The 70's and 80's in Ireland

Unknown to my dad, I "borrowed" his transistor radio some nights to listen to Radio Luxembourg.
The chats were good, the music too and they'd phone in competitions.
I'd never heard of Hangman before Radio Luxembourg.
Desiderata too, although the music at the start of it was freaking scary.

My poor dad.
He couldn't understand why the batteries weren't lasting in the radio.
I'll tell him some day soon.

fryup wrote: »

and what be dat?

Grandeeod wrote: »

WTF! We stored our phone numbers in it beside the P&T or Telecom Eireann installed land line that took months to install!

but what is it?????????? never seen one before,

iamwhoiam wrote: »

I still have one beside my phone !! Its a note book for phone number . You file them alphabetically and move the slider to open on a chosen letter

jayus! you were very sophisticated altogether

fryup wrote: »

jayus! you very sophisticated altogether

I had something like it for years after I got my first mobile too. Back then there was no such thing as cloud storage so of you lost your phone, all your numbers were gone.

My parents had one exactly the same as the one in the photo. They still have it actually.

Snickers was known as Marathon

Bambi wrote: »

Grew up in the 80s and early 90s, it was ****ing tough but tbh I'd rather have grown up then than now, not only did we get great music and genres we also got to jump on the internet while it was all a brave new frontier.

The world has gone to absolute **** in the last 3 years and it's mostly down to the prevalence of social media monopolies and smart phones

The early days of the internet were wonderful. Less dopes.

Floppybits wrote: »

Smart phones are the devil. I agree the last few years have really gone to sh1t. Everyone so vain and needy and having meltdowns if they dont get enough likes or if something negative is said.

Everyone wants to be some sort of celeb. Bloggers, Vloggers, Influencers. Fooking arseholes.

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

I bet it will lead to a spike in mental illness in this generation.

It seems like everyone under the age of 25 lives every detail of their life through a phone screen.

It's not healthy.

Under 25? Probably the majority, but the age groups are very varied up to the 40s I'd say.

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

I bet it will lead to a spike in mental illness in this generation.

It seems like everyone under the age of 25 lives every detail of their life through a phone screen.

It's not healthy.

yep, not to mention online bullying...back in day if you were picked on in school at least come the end of the school day that would be the end of it....but nowadays its there 24/7 for the whole world to see, i reckon there's a lot of kids out there under severe distress

Billy86 wrote:

That was still going on on into the early 2000s or whenever they deregulated the taxis - with the icing on the cake of seeing well over a dozen taxis with their lights on pass you by and not pay any notice.

Billy86 wrote:

Nowadays it's sometimes hard to stand at the traffic lights/bus stop/etc in Dublin without having a taxi driver flash their lights at you.

No doubt that was in Dublin or some other city. Out here in the sticks, you walked. And 10 miles wasn't far when you had a gang with you.

FanadMan wrote: »

No doubt that was in Dublin or some other city. Out here in the sticks, you walked. And 10 miles wasn't far when you had a gang with you.

Very true. And many’s a prank was played on the way home too. No vandalism.....stupid innocent stuff.

Frenzy is brilliant

Solicitor in Pub: We were just talking about the tie murderer, Maisie. You'd better watch out.
Maisie, Barmaid: [salaciously] He rapes them first, doesn't he?
Solicitor in Pub: Yes, I believe he does.
Doctor in Pub: Well I suppose it's nice to know that every cloud has a silver lining.

That's a grand cake Nora.

Raheem Euro wrote: »

I watched it on the tv when I was a kid (80s Dublin)
That was reasonably mild. The ultra violent banned stuff was around on pirate video tapes and could be seen, if you were that way inclined.

It wasn't shown on UK TV until 2003.
Did RTE show it in the '80s?
Have a vague recollection they might have.


I watched a pre-cert VHS copy in 1987.

There was one video library in New Ross that rented out all the nasties and pre-cert tapes until the end of the decade.

NewbridgeIR wrote: »

It wasn't shown on UK TV until 2003.
Did RTE show it in the '80s?
Have a vague recollection they might have.

No chance. It was still officially banned here in the mid 90s when I saw it in the IFI.

Had a Sinclair Spectrum 16K with rubber keyboard, it was a bit too much for my parents to afford for Xmas so I agreed to go halves with my confirmation money... later got the 32K Ram Pack and it was great finally being able to play all of those 48K games you heard about and could see in Tomorrow's World in the Ilac but couldn't buy. (Actually I did buy a 48K tape, Atic Atac, a while before my birthday when I got the ram pack.. loaded it in just to see the loading screen but it wouldn't play obviously!)

Bought a few games but got loads through tape swapping in the schoolyard... shhh... liked the Ultimate games the best. Pssst, Jet Pac, Tranz Am, Cookie, Atic Atac, Knight Lore, Alien 8 (thought it was great completing that with a map photocopied out of Sinclair User).

Ocean games were good too, Match Day (by Jon Ritman, who went on to write the excellent Head Over Heels which I had on the 128K and Amiga and I have a Linux port now!), Cobra, Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Super Test. Edit: OutRun!!! it was absolutely crap compared to the arcade version yet it was still good fun. Side 2 of the tape had the arcade version soundtrack that you could play on your tape deck while playing the game...

Space Harrier was another one which just never should have worked on such an underpowered machine, but somehow did.

Other good ones were more or less "one hit wonders" like 3D Tank Attack, or Ant Attack. Hewson Consultants - NightFlite, 3D Seiddab Attack (yet another game with Attack in the name, video game violence, wha? and Seiddab was Baddies backwards), Avalon which by all accounts was great but I never played it. TT Racer was surprisingly good.

Sold the Speccy a couple of years later and got a Sinclair QL (!) which would have been decent if the Microdrives weren't so unreliable and blank cartridges so expensive, because of that there were practically no games or much else for it, learned a lot about programming on it though. (Linus Torvalds was another QL owner... whatever happened to him?) Even before Sinclair had their financial crash it became impossible to get blank Microdrive cartridges, and the ones I had would stretch and eventually become unusable so it had to go.

Got a Spectrum 128K then - the short-lived "proper" Sinclair one before Amstrad took over. Felt like a step back in time (and wish I'd kept my old tapes!) but it had a good sound chip which some games took advantage of, and by this time a lot of the old good Spectrum software was available for half nothing on budget software labels.

Another couple of years after that I got an Amiga 500.. different world altogether. Wish I'd got the dial up modem for it but I never did. But I won't talk about the games because the 80s had only days left to go when I got it

BTW everything including the first year or so of my Amiga ownership (4096 colours) was viewed on a sh!tty B&W portable and the only reason I got that was that my dad got annoyed with me taking over the TV (THE tv, the only one) from school home time until dinner time!

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Had a Sinclair Spectrum 16K with rubber keyboard, it was a bit too much for my parents to afford for Xmas so I agreed to go halves with my confirmation money... later got the 32K Ram Pack and it was great finally being able to play all of those 48K games you heard about and could see in Tomorrow's World in the Ilac but couldn't buy. (Actually I did buy a 48K tape, Atic Atac, a while before my birthday when I got the ram pack.. loaded it in just to see the loading screen but it wouldn't play obviously!)

Bought a few games but got loads through tape swapping in the schoolyard... shhh... liked the Ultimate games the best. Pssst, Jet Pac, Tranz Am, Cookie, Atic Atac, Knight Lore, Alien 8 (thought it was great completing that with a map photocopied out of Sinclair User).

Ocean games were good too, Match Day (by Jon Ritman, who went on to write the excellent Head Over Heels which I had on the 128K and Amiga and I have a Linux port now!), Cobra, Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Super Test.

Other good ones were more or less "one hit wonders" like 3D Tank Attack, or Ant Attack.

Sold the Speccy a couple of years later and got a Sinclair QL (!) which would have been decent if the Microdrives weren't so unreliable and blank cartridges so expensive, because of that there were practically no games or much else for it, learned a lot about programming on it though. (Linus Torvalds was another QL owner... whatever happened to him?) Even before Sinclair had their financial crash it became impossible to get blank Microdrive cartridges, and the ones I had would stretch and eventually become unusable so it had to go.

Got a Spectrum 128K then - the short-lived "proper" Sinclair one before Amstrad took over. Felt like a step back in time (and wish I'd kept my old tapes!) but it had a good sound chip which some games took advantage of, and by this time a lot of the old good Spectrum software was available for half nothing on budget software labels.

Another couple of years after that I got an Amiga 500.. different world altogether. Wish I'd got the dial up modem for it but I never did. But I won't talk about the games because the 80s had only days left to go when I got it

BTW everything including the first year or so of my Amiga ownership (4096 colours) was viewed on a sh!tty B&W portable and the only reason I got that was that my dad got annoyed with me taking over the TV (THE tv, the only one) from school home time until dinner time!

Jaysus! Where do I start with your post?? I went to Tomorrows World in Dawson Street. We literally just hung around the shop.:D Visited the Ilac one the odd time. First feckin computer I saw was the Oric. The first one with its rubber key pad. A rich friend had it. The Oric Atmos followed quickly and we played with that in TW. How quickly the Commodore 64 came around and games became the thing. But my first real computer experience came with designing graphics on a Commodore 128, not mine, but using it as a computer as opposed to a gaming machine. I still have those graphics recorded on Super 8mm film shot off the TV screen.

The Sinclair Spectrum? What can I say. A gaming machine that didn't match the Commodore's??? My next experience was the BBC Micro and then the Amstrad with the built in tape deck. After that it was a case of the Apple and I never looked back. The Apple Performa 450?? I remember the "Windows '95, Apple '89 Ad. I'm now drifting across the Microsoft/Apple platforms to suit the need. Computers for me were always about the "what do they really offer" as opposed to games. The internet was great before Smart Phones.:D

But.. I think Commodore was the 90s though.