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Things that don't change


Yeast

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Remember rotary dial telephones that hung on the wall and had only a single ring tone? Totally mechanical typewriters? Adding machines? How about TV sets - I man the real kind with the big cathode ray tube? Seems this technology got collectively sucked into a black hole known as the iPhone. Now, what hasn't changed the last 50 years? The only thing I can think of are stop signs and fishing poles. Maybe forks and spoons, although the "spork" was meant to replace them. I suppose only nerds like these things. Remember the Encyclopedia Britannica? Swallowed whole by an iPhone somewhere. Although one would not think so, automobiles haven't changed a lot. Aside from the iTechnology chewing away at them from the inside out, cars still have 4 rubber tires, internal combustion engines, control systems such as steering wheels and rear view mirrors. They just look as though they've changed. What else hasn't changed?

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The current reigning English monarch hasn't changed during the lifetime of most of us. It seems like she is immortal!

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1 minute ago, CBC said:

Not if you lived in a very rural area and it was a party line! Anyone remember different ring sequences (a mix of long and short mostly, kind of like Morse code) for different households? You pick up when you hear your ring and leave it when it's someone else's.

 

(I know that's the opposite to the point of this thread, haha.)

Really? Never heard anything like it! How interesting!

 

I would say human nature hasn't changed but that's a bit too easy. I think apart from ready made dinners, the way we cook food hasn't changed that much. There were microwaves in the 60s and 70s already but in spite of all those predictions of 'robots doing all the work' and food replicators as in star trek, none of that has happened. Depending on where you live (the UK is a good example (fortunately!!!)) what we eat has changed a lot, though.

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1 hour ago, CBC said:

This was rural northern-ish Ontario. My aunt and uncle have a cottage on a lake there, and shared phone lines with other residences. That might still be the case now tbh, I'm not sure.

My parents seemed to hold out to get a phoneline until well in the 1970s for some reason. I had an accident one day and I remember them running to the neighbours to call a doctor. At the moment they rarely watch TV, don't have internet, let alone a computer and hardly ever use a mobile phone.

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1 hour ago, CBC said:

Not if you lived in a very rural area and it was a party line! Anyone remember different ring sequences (a mix of long and short mostly, kind of like Morse code) for different households? You pick up when you hear your ring and leave it when it's someone else's.

 

(I know that's the opposite to the point of this thread, haha.)

Party lines were the early version of Facebook.

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14 minutes ago, Acing It said:

My parents seemed to hold out to get a phoneline until well in the 1970s for some reason. I had an accident one day and I remember them running to the neighbours to call a doctor. At the moment they rarely watch TV, don't have internet, let alone a computer and hardly ever use a mobile phone.

Were you Amish?

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1 hour ago, Acing It said:

Really? Never heard anything like it! How interesting!

 

I would say human nature hasn't changed but that's a bit too easy. I think apart from ready made dinners, the way we cook food hasn't changed that much. There were microwaves in the 60s and 70s already but in spite of all those predictions of 'robots doing all the work' and food replicators as in star trek, none of that has happened. Depending on where you live (the UK is a good example (fortunately!!!)) what we eat has changed a lot, though.

TV dinners in the 50s.

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1 minute ago, Nick2 said:

Were you Amish?

Sounds like it, doesn't it? But, no 🙂 They are just happy with what they have I suppose and technology is... not of interest to them. It's a shame because I live miles away and it would be enjoyable and nice for us to talk face to face then over the phone. My mum is more 'traditional' than her parents.  

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11 minutes ago, Nick2 said:

Party lines were the early version of Facebook.

Never heard of that, at all. What are party lines?

8 minutes ago, Nick2 said:

TV dinners in the 50s.

Did they exist in the 50s? Not that I would know (see comment about my parents above). That was the good implication to a traditional family: traditional dinners/meals at a proper table with proper cutlery. Dinner time was family time, not TV time, which was lovely as a child, and even now. It'sd quality time spent with others in the family, not with soap stars! 😂 It's a thing that hasn't changed in 50 years either I think.

 

Edit: just looked it up. TV dinners did exist in the 1950s but they look suspiciously like modern day school dinners in England. 😂

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When I first met my husband-to-be in the early '80s, his parents had a party line (but I didn't know it). We were eating dinner at their house one night, when the phone rang...but everyone just sat there eating and ignored it! It kept ringing, but no one made a move to answer it. Finally I asked why, and was told, "Oh, that's not our ring"! I had never known anyone with a party line before and had no idea that they even still existed at that point. It was all very surreal.

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 plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

(usually translated as "the more things change, the more they stay the same")

 

Things that don't change:

human nature (people have been complaining about the same things as far back as records go, such as older generations complaining about newer generations)

 

I'd say the details change, but the stories remain the same.

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6 hours ago, Nick2 said:

Party lines where phone lines.  If you got a call everyone in a certain area could pick up their phone and listen in.

When I was a little kid - like under 5 - we had a party line.  You could pick up the phone and hear the neighbors talking.  We shared the party line with one other home.  I have thought back on that party line experience several times and I think it is really weird, but, it was completely normal at the time.  Kinda like outhouses.

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Wellies. Floormops, kettles, toasters, there's lots of household appliances. 

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12 hours ago, Nick2 said:

Party lines where phone lines.  If you got a call everyone in a certain area could pick up their phone and listen in.

🤣 For some reason I hooked on the the idea of party lines as in party with music, drink and lots of people and fun. I thought 'eh?? That doesn't make sense."

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18 hours ago, CBC said:

This was rural northern-ish Ontario. My aunt and uncle have a cottage on a lake there, and shared phone lines with other residences. That might still be the case now tbh, I'm not sure.

My parents had a party line in the suburbs of a medium-sized western NY city in the late 1950s.  They had a private line by the time I was born.

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We didn’t have a party line when I was a kid, but I do recall that an operator could break in to your phone conversation in case of emergency. I was once chatting with a friend when the operator interrupted with news that my uncle was being taken to the hospital. My aunt couldn’t get through to us directly because of the busy signal. I guess the operator interruption was a precursor to call waiting.-_-

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The aerospace industry likes to keep an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. There’s a lot of aircraft for example that were designed decades ago and are still flying and being produced. For stuff that get shot into space, they often use extremely oldschool tech because even though the performance isn’t like modern stuff, it’s much more sturdy and reliable.

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40 minutes ago, Semisweet said:

We didn’t have a party line when I was a kid, but I do recall that an operator could break in to your phone conversation in case of emergency. I was once chatting with a friend when the operator interrupted with news that my uncle was being taken to the hospital. My aunt couldn’t get through to us directly because of the busy signal. I guess the operator interruption was a precursor to call waiting.-_-

That’s still true today on landline calls, at least in the US.

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Janus the Fox

Beds, it's still a frame, mattress, pillow and covers.  This hasn't changed in hundreds of years despite mattresses being sold as 'New Technology'

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2 hours ago, Gwaeren said:

The aerospace industry likes to keep an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. There’s a lot of aircraft for example that were designed decades ago and are still flying and being produced.

I remember an interesting documentary about American intelligence during the cold war. Plans for a manned spy satellite were presented. The vehicle looked exactly like the space shuttle. I think it rode piggy back on a large jet before disengaging and then using its own engine to achieve orbit. It landed like the space shuttle did. Then there was a Nazi hangar opened just after the war.  It contained a wooden airplane which looked exactly like a modern stealth bomber. Its unusual shape was designed not to allow radar waves to bounce off.  Basic aircraft anatomy  has changed only once in 100 years. The Wright flyer was the first machine capable of powered flight, but it flew backward. The tail was in the front and the engine was behind the operator.  Probably explains why so many of these things crashed. 

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The way in which we iron our clothes hasn't changed. It still remains a horrible time consuming household task which most people hate.

 

So called "non iron" shirts and "crease free" cycles on washing machines are pretty much useless becsuse the items still come out with enough creases that they still need ironing anyway. Anyone who comes up with a viable invention for getting garments free of creases without the time and effort it takes to iron them will make a fortune. 

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On 1/18/2020 at 4:18 PM, Nick2 said:
On 1/18/2020 at 4:03 PM, Acing It said:

My parents seemed to hold out to get a phoneline until well in the 1970s for some reason. I had an accident one day and I remember them running to the neighbours to call a doctor. At the moment they rarely watch TV, don't have internet, let alone a computer and hardly ever use a mobile phone.

Were you Amish?

Not having a phone, hydro or indoor running water was very common in the part of southern Ontario I grew up in until the mid to late 1970s.   

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Vermont still had party lines into the '80s, and the whole state didn't have electricity until 1963 when the last 2 towns got electric.

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14 hours ago, pickles mcgee said:

We have yet to build a better mousetrap.

Perhaps we have. I saw one that was a bucket with a ruler attached to the lip. Bait was placed at the end of the ruler. The mouse would walk down the ruler which would tilt down and the mouse would drop into the bucket.  It could then be disposed of somewhere it wouldn't get back inside the house. Maybe inside a cat. Mice are cute but that's the only positive thing one can say about them.

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23 hours ago, pickles mcgee said:

We have yet to build a better mousetrap.

It was a snappy design 😋😋

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  • 2 weeks later...
CrazyCatLover

My dad moved to Vermont in the 1970s. They didn't want a party line, so they said that someone in the household had a medical condition. The phone company gave them a private line so that they could discuss said medical condition privately. 

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On 1/28/2020 at 10:50 PM, Yeast said:

Perhaps we have. I saw one that was a bucket with a ruler attached to the lip. Bait was placed at the end of the ruler. The mouse would walk down the ruler which would tilt down and the mouse would drop into the bucket.  It could then be disposed of somewhere it wouldn't get back inside the house. Maybe inside a cat. Mice are cute but that's the only positive thing one can say about them.

I think we have. I have one of these which doesn't kill anything. Much better than needlessly breaking their necks or electrocuting them IMO. You do need to let them go somwhere far away, though.

45397-mouse-live-trap-metal-with-window.

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