Once a person left the house, you couldn’t reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
You could only watch cartoons after school or on Saturday mornings.
It is now safe to turn off your computerI’m not old enough to know this one.
Old computers wouldn’t turn themselves off, they had no mechanism to control whether they remained on. Power was controlled by a heavy duty switch on the side of the PC (some manufacturers moved it to the front or something too, but many had it on the side/back).
When ATX became a thing, power controls were done by a trigger wire from the main board to tell the PSU to turn on fully. This is how things are still done. With 80+ Silver/gold/whatever rated PSUs they actually don’t really turn off anymore, power draw just drops to next to nothing when the system is “off”.
The hardware switch would physically disconnect the power to the PSU. So when you shut down, this message was displayed, most notably by Windows 9x, to inform you that it had finished the shutdown process and you could flick the switch to turn the power off, and it wouldn’t cause any damage to the system.
I’m not young enough to know what “cap” and “no cap” mean
Same
Games used to come with books to read, and their anti-piracy measure was to give you a page number and tell you to enter the first word on the page to activate the software.
Of course, you’d copy that floppy and write the code word on the label for your friends.
My jpeg stopped downloading cause my roommate picked up the phone.
Internet you could hear, literally.
Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.
Insects. At night there would be plenty of insects under every singe street lamp. The windscreen would be full of yellow goo after driving in summer.
Snow. It used to last the whole winter and not just 2 days here and there.
If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.
If they were in the same city, you only needed 7…
Using pencils to manually rewind cassette tapes.
I love how the title is “Tell me what it means” and then 747 replies later, no one has done that.
Tamagotchi and a Walkman with skip protection
To continue installing a game you had to type in the 7th word found on page 16, paragraph 3 on line 4.
Huh? What does this mean?
Old anti piracy measure.
Games were on floppies and could be copied trivially. Games also came with a printed instruction manual. If you bought it, you’d have the manual. If you’re just playing a copy you wouldn’t. So type one word from a specific page so we know you own the game.
TV had an end. After a last program or movie that ended after midnight, broadcast stopped and it only showed the test card.
When you bought a thing you owned it.
I actually know what this means, from getting my mom’s Atari to work on my grandmother’s TV
I think it was channel 2 for that one though, idk. We switched to using the flatscreen because of the annoying high pitched noise. (To the annoyance of all retro gamers who read this)
