You know you're old when.....

[themadhippy]

when the barmaid your chanting to about the  local area  turns around and says" you must have been at school with my  gran"

[Ed.Kloonk]

when the barmaid your chanting to about the  local area  turns around and says" you must have been at school with my  gran"

"I am your grand father"

[Cerebus]

I have about eight Aboriginal plastic $10 notes from 1988, the first plastic notes ever printed in the world (Australian invention).

I hate to disabuse you of your national pride, but Haiti circulated plastic bank notes in 1982 printed by the American Bank Note Company. So not an Australian invention; you might have developed a better plastic banknote, but you didn't invent it. The Haitian ones were printed on Tyvek and to all accounts were problematic. The idea of printing on smooth plastic 'paper' wasn't even of itself new, Du Pont sold a printable version of Tyvek in the 1970s. I went to an outdoor festival in the summer of 1978 where the programme had been printed on Tyvek to allow it to survive the outdoor conditions of a British Summer.

[VK3DRB]

I have about eight Aboriginal plastic $10 notes from 1988, the first plastic notes ever printed in the world (Australian invention).

I hate to disabuse you of your national pride, but Haiti circulated plastic bank notes in 1982 printed by the American Bank Note Company. So not an Australian invention; you might have developed a better plastic banknote, but you didn't invent it. The Haitian ones were printed on Tyvek and to all accounts were problematic. The idea of printing on smooth plastic 'paper' wasn't even of itself new, Du Pont sold a printable version of Tyvek in the 1970s. I went to an outdoor festival in the summer of 1978 where the programme had been printed on Tyvek to allow it to survive the outdoor conditions of a British Summer.

OK, but Australia "perfected" the notes by developing novel technology for printing them. To be honest, the Aboriginal notes were too big for most wallets and were not overly robust. Our banknotes are very robust now. We are the biggest manufacturer of plastic notes on the planet and we export them to many countries. Bank note printing is a dying trade as the notes are generally much less used in Australia these days. Crooks hiding their income from the authorities still use cash. But most people use EFT. In a few years, wallets will disappear as it all moves to the mobile telephone. In a few years, I suspect some stores won't even bother with cash.

You know you are getting old when you are the only person in the checkout line paying in cash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote#:~:text=banknote%20is%20returned.-,Adoption,coincide%20with%20Australia's%20bicentennial%20year.

[RJSV]

...old when you:
   Use the initials P.C.F. when telling a kid you came up in a time, Pre - Cell - Phone days, when there were no cell phone markets.
Oh and I spelled 'Fhone' wrong too, we do that...eh

[Neilm]

You also know you are getting old when university graduates in electrical/electronic engineering have never heard of a CB or ham radio.

Ham radio? isn't that what the USS Swinetrek used to communicate

[Gregg]

You know you are old if you remember when a high tech phone had a 20 speed dial.   

[duckduck]

My wife was in the hospital a couple of years ago for an outpatient procedure. I was in my wife's room and we were chatting with the nurse, who in the course of the conversation said "I have recently been re-reading my old facebook posts from when I was 14..."

I have never felt older in my life.

[asmi]

...when you start yet another "electronics as a hobby is dying" thread.

[tpowell1830]

... when all of your friends have died out.

[coppice]

... when all of your friends have died out.

You are getting seriously old at that point. You are starting to age when you are invited to more funerals than weddings. You are ageing when the police start to look young, but you are getting seriously old when the corpses start to look young.

[BradC]

... when all of your friends have died out.

I recall having that conversation with my grandmother at 96. "None of my friends visit anymore. Yeah Nan, you've outlived all of them."

My grandfather turns 100 in August. He has a similar problem. Unfortunately he's also outlived his 5 year old great grandson and completely upset the natural order.

Personally I only go back as far as electro-mechanical totalizers, so I'm not as old as most of you.

[GlennSprigg]

When the salesman looks at you strangely when you ask where the colour TV's

I remember as something like a 7 year old, going to a friends house and they had a new colour TV.  They played around with the colour knob turning it to b&w and back to colour.

I then went home and tried to do the same thing on our b&w tv

Not to mention the 'Sales Gimics' back then, trying to sell you a 'special' Colour TV Aerial!!!   

[NiHaoMike]

Not to mention the 'Sales Gimics' back then, trying to sell you a 'special' Colour TV Aerial!!!   

They're still doing it with "HD" and "4K" antennas.

[GlennSprigg]

And now just REMINDED of my age, when a then best mate from my 1st year apprenticeship just phoned me!!!   
It's been 45 years... and we have a lot more to talk about and catch up on !!   

[GreyWoolfe]

Pushbutton transmissions (don't play with the buttons, they can fall inside the dashboard-don't ask how I know)  Peeling the side label off my black Converse hightops and writing on the white rubber piece at the toe.  Wearing ties in public grammar school.  Going to Gym class, none of this P.E. rubbish.  Tub washing machine with the wringing rollers.  Having a Sting Ray bike when they first came out and putting baseball cards in the spokes with clothespins.  Getting yelled at by Mom for taking her broomstick handle to play stick ball with.  Getting Matchbox cars that came in boxes and being a teenager when Hot Wheels first came out.  I used to play hard with them till all the paint was off.  Now I display my collection in UV resistant Acrylic cases on the walls in my office, wishing I had those cars to add.

[CatalinaWOW]

Cars with hydraulic power door locks.  Can't image who thought this was a good idea.  Fortunately they weren't mass market.

[richnormand]

@ GlennSprigg
"Not to mention the 'Sales Gimics' back then, trying to sell you a 'special' Colour TV Aerial!!!   "

Same people selling "digital" TV antennas today...

[NiHaoMike]

To be fair, there is a bit of truth to it, in that newer standards that cram more information into the same bandwidth would be more picky about signal quality. Especially in the US where they used the oddball 8VSB.

[coppice]

Same people selling "digital" TV antennas today...

It depends where you live, and the broadcast system there, but "digital TV antennae" can be ones optimised for the band used for digital broadcasts in that area.

[Cerebus]

Cars with hydraulic power door locks.  Can't image who thought this was a good idea.  Fortunately they weren't mass market.

Depends what you mean by hydraulics. For many years the central locking on Audis was operated by air pressure and on enough of them to definitely qualify as "mass market". There was a car thieves' trick that allowed you to completely unlock the whole car with a small source of air power applied in the right place. Apparently a tennis ball with a hole cut in it was sufficient if hit smartly to supply said air power.

[TimFox]

I remember a "Carl and Jerry" episode in Popular Electronics (somewhere around 1962, maybe) where a disgruntled high-school kid evacuated a small propane tank in the physics lab and used it to suck on vacuum lines to open car locks for knavery.  His excuse was to whine that his awful mother had taken away his tape recorder when he used it to document that she snored.

[CatalinaWOW]

The ones I was thinking of were fluid hydraulics.  An uncle had one.  I think it was Oldsmobile or perhaps Buick, and the leaks were unfortunate, both from a staining and odor standpoint.

[themadhippy]

Apparently a tennis ball with a hole cut in it was sufficient if hit smartly to supply said air power.

A tennis ball cut in half , placed over the boot lock  and struck worked on certain ford estates,so im told.

[TerraHertz]

... you realise that when you were born, Albert Einstein was still alive.   

Or (in my case) that Einstein died the year you were born.

Also, when you're well familiar with 'decaying antistatic foam' and it's a problem that affects you personally