Dial Up. Yeah I know the sound and I know the time it took to load anything with. But it’s something I won’t ever miss having. I would much rather be on a 1MB connection if I had to choose between that or dial up ever again. I also hated how easy it was to be kicked off, if anyone called the phone, you were off it in seconds.
Working in an office. I get so much more done at home. With no sickness from selfish people who won’t mask when sick. Plus I can walk my dog multiple times a day. And cook real food.
When COVID hit and I was going to work from home, I was convinced that I’d hate it. I assured myself that it was okay because COVID would only last a few weeks and then the world would get back to normal. (Oh how naive I was!)
Once I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. My commutes weren’t that bad before, but now it’s just “walk up the stairs.” I don’t need to worry about traffic or parking spaces at all. I also don’t need to worry about people stopping by to chat when I’m in the zone. Yes, people can message me on Teams, but it’s easy to switch over and postpone dealing with them if it’s not important.
Even meetings are nicer. Most of mine aren’t on camera so I can get up and walk around my work area during my meetings.
I’m even healthier working from home. Previously, I’d bring a bunch of food to work to make sure I’d have enough and then snack all day. Now, I don’t bother going back downstairs except for lunch and for that I can take time to make a healthy lunch (salad or something).
My current job is now permanently work from home (my “home base” was moved and is now a 10 hour drive away so I’m DEFINITELY not commuting in). I’m not going back if I can help it. (If I were to ever leave this job, I’d make working from home a priority.)
The first day I ever worked from home I was sold within an hour. If I could do my job without ever going back to the office I’d seriously consider taking a pay cut to make it happen
I wish I could not work in an office
Listening to the radio
Limited selection, constant ads, and hit or miss sound quality. Digital music and podcasts are better in every way. The only thing I really miss is discovering new music on a local college radio station.
Great, reading this while listening to the radio, huge stereo wall, Onkio tuner, FM antenna in the attic, coax cable trough the house,… I have a constant quality and yes, internet radio is a tad better, but the biggest issue there is the delay. When you have radio in multiple rooms, the different delays are a use sourec of irritation. Also my wife finds the sount to harsh witn sattelite radio or DAB.
As long as FM is available, I’ll use it for radio. When it’s end of the road for FM, I’ll switch to my own collection. (And in the car, no alternative to FM, CD of cassette)
I still listen to the radio in my car even though I have Bluetooth. My car is an older model and there are times when it will stop auto connecting and I’ll have to connect it again. So, I’d rather just listen to the radio
I’m sorry for your loss
It’s not too bad. My favorite radio stations so far are 98.7 The Gator and NPR. As for commercials I mostly tune them out, but some I find pretty humorous and entertaining.
I personally prefer silence over radio.
This makes me so happy about our community radio station. We lost the ok commercial station (had an “alternative rock” station that played good music and hosted awesome concerts). But kept the nonprofit community station, and good radio is a joy.
I seriously wish I could disable the radio in my car. Nothing worse than accidentally turning it on and being blasted with an obnoxious commercial or overplayed pop song.
Pull the fuse? Disconnect the harness?
I still want my stereo for Bluetooth/USB, just no way to easily access AM/FM/satellite function in the stereo.
Disconnect the aerial, that should shut down anything but the most powerful stations. I’ve done that in my car
I do not miss having a work phone. Never wanted one and so glad it’s gone.
Sure as hell not nostalgic for childhood either, it was not good. I hated having no control of my life. It was not terrible or abusive but I do not consider it a magical time. No.
Cassette tapes. I like discs, but tapes… Damn that belongs in a museum. Even tho I do admire the technology.
(Unless for like, storage backup and stuff where it can be actually useful.)
You mean you don’t miss your tape deck eating your cassettes and having to wind them back into the cartridge with a pencil? Weird.
That’s at least better than chucking the broken tape out your car window and having it become a tape snarl by the side of the road.
You remember portable CD players before they had a buffer cache? Couldn’t even keep them in your pocket without skipping like mad.
And how they later market on later CD players as “now comes with 30 second anti-skip!” which barely worked.
I had an MP3 CD player that would still sometimes skip if things were bumpy enough. First time it happened, I was like !?
In the late 90’s, the technology was incredible tho. The little machines were fucking monsters. A few years ago I’ve got a few portables from that era and even with antiskip disabled, it’s super hard to make some of them skip. With it enabled, it’s probably impossible without the device falling apart.
It’s also interesting how even despite obvious abuse and shitty shipping, those things work perfectly. The cheap plastics and close to zero weight would suggest they wouldn’t last a month, never mind 20 years.
I don’t, but I’m aware of that (same in cars). I only got into CDs near the end of their popularity, maybe that’s the main reason I’m sick of tapes and like discs. (Altho frankly, any portable/headphone audio was shit compared to what we have today.)
The thing that blows my mind about tape is that copying 1:1 is real time and takes the exact same time as the track is long. Or that making a copy always lowers quality with every generation. Analogue media is whack, man.
Absolutely! And if you had a cassette that you wanted to write over (that wasn’t meant to be recorded over), you had to stuff a piece of paper in it.
That write prevention was punch card technology. Floppy disks also used it.
I still have them, and a player (Nakamishi 700 ZXL), and a Revox B77 with reels. I don’t have functioning 8-tracks anymore. I have the tapes and equipment, but the tapes all broke. I need to find way to fix them (restore the loop).
There’s to much music lost just because the medium isn’t available anymore and it wasn’t economicaly viable to transfer it to a newer medium. So many records that didn’t get transferred to CD.
CDs are in decline and vinyl is prohibitively expensive and the lead times to get a record pressed are insane because your record will be stuck behind the millionth Urban Outfitters special edition of Rumors… so cassettes have made a weird comeback in underground scenes. Worst fucking format
I don’t miss the cassette tapes, but I don’t miss even more the big cassette cases that I used to carry in my car with all the tapes in it!
I was visiting my parents one year and found some old cassette tapes. I showed them to my kids and played a song. My youngest liked the song and wanted to hear it again. He was surprised when I couldn’t just hit “repeat.” Instead, I needed to rewind, rewind, rewind. Not far enough. Rewind, rewind. Too far. Fast Forward. Too far. Rewind. Too far but good enough.
I still love CDs, but don’t miss vinyl records at all. I grew up in the original vinyl era and was very happy to no longer have to bother with a big and unwieldy format which is physically degraded during every play and which you have to tiptoe past the player to avoid making it skip.
I’m a vinyl guy and how you enjoy music doesn’t affect me, BUT: there’s something wrong with your setup. It’s not level if it’s that sensitive
I never got on board with CDs because no one knew how to master them for the first few years. Everything sounded quiet, tinny and harsh in the wrong way, so I went back to LPs. Eventually they figured out how to optimize music to that format but then the loudness wars came along and made everything sound like shit again. There was a brief period in the 90s when CDs sounded fantastic.
If you try to make records too loud the needle will physically jump out of the groove so they have to be relatively normalized (unless you try to fit too much music on one side in which case the record gets super quiet)
There is/was something like a loudness db. I’ve got a bunch of CDs from the top of the charts and man that’s so good.
I gave up watching a show (Smallville) because it was too much of a pain to find a tape to use in the VCR, make sure there was enough room to record my show without recording over something else, finding which tape had which episode, and watching the episodes while still leaving the tapes at the start of my wife’s recorded program.
Once the era of DVRs and then streaming hit, watching shows became SO much more convenient.
Ugh, I basically never watched any show that closely before DVDs. Mind you, I was also pretty young at the time, but that worked even more against me as it was much less of an option to record anything when it was entirely on my parents’ devices. Plus only one TV had satellite and my dad basically monopolized it.
I basically only watched things sporadically, as I was able to. Which also meant story heavy serials weren’t viable. Everything had to be at least decently episodic so that I wouldn’t feel lost due to missing half the episodes and watching reruns out of order.
I’m genuinely glad kids these days have it so much better. How many times as a kid did I beg my parents to let me watch some popular kids show and it wasn’t an option? And if I ever did get to see something I liked, it could be months before the stars aligned to get to see another episode.
Ahh, the beloved VCR! Also while recording, pressing pause to leave out the tv commercials, forgetting to unpause, the station interrupting news breaks, a low-flying airplane messing up the tv reception, someone changing the channel while you went to go to the bathroom. And my all-time favorite… dad placing his big brand new stereo speakers right next to the little videotape shelf!
CRTs in TVs and monitors. Heavy bastards with small DPI.
Yeah but they were particle accelerators that shot electrons towards your face at relativistic speeds (the phosphor grid and lead lining made use more pleasurable). That’s just too damn cool.
Barely relativistic: 10 - 20% of speed of light. But I agree, from technology point of view, that was very cool.
One type of CRT I miss is monochrome vector CRT. This is where the image was drawn, as opposed to rastered from pixels. Although, with “retina” displays, this became less important, it was still cool technology.
They also feel fuzzy! Mmmmm TV fuzz…
CRTs.
But you need a whole second desk to fit them and they make that awful buzzing sound!
I originally read this as “what are you nostalgic about” and was confused by all the responses.
I am certainly not nostalgic about smoking sections in restaurants. Those half ass dividers that did nothing and the whole place smelling like an ash tray was not fun.
Not to mention airplanes.
When I was in Germany recently I was shocked that if you sit on a lovely outdoor patio that smoking is allowed. So you either pick indoors and get no views or sit outdoors with the smokers.
Smokers and smoking. It was glorified in the 80s and 90s. You were seen as cool and manly. Such a bad habit.
It was glorified then, before that is what normalized which it much worse.
I don’t miss it at all, but I couldn’t afford to do it today! The government is obviously trying to price people out of doing it. That’s not why I quit, but it would certainly make me if I still was.
I still remember passing by “the pit.” That was the section where the high school kids were allowed to smoke. It was outdoors, but they always left the doors open. I needed to pass by to get to class and hated the stench. So I’d hold my breath. But the crowds were always slow so it was a game of “will I be forced to breathe the stench, will I get by in time, or will I pass out?”
I have fond memories of smoking at certain times in the 90s. But it was a filthy and unhealthy habit. Glad I quit without much damage being done.
I have to say, I miss how you’d go on smoke breaks. I love how the IT Crowd portrayed the social pariah that was smoking into the 2000s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvjS_c1U6zs
I was just thinking about dial up last night while downloading a game update. My wifi was downloading like 1GB/min and I sat there absolutely amazed at how fast that was, thinking about how the younger me would’ve been mind-blown with that speed.
I don’t miss not knowing things. If I am unsure of something today I can pull out my phone and Google it. Although I do wish I had more of a reason to go to the library now
Younger me would have been kind blown about a 500mb hard drive.
I remember getting my first computer: A 286 with a whole MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking that there is no way that I’d ever fill up that 40 MEGA-bytes!
Now, I’m typing this out on a phone with specs that would have shattered my brain at the time - and my phone isn’t even top of the line. “Wait, your phone has 128GB of storage? Like 3,000 of my 286 computers?!!!”
That too! Imagine taking a 256 GB micro SD card to the past?
Phone calls in general. I’ve always been a computer nerd that prefers thinking about my responses and typing them out in front of a glowing rectangle.
God, I love my glowing rectangles 🥰
Road trips before GPS and maps apps. Navigating off just paper maps and poor signage was not fun.
Its a shame because it is something I am actually really good at, and now it’s a completely useless skill!
Time to play geoguessr
I don’t want to change back, but I still thought it added a sense of adventure, and having to be actively involved with the navigation gave you more awareness of where you were and where you were going. Now you just slavishly follow instructions and then some hours later you are there.
Like, we drove to Austria last summer and when we came back my dad asked me: so did you drive over Stuttgart or Nuremberg? And I honestly didn’t know.
The funny part about driving to Austria from Germany is you only know you’re in Austria because the GPS lets you know the speed limit is 100.
Riding motorcycles is a way back to this sense of adventure. You sort out your path before riding, do your best to remember as much as you can, and then do your best while on the road for as long as you can. Pulling out a phone is a pain while riding, so you want to go as far as you can and happily improvise to see how well you can do.
You quickly get to the point where you learn to remember route numbers and such and can go pretty far on memory and educated guesses. Feels cool, and you start to learn an area well, getting to the point where you can give people quite detailed directions.
I dunno man, I don’t really get a sense of adventure when I had my giant ass paper map laying halfway across the fucking dash.
I navigated Europe in 1997 while hitchhiking using nothing more than paper maps and a sharpie to mark where I’ve been and where I wanted to go. It was pretty fun. Only got off track once or twice.
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7th Generation of consoles was the beginning of the end times. It was the beginning of the practice of DLCs, preorders, early access and microtransactions. Oh and how much they relied being online.
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Misread the title with my first comment. Something I’m not particularly nostalgic about is school. I’m grateful for some of things that I learned, but my memories are not fond enough to want to repeat or relive any of it and I definitely wouldn’t go to any sort of reunion. All of that is just way behind even it hasn’t been a decade yet, I’m just over it with not much to reminiscence about.
I always loved the school part of school (well, except for gym class). It’s everything else I hated. Especially between classes when a group of bullies would follow me making my life a living hell. If I had been able to compress my school day into just classes without gym class or any “between class” time, I would have enjoyed it more.
Instead, I mainly remember getting more and more paranoid that anyone who was laughing was laughing at me - all because my bullies thought it was fun to torment me.
Wow. I feel the same. For me school was always a place of competition. There was just studying and rarely did we get the time to play together with classmates. It was full of fucking idiot teachers who lacked basic humanity and would start beating you up if you failed to solve the questions they asked or make you kneel down for 40+ minutes on the floor. So yeah school was nothing to long for. Btw this was in India.
I would love to have relived my high school days again, it wasn’t too too bad. Might’ve have had a rough start for the first few months of freshman year, but that was to be expected. The rest of the years was fine, all things considered.
It was my middle school years that I honestly am better off forgetting, aside from a few good childhood highlights that everyone else would remember. Things like how decorated for the holidays the school got, halloween parties, special activities and other things. But I don’t miss the humiliating points and the struggles of having to put up with antagonizing people.
Get drunk without a hangover the next day
