Experiences and stuff that won't happen again....

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119856330#Comment_119856330

Used to get bootleg gig tapes off the late George Murray in Record Collector in Wicklow St.. won’t be a happening now with everything conveniently online and obviously with George no longer with us sadly but I used to enjoy spending a couple of hours on a day off trawling through record shops….and a catch up with George who’d always have tips.. “ ohhh you like xyx… try …… “

so yeah as convenient as Spotify is I miss in a way getting lost for an hour or two trawling through music shops.

Thespoofer

Italia 90.

Sweet Talkin Romeo

22 million Brits tooned into the snooker WC final

ceadaoin.

Bamboozle, swing ball and getting a basket of cocktail sausages and chips in the pub while your parents had a few drinks 😄

Sgt Hartman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119858925#Comment_119858925

My neighbor's car had a metal clothes hanger wrapped in aluminium foil as a makeshift radio ariel. My friend's Dad had a brown coloured Austin Allegro with a missing keyhole for the boot. He had to stick a fork into the hole to open it.

There was also the manual choke in the cars back then. If you pulled it out too far you risked "flooding" the engine.

Hotblack Desiato

I bought a brand new motorbike as late as 1998 with a manual choke. If I was in a hurry on a cold morning going to work and set off with a bit of choke still on, it might give a surge of power just as I was tiptoeing through a slippery corner covered in dead leaves in the estate. Fun times. I had another motorbike before that on which, if you didn't have time on a cold morning to let it idle for 2 or 3 mins before setting off, the throttle could freeze open half a mile up the road. You then had no option but to turn the engine off and wait for engine heat to unfreeze the carb. That's assuming you actually managed to stop before the junction or whatever you were trying to slow down for.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119857505#Comment_119857505

The important word there in the post you were replying to is "summary" - it's actually not that easy to fit a news story into that small a space while keeping all the important details. Aertel not only provided all the info they needed for the story, but did the work of summarizing it too.

Ush1

Penny jellies. In my local shop you might get 50 cola bottles for 50p, the oul wans in the shop would just grabs random handfuls. No gloves and fingers be covered in sovereign rings.

You could also buy single, loose smokes.

b318isp

1. Buying music was an event - a specific trip into Virgin Megastore in town, or to a local Golden Discs
2. DIY servicing and fixing cars - points and plugs, the hassle of changing drum brakes (until you customised an old screwdriver to hook the springs)
3. Push starting cars in the winter
4. Lighting a coal fire to heat up the house after coming home at 6pm
5. Super Ser or electric fan heater in the mornings - in only 1 or 2 rooms
6. No duvets - only blankets and eiderdown quilts
7. Almost every dinner involved potatoes
8. A fry up for "tea" at 5pm
9. 3 fuses for the whole house - sockets, lights, oven
10. Briefcases were cool
11. Short trousers much of the year on boys under 10
12. Rabbit ears aerials, or a coathanger as an alternative
13. Wind up mechanical alarm clocks in bedrooms
14. Airfix and Matchbox models being relatively common
15. Almost everyone new how to fix a puncture
16. Aluminium windows and porches
17. Radio ads for shopping centres - "Northsoide, Northsoide, a great great shopping centre" or something like that
18. Bunting at easter
19. Tommy's was the best shop around (not the crap it sells now). Ours had a bike shop at the back, and a very good toy section.
20. Action Man for the boys, Cindy dolls for the girls
21. Panini football sticker collections
22. Summer special comics and winter annuals
23. Not afraid of kids being covered in muck
24. A house with a walk in shower was posh. Most of us washed in the bath with rubber push on shower hoses on the taps

Cluedo Monopoly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119855398#Comment_119855398

I remember some parents banning their children watching the Michael Jackson video Thriller when it aired first on MT USA. Parents were chattering about it for weeks before it aired and many made the decision to unplug the TV that afternoon after hearing that it could be disturbing for the kids. Crazy stuff now when you think back. 1982.

Cluedo Monopoly

Collecting Hula Hoops packs to get a Hula Hoops watch.

Collecting ice pop sticks to race them in the steams beside footpaths during heavy rain or to build stuff with them.

Putting conkers in the hotpress to make them unbreakable. Never worked.

I remember making and throwing petrol bombs in the 80s. We were mimicking what we saw in NI.

Larbre34

Short trousers much of the year on boys under 10?

It was the 80s,not an edition of Billy Bunter...

Having the bedroom over the sitting room and waking daily in winter to the noise of the Da scraping out the fire grate from the night before and setting a new one before heading out to work. They were a work of art too; kindling criss-crossed to let air up through, firelighters, coal, black diamond nuggets, logs and a covering of slack for the slow hot burn.

In fact the whole business of open fires was a production and a half.

Chopping wood with a sharp axe on an old tree stump from the age of about 9. Every few weeks hearing a noisy lorry pull up and three huge lads who looked like they walked straight out of a mine hefting bags of coal around the side of the house and emptying them into the coal shed. Learning the science of dampers and grate covers, again from about age 8 or 9.

No stove fires then me boys!

Tabnabs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860570#Comment_119860570

We had a coal burning stove installed in the house when the oil strike in the 70s made getting home heating oil so difficult. It was the central heating for the whole house through air ducts. Our second stove was bought in the 80s and that was for logs and briquettes. Both imported directly from Norway.

The Mighty Quinn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119859035#Comment_119859035

My dad used to stick a pen in the socket to act as a top pin, then plug in the two pins! 😄

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860550#Comment_119860550

If the kids weren't terrified by watching Michael Jackson, they should have been

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860485#Comment_119860485

50p? You were one of those rich kids then 😁

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860186#Comment_119860186

“Manual chokes” are still very much part of decades old light aircraft still flying the skies, and flooding the engine can happen. 😁

Using a Desktop Windows PC with TWO physical CD ROM Drives, a CD ROM drive which could not record or a DVD Rom which could not record, and a CD Rewriteable, which only wrote to CD's, not DVDs, a successful write not always guaranteed - so don't use a Gold Plated Record Once CD ROM for this.

Using a ZIP drive on a PC

Using an LS 120

Using a Jazz Drive

DOS based Business Software like word perfect

Tommy's in the Square Tallaght had a small section selling Italeri and Dragon kits. sold glue. but no paint. Also, at one stage The Monogram kit "Joker Goon Car" kit was on sale. (From Batman 1990 movie) Where kay's kitchen is now.

griffin100

Being able to get 4 pints of Smitwicks and a fish and chips on the way home from the pub for under a tenner!

Using a phone box - trying to find 5p / 10p's and trying to speak fast before the pips started

Calling up to friends houses unannounced

Do you still get a free plate of rice and chicken curry in nightclubs now?

Smoking upstairs on the bus

Going on school trips with teachers who would bring you to nightclubs and leave you off to drink whilst they chased women / men

Buying home computer with 1k of RAM and using a little dongle to get another whopping 16k to allow you to play games

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860505#Comment_119860505

I had both Cindy and Action Man, loved the space gear he had, the Geiger counter was cool. I added a plasticine extension to him, so to speak. I was a delightful little girl.

b318isp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860570#Comment_119860570

I wore shorts to primary school in the 70s (up to maybe 2nd/3rd class), and as a child was in them pretty much all summer.

kirk.

Wearing trousers made out of old curtains

Fighting in the schoolyard

Smoky discarded fagbutts

mikemac2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119854518#Comment_119854518

For sure. In Japanese banks faxes are still used. When I worked in such place not long ago we had a guy who would check the machine a few times a day and hand us our faxes. Just part of his job 😊

We also had a room for our ancient Telex machine. I never saw the Telex being used though

In 20 years time they will still use faxes. "Paperless office" does not exist in Japan

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119861357#Comment_119861357

Still some primary schools around Dublin like that.

mikemac2

Going to Dublin on December 8th! My once a year trip to the Big Smoke

I was awfully unstreetwise, people sure saw me coming. A young lad outside Busaras asking for me for a pound for the bus so of course I gave it. I even gave it again when I met him later that evening. The third time, ah heyor but I was very slow to cop on

Being blown away at the size of Easons on O´Connell St. I could spent hours there

Walking around streets with the Christmas lights and seeing the shops. Ah it's nothing for Dubs but from rural Tipp we had nothing like this (where shops closed for lunch hour , in fact some still do!) and I loved my once a year trip.

December 8th - culchie invasion 😃

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119861525#Comment_119861525

As an aside, there's some beautiful passages in John Banville's memoir about taking the train up to Dublin on December 8th as a kid.

https://www.rte.ie/culture/reviews/2016/1105/829418-john-banville-time-pieces-a-dublin-memoir/

bodhrandude

Man. I'd love to taste one of these again, the best chocolate ever.

ChickenDish

• Getting the ride for the first time
• Fapping over page 3 in the Sun
• Buying a loosey (single cigarette) & single match for 10 pence
• Licking the window on the bus or chomping on the back of the seat in front of you
• Paying the bus conductor or smoking upstairs in a bus
• Walking half a mile to use a pay phone
• Playing sticky finger with little miss rotten crotch in the local fields/bushes/park

jasonb

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119855902#Comment_119855902

God yes, I spent a lot of time becoming an expert in this, editing the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to free up as much of that precious 640KB as possible. Does this game come on floppy disk? Yes it does, so great, disable the CD-ROM driver and free up a few more KB... :)

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860550#Comment_119860550

I might be mis-remembering this, but I think Anything Goes on Saturday morning on RTE showed the Thriller video too, but over two weeks (or at least splitting it over the one show). I have a memory of Aonghus McAnally saying something along the lines off ... "Now we're going to see Part 2 of Thriller. When we left it, Michael was being chased by Zombies..." or something like that!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119860993#Comment_119860993

My very first PC had a 10MB Hard Drive, and two 5.25 Floppy Disk Drives. The 10MB Hard Drive was a double-height unit that just about squeezed inside the case. The fact that I have a 128GB Micro SD card in my phone now is just mad.