Southloop [he/him]

This. I can fumble around with physical switches while inverted in a negative 4g dive and still change the station off of Chappell Roan. You can’t do that with capacitive touch, especially the ones that get hot and all the heuristics get goofy.

I miss Wild America.

Oh, no, nobody buying these things in the US can afford them. These things roll off the lot powered more because of subprime lending than gasoline.

StarTAC! Then I had a Nokia 5100 when I went to college with a blue airbrushed lighting faceplate so it looked like the cover of Ride the Lightning. I might have made three total calls between the two of them and never texted, only partly because it was 10 cents a text.

I’m actually just a bit younger than you. We had it because my dad worked at Bell Labs and Scientific Atlanta way back when, so we could get the hook ups and build out whatever computing or network machinery we needed at the time. It was like sci-fi legos learning it as I grew up. It was great!

Half my duties at my first job as a maitre de at an Italian restaurant.

I can’t help but picture this being the size of a cinder block, like something tied to the gas station bathroom door’s key.

Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.

Yes! The Harvard Family Health Guide or the American College of Physicians Home Medical Guide! And my dad always bought every new edition of the Green Beret Medical Handbook!

The typical Fox News addict of today also probably wouldn’t have been caught dead watching anything news related outside of local evening and maybe 20/20 depending on the subject matter. The CNN nerds were still watching though.

There was also a better spread of educational programming in popular circulation (talking NASA-owned TLC days and prior here).