How is stuff different from when I was born in the Dark Ages? (1972) Note: I'm not saying any of this stuff is better as in "The Good Old Days..." I actually dig my computer and electric kettle. These are just random observations!

• households generally had one phone, and it was a rotary dial one
• there was only one telephone company and they owned all the phones.
• TV got 4 stations: NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS. In order to pick up some of them you had to play with the antenna on top of the TV.
• there were no VCRs, you had to watch movies in the theater. When VCRs first became popular, you had to wait years before movies came out on tape.
• there was one stereo in the house, and it had a record player and an 8-track in it.
• the personal computer hadn't been invented yet (we got one in the mid-80s-- a Commodore-16 and all we could do on it was program in BASIC!)
• microwave ovens were a fairly new phenomenon; they were gigantic and few people had them.
• nurses wore white uniforms with little white hats
• I didn't have a male teacher until 7th grade (they existed; they were just few and far between in elementary school!)
• all of the Beatles were still alive
• Dad did his work on a non-electric typewriter (I learned to type on an electric one in the 80s)
• typewriters didn't have a number 1 (you used a lower case L) or an exclamation point (you used an apostrophe and then backed up and typed a period)
• I don't think bicycle helmets were invented yet, if so only hardcore racers wore them. We all had really long bright orange flags on the backs of our bikes for some safety reason
• there was pretty much only one kind of pop music (hip hop, emo, indie, punk, Symphonic Progressive Euro-Trance, whatever, hadn't really been invented yet)
• There was no internet-- we had to use the library to do research.
• They started putting old newspapers on microfilm in libraries and we got to look at them in special microfilm readers (maybe they still do this)?
• Libraries all used the Dewey Decimal System, and had card catalogues.
• we watched films from projectors and also filmstrips in school. Most of these were made in the 50s and early 60s, but we still watched them!
• calculators were gigantic and you either had to plug them in, or they ran on tons of batteries.
• people still had clocks and watches that you had to wind up (electric/battery ones existed, but people hadn't completely switched to them yet!)
• at noon, small towns would sound the air raid siren ("noon whistle") - I have no idea why. They may still do this in some places.
• when I was in high school, hardly any students had cars. If they did, it was an old cast-off one from their parents. I don't know, it just seems like most teenagers have cars these days. Maybe I'm wrong.
• You could get "generic" brand groceries-- they came in plain white boxes with the product written in black on the outside in stencilled-looking letters. (i.e., BEER, SOAP etc.)
• Playgrounds consisted of structures made with metal bars stuck into cement. We had see-saws! (I haven't seen any in modern playgrounds in years!)
• There was no MLK Jr. Day, and Presidents' Day was broken into two different holidays: Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday
• people who coould afford it recorded family events on 8mm film (silent) as video recorders were still just for professionals. To watch them you had to have a projector and sit in the dark.
• people took slides of their vacations and stuff and would give slide presentations to friends and family members.