Remember When

Quote: AZDuffman

Quote: AutomaticMonkey

Quote: Dieter

Quote: EvenBob

Quote: Dieter

I don't remember the old big headlights being all that complicated. The aiming adjustment screws were separate from the mounting screws; pull the wire, pull the trim ring, and hold your hand (gloved! It's hot!) so the glass doesn't hit the pavement. Jiggle the new one in, secure it with the trim ring, and wire it up.

It was actually a lot easier than half these newfangled bulbs where you need to either pull the battery to get to it from the back, or pull the whole reflector lens out to get enough room.

The modern permanent headlights are stupidly expensive if they ever do need changing, but most people just get a new car before the LED 's are expected to burn out.
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So you changed a lot of headlights on 50s and 60s cars then? They were always burning out And I always carried at least two. Same thing with brake lights And the thermostat. You could always tell when the thermostat was bad'cause you didn't get any heat coming out from under the dashboard.
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A handful. My recollection is that they were all very similar until the late 1970's when rectangular lights started to appear. Those still had the same basic mechanism, just with corners, and maybe no alignment notch.

Cars, pickups, motorcycles, farm equipment, bulldozers... headlights is headlights.

In the 1990's, the little bulbs that slipped into the reflector/lens assembly started to show up. Those were different than the big glass bulb with the fresnel front and the mirrored parabola in the back.
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There were always 4 versions of headlights- square, round, and a 2 bulb system or 4 bulb system either square or round. As I recall high end GM had 4 square, Mopar used 4 round, Ford used 1 round and AMC used 1 square, but there were many exceptions.

You could buy them in a lot of places and if a store sold motor oil good chance they had headlights. But I had to be careful when discussing them, as due to sharing an accent with Springsteen "headlights" can be pronounced the same as a condition associated with schoolchildren who try on each other's hats, leading to unfortunate misunderstandings when asking a store clerk if they have them.

Yes, I need to be careful when using the colloquial term for the lowest ranked card in a deck of cards as well.
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When I was a kid some goof on the next block set his truck with one square and one round.
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If you got it one piece at a time, you can have two on the left and one on the right. I understand this provides some visual balance to the one tail fin.

Anybody else remember that before 1978 there were no zip lock sandwich bags. The zip lock system was invented in 1950 but like everything else it takes 15 or 20 years before you actually see it on the market. Television was invented around 1930 but you didn't start seeing it in a lot of houses until almost 1950. Transistors were invented in the late 1940s but I never saw a transistor radio before 1960.

Quote: DRich

Remember when you had a 300 baud acoustic modem. It would take almost four hours to download a song. That was my first modem.

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I remember trying to download something for almost 8 hours, and somewhere just before the 7 hour mark the connection broke, and I got nothing.

Quote: DRich

Quote: AZDuffman

Quote: EvenBob

Just watching old car video and I was remembering the days when you actually carried extra headlights in your trunk for when you had to change them and what a pain in the ass that was. This was the 60s and 70s when you did all the car work yourself. There was no fast oil change places that would also change a headlight. The hardest part was centering it so it wasn't shining up into the trees. The good old days..
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Speaking of cars and trips, remember when it was so cool to spend hours downloading songs on Napster then burning to CD? On dial up a song took like 20 mins. It was awesome.

Now I am ripping songs from YT in about a minute then putting them on the phone for bluetooth. The old way seems so old.
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Remember when you had a 300 baud acoustic modem. It would take almost four hours to download a song. That was my first modem.


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This is the 1982 news story that convinced DRich to buy his first computer in the mid 80s. The part I like is it takes months to learn how to use it and once you learn it does almost nothing.

1985 is like yesterday to me. I remember in 1993 I saw somebody pay at the pump with a credit card and I was blown away. Seriously, it shocked me. I just looked it up in 1994 only 13% of gas stations had pay at the pump. It wasn't until 1998 when I got my first Visa card. Even then I hardly used it. Now I never pay cash for anything anywhere. I have the same $37 in my wallet that I had a year ago.

what merchants have to pay went up, and around here most places charge you a 3% fee for using a credit card. The exception seems to be restaurants and the like

I got tired of not having change when I pay cash [a lot now] and purchased a coin purse like I used to have

Ahh... the old vinyl football.
Most of the old guys I knew who carried coin purses chose the leather folding octagon, or the leather horseshoe.

Both designs have merit.

A number of designs look like a leather pouch, but with a spring that is squeezed to open. The people I knew who carried those used them for hearing aids and batteries, rather than coins.

Quote: EvenBob

Quote: DRich

Quote: AZDuffman

Quote: EvenBob

Just watching old car video and I was remembering the days when you actually carried extra headlights in your trunk for when you had to change them and what a pain in the ass that was. This was the 60s and 70s when you did all the car work yourself. There was no fast oil change places that would also change a headlight. The hardest part was centering it so it wasn't shining up into the trees. The good old days..
link to original post

Speaking of cars and trips, remember when it was so cool to spend hours downloading songs on Napster then burning to CD? On dial up a song took like 20 mins. It was awesome.

Now I am ripping songs from YT in about a minute then putting them on the phone for bluetooth. The old way seems so old.
link to original post

Remember when you had a 300 baud acoustic modem. It would take almost four hours to download a song. That was my first modem.


link to original post

This is the 1982 news story that convinced DRich to buy his first computer in the mid 80s. The part I like is it takes months to learn how to use it and once you learn it does almost nothing.

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Bob, I was already programming computers in 1982. I bought my first computer with money I made at my computer programming jobs.

I lost my best friend to a computer right around 1982/83. He was a normal, pot-smoking, beer-drinking yute until one day he heard the tone of a dial-up modem and was hooked. He bought something at Radio Shack and started building a motherboard. He rarely left his room for the next few years. He was arrested for phone phreaking or something like that, and avoided jail by joining the Air Force. When he got out, he got a job with Computer Associates, and they sent him to California.