Material Things of Which the Younger Generation Has No Idea

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the horizontal scan whistle from the back end of CRT monitors.

everyone has thought of everything, but i remember when i was in infant's school that there were "rods" ( that's what they called them) of different lengths from the 1 rod to the 10 rod.

the one rod was about 1 cm cubed and was just plain colored light wood.
the 2 rod was 2 cm long and 1 cm tall and 1 cm wide and was colored i think yellow.

anyway, it went up to the 10 rod which was 10 cm long and 1 cm tall and 1 cm wide and was colored red. (the 9 rod was blue)

i do not know what we used them for but if you sucked on them, they gave pleasant little bubbles into your saliva which tasted nice.

i am sure i will never be able to type in a descriptive enough search term to find reference to these rods on the net.

me too, but i got stuck with the crappy rabbit hides stitched together.

^^cuisenaire rods?

I remember those.

goodness i did find a reference to them. here is a pic (but it is computer generated but shows what the wooden ones looked like (without the sectional lines)

god you're quick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods

^ they were replaced by mab blocks, which weren't nearly so much fun.

that is totally correct except the colors are not how i remember them. i think it was where i learned the word "crimson"
the 5 was crimson, and those rods look newer and as if they are made of plastic.
good work.

Wristwatches that you had to wind up.

i used to have entire bags of those at home.

some came in flat square blocks and they were all orange.

Never heard of them.

What were they for?

^ if you were autistic, they were for endlessly taking out, sorting, and packing back in their little boxes.

Other people used them for learning to count.

I still wear one. got tired of replacing batteries. but i'm an outlier

white out fluid.

Teletype machines, and anything that goes with them.

Kind of 1930's precursor of the Fax machine teletype machines were basically typewriters hooked to telegraph lines, so you would have an immediate transcription from morse code to text.

We stocked the ink ribbons for teletype machines in the typewriter ribbon section, at the office supply store I worked at in the 80's. They didnt move fast. But we had a few on the shelf. The two young guys who managed the store didnt know WTF a teletype machine was. They would even ask customers to explain to them what a teletype machine is. I over heard them once, and explained it to them. But even I would never have heard of them myself if I hadnt seen one particular old Charlie Chan movie on TV that involved a teletype machine.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 03 Jan 2017, 4:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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