A wire coat hanger shoved into the back of the TV to get it working
Going next door to borrow the phone because you've been downloading something all day and didn't want to lose it
Being hyper aware of the current status of the street lights in summer evenings
Watching the Challenger burn up.
Nuclear war drills hiding under my desk.
Game related - monochrome monitors
TV had an end. After a last program or movie that ended after midnight, broadcast stopped and it only showed the test card.
I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.
You couldn't just listen to the same music track on repeat - you had to rewind at the end before you could listen to it again.
I was a beta tester for AOL, so they’d send me all of those dumb discs. None of the actual software ever changed or improved. All they did was change the graphics around the guts of it. Their whole strategy was essentially fooling people via appearances. I liked collecting the discs though.
My first internet before AOL was Prodigy. I was in a DOS terminal when I was a kid.
Sometimes you'd go to pick up the phone to call someone but you couldn't because your neighbor was busy talking, so you'd have to put the receiver down gently in hopes they didn't hear it and think you were eavesdropping on them.
Channel 3 was an actual channel in my area, so we used the dip switch to select channel 4 instead.
There was a video game console that used clear colored plastic that you would stick onto the tv to show different colored areas on the screen. It also came packaged with dice and paper money.
Picking up the phone to make a call, and getting yelled at by the neighbor for not checking for a dialtone before dialling. Alternatively, learning how to screw out the mouth piece (muting the handset) and pick up the receiver without making a noise so I could listen to the neighbour gossip.
Standing in line in the basement of the CS building at UofM to get access to a card punch machine and type up my Fortran 4 program.
How to test vacuum tubes to fix the TV. Or maybe just watching black and white TV and I was the remote. Being able to buy bottled pop out of a pop machine for 15 cents AND it had Near Beer in it.
You could get kicked off the internet if someone picked up the phone.
Connecting to the internet was loud and took a few minutes at best.
To watch different channels, you may have needed to turn a rotor to turn the roof antenna because the stations were in a different physical direction.
I remember when printers would print without being sassy & extortionate.
It also had a switch to make it work on channel 4 if you, for some bizarre reason, were a weirdo and needed that.
The sounds your computer would make if it was connecting to dialup Internet, or the sound you would hear if someone was using said dialup and you picked up the phone.
PC speakers and how they differed from regular speakers, or the fact that you needed a sound card if you wanted sound that wasn't just beeps.
Buying the car kit so I could connect my CD Walkman (with 15 second ESP) to the cigarette lighter and cassette deck in my first car.
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