Dial Up. Yeah I know the sound and I know the time it took to load anything with. But it’s something I won’t ever miss having. I would much rather be on a 1MB connection if I had to choose between that or dial up ever again. I also hated how easy it was to be kicked off, if anyone called the phone, you were off it in seconds.
Road trips before GPS and maps apps. Navigating off just paper maps and poor signage was not fun.
I don’t want to change back, but I still thought it added a sense of adventure, and having to be actively involved with the navigation gave you more awareness of where you were and where you were going. Now you just slavishly follow instructions and then some hours later you are there.
Like, we drove to Austria last summer and when we came back my dad asked me: so did you drive over Stuttgart or Nuremberg? And I honestly didn’t know.
Riding motorcycles is a way back to this sense of adventure. You sort out your path before riding, do your best to remember as much as you can, and then do your best while on the road for as long as you can. Pulling out a phone is a pain while riding, so you want to go as far as you can and happily improvise to see how well you can do.
You quickly get to the point where you learn to remember route numbers and such and can go pretty far on memory and educated guesses. Feels cool, and you start to learn an area well, getting to the point where you can give people quite detailed directions.
I dunno man, I don’t really get a sense of adventure when I had my giant ass paper map laying halfway across the fucking dash.
The funny part about driving to Austria from Germany is you only know you’re in Austria because the GPS lets you know the speed limit is 100.
Its a shame because it is something I am actually really good at, and now it’s a completely useless skill!
Time to play geoguessr
I navigated Europe in 1997 while hitchhiking using nothing more than paper maps and a sharpie to mark where I’ve been and where I wanted to go. It was pretty fun. Only got off track once or twice.
I originally read this as “what are you nostalgic about” and was confused by all the responses.
I am certainly not nostalgic about smoking sections in restaurants. Those half ass dividers that did nothing and the whole place smelling like an ash tray was not fun.
When I was in Germany recently I was shocked that if you sit on a lovely outdoor patio that smoking is allowed. So you either pick indoors and get no views or sit outdoors with the smokers.
Not to mention airplanes.
Yeah, jets taking off always ruin the ambiance at Applebee’s.
Phone calls in general. I’ve always been a computer nerd that prefers thinking about my responses and typing them out in front of a glowing rectangle.
God, I love my glowing rectangles 🥰
Working in an office. I get so much more done at home. With no sickness from selfish people who won’t mask when sick. Plus I can walk my dog multiple times a day. And cook real food.
I wish I could not work in an office
When COVID hit and I was going to work from home, I was convinced that I’d hate it. I assured myself that it was okay because COVID would only last a few weeks and then the world would get back to normal. (Oh how naive I was!)
Once I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. My commutes weren’t that bad before, but now it’s just “walk up the stairs.” I don’t need to worry about traffic or parking spaces at all. I also don’t need to worry about people stopping by to chat when I’m in the zone. Yes, people can message me on Teams, but it’s easy to switch over and postpone dealing with them if it’s not important.
Even meetings are nicer. Most of mine aren’t on camera so I can get up and walk around my work area during my meetings.
I’m even healthier working from home. Previously, I’d bring a bunch of food to work to make sure I’d have enough and then snack all day. Now, I don’t bother going back downstairs except for lunch and for that I can take time to make a healthy lunch (salad or something).
My current job is now permanently work from home (my “home base” was moved and is now a 10 hour drive away so I’m DEFINITELY not commuting in). I’m not going back if I can help it. (If I were to ever leave this job, I’d make working from home a priority.)
The first day I ever worked from home I was sold within an hour. If I could do my job without ever going back to the office I’d seriously consider taking a pay cut to make it happen
Listening to the radio
Limited selection, constant ads, and hit or miss sound quality. Digital music and podcasts are better in every way. The only thing I really miss is discovering new music on a local college radio station.
Great, reading this while listening to the radio, huge stereo wall, Onkio tuner, FM antenna in the attic, coax cable trough the house,… I have a constant quality and yes, internet radio is a tad better, but the biggest issue there is the delay. When you have radio in multiple rooms, the different delays are a use sourec of irritation. Also my wife finds the sount to harsh witn sattelite radio or DAB.
As long as FM is available, I’ll use it for radio. When it’s end of the road for FM, I’ll switch to my own collection. (And in the car, no alternative to FM, CD of cassette)
the radio, huge stereo wall, Onkio tuner, FM antenna in the attic, coax cable trough the house
hell yeah!! I loved listening to the radio growing up.
I still like it, but it’s more background music. The programming went from vertical (every day another style the whole day long) to horizontal (every day, same style at the same hours), which is really boring.
I still listen to the radio in my car even though I have Bluetooth. My car is an older model and there are times when it will stop auto connecting and I’ll have to connect it again. So, I’d rather just listen to the radio
I’m sorry for your loss
It’s not too bad. My favorite radio stations so far are 98.7 The Gator and NPR. As for commercials I mostly tune them out, but some I find pretty humorous and entertaining.
I personally prefer silence over radio.
I seriously wish I could disable the radio in my car. Nothing worse than accidentally turning it on and being blasted with an obnoxious commercial or overplayed pop song.
Disconnect the aerial, that should shut down anything but the most powerful stations. I’ve done that in my car
Pull the fuse? Disconnect the harness?
I still want my stereo for Bluetooth/USB, just no way to easily access AM/FM/satellite function in the stereo.
This makes me so happy about our community radio station. We lost the ok commercial station (had an “alternative rock” station that played good music and hosted awesome concerts). But kept the nonprofit community station, and good radio is a joy.
Pop up ads. They were a plague in the early internet day.
Myspace. There were so many poorly designed Myspace pages that were hard to read and would make it take longer to load the website.
“Pop-up blocking” started out as a feature of specialty web browsers like iCab and Opera. If I recall correctly, Firefox was the first “mainstream” browser to build it in as a feature; and Chrome supported it from the beginning.
My “favorite” (in hindsight only) popup experience: I was new to my job and was taking a short break from work to look something up on Barnes and Noble’s website. Except, I typed BarnesNNoble dot com instead of BarnesAndNoble. I was presented with the image of a woman sans clothing and it certainly wasn’t a book she was enjoying!
Obviously, I’m at work (and right down the hall from my boss). I do NOT want to be viewing this stuff now so I close the window. Except up pops another window with another woman definitely not reading. Close. Another one. Close. Another one. Close. Another one.
I actually started sweating because I was sure that my boss would walk in any moment and ask just WHAT I was looking at during work hours.
Finally, I managed to hit close before the pop-up script was able to run. We take pop-up blockers for granted today, but those times between the invention of the pop-up and the pop-up blocker were treacherous times to be online!
In the 80s, it was fairly common to call everyone by LGBT pejoratives. Hey, f-word, hey homo, hey queer.
It was like, no matter how manly you were your masculinity was constantly being challenged by the homophobic vernacular.
It’s amazing how nobody ever remembers this.
I remember this vivedly and I’m straight.
In high school, I was very awkward socially (decades later I could find out that it’s autism, but at that point it was just called “he’s shy and awkward”). I had a group of bullies who would follow me around taunting me.
Usually, they’d leave me alone if they were alone with me, but there was one exception. One of my bullies loved pretending to come onto me in the locker room. As if being in your underpants changing in front of other guys wasn’t embarrassing enough as a teen, this guy would pretend that he was gay (he definitely wasn’t) and that he was attracted to me.
I remember feeling ashamed of being identified by someone as possibly being gay. (A feeling that present day me realizes wasn’t right, but I was a teenager and being gay wasn’t widely accepted then.) I wanted desperately to prove that I was straight, but had no way of doing that. (See above about being extremely awkward socially - I didn’t have my first date until about a decade later.)
Yeah because by that point, men weren’t allowed to have feelings. Men had to be…Men who did MAN things. Working on cars - MAN thing. Drinking beers - MAN thing. Doing lumberjack or other fields of intensive labor - MAN thing. There was no room for these things called emotions because that made you a BOY and we need to separate the boys from the men! That was the kind of rhetoric that was instilled in male society for decades up to that point.
And it took someone like an animated character like Kenshiro from an anime to show people that it’s actually okay for guys to have feelings. In a show where he does an awful lot of manly things.
In my area of the world where queerness is still criminalised, people still use those terms openly.
It was pretty popular into the early 2000s as well as far as I’m concerned. Just not in media as much.
Options for word choices have diminished and aren’t as edgy, but I still see men call each other cupcakes and removed in lieu of using more classical words.
Edit: Guess there’s some pretty strong word filters here. It was the b-word in case anyone was wondering. Feel like I’m in elementary school…
I grew up in the 90’s being called fag/faggot a lot and I wasn’t even queer until like, my junior year of highschool when I discovered yaoi.
Cassette tapes. I like discs, but tapes… Damn that belongs in a museum. Even tho I do admire the technology.
(Unless for like, storage backup and stuff where it can be actually useful.)
You remember portable CD players before they had a buffer cache? Couldn’t even keep them in your pocket without skipping like mad.
I don’t, but I’m aware of that (same in cars). I only got into CDs near the end of their popularity, maybe that’s the main reason I’m sick of tapes and like discs. (Altho frankly, any portable/headphone audio was shit compared to what we have today.)
The thing that blows my mind about tape is that copying 1:1 is real time and takes the exact same time as the track is long. Or that making a copy always lowers quality with every generation. Analogue media is whack, man.
Absolutely! And if you had a cassette that you wanted to write over (that wasn’t meant to be recorded over), you had to stuff a piece of paper in it.
That write prevention was punch card technology. Floppy disks also used it.
And how they later market on later CD players as “now comes with 30 second anti-skip!” which barely worked.
In the late 90’s, the technology was incredible tho. The little machines were fucking monsters. A few years ago I’ve got a few portables from that era and even with antiskip disabled, it’s super hard to make some of them skip. With it enabled, it’s probably impossible without the device falling apart.
It’s also interesting how even despite obvious abuse and shitty shipping, those things work perfectly. The cheap plastics and close to zero weight would suggest they wouldn’t last a month, never mind 20 years.
I had an MP3 CD player that would still sometimes skip if things were bumpy enough. First time it happened, I was like !?
I still love CDs, but don’t miss vinyl records at all. I grew up in the original vinyl era and was very happy to no longer have to bother with a big and unwieldy format which is physically degraded during every play and which you have to tiptoe past the player to avoid making it skip.
I’m a vinyl guy and how you enjoy music doesn’t affect me, BUT: there’s something wrong with your setup. It’s not level if it’s that sensitive
I never got on board with CDs because no one knew how to master them for the first few years. Everything sounded quiet, tinny and harsh in the wrong way, so I went back to LPs. Eventually they figured out how to optimize music to that format but then the loudness wars came along and made everything sound like shit again. There was a brief period in the 90s when CDs sounded fantastic.
If you try to make records too loud the needle will physically jump out of the groove so they have to be relatively normalized (unless you try to fit too much music on one side in which case the record gets super quiet)
There is/was something like a loudness db. I’ve got a bunch of CDs from the top of the charts and man that’s so good.
You mean you don’t miss your tape deck eating your cassettes and having to wind them back into the cartridge with a pencil? Weird.
That’s at least better than chucking the broken tape out your car window and having it become a tape snarl by the side of the road.
I was visiting my parents one year and found some old cassette tapes. I showed them to my kids and played a song. My youngest liked the song and wanted to hear it again. He was surprised when I couldn’t just hit “repeat.” Instead, I needed to rewind, rewind, rewind. Not far enough. Rewind, rewind. Too far. Fast Forward. Too far. Rewind. Too far but good enough.
CDs are in decline and vinyl is prohibitively expensive and the lead times to get a record pressed are insane because your record will be stuck behind the millionth Urban Outfitters special edition of Rumors… so cassettes have made a weird comeback in underground scenes. Worst fucking format
I still have them, and a player (Nakamishi 700 ZXL), and a Revox B77 with reels. I don’t have functioning 8-tracks anymore. I have the tapes and equipment, but the tapes all broke. I need to find way to fix them (restore the loop).
There’s to much music lost just because the medium isn’t available anymore and it wasn’t economicaly viable to transfer it to a newer medium. So many records that didn’t get transferred to CD.
I don’t miss the cassette tapes, but I don’t miss even more the big cassette cases that I used to carry in my car with all the tapes in it!
Smokers and smoking. It was glorified in the 80s and 90s. You were seen as cool and manly. Such a bad habit.
It was glorified then, before that is what normalized which it much worse.
I still remember passing by “the pit.” That was the section where the high school kids were allowed to smoke. It was outdoors, but they always left the doors open. I needed to pass by to get to class and hated the stench. So I’d hold my breath. But the crowds were always slow so it was a game of “will I be forced to breathe the stench, will I get by in time, or will I pass out?”
I don’t miss it at all, but I couldn’t afford to do it today! The government is obviously trying to price people out of doing it. That’s not why I quit, but it would certainly make me if I still was.
I have fond memories of smoking at certain times in the 90s. But it was a filthy and unhealthy habit. Glad I quit without much damage being done.
I have to say, I miss how you’d go on smoke breaks. I love how the IT Crowd portrayed the social pariah that was smoking into the 2000s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvjS_c1U6zs
Cruelty of highschoolers
Yeah. If someone could give me $10 million, but I had to relive my 4 years of high school, I wouldn’t take the money.
I mean, 10 million can pay for a lot of therapy…
Gas lawn mowers. I hated reeking of exhaust fumes as a kid.
Almost everyone I see mowing is still using gas. Not sure that’s out of style/can be considered something that people could have nostalgia for.
Most people around me use battery powered ones. New gas ones will actually be illegal in my city in a year and a half. Good riddance.
I tried an electric like 6 years ago. Really didn’t cut it on the half acre. Hope they’ve gotten alot better these days.
Half acre you would definitely need a couple batteries. The longer lasting ones will get 60-70 minutes.
Alternative suggestion: cut down on the amount of grass you have. Clover (especially micro clover) does not get as tall and stays green much easier as well as being good for the soil. Creeping thyme is similar except it is even shorter.
Live in the south, almost no clover or thyme survives the summer. My yards probably half what people consider weeds, aka native plants but it requires regular mowing or Id get a ticket from the city.
Unfortunately nothing has changed. I live in a condo and our strata has landscapers show up twice a week. All I smell all day is gas fumes and cut grass. I asked our strata if they could hire a company that just does manual trimming without the noise and pollution but they shrugged and said if I can find better to bring it forward.
I have a cabled electric mower. I have to whip the cord all over like Indiana Jones when I change directions. I’d take gas over it in a heartbeat
I have a cabled lawn mower also. I’m not going back to gas. Whipping the cable around is a small price over breaking my bank trying to pull the cord repeatedly until it starts, breathing in the fumes, needing to check the oil, and needing to buy gas to fill it up with.
Plus, there are battery powered mowers now. You plug them in to charge and then mow your lawn cord-free.
I was just thinking about dial up last night while downloading a game update. My wifi was downloading like 1GB/min and I sat there absolutely amazed at how fast that was, thinking about how the younger me would’ve been mind-blown with that speed.
I don’t miss not knowing things. If I am unsure of something today I can pull out my phone and Google it. Although I do wish I had more of a reason to go to the library now
Younger me would have been kind blown about a 500mb hard drive.
That too! Imagine taking a 256 GB micro SD card to the past?
I remember getting my first computer: A 286 with a whole MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking that there is no way that I’d ever fill up that 40 MEGA-bytes!
Now, I’m typing this out on a phone with specs that would have shattered my brain at the time - and my phone isn’t even top of the line. “Wait, your phone has 128GB of storage? Like 3,000 of my 286 computers?!!!”
VHS tapes. The freed space moving to DVD and Blu-ray was most welcome.
Agreeing with that. Man, remember having to rewind the thing when you were done so the next watch was ready? Or realizing that it wasn’t rewound when you wanted to watch it and having to do it yourself?
Or thinking that you were about to watch a certain movie but someone taped over top of it? Good times…
Be Kind. Rewind
Incandescent bulbs, i hate them with every fiber of my being.
Lost opportunity to use “filament” over “fiber”
He was going to type filament, but it burnt out too quickly.
Why is that? The light they give off is generally pleasing.
They were very expensive to run and had to be constantly changed. As a kid we always had a drawer of replacement bulbs ready. I don’t bother any more they last so long.
Led bulbs give off very pleasant light these days if you get the right colour temperature.
They usually don’t last more than 4 months, they waste a lot of electricity and they are too hot compared to LEDs.
They’re just so fussy - like for example growing up we had to use floor lamps everywhere in our house because whoever before us wired up the overhead lights used a really low max wattage so we were stuck with a pissy lumen output
Now with LEDs? I can stuff 1k lumen bulbs into a 40 watt socket with no problem! I can finally fucking see things now without needing like five extra lights! And I don’t need to worry about heat! (As much).
I don’t miss constantly running around changing incandescent light bulbs! It seemed like there was always one burned out in the house somewhere. In my experience the newer bulbs don’t necessarily last the length of time that’s advertised, but they sure as heck last longer than the old style.
CRTs in TVs and monitors. Heavy bastards with small DPI.
Yeah but they were particle accelerators that shot electrons towards your face at relativistic speeds (the phosphor grid and lead lining made use more pleasurable). That’s just too damn cool.
Barely relativistic: 10 - 20% of speed of light. But I agree, from technology point of view, that was very cool.
One type of CRT I miss is monochrome vector CRT. This is where the image was drawn, as opposed to rastered from pixels. Although, with “retina” displays, this became less important, it was still cool technology.
They also feel fuzzy! Mmmmm TV fuzz…
