Pre- mobiles and internet time, question for those who knew it

[User32269]

Really, it was not uncommon for people in the UK not to have landlines in 1987? Wow.

No. My mum and dad thought they were only for posh people. Along with colour TV, home ownership, further education and any form of employment that didn't involve digging holes.

 

[ColinJ]

If a teenager without well-off parents wanted a decent stereo amp (s)he might ... spend a month or two learning basic electronics, how to use a soldering iron etc. Buy copies of Practical Wireless, Practical Electronics (whatever) and select an amplifier project. Read the ads and find companies doing the printed circuit boards for the project in question and order them. Write letters to various other companies (or phone them) to ask for copies of their component catalogues. Wait for the catalogues to arrive. Fill the order forms in for the various companies, write cheques to them and send off the orders. Wait a week or two for the parts to arrive. There would always be some parts out of stock. Find alternative mail order suppliers for them, or catch the bus to the city centre and go to the local electronics supply store. (They were more expensive, so that's why you didn't get all the parts from them in the first place.) Spend a few nights soldering the components onto the PCBs. Make a case for the amp and put the various bits into that. Test the amp. Spend a week trying to work out why it wasn't working properly. Fix it. Several months after you started out, you finally had a working stereo amp!

As opposed to (a) Get your mum and/or dad to buy you an amp from Richer Sounds on their way back from work or (b) Using your smartphone, order an amp from the Richer Sounds website. Several hours (or maybe a day or two) later you have a working stereo amp which is more powerful than the one your granddad built, and cost less!

I built a computer with 4 kilobytes of memory, no external storage, very low resolution display on our SDTV. It cost me over £300 at a time when I was earning £100/week!

 

[Smithbat]

Really, it was not uncommon for people in the UK not to have landlines in 1987? Wow.

My grandparents died in 1985 and they were one of many in our village who did not have a land line. The only reason ours was put in originally was because my grandfather was a volunteer fireman and he had to have one to make his bell work. He preceded the 'beeper' generation.

My Aunt and Uncle only had a land line when they moved house in 1993, up until then if they wanted to phone someone, they would come and use ours.

 

[Smithbat]

If a teenager without well-off parents wanted a decent stereo amp (s)he might ... spend a month or two learning basic electronics, how to use a soldering iron etc. Buy copies of Practical Wireless, Practical Electronics (whatever) and select an amplifier project. Read the ads and find companies doing the printed circuit boards for the project in question and order them. Write letters to various other companies (or phone them) to ask for copies of their component catalogues. Wait for the catalogues to arrive. Fill the order forms in for the various companies, write cheques to them and send off the orders. Wait a week or two for the parts to arrive. There would always be some parts out of stock. Find alternative mail order suppliers for them, or catch the bus to the city centre and go to the local electronics supply store. (They were more expensive, so that's why you didn't get all the parts from them in the first place.) Spend a few nights soldering the components onto the PCBs. Make a case for the amp and put the various bits into that. Test the amp. Spend a week trying to work out why it wasn't working properly. Fix it. Several months after you started out, you finally had a working stereo amp!

As opposed to (a) Get your mum and/or dad to buy you an amp from Richer Sounds on their way back from work or (b) Using your smartphone, order an amp from the Richer Sounds website. Several hours (or maybe a day or two) later you have a working stereo amp which is more powerful than the one your granddad built, and cost less!

I built a computer with 4 kilobytes of memory, no external storage, very low resolution display on our SDTV. It cost me over £300 at a time when I was earning £100/week!

You are heading back into nerd territory again

 

[ColinJ]

You are heading back into nerd territory again

It is 30 years since I built anything. I enjoyed it when I could make things that I couldn't otherwise afford, but how can you make your own smartphone for under £100!

The nearest you could come these days would be to buy something like an iPhone with a broken screen on eBay and repair it yourself.

PS That reminds me - @Oldfentiger kindly donated a broken Garmin GPS to me. I am going to repair that and use it to guide me on my hilly forum rides!

 

[classic33]

You are heading back into nerd territory again

Enjoying what may be his last days of freedom!

 

[raleighnut]

You are heading back into nerd territory again

You can still get the kits to build your own valve amps @ColinJ

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rc...e.html&usg=AFQjCNH0xNkT0NJZ5yTU2E58fX03-EF-ww

 

[Globalti]

I dread to think what my teenage years would have been like if texting had been available. We used to write letters and use the house phone to call friends, sometimes spending an hour chatting away - does anybody else remember their parents complaining about the phone bills? At college during free time we would wander around the usual haunts asking people "have you seen so-and-so?" for no real reason other than to have something to say. With mobile phones and texting, I can see that I'd have been glued to the damned thing all day just like my teenage son is nowadays.I still write letters but only to one elderly French friend. It's more the ridiculous cost of postage than the ease of texting that has stopped me writing because I enjoy it.

 

[Starchivore]

Thanks everyone for so many responses! It really has made for fascinating reading for me, all of it, so many different thoughts and stories.

 

[Starchivore]

I was musing the other day about how my daughter is missing out on one of the great pleasures of my university life: dropping in on people. Back then, you'd finish a piece of work at 3 in the morning and if you were in the mood just go for a wander round your friends' rooms. Sooner or later you'd come across a door with light showing under it, and you could drop in for a coffee. No-one 'drops in' anymore...they'd have to check first, which just isn't the same.

Yes I definitely feel myself that, it being so easy to get hold of someone quickly, actually knocking on a friend's door to ask if they want to go do something or whatever almost seems somehow too assertive, almost aggressively assertive. Because it is in comparison to sending a text first I suppose.

When I was at uni most of us did wedge our doors open in the halls a lot of the time, to kind of invite interaction. But I refused to sign up for Facebook and really cut myself out of a lot there- no one did that deliberately, but it just made it hard for me to know all the things going on. In hindsight I should have just swallowed my pride at the start and signed up but there you go.

Absolutely, 100%, YES!
It's far too easy to keep in contact with people now, through so many mediums, that IMHO it has watered down the value of keeping in touch with someone. I think what I am trying to say is that it has lost it's specialness.
I remember from my Merchant Navy days that when you left home to go and join a ship, that meant your only contact with people at home was going to be by the occasional letter or postcard until you came home 5 or 6 months later. When you DID get home, it meant that the catching up was amazing; you had a load of stories to tell, as did those you had left behind. Now? Everybody would know your every move while you were away by logging in to FaceBook.

My girlfriend has said similar to this- she meets up with her "old" friends back down south and they all already know what the other has been up to because it's all been seen on Facebook! Doesn't preclude discussion but does dampen the fun a bit, surely.

I miss letter writing. When I was at uni there was a pay phone for urgent matters but for all other communications with family we would exchange letters. I used to look forward to writing about what I'd done in the week and I always enjoyed the anticipation of picking up letters from friends and family. And when I met my future wife, then living 300 miles away, it was mostly through letters that we started to get to know each other.

When I was 20 I went abroad for 3 months in a summer. I had a new girlfriend and as you can imagine I was pretty keen and a bit torn about going. I wasn't going to have much internet access, definitely not for Skype, and so we did email a bit but used letters to properly communicate- mainly just for the fun of it I think.

I remember being homesick after the first 4 weeks and these letters took like 2 weeks to travel (and she was a very, very busy person who, again in hindsight, didn't exactly prioritise me too much.....) getting that first letter was just the most incredible pleasure, I was so happy to get it. Four pages from someone you're that into, when you haven't seen them in a while and are a long way from home, it was amazing. I think letters facilitate "saying more", because they are slightly removed in comparison to instant messaging and talking on the phone. You tend to be a bit bolder and more honest, because they aren't going to see it straightaway or respond immediately and somehow that makes it easier, I think.

At the time it seemed OK, but looking back it was completely useless

As a teenager....arranging to meet someone and they're delayed but you have no idea, or you're standing in the wrong place or whatever. Meet some girl and find you've got no way of keeping in touch except letter writing or a tortuous arrangement with payphones. Losing touch with people you went to school with.
It wasn't better. It was shoot

That does sound like a pain, waiting around not knowing if someone is going to turn up or not, or maybe they were delayed and you leae and just miss them.
I wouldn't mind the losing contact with people from school though, personally. I only have three I deliberately have kept in touch with. Although come to think of it that would be harder without phones and internet, yes.

I used to write letters at university to one of my college friends. In the end she told me to stop writing and just text. Ironically enough a while later she tried to contact me on facebook where I didn't read the message till three years later . A Christmas card appeared at my home address last year despite her saying she couldn't remember where I lived and having not repeated it .

That's a shame, I think a lot of people would be happy to still write! I think you can find people who want penpals still, my girlfriend has one.

 

[Starchivore]

nce, and my partner was in NZ. Pre-mobile, she'd worry that I was impaled on a tree half-way down Ventoux or some such. Now, we could chat (briefly, cos it's still ruddy expensive) each morning (my time) / evening (her time) and when she got up the following day, it would be to a few txts advising the highlights of my day and that I was safely at the next hotel.
Getting a call from a work colleague at 3 am, however, is less welcome...

I think that can be a bit double-edged though. Because for a lot of people now, if they don't hear from you, they assume something bad has happened. Whereas way-back-when not hearing from someone for a day who's gone away wouldn't necessarily be a cause for big concern.

When I left school at eighteen, I set off alone on the overland trail to Nepal, hitching and using local buses and trains. I was away for four or five months, I forget which. My family received four postcards while I was away.. Years later, my mother confessed that she found the first three weeks of postal silence a bit difficult.

Edit: I took a grand total of 36 Kodachrome slide photos on the whole trip. Hosing your friends down with the tedious small details of your life had yet to become fashionable.
Oh dear... I seem to be doing it...

Photos - I well remember as a kid waiting for the photos to come back to boots to see "if they had come out".

I think that it is amazing the photography capabilities available now with phones..... but the flipside is some people now seem to have a compulsive need to document everything. A lot of gigs have several plonkers who want to film pretty much every song, so you have to peer round the screen of their gigantic phone/

I actually as a kid had a camera with film too. And it was good fun to get them back to see how they were (ah, three there with someone's finger over the lense!) And you're more likely to get some quirky pictures that grow on you (but might now now be deleted immediately in the chase for perfection).

 

[Vapin' Joe]

Really, it was not uncommon for people in the UK not to have landlines in 1987? Wow.

When I began as a driving instructor in 1985 one of the questions you asked a new pupil was, "Are you on the phone"? Not everyone was and I'd only got one myself in '82. Mind you, back then we only had one TV - we now have four dotted about the house (And we don't watch all that much) plus six phones, the two fixed ones that were here when we moved in plus the cordless which came with another three satellite handsets.

 

[mybike]

It is 30 years since I built anything. I enjoyed it when I could make things that I couldn't otherwise afford, but how can you make your own smartphone for under £100!

The nearest you could come these days would be to buy something like an iPhone with a broken screen on eBay and repair it yourself.

PS That reminds me - @Oldfentiger kindly donated a broken Garmin GPS to me. I am going to repair that and use it to guide me on my hilly forum rides!

My problem these days is seeing what I'm doing.

 

[Deleted member 1258]

When I began as a driving instructor in 1985 one of the questions you asked a new pupil was, "Are you on the phone"? Not everyone was and I'd only got one myself in '82. Mind you, back then we only had one TV - we now have four dotted about the house (And we don't watch all that much) plus six phones, the two fixed ones that were here when we moved in plus the cordless which came with another three satellite handsets.

We didn't have a phone until the mid 1980's, and we only got one because my Good lady insisted on us getting one. Now we don't have a landline phone as we've all gone over to mobiles.

 

[mustang1]

Good thread!

People always go on about how things were better in "the old days" meaning when they were younger. I'm sure many young people today, when they get to my age, will probably say the same (they preferred the days of Google/Twitter/Facebook etc rather than whatever is new in 20 years from now).

Buuuut, I really did like things without mobile phones. Buuuut I loved it when I got onto CompuServe and the various other services that were around. Idk, sometimes I prefer pre, sometimes I prefer post. One thing I hate in the post is just constantly being available and switching off the phone isn't an option.