pauline who was far too tolerant of all our bullshit) so he'd hand write letters, fax them over in his tiny scrawled writing, she'd type them and fax them back, he'd correct the errors in even tinier scrawled writing and fax it back, she'd retype it and fax it back... I gave up trying to change him but I did manage to convince her that she could send her typed documents back over the office computer system which made the process slightly more efficient. Eventually, in 1996, he was transferred to an office in a foreign country where the secretaries didn't do typing - they were mostly there to organise meetings and travel. Miraculously it turned out he could type after all!

Being able to play on building sites, in half-built houses!

PE knickers. Without skirts over the top to do cross country in the local park.

We campaigned... and won... football shorts.
School girls campaigning for longer school wear... must be the only time in history.

(Those things were hideous though. They were bright purple too.) (The school has black leggings as pe kit now)

My dad had a monthly bonus in his contract from the Civil Service... because he could a Computer. Until he retired about 10 years ago.

Well yesterday I was shocked to read a sign in the lift saying 16 people could fit in it - wtf !!

I was a teacher and can recall the days of having to stand and crank the arm of a Banda machine to make copies for classes . How time consuming was that !! Loved the smell of them though .

Worked in a hotel pub as a student and not allowed to wear trousers .

Yes the party line phone , no fax machines ( who even uses a fax machine today ?)

We’ve been clearing out an office at work (NHS) and found a load of team memos, which were always printed on blue paper, updating us on team changes etc. They got sent to each clinic base and everyone that worked there had to initial it to say they’d read it and put it in the next person’s pigeon hole! The horror of holding up the memo if you were on holiday or off sick! This was early 2000s.
Now it’s an email or a post on a Teams channel.

I started uni in 2001. If you wanted to have a computer in your room (which not everyone did) you had to go and get a special card to insert into the machine - not like a credit card, an actual bit of computing machinery, like in the picture. You then had to know how to insert this into your machine yourself! The idea of WiFi was unheard of!

Dialling up for internet! No seatbelts or very casually worn. I wrote my whole university dissertation on an old 1920’s typewriter I borrowed off my mum…with the aid of tippex of course! Smoking on planes, always reserved for at the back as if the smoke wouldn’t get anywhere else! 😂

I banked with the Natwest in the 1980s specifically to get my hands on their cheque book. The cheques were a beigey colour with lovely handrawn pictures of nature on them.

When I applied to uni we had to write our personal statement by hand and photocopy a copy for each uni. We also had to apply separately for polys using the same method. It meant you got to apply to more places though - I think 5 uni via UCCA and via polys via PCAS.

My mum had a Littlewoods catalogue which friend and neighbour things from. You could pay it back over several weeks and when she collected in their money she had to record it on a little involve book which had blue carbon paper in it to make a copy for the person paying in. I loved playing with the spare books and using the carbon paper to copy my handwriting.

We had no home phone. If you visited someone you couldn't call ahead. You just went there and hoped they would be in. I remember friends of my parents turned up from Germany one day and my parents were out for the day. They hung around for two hours before giving up.

In uni in the late 1980s only the computer Science people had IT access. To borrow a library book yo had to look up the ISBM number using the card index in the long wooded drawers. The course books were on short term loan only and could only be taken out for the day. wealthier students didn't give a damn about the rest of us and hogged them, happy to pay the hefty fines.

@irresistibleoverwhelm

I’m only in my early 40s too, but in my first job I was a junior assistant in a law firm. In 1999 (!) there were only four computers in an office of around 25 people, and only one of them was connected to the internet

If a letter had to be sent to a client, your manager told you roughly what he wanted you to say; you wrote your letter by hand then dictated the letter into a dictaphone, whereupon a secretary typed it up and printed it out and put it in a faux-leather folder.

You then read and annotated/corrected it by hand, gave it back to the secretary and she (always she) retyped it. You then corrected any further mistakes and sent it to your manager to read. He (always he!) then called you in and told you any further changes that needed making, whereupon you then noted them down, and sent it back to the secretary for final correction. She retyped it, printed it out on nicer letterheaded paper, and left it for you again. You then signed/pp’d it and/or left it for the manager to countersign. Evebtualt the thing in its faux leather folder would make its way back to the secretary, who would stamp and address it and take it to the postbox.

I don’t think most people under 30 would even be able to conceptualise this, yet it was basically how business was conducted for decades before computers and the internet. Definitely another world

In the late 90's I worked briefly for one of the big name estate agents (think like Savills) in their head office, and it was still like that EXCEPT they had dimly realised that this was not sustainable.

So... they had rounded up all their management (all male, all over 50 - although it could just be that the women could already do this) and got the Pitman people in with a battery of electronic typewriters to teach them all touch typing! I remember peeping in a glass door, and there were all the men sitting in rows, in their smart suits and neatly combed grey hair, learning to type!

When I left the NHS a mere 18 months ago, faxes were (and probably still are) routinely being used. The poor ward clerk would spend hours faxing off reams of patient discharge information to GP surgeries and then put the same info into an envelope and post them via snail mail. The situation was made even worse because the hospital had only 2 fax machines and usually one one worked…. I tried to get them to consider emailing the info but was met with huge resistance…bloody dinosaurs!

1986. Travelling to Spain with a friend and our children. My friend got a water pistol out of her bag to show the security man and he put his hands up in mock terror. We all had a laugh.

I remember

The rep from the Pearl Insurance coming round to collect the installments on life insurance policies.
Smoking in the office. I worked for Midland Bank (later hsbc) and we had ashtrays with the company logo on them.
Close down around midnight on the TV stations. BBC would play the national anthem.
Being able to walk onto building sites. No safety fencing around the perimeter.
This was I'm the 80's.

I went to uni in 2000 and had to take a compulsory IT module. The tutor told us to pay close attention as there was a new search engine, much more academic than ask Jeeves or Lycos. It was ‘now write this down carefully’ Google.
Also having time to just be, if you were on a train or waiting for someone…no phone to check just being with your thoughts.

@HelenaJustina

At primary school in the 90s, the place did not look like Fort Knox. There was no ‘single point of access’, locked gates, staff having sight of every corner of the playground at all times. Talking to a colleague at school yesterday who was already teaching then, I asked if they had a really high attrition rate or whether pupils were genuinely less likely to make a run for it in those days!

The reason schools have such security now is not to stop the children escaping, it is because of Dunblane.

At junior school, if you need a map, you printed them by using a roller. The ink always seemed to be purple (70s).

School years were labelled differently - first year junior, second year, and then first year senior, second year etc.

There was no national curriculum, so schools could teach what they wanted.

Everything was done on blackboards using chalk, even in senior schools. Later on, ohp’s were used. Ie. Overhead projectors.

I echo what people said about being more independent at a younger age. We would move away to university and phone home once a week, which probably made a more resilient generation.

@HelenaJustina

At primary school in the 90s, the place did not look like Fort Knox. There was no ‘single point of access’, locked gates, staff having sight of every corner of the playground at all times. Talking to a colleague at school yesterday who was already teaching then, I asked if they had a really high attrition rate or whether pupils were genuinely less likely to make a run for it in those days!

I was teaching in the 1990s. Sadly the reason why schools now have high fences and a single point of entry is not because we feared children making a run fr t - it is for their security. during my time in teaching we had a few instances of people coming into the site who should not have been there. One particularly distressing one involving DV where a parent came in trying to remove his children from school.

After Dunblane security measures in schools really tightened up. I would never have dreamt that I would one day be practicing regular lockdown procedures with my classes. Very sad.

When I started work I used a Gestetner to make copies. One mistake on the manual typewriter created a world of pain! It was messy and you black ink everywhere if you weren't careful (it came out of a tube like toothpaste and you smeared it on the plates). Urgh! Funny to think it went from a Gestetner to being able to print quality letters quickly to then everything being electronic in such a short space of time!

@Odisia

Gosh, so many things, and I'm only in my 50s.

I remember when if you needed a cash on a Saturday, when the banks were closed, people used to go into M&S, buy something and pay by cheque. Then take the item for a refund and get the refund paid in cash.....

And banks closed at 3pm.

I also remember cashing cheques at the pub. You could only pay in cash but if the landlord knew you then you could cash a check. Then you spent the money he or she had just given you.

And shops not taking cheques from Barclays Bank because it did business in South Africa.

I remember when eating out as a family was a BIG DEAL and girls would have their hair put up or curled and wear a long dress.

No children's meal, my brother and I had to agree with each other and my mum would order from the menu and say, "with a plate" and whatever it was would be delivered tot he table and my mum would put half of it on 'the plate' so we had half each.

@UpHillandDownAle

Ha ha! Love it. We’ve got kids of both sexes. When filling in the boy passport application, I noticed Master wasn’t there anymore so it was straight to Mr. So for our daughter, I went for Ms. The person in the post office wanted to change my form! It is so ducking wrong (IMO) to have a title that changes when you marry for one sex and not the other! Especially as the historical root for it is that women passed from their father’s possession to their husbands (hence the whole giving away bit of marriage ceremony which is largely defunct now I believe). And don’t get me onto the word History! I mean, it is literally HIS STORY!! Rant over! Back to the original post: the casual sexism in films in the 90s is shocking. Didn’t even notice it when living through the 90s! Also listened to a historic interview of the first international women footballs (60s/70s) and the questions the interview asked! OMG - the commentator even told one player she had the wrong decision when she wasn’t married (yes, the first question was, “are you married”) as her boyfriend of 2 years had said it was him or football and the commentator replied something along the lines of surely most girls would want the marriage!

Well "History" is derived from Historia which means inquiry. So it's not the literal definition of his story.

So I think you're getting a bit HISterical over nothing

Oh and when you’d run out free text messages on your phone plan (40p per text otherwise) I’d walk from my student house to the computer lab and send a text message from the Orange mobile network website.

I work in a publisher’s office which also has a print service and people occasionally come in for us to do photocopying and print documents etc as they haven’t got their own printer. Which I think is charming and retro in itself but the other day someone came in and asked if we could FAX A DOCUMENT to someone.

We do still actually have a fax machine but it’s usually just used as an answerphone/normal phone now. Anyway, the other staff were all “how do you fax something?” And I had to step in and do the fax. [proud]

Only obviously, there was no answer on the other end - I was imagining some ancient fax machine in a distant store room ringing away unanswered.

The person went off to try and find another method of communication.