When I was younger, we had a designated "computer room" in our household, and my mom would always get mad at me because she couldn't go on the internet while I was on the phone. Oh, how times have changed! Looking back, I always thought that was wild, but then I learned about what the world was like in the years before I was born, and I got even more shook. Recently, older adults of the BuzzFeed Community shared with me the unique "back in the day" experiences that were totally normal back then but have now become obsolete. Here are some responses that will either have you feeling nostalgic or completely surprised:
1. "I grew up in NYC in the '50s, long before owners had to pick up after their dogs. The sidewalks were literally like an obstacle course filled with dog poop! It was everywhere!"
2. "My high school had a smoking area outside for students, no permission slip required. No one ever checked to see if any of the students out there smoking were actually old enough to legally smoke."
3. "My mother told me once that when she was younger, around the '60s or '70s, she went to the dentist, and her dentist spent the entire appointment ranting about how another woman patient had the audacity to show up wearing pants instead of a dress or skirt. Apparently, it was common to dress nicely for simple things like going to the dentist."
4. "For a short while, we had to deal with having to pay to use the restroom, particularly at gas stations and airports. Each stall in the restroom had a lock that would only open if you inserted a dime."
—Bob, 68, Michigan
5. "Automatic push-a-button windows were extremely rare; most cars had a lever on the door you had to crank to put the window up and down. Each window. So if you had no passengers, you couldn't put the other windows up or down without stopping and cranking each one."
6. "The card catalog at the library! If you had to write a paper for school, you started there. It told you which books (in your local library only) MIGHT have some useful info, and you'd source from those books to write your paper. All I have to say is thank god for Google!"
—Anna, 56, Georgia
7. "I'm 70, and rotary phones were pretty much used until the late '70s/early '80s. Of course, all the rotary phones were corded. Touch tone/cordless phones were a HUGE improvement. Pretty soon, I predict landlines will be obsolete, and people will only have their cellphones."
8. "People would let a stranger in their home to demonstrate things they were trying to sell: vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, cleaning supplies, and more."
—Joe, 60, Illinois
9. "When I was in fourth grade, my allowance was 25 cents a week. That was back in 1969 to 1970, and as I got older, I received 30 cents a week. I would buy a Sprite and a bag of peanuts, and I'd put my peanuts in the Sprite. Back then, Coke was maybe 5 cents, and peanuts were about a nickel."
10. "There was pornography everywhere you looked. There were centerfolds posted on the walls of auto shops and magazines in barber shops, and there were no plastic covers on newsstands. And if you couldn't afford to buy a magazine yourself, you could rummage through the garbage behind your local convenience store and find copies of last month's edition. It was strange, but it was normal."
—Anonymous
11. "Banks refused to give my mother a mortgage just because she was divorced. They told her that divorced women were 'unreliable' and were, therefore, a credit risk. Mind you, when she applied, she was employed full-time and had been for decades."
12. "My mom and aunt wore paper dresses for a bit. They tore like wild, as you can imagine. My grandma still has one; it looks like a hospital sheet that's just more decorated."
13. "There was SPF 2 and 4. That's it. And to get a tan, women rubbed themselves down with baby oil."
14. "My dad was born in 1947, and he said that when they went swimming in gym class, all the boys swam completely naked. I guess it had to do with bathing suits not being good for the filtration system, but he said that none of the boys could refuse. Girls also weren't allowed in the pool."
15. "My parents didn't smoke, but as a kid, I remember dealing with people who smoke whenever we went places. At restaurants, there were smoking and non-smoking sections. The wait was almost always longer for the non-smoking area. At baseball games, cigarette smoke filled the air, and I remember thinking it was really neat when they added specific non-smoking sections at the ballparks. Now, you rarely run into people smoking in public, to the point where you REALLY notice when someone is."
16. "Phone calls made to towns 40 to 50 miles away were considered 'long distance' and incurred hefty fees. Even calls to the next town, which should have been considered local, were called 'toll calls' and had high rates due to differing local phone companies. It's hard to imagine that happening now."
—John, 79, Washington
17. "I remember when we got the very first fax machine in a law office I worked in during the mid-1980s. The fax came out on curled paper in brown ink. We'd take the faxed paper to the copier and photocopy it immediately because — wild as it sounds — that brown ink would literally fade and become invisible in a few weeks. Hardly a good thing for legal documents!
18. "I used to go to the corner store to buy cigarettes for my mom with a note from her. I got to buy candy with the change."
19. "Hairstyles were a big deal when I was in high school. To get wavy or curly hair straight enough to 'tease' into a bouffant style, we'd roll our hair around three-inch diameter brush rollers held in place by plastic picks or bobby pins and sleep on them overnight. We weren't allowed to wear trousers or blue jeans to school, but our skirts and dresses had to be long enough to touch the floor when we were ordered by a teacher to kneel. And since we lived in the countryside, where the school was too small to have buses, we walked 3/4 of a mile to school wearing wool snow pants under our dresses."
20. "I grew up on a farm in the '60s. Most of us had pick-up trucks, and most had gun racks with loaded rifles. We drove to school with our gun-loaded trucks every day. No one ever thought a thing about doing so — we'd never even heard of a mass shooting back then."
21. Lastly: "Car doors usually flew open while taking a turn! No one remembers kids in the backseat of those 1960 and 1970 cars being told to 'sit close in the middle.' Parents always yelled not to lean or fall asleep on the back doors because they would sometimes fly open. Yes, kids fell out of moving cars! I am grateful for car seats, seat belts, and car doors that lock and stay shut."
