Time Flies When You're Having Fun

A friend who is younger than I  but no spring chicken herself  has poked a stick at me with a comment on the preceding post. She has provided the following link, which you should check out before reading the rest of this post:

Getting into the spirit of it, I confess that with regard to most items listed, I am even older than *that*.

1. Rotary Dial Telephone: When I was in grammar school rotary dials had not yet made their appearance. You picked up the receiver and the operator came on the line. You told her what number you wanted and she took care of it for you.
   
   
2. Manual Typewriter: I had one, a Royal Portable given to me for my fifteenth birthday. I learned to type on it, picking up a bad habit along the way. When I was composing and typing I often had to stop and think of what to type next, and would lightly drum my fingers on the keys. When the IBM Selectric came out in the 1960's it had no sense of humor at all about that, and a half dozen characters would be typed before I managed to stop my fingers.
   
   
3. Coffee Percolator: It's electric. Ho hum. My mother had one that was *not* electric. You put the coffee in, added water, put the top back on, turned on the gas, and waited until it had perked a couple of minutes.
   
   
4. Flash Cube: I actually owned a box camera, a Brownie. No flash of any kind. If you wanted a picture you waited until the daytime.
   
   
5. TV Channel Selector: That was how it was with us. Get up, walk to the TV, manually set the selector to channel 4, 5, or 7.
   
   
6. Record Changer: The earliest couple of record players I remember us having did not have the capability. When a record ended the needle skipped back and forth in a silent area near the center hole. You had to lift the arm manually and put it back on the arm rest. Later, we had a console record player. It not only had a record changer but it had four speeds: 78, 45, 33 1/3, and 16 2/3 rpm.
   
   
7. Gas Station Driveway Bell: Yup, and a boy would come running. He'd pump your gas, clean your windshield, and offer to check your oil. Sometimes he'd just check it without asking.
   
   
8. TV Station Sign Off: I remember them. I didn't see them very often because I was young and they occurred after my bedtime. I think the stations went off the air at 10:00 PM and started up again around 10:00 AM.
   
   
9. Cash Register: To tell you the truth, I never paid much attention to them and have no clue regarding what they looked like when I was young.
   
   
10. Film Projector: Yes, I remember those, particularly from grammar school days when the entire school would be summoned to the auditorium to watch The Night Before Christmas or something similar.
    
    
11. Broken Record: Yup. Sometimes the needle would hop back and forth from one groove to another, over and over again. Another potential hazard was the "skip," when the needle would jump a groove and some small period of music or words would not be played.