I'm old enough to remember renting videos from the video rental store.

[Yavin4]

Back in my day, if you wanted a movie, you had to go to the local video rental store, and if they didn't have the title that you were looking for, too bad. You rented something else. And hey, if you were late returning the videos, you paid the late fee. And, if you didn't rewind the video, that was another fee. And, you had to pay a yearly membership fee and leave an imprint of your credit card on file.

You kids today with your streaming and binging. You don't how hard we had it back in the day.

[3catwoman3]

1. Did we have to walk barefoot in the snow...

...to get there?

[calguy]

5. Had to use bread sacks.

[Enterstageleft]

6. Uphill, both ways.

[jpak]

7. Uphill

Both ways

[Enterstageleft]

9. great minds think...I think?

[jpak]

20. Yup and Jinks

[calguy]

2. Back in my day there wasn't even color tv.

And half the kids in my class, me included, didn't even have a tv.

[Kittycow]

25. My parents are very frugal, depression era kids.

We had a tv when I was a little kid to watch, with Romper Room and Ding Ding School being my earliest tv memories. But I felt really deprived later on when we didn't have a color tv even years past the date that they had become affordable.

[pdxflyboy]

51. OMG....Romper Room, with her "magic mirror ".

“And I see Robert and Sally. Oh and Loretta and Joseph and Karen”. Remember that, Kittycow?

[Kittycow]

64. Oh how well I remember that Magic Mirror

she said bitterly

You see, my first name is Kelly and that wasn't a very common name for girls back then. In fact, I don't remember ever hearing Kelly at all. But I kept listening with all my heart!

I won a local kid's tv show limerick contest when I was in the first grade and they sent me a boy's prize, not the dolly

It's just as well, though, cuz my mother actually wrote it, not me

[Rhiannon12866]

71. I remember both of those! And of course Captain Kangaroo

Before we had a television, I used to go next door to my aunt and uncle's to watch. And I was very fortunate - had my very own Romper Room Bronc! It looked exactly like this, except mine was all red. And when she was with us, my grandmother would "ride" around with me! Except I had my Romper Room Bronc and she used the dust mop!

[Kittycow]

75. So funny!

What a precious memory of you and your grandmother riding around lol

[Rhiannon12866]

78. As a preschooler, I thought it was great

But thinking of it now, I can't help but laugh! I was particularly close to my grandmother and she really was a great sport!

[hunter]

101. I was a Los Angeles Romper Room kid. I flunked out of Hollywood.

My grandma and her sister ran away to Hollywood in their teens. They rejected lives as future wives of California dairymen.

They did not like cows.

My parents met as artists, with day jobs, working in Hollywood.

My mom says I used to stare at important people like they were interesting insects and I disturbed them. Which was my super-power as a four year old. Maybe it still is.

Two of my siblings had some success in Hollywood, but not consistently enough to pay the rent. My sister is still a member of the guilds, the girl/woman in the pink bikini, my brother the random cowboy or bad biker dude.

[Kittycow]

103. I wonder if any of your siblings made it onto

Mystery Science Theater 3000.

People have the most interesting lives around here

[yankeepants]

3. I'm old enough to remember not having video stores.

[Enterstageleft]

4. I'm old enough to remember...

when there was no such thing as a "video".

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

24. I'm old enough to remember when we had nothing to watch one on if they had existed.

We got a tv when I was in first grade.

[Jeebo]

44. You're about the same age I am.

I was born in 1949, and we also got our first TV when I was in first grade. A big ol' wooden console black-and-white TV, a piece of furniture, with a roof antenna that pulled in two or three local network channels. Fat horizontal lines made up the picture, and they were big enough that you could see them from halfway across the room. Before then I remember going over to a neighbor's house to watch TV.

-- Ron

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

49. Exactly!

Also test patterns!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

60. I remember the first time Peter Pan was on TV.

We didn't have a TV yet, and half of the people in the low-income housing complex we lived in watched it at the one neighbor who had a TV. Only there wasn't enough room for all of us to be in the small living room, and I clearly recall watching it from outside, through a window.

And honestly, we were so glad to be able to see it that we didn't feel at all deprived.

[murielm99]

65. So did we!

It was a Fada. It was black and white, of course. My parents replaced it when I was in sixth grade.

They did not get a color set until I was in high school.

[csziggy]

57. I remember buying my first BetaMax video player/recorder

I wanted to record Paul Simon on SNL singing "Still Crazy After All these Years" while dressed in a turkey suit. It was a re-run and I wanted to have it to keep.

The local Sears was the first store in town that sold BetaMax player/recorders so I went in to buy one. They almost lost my business since they had a display model but none to sell. I brow beat the manager of the Audio-Video department until he sold me the display model. He kept telling me that a shipment of players in the boxes were due on Monday, but that wouldn't do me any good.

I kept that first recording until my last BetaMax machine died. The bit is still worth watching:

[Jeebo]

68. I still have two functioning Beta VCRs.

At least, I think they still work. They did the last time I used either one of them, three or four years ago. Both are Sony SL-HF900 models. I still have videocassettes that I recorded as long ago as 1977, too. I guess those videocassettes will still play, too, although I have heard they will deteriorate over time. Some of the movies I recorded then are now available for free on YouTube. I watched "The Day of the Triffids" a month or so ago on YouTube. Last year after reading a book about Hedy Lamarr I wanted to see the first movie she made, a Czech film from 1933 that she made before her Hollywood days, and I found it on YouTube. There are so many ways you can see movies and other features nowadays that old videocassettes have become essentially meaningless, but I do have some stuff on videocassettes -- Beta and VHS -- that is irreplaceable, old sporting events, home movies, things like that that'll never show up on TV anywhere. Oh, I'm rambling, so I'll shut up now.

-- Ron

[csziggy]

85. Yeah, I got rid of pretty much all our video tapes a long time ago

But I've kept s few - Olympic equine sports clips from before NBC got the contract for the Olympics, videos of our horses, and videos of my husband and me.

All the VHS tapes were transferred to DVD but when I tried to transfer the Beta tapes, my BetaMax broke. Now I am no longer set up to transfer and my software is outdated so even if I got a BetaMax, it would take some effort to get it done.

Oh, well, those tapes don't mean anything to anyone other than us.

[RainCaster]

8. The hours were limited...

The movie you wanted to watch was either checked out already or not released yet.

[FM123]

10. I'm pretty sure my blue & yellow Blockbuster card is still around here somewhere.....

[NRaleighLiberal]

11. I'm old enough to remember playing 1/4 inch thick LPs my dad and I found at

local shops with used stuff on a phonograph - 33 1/3 rpm.

And looking forward to watching Wizard of Oz when it was on TV each year.

[Arne]

16. I remember sitting around the radio with family

'Sing Along With Mitch Miller'

came after 'The Shadow'.

[Kittycow]

26. Geez you are old.

Just kidding, I just turned 68 so I'm starting to feel my age jokes.

[Arne]

27. I'm retired

of course in Florida.

[Kittycow]

30. Never a dull moment down there!

I wouldn't mind being in the warm sun though.

[Arkansas Granny]

38. We listened to "One Man's Family" every night during supper.

[Arne]

41. West coast, had to look it up.

[Arkansas Granny]

47. I never knew it was on tv. We listened on my Dad's big old Silvertone radio.

One Man's Family is an American radio soap opera, heard for almost three decades, from 1932 to 1959. Created by Carlton E. Morse, it was the longest-running uninterrupted dramatic serial in the history of American radio.[1] Television versions of the series aired in prime time from 1949 to 1952 and in daytime from 1954 to 1955.[2

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Man's_Family

[Arne]

77. Some of the old radio's were pieces of art.

I watch the guys who restore them on Youtube.

[Arkansas Granny]

82. Yes, the old ones were important pieces of furniture. Ours had a drawer for a pull out phonograph.

There was also a built in cabinet for records. It was only big enough for the old 78's, not the 33 1/3.

[Arne]

83. RCA Victor, His Master's Voice. always stuck with me.

[Jeebo]

50. There's an old-time radio classics channel on Sirius/XM satellite radio.

I listen to those radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s often when I'm in the car. There's also a progressive talk radio channel that I listen to more often.

-- Ron

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

61. WHAT???

Mitch Miller was on the radio? OMFG!

I remember watching his TV show, and all of us (Mom, Dad, the six kids) watching that show.

[soldierant]

66. We didn't get The Shadow where I grew up

but we did have "The Whistler."

And Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Fibber McGee and Molly.

Funny you should mention the Shadow during a pandemic. I had some episodes on cassette when I was in my thirties, and one was about biological warfare.

[Arne]

74. A lot of people know what evil lurks in the heart of man.

[soldierant]

92. True . But not the ones in whose hearts the evil lurks. They are blind to it.

[Staph]

43. I also remember watching the Wizard of Oz each year on TV. In black and white.

I did not know until I saw the movie in college that the Wicked Witch of the West was green! I shrieked like a little kid when she first showed up.

[Jeebo]

46. That is the first movie I remember ever watching.

I was five years old, in the summer of 1955, and CBS was showing The Wizard of Oz once every year on a Sunday afternoon. That movie had a profound effect on me then. I was rapt. It's still one of my favorite movies, but of course I appreciate it on a different level now.

-- Ron

[Arne]

81. First movie I remember was The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Klaatu barada nikto

[JDC]

12. I remember TV tube testing machines in the grocery store

We got up to change 1 of 3 channels. Unless you went to uhf. Then we got a couple more fuzzy ones.

[PoliticAverse]

32. Kids these days will never know the joy of having to replace tubes.

Or the excitement of the sparks that resulted when I put 2 of the tubes back in the wrong sockets.

[Arne]

34. When the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan

my dad pulled the tubes from the old Sears Silvertone set.

I had an extra set of tubes and He flipped out when we watched

those mop headed degenerates.

[keithbvadu2]

52. Wild, radical, rocknrollers - in a coat and tie.

Wild, radical, rocknrollers - in a coat and tie.

[trackfan]

58. When I tune in to a one-time UHF channel today, I still somehow expect bad reception. n/t

[Arne]

76. In 2020 I've gone back to the antenna on the roof thing.

Works good until a plane flies over.

[captain queeg]

13. I was one of the kids in my grade school that could run the movie projector

It was sometimes a challenge to get the film started, then dealing with any prblems along the way. And rewinding afterwards. Good times.

[dweller]

17. Me too Captain

aka the AV guy ... would be called out of class to set up and run a film in another class... later on had a specific period that I would spend in the AV room in case there was a film to be run ... or just goofed around if not ... eventually got around to replacing projector bulbs and splicing film, etc ...
I think we were pre-geeks 😁

✌🏻

[Arne]

29. What about those big round burn marks when it jammed?

[Marie Marie]

42. Speaking of grade school...

Remember when tests were run off on the mimeograph machine and everyone stopped to sniff the page before passing them to the kid behind them? They smelled great and the ink was bright blue.

[hunter]

88. When I was teaching our school had a Xerox machine. Access to it was jealously guarded...

... by the school secretary.

The machine was kept in its own locked room and teachers did not have the key.

Teachers were technically allowed 100 Xerox copies per semester but that was nothing. I had more than 200 students on my rolls. Teachers didn't bother with the Xerox machine. That's the way school administrators wanted it.

We did have unlimited access to the ditto machines but those quickly ran out of supplies and teachers had to buy their own ditto masters, paper, and fluid.

Ditto fluid was about 85% alcohol, 10% trichlorofluoromethane, and other proprietary ingredients. Trichlorofluoromethane is now largely banned worldwide because it was destroying earth's ozone layer. Yet there is clear evidence that it is being manufactured and used illegally in many parts of the world.

I pity all the poor teachers who ever had to run off dittos minutes before a class started.

A handful of freshly made dittos had a very distinctive odor and were cold from the evaporating solvents.

How things have changed... My wife's sister is a teacher and has fully embraced the paperless classroom. All the students in her high school get Chromebooks. They do all their schoolwork on Chromebooks.

This made the transition to at-home learning during the pandemic surprisingly seamless.

Unfortunately many of her students simply disappeared, largely because their housing and family situations are unstable.

[Wicked Blue]

98. Once upon a time some wild and crazy high school kids

from the school paper and the literary magazine on lunch period set fire to some ditto fluid in an aluminum foil pie pan while everyone drummed loudly on whatever surface they could find. Primitive 1960s ritual of some sort. Miraculously, they didn't get caught.

[wcmagumba]

14. I remember b&w only tv with 3 channels (on a good day with rabbit ear antenna on top)...

remember seeing color tv in person at a relatively well off friend's house and watching an episode of the original Star Trek...the bright planets in orbit were sooo cool... The first video tape machine I remember was at my high school, a giant boxy thing that the librarian/media center brought into the classroom on a cart with the tube tv on top...We thought the space age was really right there...kids today, what do they know?

[bluedigger]

15. And you had to be 18 to get in the room in the back with the good stuff.

[Arne]

22. Our back room was the shoe repair shop.

They played 16mm with no sound, thrilling.

[flamin lib]

18. I'm old enough to, uh, what were we talking about?

They say short term memory goes first and damned if I remember what goes next . . .

[Yavin4]

19. I forget. n/t

[grumpyduck]

21. I remember those stores.

Once, when returning a video, I asked the lady at the counter whether I could get my money back if I didn't like the ending.

The look on her face was priceless.

[True Dough]

23. And don't forget

Please be kind, rewind!

[lastlib]

28. I'm old enough to remember using slide rules--in fact.....

...my parents gave me one for my sixteenth birthday.

It was three years later when electronic hand-held calculators were cheap enough for me that I could spend a month's pay on one.

[exboyfil]

36. My dad between 7th and 8th grade I think

Taught be how to use a slide rule. At the start of the next year we had calculators brought into math class. Our teacher was able to beat it on the board.

By 10th grade we all had calculators. I think they were pretty pricing in comparison. My friends had the TI-30 with the red numbers. I had an early LCD Casino I think which was more expensive. Not sure why I never had a TI-30.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

62. I just missed slide rules.

I recently got into an argument with a high school classmate who swore up and down she learned to use a slide rule in our junior year of math. Turns out she moved into a different math track that year, different teacher, who apparently taught his kids slide rules. In my track, no.

That was 1965. Fast forward at least 30 years. I am now taking math classes at my local junior college. 2nd year algebra -- hey, after more than 30 years I tested into algebra 2, so give me some respect -- with a wonderful instructor a couple of years older than me. By this time, calculators were common. I think I was using a TI-82. It was wonderful. All of the other kids in the class were about 19 years old and had been using calculators since 5th grade. They thought I was weird.

The next year, same wonderful instructor, I'm in college algebra. I loved it. I especially loved the calculator, as 30 plus years earlier we were doing quadratic equations, the hard way, using pencil and paper to calculate enough points to actually create the graph. Instead, just put the equation into the calculator and voila! The graph magically appears. The best part was that back when I was in high school, the math teacher could give us maybe two or four problems each day, simply because of how long it took to work them by hand. With the calculator, we could get a whole lot more, and I found myself playing with changing some of the numbers just to see what would happen. Yes!

There's another story about inequalities, that I think is too complicated and subtle to relate here, but I will simply say that graphing calculators are wonderful.

[Arne]

86. I only had a pen with a built in clock.

[lastlib]

80. My junior year in high school, I competed in an interscholastic math competition....

at a nearby college in a slide-rule contest, and placed second out of 30 teams. I understood I just missed first place by a couple of points.

I can still use one like nobody's business. But calculators, and then computers, ran 'em into the ground.

[Paladin]

87. Yes, but did you have a SCABBARD for your slide rule?

So you could carry it around on your belt, and whip it out like an Old West gunfighter, to work on a math problem? I remember seeing a few of those, on the belts of the really serious tech students in college. Whole different world....

[hunter]

97. I have a slide rule collection, short and long.

I remember thinking I was hot stuff as a kid, schooled in slide rules, until I worked one summer for a machinist who could do all that fancy math in his head.

That was his day job. His art was ion engines and the GPS system.

A few years later I met my wife. She has similar knacks.

One of our first dates was an open house at JPL. We both knew people there working on Galileo. We were standing there in the room with it.

w

Not us, but you get the idea.

I already knew I'd be marrying her, but this was fate.

[Paladin]

100. That's how little I know about slide rules:

I didn't know there were "short" and "long" ones. My wife probably is aware of it; she's the technocrat of the family.

[PoliticAverse]

31. Were you kind? Did you rewind?? n/t

[Marie Marie]

40. Yes, even the DVD's.

[PoliticAverse]

56. ...

[Chipper Chat]

33. I remember renting 8mm stag films for our beer parties.

College fraternity ones that is. I won't go into detail but I remember them well.

[frazzled]

35. My kids are old enough to remember video rental stores

You don’t have to be more than 30 to remember that.

At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster consisted of 9,094 stores and employed approximately 84,300 people: 58,500 in the United States and 25,800 in other countries.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

63. The Last Blockbuster

https://twitter.com/loneblockbuster?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

The best ever.

[exboyfil]

37. I remember when Redbox started

I knew immediately that video stores were doomed. I didn't anticipate streaming though.

I still get a number of BluRays out of our local library. I have a tough time justifying $4 for a streaming movie rental which is funny since I remember in the 1990s that new releases were $3 at Blockbuster.

We do still have one Family Video in our area (used to have three). Haven't been into it in years though. They broke up half their floorspace for a pizza place and run joint specials.

[Kablooie]

39. Boy it was exciting when they started renting DVDs too.

[Stuart G]

45. I remember the first TV shows I watched, I Love Lucy..1951 or 1952 maybe earlier.

I also remember.(..and this one is wild beyond wild and you will not believe this..) watching a TV commercial for a new movie that came out with signing and dancing......................................................
..................................That movie was Singin' in the Rain.........................................

...That is a faded memory, but yes, I remember that commercial. I saw that movie for the first time ever in 1980 in a movie theater.
...... Yes, I got that one too, and view it often. No, I do not get tired of watching it, and have posted segments at Democratic Underground....

.....If you have never watched...Singin' in the Rain ..you are in for one of the greatest movie treats of
all time. It defines movie musicals and is a great movie as well as a great musical.......
Please give yourself a great movie treat and watch that movie..I think it is available at most libraries
that have classic movies......So get ready for some popcorn & enjoy-YES, THIS IS A GREAT MOVIE.
............released into movie theaters, April 11, 1952...(one hour & 43 minutes)





Go to any movie site to see a review. Perhaps...the Greatest Movie Musical ........EVER!!!!!!!!!

[Jeebo]

48. That's not a long time ago.

You talk about it like it's the Dark Ages. The last video rental store here in Columbia, Missouri, closed about three years ago. They were renting mainly DVDs then, of course, and had been for several years, but they still had a few VHS tapes.

-- Ron

[keithbvadu2]

53. Some of the video rental stores had lifetime memberships.

Some of the video rental stores had lifetime memberships.

That was a lifetime ago.

[IcyPeas]

54. I remember renting The Sopranos from Blockbuster...

I didnt have cable tv/HBO at the time. What a great series.

[Jeebo]

93. It was a long time before I realized The Sopranos wasn't about opera singers.

I've still never watched a single episode of it. Probably never will.

-- Ron

[Jeebo]

55. I remember cigarette commercials.

I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel. LSMFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco). Kent, with the Micronite Filter. You've Come a Long Way, Baby (Virginia Slims). The Marlboro Man. Benson & Hedges 100's getting stuck in car windows and elevator doors.

Sometimes on the old-time radio classics channel on Sirius/XM satellite radio they broadcast old radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s with the commercials intact, but never with any cigarette commercials. I don't know whether that's because they choose not to include the cigarette commercials or because they legally can't, but I wish they would include them just because of, well, nostalgia. Whimsy.

-- Ron

[trackfan]

59. I never entered a video rental store - and I'm 61.

I fall right in the prime age group for video rental, but just never had a video player, or enough money to be renting movies.

[lunatica]

67. I remember when televisions were a brand new thing

I’m evidently way older than you.

[Demovictory9]

105. must have been an amazing thing to see

[captain queeg]

69. I bought a color TV when I was 19. We never had one growing up so when I got out on my own

It was one of my first big purchases, right after a stereo. I paid about $500 for a big console color TV back in the 70s. That’s certainly something that is cheaper nowadays. I got a 50” flatscreen a couple years ago and I think it was around $300. Maybe a little more, can’t really remember. Geezus, before that I had one of the last tube TVs, 32” I think, and it was huge. I can’t believe I got that home by myself. By the time I got the flatscreen you could hardly give away a tube TV. Finally the Salvation Army took it.

[sarge43]

70. I'm old enough to remember when

asking "What's a video?" was a valid question.

[gladium et scutum]

72. Thats nothing

I remember when the two channels on, the 12 inch black and white tv, stopped programing at midnight and showed a "test pattern" until 6 am, then they would play the National Anthem and resume programing.

[pstokely]

73. how was the butt naked walk to school in the snow?

&ab_channel=caesarjustinian12

[NNadir]

79. Back in my day, we carved movies into stone tablets. n/t.

[Paladin]

84. Porno at the local Blockbuster.

Back in the mid-80's, I went to the neighborhood Blockbuster for a movie. I wandered over to the foreign films section, and to my amazement, there was a video of "In The Realm Of The Senses," the legendary 1976 Japanese X-rated arthouse flick. I'd never seen it, had only read of it, and not quite believing a copy of it was sitting in a Blockbuster store, I immediately rented it and took it home. (Yeah, like you wouldn't have done the same!) Sure enough, it was the real thing, in all its hyper-erotic, beautifully filmed glory. I couldn't resist having a little fun with the Blockbuster folks, so I returned the video to the local store and informed the manager that he had a porno movie available for rent. The guy clearly didn't believe me, probably figured I was a religious fanatic (there were a number of them in the area) so I got huffy with him, put the video in his hands, and told him to take it in the back of the store and prove me wrong. A few minutes later he came back, jaw hanging open, complexion white as a sheet. He apologized for having doubted me and for my being offended; I told him I wasn't offended at all, and advised him to contact his higher-ups of what had happened. Needless to say, I never saw that movie at that store again.

Times have certainly changed. Now days, you can watch "In The Realm Of The Senses" online at several sites. I recommend it, even though my interest in erotic films is a thing of the past. I still regard my first home video player as the best piece of electronic equipment I ever acquired.

[hunter]

89. Our neighborhood Blockbuster video is still empty, with "For Lease" signs in the windows.

My wife and I mostly watch Netflix, but also have a very large library of DVDs, many of them I found in thrift stores.

We occasionally rent newer movies from the Redbox in our grocery store.

[Hotler]

90. My first binge watch was from Blockbuster VHS.

I had not seen the Sopranos series so I rented all of them. I didn't start off to binge but it was like a train wreck. I got sucked in and at the end I felt all used, dirty and empty. It's a dark story that is told well. I may never watch it again.

[Fla Dem]

91. Wow, that sure dates you!! Not!

Video stores were still around into the mid 2000's. After I retired and moved to FL I worked at a Blockbuster for 5 years until they went out of business in 2010.

I'm old enough to remember when there were no video stores. If you wanted to watch a movie on the TV you had to subscribe to HBO.

Oh that reminds me I remember when we didn't have cable tv and you had to go to a theater to see a movie.

I remember when we only got 4 local tv channels, WBZ, WNAC, WHDH/WCVB and the PBS channel WGBH and we watched them on a 12" B&W TV.

[Arne]

95. Wow, 12 inch screen and no color, even Fred had color.

[Fla Dem]

96. LOL, if you had watched beyond the commercial, the show was in B&W.

Having said that. The Flintstones debuted in 1960. Color television broadcasts didn't start until the early 1960's, So I'm sure by the time the Flintstones started broadcasting in color, we probably had a color set. Can't really remember when we got one, but it was before I graduated high school.

I know you were inferring that the Flintstones were in the stone age so I must really be ancient.

[LNM]

94. and they had a back room with the "adult" videos

Hoped your neighbors didn't see you sneak into the porn section.

[Yavin4]

102. Yes. Watching porn in shame.

The way God intended.

[Brother Buzz]

99. I'm old enough to remember watching the television test pattern for twenty minutes.....

waiting for television broadcasting to resume; The Wonderful World of Brother Buzz was the first program in the lineup

[Demovictory9]

104. or you stood around waiting until someone returned the vid you wanted