When I was a kid (I’m 65 years old) I used to sniff mimeograph sheets.
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Yeah - I remember FM ‘underground’ album rock stations with DJs that were actually intelligent, musically knowledgeable and had a maturity level exceeding that of a 15 year old. The old KOL here in Seattle - it was the soundtrack to some of our highest times.
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Soon there will be nostalgia along the lines of, “remember bananas?”
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“We used to just look at them…”
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The one classroom task students eagerly raised their hand to volunteer for!
Which reminds me: cleaning the chalkboard erasers. Yup, that really did used to be a thing.
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I remember when they used to be “blackboards”, on account of being actually black. I can’t remember why they were all replaced with green surfaces, but I remember it happening.
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Oh come on. It’s because it turns purple in the presence of certain gases in the Praxis range to which he is allergic. Caves of Androzani, people!
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We used to use these when I was in elementary school:
Eventually by the time I arrived in high school, they’d switched to camera based overheads.
I remember everyone wanted the job of cleaning the transparency roll because it was a good way to waste an hour not doing school work, and then you can do some more doodling on it.
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i remember when rocks were invented.
dust farts me.
you knew the post person’s name and you gave them a christmas present, otherwise they’d be jealous of the milk person. more importantly they weren’t referred to as “persons” but “men” milkman, postman, etc.
kids could travel alone, even unaccompanied international, and walk home by themselves, let themselves into the house, make themselves food, and take care of the pets and chores before doing something called homework. latchkey wasn’t a reason to have your kids taken away.
space and the future were bright shiny pollution free, crime free, utopias where no one worked and intellect and leisure ruled. now everything is dystopian and hopeless.
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Yeah, we didn’t get those until highschool, and a few of my college courses (especially classes in the engineering college).
Also, those slide and tape things, what were they called?
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I’m not sure? On nearly all the projectors, they had a scroll off transparent tape, and the teachers would write and draw on it with washable pens, and as the screen would fill up they’d just scroll it along to the next empty spot.
Is that it?
In one math class a teacher had a transparent calculator that could be projected via the overhead, that was pretty awesome.
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Filmstrip!
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Wait around long enough and everything gets answered 
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I remember using microfiche in the library. It used to give me a headache, trying to make out the tiny printing on those screens. Hell, I remember using card catalogs to find books I needed for school reports, poking through those long, thin drawers to find titles.
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Massive nostalgia for card catalogs. I found so many other books that were usually much more interesting than whatever it was I was looking for.
Microfiche, ugh, that was sheer misery, nausea and vertigo inducing agony.
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Printed dictionaries were another favorite for me in school… sometimes I’d spend time just browsing the dictionary, and whenever I found an interesting word, I’d always note its etymology. I regret not taking at least one foreign language in my grade school days, but I picked up Spanish quite well in junior college.
My Spanish teacher was a native speaker from Guatemala, and while he wasn’t easy, he was very good. We started with about thirty students in Spanish 101, and we were down to seven in the 104 class. It was the only college subject I aced, and in the 103-104 classes, I started having dreams in Spanish.
I can still mostly follow the action if I tune in a soccer game broadcast in Spanish - but I can’t translate it at all… I have to think in Spanish to even have a chance of keeping up. It’s easier for me to read it, and I can sort of read Portuguese and Italian as well.
It’s kind of weird to watch an English Premier League game in Spanish, but it’s a lot of fun just the same. “¡Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!”
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i spent many hours in the 80s and 90s going through microform records of old censuses to help my mother with genealogical research.
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See, I thought microfiche was cool (maybe we had better magnifying screens?), but I was less excited about card catalogs. They took some of the pain out of books having to be physically located under a single genre, but not all of it.
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Even a minor disconnect between what my eyes see and my inner ear feels triggers vertigo and/or nausea. So scrolling through microfiche and zooming in and out to read was sheer agony in my college research paper days. With current tech, I cannot watch my daughter play Minecraft, 3D movies are right out, and I’m the person you probably don’t want to sit by on a flight. And in keeping in line with the topic of “I’m so old”, it’s gotten worse with age.
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giggles
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