Yup! I wish I still had a picture of the satellite antenna we bought to bring netmail and echomail into the area.
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I didnāt make the connection with your handle. Iām giving myself the excuse that it was awhile ago.
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Or you could use the excuse that two things are unrelated, which would be true! 
The early RATS Nest evolved into a different and much more sophisticated BBS product with another name, and then changed again when I sold it. And time passed, and here we are today.
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Ah. Very well then. I thought from the satellite antenna comment you were directly involved with the āinfrastructureā. ETA: You must have stealth edited the comment above as well. 
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I was disconnecting from it (pun intended) by then. I was active duty Navy at the time and Uncle Sam and personal issues were keeping me quite busy then.
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Oldest school skates? I had quad skates, but with urethane wheels. And Iāve never even seen a skate key. Anyone have skates with metal wheels?
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I did as a kid (hand me downs). Used to use them in the upper floor of the barn during the spring early summer when the hay was at a minimum.
At the same time, early/mid 70ās, the neighboring town had skating one night a week where the skates were the old metal-wheeled ones (at least for the first couple years that I went).
Wow, they are still doing it ā doubt that they are using the old ones, though)
My mom told me about how they used corn cobs as ice skates when she was a kid during the great depression.
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I bought one of these when I needed to spot check results on some programs I was writing.
At my first job after graduation they were still using this for input to an older computer.
But this carried me through university.
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Anyone have old school dangerous toys? The kind that used to be mainstream but are now considered horrifically dangerous?
I had a chemistry set, and a kind of scary old chemistry set manualā¦
ā¦it did not come with a fume hood or common sense, though.
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Iām old enough to have had a chemistry set that had fun things like sodium ferrocyanide in it, when I was roughly a 1st grader. Granted, itās a fairly non toxic compound if you donāt mix it with anything acidic. Probably best my mom chucked that one up on a higher shelf until I was older.
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We had this Magnavox VHS machine to go along with our Magnavox television. I think the TV is still in my momās basement, though it doesnāt work anymore.
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Fine old bordello song. Nothing to do with skating, of course.
If you had to go to Lake Nebagamon to find some action, you were in a small town indeed.
Anyone have old school dangerous toys?
My best friend in 6th grade seemed to have an unlimited supply of fulminate of mercury. It wasnāt designed as a toy, I donāt think, but we enjoyed playing with it.
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That was my calculator when I was very small! And by āmy calculatorā, I mean it was my dadās, but I played with it way more than he ever used it.[quote=āSkeptic, post:30, topic:84257ā]
Oldest school skates? I had quad skates, but with urethane wheels.
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I had those, too ā four urethane wheels, metal base that strapped to your shoes ā but it had some sort of ratchet mechanism, no skate key.
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I remember one of my friends in 8th grade somehow getting his hands on a big box of thermometers. He spent a weekend breaking them open and extracting all the mercury, and brought it to school in a little vial. Heād roll it around on the lunch tables and desks, and liked to let it roll from hand to hand, cupping it in his palms. Unfortunately he developed weird dark spots on his palms and got very sick. We didnāt see him for awhile.
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I had one of those handheld quicksilver mazes. I ended up getting rid of it, not out of rational self-preservation but boredom. I had a bike, a drafting table, Construx, and an NES. What more could a bored kid ask for?
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Oh, everyone had easy access to liquid mercury when I was a kid. We all had mercury switches on our walls (in the thermostat), you could buy replacements for a couple of bucks at the local hardware store, and they had lots more mercury in them than a thermometer. We even had a hobby shop in town where you could buy mercury by the bottle, and it must have been cheap because I could afford it when I was 12.
The fulminate, though, I have no idea where that came from, other than Buddyās garage.
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I use it for mercury gilding. It is harder to get than it used to be. And we have to do the process under the sort of conditions that one might use to handle ebola.
All metal except for the leather ankle straps, and the key hung around my neck from a (dirty) white cordā¦when this song was popular:
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Hah! fist bump
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