<p>No, I don’t meant College Confidential… I mean cc, as in the email selection. One of my students asked me today what the cc stands for. I explained that it meant “carbon copy”, from the old days. Blank look. I then explained that before copiers and printers, they had to use carbon paper when they typed letters if they wanted extra copies, and the cc meant carbon copy. Blank look. Carbon paper? Blank look. Again…</p>
<p>When my mother in law moved to a smaller home, she had a sale, and one of my boys got an old typewriter. I happen to actually have some actual CARBON PAPER, and I’m going to take both into school to demonstrate CARBON COPIES to my students.</p>
<p>OK, I am now officially older than dirt.</p>
<p>It reminds me of the time that I overheard the very patient English teacher patiently explaining to his kids as they were typing up papers in the word processor, “No, you double space between the lines,* not the words*”</p>
<p>I chuckled all day long.</p>
<p>Any other old farts out there? what have you tried to explain lately?</p>
<p>One more… my car sports a bumper sticker that states “things haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.” It’s way less than 50% of the kids who get it (but the ones who do, love it!)</p>
<p>My daughter bought a typewriter recently (she’s kind of retro). She called me up to complain how noisy it was, and exclaimed “libraries must have been really noisy.” When I explained that people took notes in longhand, and that libraries didn’t supply typewriters, she asked me how people got their papers typed. She didn’t believe me when I told her that some papers were done in LONGHAND and that I made a tidy sum in college by typing people’s papers for them at $1/page.</p>
<p>B side of single records. Was telling a story to my kids and said I didn’t even know the A side how would I have known the B side. Blank looks. And when you explain you just get that quizzical ‘yea right mom - you losing it?’ look.</p>
<p>Nice way to talk about your sister by the way ;)</p>
<p>Remember putting a phone hand set into an acoustic coupler to connect remotely to a mainframe? That high pitched whine that was the sound of a computer “answering the phone”?</p>
<p>and if you didn’t get the template loaded onto the mimeograph machine just right… bad copies for you.</p>
<p>The whole MANUAL typewriter thing is completely foreign to most. I posted on another thread about how much work it took to center something on the page correctly.</p>
<p>And how about Manually tilting the wheel so you could get your subscripts just right.</p>
<p>and if you lost track of where you were and typed into the bottom margin…</p>
<p>I remember getting points taken off for incorrect hyphenations. Has anybody under 30 years old ever had to use one of those?</p>
<p>How about just trying to explain the massive old mainframe computers of old (do they still exist?). And the key punch cards to enter Data. We had to fill out a form which was sent to another department where they punched the data onto cards and then it was entered into the computers. And that was only a little over 20 years ago!</p>
<p>oh yeah, acoustical coupler… Today’s phones wouldn’t exactly fit into one of those.</p>
<p>And then you could watch the dots print on the screen. In that lovely green on black… or a few years later, you might have had the amber monochrome.</p>
<p>Oh and when you got those cards back from keypunch you looked at them carefully. One bad space or errant comma would mean no compiling for your code. Nobody wanted that!</p>
<p>Forget the acoustic coupler – what about having to actually dial the phone numbers? And papers were typed without any automatic spell check feature, except what you could provide. I had a prof in college who was extremely picky about correct spelling, no typos, absolutely perfect footnote form, etc. etc. On a major paper my senior year I cajoled my mother (trained as aprofessional secretary) to type it. I/we got a great grade and the comment that it was the “best looking typed paper he’d ever seen.” Go Mom!</p>
<p>My Mum actually still had a dial phone till about 3 years ago. And she was paying each month to rent the darn thing from the phone company (in the UK). She finally bought a cordless with a 2nd handset after years of nagging by my brother and I. I wondered if the phone went into a museum somewhere.</p>
<p>Mentioning Get Smart – when I brought up to a colleague the other day that they were making a movie out of it, all I got was a blank stare. She had NEVER heard of it – and she’s in her 30’s. Wow, did that make me feel old!</p>
<p>Swimcatsmom, high-five! My grandpa had one of those outhouses, too. I recently saw a bunch of such potties on a shelf at a local tourist trap gift store. No, they were not being sold for the originally intended purpose! “Great for popcorn”, pronounced the sign on the shelf! I do not think the kids around me understood why I suddenly folded in half laughing hysterically!</p>