"You're Old!!!" moments

[wolf]

Originally posted by plthijinx
'93?!? whoa. i was a manager at a local video store chain and we only carried VHS. that was from '89 to 91, in the collage (emphasis added) days.

You made art by pasting cutout pictures from magazines onto things? Do you have pictures??

Yes, you young whippersnapper, there was a time when BetaMax was thought to be the superior format for video distribution. (okay, the REALLY superior one was the laser disk, but that didn't last because it was too damn expensive and you couldn't record on them).

Once upon a time videos were relased Beta-only. Sony, however, made one of their rare technological gaffes ... they made the format proprietary, so no cheap knockoffs were produced and the format died a quiet death as the VHS format was produced in cheaper and cheaper units.

My first VHS VCR cost $349.99, from Hess' Department Store, and had a programmable timer (very big deal) and a wired remote control. It was a front-loader rather than a top loader. I bought it in 1984, at which time there were no video store chains (West Coast was just starting to penetrate the east coast video market, Blockbuster opened their Montgomeryville store a quite a few years later) and the mom and pop video store I joined (you had to pay a membership fee in the bad old days) in Ambler was 3/4 Beta to 1/4 VHS. I watched that ratio change over time, until they finally discontinued their Beta collection, mostly by selling it off to tape-hungry BetaMax owners. Unlike the major chainstores, the mom and pops' had the infamous "back room" for adult oriented viewing, so I was able to see such classics as Caligula and Alien Lust.

originally posted by OnyxCougar
Talk about old, I can remember when the ' and the " were on a typewriter on the upper left of the keyboard, where the ` and ~ is now.

HAH. I remember typewriters that were produced without a number 1. You had to remember to type a lowercase "l". I also suffered through the use of a "proportionally spaced" typewriter. This IBM electric monstrosity produced beautiful business correspondence, unless you made a mistake, because the letters each had different widths. You also had to remember that a "W" required three backspaces, but a "n" needed only two.

LJ mentioned jinx having an unusual belief regarding nuke-a-matics

As far as the microwave sucking nutrients out of food ... if you are cooking fresh foods, that doesn't seem logical, at least it won't suck anymore nutrients out of something than conventional cooking would. And, for veggies, since the cooking time is shorter, and you are essentially steaming them, just so long as you don't cook the broccoli into a gooey mess, then it should retain more vitamins than if you boil them. Prepackaged microwavable foods have the nutrients pre-sucked out of them at the factory, though. Perhaps that's what you should be worried about.