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  • #16
    (pedantic curmudgeon mode *on*)

    Fax machines date back to the 1800s. A bit after the Civil Wars as I recall.

    TV remote controls go back to the 1950s (the early ones were ultrasonic).

    TVs and TV broadcasting go back to the 1930s (there were TV broadcasts associated with the New York World's Fair that featured the Trylon and Perisphere.)

    BASIC was never the only computer language. Both FORTRAN and COBOL predate it. And I'm fairly sure *they* weren't the first "high level" languages.

    Microwave ovens are a lot older than most folks realize as well. The Amana RadarRange dates back to the 60s (maybe even the 50s). Spendy as hell, though.

    A *lot* of things go back *way* farther than most folks think.

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    • #17
      ComputerNecromancer has a point there, but most of those items weren't standard, at least not where I live. Only wealthy people could buy a lot of those things. TV, of course, has been around for a long time, but I remember my mother telling the story of how her family got their first TV when she was a young girl (she was born in 1932). I forget how old she was but I believe it was older than 10. So her family didn't get a TV until at least 1942.

      My grandparents, and my mother, used wringer washers until well into the 1960s because they worked, and an automatic washer was expensive. I still remember my grandma's washer with its timer (we used to sneak downstairs to their flat and set the timer so the bell would ring suddenly while they were doing something else )

      A lot of things we take for granted were once "the latest thing" and not available to the average joe, especially if you didn't live in a big city. You had to wait until the price came down to middle class or lower-middle-class level.

      It still surprises me how some people rush out and buy the latest i-thing for several hundred dollars a pop, even though the "old" version still works fine. Not saying they shouldn't--just a different viewpoint.
      When you start at zero, everything's progress.

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      • #18
        This video is obligatory for this whole post. Enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk
        "That's too bad. Hospitals aren't fun to fight through."
        "What IS fun to fight through?"
        "Gardens. Electronics shops. Antique stores, but only if they're classy."

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        • #19
          BASIC was never the only computer language. Both FORTRAN and COBOL predate it. And I'm fairly sure *they* weren't the first "high level" languages.
          You're correct - FORTRAN and COBOL (as well as many newer languages such as Pascal and C) are sometimes described as "ALGOL family" languages. ALGOL was the pioneer of the type. I forget how far Lisp and Forth (which are *not* ALGOL-family) go back, too.

          BASIC was always a "beginner's" language. It was designed as such, and the name even says so: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It lacked several powerful features that were already reasonably standard in other languages, most notably dynamic memory management.

          Even if you didn't have access to any of these, you would probably have been given a "macro assembler" to work with. This was termed a "low level" language at about the same time as ALGOL and BASIC defined what "high level" meant. Until the late 1980s, many programmers still used assembly code to get the most out of their computer, since compilers were still a bit primitive; assembly programmers still exist today for the same reason, but are much rarer.

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          • #20
            From 1955.
            I remember wired "remotes". A control box with a wire plugged into the TV.
            When I was little, the milkman came in a horsedrawn cart, you went out and got milk in a bucket from taps on the cart.
            Like this:
            though our milkman only had one horse (she was named Musse (the horse)).
            We had no fridge, though they existed, and I remember how I hated the taste of milk in the summer. No freezer either. When I was 11, my parents rented a locker in a communal freezer house and suddenly they could keep food.
            My parents had a phone without dial. Just a lever to call the switchboard to get connected.
            My parents first TV was rented per hour. There was a coin slot on the back and you paid one krone for half an hour. When the coin ran out the TV switched off. You can imagine Mum, Dad and three kids running round the house to find a coin to see the end of a movie .

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            • #21
              One of my workplaces had a 50-year-old General Electric fridge that still worked when I worked there!
              cindybubbles (👧 ❤️ 🎂 )

              Enter Cindyland here!

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              • #22
                Quoth MoonCat View Post
                But still no flying cars...
                Flying cars have been around since 1917.

                The one I remember from my childhood was the Aerocar, which was featured in the 1961-62 TV show The New Bob Cummings Show.
                "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

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                • #23
                  What's a Keurig?

                  We had an Amstrad CPC computer.Stuck it up in the loft-dragged it down last year or so. Still works. Bet it's worth something too. The football game was hilarious-it looked vaguely like

                  LIVERPOOL......................................... .................................................. ........MAN UTD
                  [________].................................................. ................................................[___*___]
                  G O A L ! ! G O A L ! ! G O A L ! !

                  Comparing that to the footie games where screenshots are almost indistinguishable from real TV shots,I often wonder what computer games will be like in another 25-30 years.It gets scary thinking about it sometimes...
                  The Copyright Monster has made me tell you that my avatar is courtesy of the wonderful Alice XZ.And you don't want to annoy the Copyright Monster.

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                  • #24
                    Quoth Kit-Ginevra View Post
                    What's a Keurig?
                    A single cup coffee maker.
                    "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

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                    • #25
                      Quoth Chromatix View Post
                      When I was little, my mother still used a "twin tub" washing machine - something very like this. That was a royal pain to use, compared to today's ubiquitous front-loaders.



                      .
                      I had one of these as a spare for when the regular one died - I bought it when I lived in Ocean View [the beach front Norfolk VA slum, go figure.] It finally died about 5 years back. It was roughly 22 years old, they were built *solid*. I also had the roll around use as a spare bit of countertop dish washer =)
                      EVE Online: 99% of the time you sit around waiting for something to happen, but that 1% of action is what hooks people like crack, you don't get interviewed by the BBC for a WoW raid.

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                      • #26
                        Pfft, 22, nothin. My parents' washer lasted more than 30 before giving any trouble at all. The matching drier never did. Unfortunately, it was beyond us to fully repair it before we moved, and even more unfortunately, the washer hook up was inside in the new house, not in the garage. I swear they moved those inside to give places like ServPro more business. The leaky washer did not make the move with us, and it and its counterpart were left as a bonus for the people that bought the house I grew up in.

                        I will consider myself lucky if I get half that out of the set I bought.
                        Supporting the idiots charged with protecting your personal information.

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                        • #27
                          A couple years back, my father's washing machine broke down and needed to be replaced. This machine was bought in anticipation of the heavier laundry load caused by a new baby in the house making laundromat trips impractical. The new baby? Me. That machine was well over 40 years old.
                          Any fool can piss on the floor. It takes a talented SC to shit on the ceiling.

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