I used to record my CD’s onto blank cassette tapes so I could listen to them on the tape deck in my car. Did the same thing with vinyl records, too.
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Making crank phone calls on your friends. No caller I.D. back then, and no *69. Can’t get away with that now!
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Skateland!!!
Recording a movie off tv using the VCR - pausing for the commercials and pray you remembered to press record again.
Pen pals.
Paying the paper boy.
Soda in glass bottles.
Adjusting the tv antenna to get the best picture.
Playing with the cardboard box your neighbors put to the curb when they got a new fridge, for days.
“It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?”
The Mall.
Waterbeds.
My first car that had an 8 track player and cassette.
Using a typewriter for school papers.
Sending money in the mail to order things from magazines and hopefully it was as cool as you thought it would be.
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My dad used to be an appliance repair man for Sears. He would bring those huge boxes home and I would cut windows out of them and make a “fort”.
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Yeah, ours transformed into many things before it finally fell apart. But you reminded me…making tree forts in the woods. And hanging out in them everyday. ‘No girls allowed, except Laura’ (and I was the only girl on the street 
)
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I mean, the word QUEST was in the name the whole time… 
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Napster! Making mix cds and not knowing if the songs you downloaded would give your computer a virus 
I still have some cds that were made that way!
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I downloaded so much music from Napster! Hours and hours burning cd’s!
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Napster caused a huge controversy, I remember. The guys in Metallica were really up in arms about it.
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Downloaded music cost me 11k… it was actually my wife before we were married that got nabbed… 7 songs the record company sued and won $11,000 dollars. I’ve been stealing shit from them ever since to get my money 
back 
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Napster WRECKED our computer. Norton anti virus didn’t know what hit it!
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Before google maps, I used to get lost… a lot.
When I was about 12, my mom signed me for tutoring at this teacher’s home. She lived a 5-minute walk from us, so my mom walked me there for the first session. For the second one I was over an hour late because I kept going round in circles and couldn’t figure out which one was the right apartment block.
When I went to uni, in a different country no less, I struggled a lot in the first week and missed several lectures because I couldn’t figure out where the building was. When I got the route to the uni sorted, I could not figure out where the damn lecture rooms were, and we had to go to different ones for each class. One day, I couldn’t find find my way back home and called a friend to help me… it turns out, I’d been walking for 20 minutes in the wrong direction.
Speaking of wrong directions, for my first ever job interview I checked google maps on my laptop before heading out and planned the route in my head. No smartphone tho. Just my silly ADHD brain. I walked the wrong way for an hour all dressed up and in high heels before realising my mistake and heading back home.
For my first ever therapy session… I got off the train at the right stop, then walked the wrong way for 20 minutes, eventually got there 5 minutes before the session was supposed to end. It’s amazing she still took me on as a client after that performance 
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At night I read books illuminated by a lamp under the covers for hours. Nearly setting the house alight with said lamp, burning holes in the sheets. No idea why I don’t remember my mom going crazy over that.
One of the reasons I was reading late every night was that in the room next to mine my dad was hammering away at his typewriter, a mechanical one first, an IBM bullet electric one later, making a huge racket next to my head.
My parents never made the connection between my bad sleep and my dad’s writing late into the night. And I never told them. So it persisted for years
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Completely unrelated… But you just reminded me, I wrote my first (and only!) book on a typewriter when I was 11.
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Age 6, winter days on the sledding hill standing next to a burn barrel for warmth.
Age 12, Riding bikes (3 speed was the norm, only rich kids had a 10 speed) to the arcade to play pinball machines.
Age 17, my first typing class on manual typewriters. The school (the whole school) had an Apple I computer.
Spent a good piece of my childhood with my 5 brothers in the way back seat of those Detroit steel behemoth station wagons (estate cars, for the Brits). No seatbelts of course.
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4 channels on TV and all of them shut down overnight.
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dang! I always heard stories about that but thought they ain’t gonna get me 
I’m glad they didn’t! I would have owed so much money
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So you actually get in trouble for uploading (or keeping the song in a shared folder). They upload the song from you, get a warrant for your IP address and sue you.
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The electric typewriter was my best friend back in the day. Did my homework assignments on them, book reports, wrote to my pen pals in the U.K. with them, articles for my school newspaper…on and on. I loved them. Computers are great, but they don’t have that same aesthetic as typewriters.
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Just out of curiosity, did your Dad have any of his writing published?
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