What discontinued products do you miss?

[Badger]

A real half gallon of ice cream!

Blue Bell ice cream is still a half gallon and the quality is one of the best. I don't think they whip in as much air as many of the others.

Our Ice Cream, Blue Bell Ice Cream

Cheers!

 

[jerome len]

Listening to the "lone ranger" on radio

 

[JoeWras]

The Weather Channel, when they talked about the weather.

MTV, when they played videos.

CourtTV.

Basically any cable television that has productions instead of "reality" crap.

 

[Bestwifeever]

Harold Ramis.

 

[imoldernu]

The subject is scary. You don't have time to read about "what used to be"...

Instead... take a minute, and look around... for just one thing...

Plastic

Growing up in the 1930's and early 1940's... We didn't have plastic.

Now, imagine your life without plastic.

And try to imagine what would have been there, instead.

I miss a lot of that.

 

[MRG]

Blue Bell ice cream is still a half gallon and the quality is one of the best. I don't think they whip in as much air as many of the others.

Our Ice Cream, Blue Bell Ice Cream

Cheers!

Thanks I'll give it a try!

 

[jimbee]

Growing up in the 1930's and early 1940's... We didn't have plastic.

Now, imagine your life without plastic.

And try to imagine what would have been there, instead.

I miss a lot of that.

Bakelite?
Technically a plastic though (maybe).

Wood?

 

[Bestwifeever]

Bakelite?
Technically a plastic though (maybe).

Wood?

Celluloid and plexiglas too.

We didn't have a ton of toys but I remember the frustration of the tab breaking from repeated bending trying to make it fit in the tab/slot assembly of inexpensive metal toys (quick to rust and painted with lead-based paint, probably, too).

 

[Jack_Pine]

Original super balls. I loved those things.

I was going to say full sized smokie links, but they just came back around me.

 

[Badger]

Listening to the "lone ranger" on radio

Some of the websites I have used (otrcat) others not. I even bought a few MP3 discs for a couple of dollars that contained hours of episodes. There are many more of these. Just google. You may also find CDs at your library. I use to copy them to tape years ago to use in the car when traveling. Now I guess you just burn a CD or put on a jump-drive.

http://www.otrcat.com/

http://www.oldradioworld.com/

The Original Old Time Radio (OTR) WWW Pages. Old-Time Radio at its Best

Old Time Radio (OTR) - Radio Days: A Radio History

Free Old Time Radio Shows - Free OTR Downloads In MP3

Cheers!

 

[Lakewood90712]

The subject is scary.

Instead... take a minute, and look around... for just one thing...

Plastic

Growing up in the 1930's and early 1940's... We didn't have plastic.

Now, imagine your life without plastic.

.

Plastics ?

 

[Janet H]

The Seven Up candy bar | Loved these.

Coach Handbags made in NY - back when they were simply designed and made with saddle leather

Reasonably priced, well made underwear.

 

[Beldar]

Pre-Smog cars with carbureted engines.

They were so easy and enjoyable to work on, I never got stuck on the road unless it was some sort of major failure. Todays cars are such a PITA to work on, a breakdown nearly always results in a tow.

Plus, the smell of a non-catalytic exhaust, especially if detuned, is pure ambrosia, that subtle hint of unleaded gasoline...


_B

 

[PhrugalPhan]

Baseball (and football) cards in/on cereal boxes and on Hostess boxes (Tastykake was the main mini-cake vendor in my area, so Hostess was hard to find ). I still have them, and they remind me of my youth.

 

[braumeister]

Growing up in the 1930's and early 1940's... We didn't have plastic.

Now, imagine your life without plastic.

And try to imagine what would have been there, instead.

I distinctly remember building my first crystal radio set on a bakelite chassis. Early 50s. Aside from that, I guess everything was wood or metal.

Of course, when I was very young, all we had was stone. Well, the occasional mammoth bone.

 

[CoolChange]

Andy Capp's fries.

Not the cheddar or hot flavored ones, although they are good comfort food too, just the plain version which was the ultimate salty greasy treat in my mind.

 

[Tortoise]

Fizzies! Drop one in a glass of water and you had instant soda pop.

 

[Easypick]

Chocolate soldier drink in a bottle. I remember getting them out of a horizontal soda machine. You put your money in and slid the bottle along a rack then lifted your selection out.

 

[Samz]

I only see Telephone Booths on TV. There may be 2 wall pay phones at the Atlanta airport luggage area now.

When I was a kid and a couple of us had a dime it was fun to prank call someone we knew (disguising our voices best we could)...no caller ID back then. Good times!

 

[ERD50]

The Seven Up candy bar | Loved these. ...

Never saw those, an East coast thing I guess (but then one comment mentioned Jewel-Osco in Racine)? Sound good from that link. Here's more:

Fizzies! Drop one in a glass of water and you had instant soda pop.

Yep, those were fun as a kid. Did anyone mention those wax mini-bottles of sweet juice inside? Terrible, but appealed to us kids.

The thread has really turned into food nostalgia, and I'm not surprised, as I honestly had a hard time thinking of anything from the past that I really 'miss' - things mostly are far better today.

OK, here's one (could be in the rant thread) - the VOLUME CONTROL, the physical volume control. Yep, the old rotary type. I absolutely hate having to grab a remote and find the volume keys (in a different place on most remotes), and then point and click, click, click, click to get the volume down for some obnoxious commercial, or to answer the phone/door. And I hate to use MUTE, because then you can forget you had it on. Try to find the buttons on a TV if the remote is hiding - a bunch in a row, and nothing to distinguish volume from anything else. And computers are worse, find a menu, or the function key among about a hundred...

There is just nothing as direct and 'user friendly' as a physical knob. Grab it, turn it down or up, you know the drill. And you always know a full turn of the wrist takes you just about all the way from off to full. You know what a quarter turn will do - your wrist is practically calibrated for that. Direct feedback, muscle-memory, no delay - it's near perfect.

In fact, that was the main deciding factor when I bought an Analog-to-Digital converter to play digitized audio from my computer to the stereo. I got one with a physical volume control - bliss!

For our kitchen TV, I wanted some external speakers - the little internal TV speakers were just too tinny. So I got a small amp and speakers - and the best thing - the amp has a physical volume control. Remotes seem like the stone age compared to the older physical volume control - we've gone backwards.

Do they make a TV remote with a physical volume knob? That would be great!

Beyond that, I have not thought of anything other than nostalgia.

Pre-Smog cars with carbureted engines.

They were so easy and enjoyable to work on, I never got stuck on the road unless it was some sort of major failure. Todays cars are such a PITA to work on, a breakdown nearly always results in a tow. ...

_B

I thought you were using satire, but I guess not. That's not how I remember it.

Points that had to be adjusted, timing, dwell, spark plugs that would foul, carburetors with idle adjustments, lean/rich, choke adjustments - and that dashpot thingie to squirt a little extra gas in when you slammed the throttle?

Ran terrible on a cold day until they warmed up. Oh man, sorry, no nostalgia even for any of that. No thanks.

Modern cars needing a tow? Hmmm, last few times I've had any issues at all, the check engine light comes on, I read the code, and it practically tells me what is wrong - long before I even noticed any problems.

-ERD50

 

[athena53]

There is just nothing as direct and 'user friendly' as a physical knob. Grab it, turn it down or up, you know the drill. <snip>

Do they make a TV remote with a physical volume knob? That would be great!

Amen! The place where I miss knobs is on radios when you're trying to tune into a station. Sometimes the "scan/seek" type controls just don't get it right. Even better, I had a tuner with a second knob for fine-tuning.

 

[ERD50]

Amen! The place where I miss knobs is on radios when you're trying to tune into a station. Sometimes the "scan/seek" type controls just don't get it right. Even better, I had a tuner with a second knob for fine-tuning.

Hah! That's one place I do like the buttons. With a digital display (and memory select) you get the station exactly. With the knobs, I wasn't always sure if I had station WWWX or nearby (on the dial) WWWZ until some announcement clued me in.

I'm pretty sure the digital tuners get you as close as you are going to get, they have PLL circuitry to lock on. Your old analogue tuner might have had higher sensitivity, and therefore with careful tuning you could get a distant station in. But receiver sensitivity is a function of the tuner itself, not so much the human interface on that tuner.

My NAD receiver even has a second button that acted like your fine tune knob - it moved you in a few increments plus/minus from directly on frequency - that could help to move away from a strong neighboring station. But good capture ratios and high rejection ratios and selectivity make that a not-so-common problem. And unless I'm in my car, most radio listening is done over the internet - point/click to choose my station. And I feed my computer through an amplifier, with a ... physical volume control!

-ERD50

 

[Calico]

Fizzies! Drop one in a glass of water and you had instant soda pop.

I had forgotten all about these! Found them on Amazon:

Fizzies

 

[redduck]

Carnation Breakfast Bars....

Loved those bars and ate a lot of them. I was surprised when they were discontinued. Maybe I ate too many, causing some of the main ingredients to become extinct.

 

[aja8888]

I thought you were using satire, but I guess not. That's not how I remember it.

Points that had to be adjusted, timing, dwell, spark plugs that would foul, carburetors with idle adjustments, lean/rich, choke adjustments - and that dashpot thingie to squirt a little extra gas in when you slammed the throttle?

Ran terrible on a cold day until they warmed up. Oh man, sorry, no nostalgia even for any of that. No thanks.

Modern cars needing a tow? Hmmm, last few times I've had any issues at all, the check engine light comes on, I read the code, and it practically tells me what is wrong - long before I even noticed any problems.

-ERD50

Apparently, you were not a good mechanic on the older cars that had ignition points and a carburetor, or you didn't have a good mechanic handy.

I had plenty of those simple cars, and all that they required was a good, simple tune up every 10,000 miles or so. Besides, all the tools you needed to do that tune up with consisted of a set of sockets/wrenches and a feeler gauge. If you were like me, you bought (or built) a dwell meter for determining if you gapped the points correctly. And, if you were in the time quadrant when electronic ignition modules were available as an add on, these old cars were even more reliable. There was a lot less to go wrong with those very simple spark-ignition systems than there is today.

Carburetors were pretty simple devices until air emission rules caused manufacturers to try to add computerized main jet control and other not-so-effective manipulation of the air/fuel ratio under different operating temperatures. That was a transition period (mid - 1980's) to fuel injection, and the early fuel injection units were not very good, especially the mechanical ones (early GM - Rochester).

The little "dashpot thingie" you mention was the carburetor accelerator pump - and BTW, and they worked quite well and were a simple design. Back in the late 70's and early 80's, a good backyard mechanic could totally rebuild a carb in an hour and a kit that contained a new needle valve and seat, an accelerator pump, all the gaskets and O-rings, and other miscellaneous parts was under $20.

Cars needing tows? Seems like I see lots of them around here and towing services are everywhere. These newer, computer controlled cars seem to either run or just stop, and fixing one in your driveway requires a good ECM scanner and that may not be enough. Oh, and an inexpensive code reader tells you what the "symptom" is and that is generally not enough information to figure out the defective part(s). Try deciphering a typical code that gives the info as PXXXX - "leak in evaporative control system" and go to Autozone with that in your hand. Good luck!

Yes, the newer cars are better designed, more efficient, more comfortable, but are disasters waiting to happen if some critical component goes south. The old cars had no critical components outside of the nut behind the wheel.