One of those can be seen in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 being used by Chris Pratts character. I LOLed when I saw it.


I miss mine

Rotary phones are pulse phones.  And rotary phones worked at least into the 90's and probably after.  I think they may still work.

I think they converted some of those to FEDex drop offs.

 How did you even remember that thing. I had blue.

Specie (honest money)

They punched it in manually later so yes, it's likely their machine was down. If you had a chip in your card, you could conceivably call and dispute. Instant decision in your favor.

They have a name for disputing a charge on a purchase you actually made - "theft".

I remember  using these:

got mine in the tool box and a old can of pee's with both ends cut off to straddle the air cleaner stud you run across on some carbs.

Who remembers this?

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You'll probably have to use this......to find out what yours is.

Microfiche reader.

Damn right it's theft. But it happens every. Fucking. Day.

My wife works as a controller and CFO of a restaurant POS company. Keeping up with PCI compliance across all of their clients is her responsibility and she has a boatload of horror stories.

I've broached the idea of chip readers for our company, but they feel like the loss from disputes would be cheaper than conversion at the moment.

Mmmmmm. Selectric. Best typing keyboard ever. 

They have come a long way since then!  Not Estes, but still :)

We still have one at work and is used a almost monthly to find some information that isn't in the books or computer

I am.

I have one in my basement.

On a Harris mainframe in '79.

Mine was programming FORTRAN on a PDP-11

On a GM you open the little door on the dist cap and turn a allen wrench right until the engine starts missing then left 1/2 turn.
I always thought that was kinda handy.

I still have mine.
For the first year of college we were not allowed to use those "new" electronic calculators.

The first computer I programmed.



It was done using jumpers and plug-in resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The dials were used to input parameters and the output was read on an X-Y plotter or oscilloscope. Those little devices on the top are vacuum tubes.

Or if you were a Business Major; COBOL.

I remember Mom being scared to death that Dad would be drafted and sent to Korea.He just got out of the Navy in '47.

How many of you guy's grew up with this in the living room ?
My parents had a huge one.Just talked to my father and he had his custom made and picked out all the stereo and TV equipment.He said it cost him $900.00 back in 1962.
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The drink of astronauts

I still have ours that came from our furniture store, I think ours is a late 60s model. We sold them up until the mid 80s, although by that time the component stereos were 90% of the market.

Do you remember, or know that they used to come with 3-5 records and at least one or two 8 Tracks?

They would have an orchestral type album, a country or light pop album, and usually an album that had a variety of new rock ( not too hard though ). The albums were from a deal between the record companies and the manufacturers of the stereos. The manufacturers wanted to have albums and tapes so the dealers could demonstrate the sound of their stereos, and the record companies wanted to be able to have an outlet to promote new artists or upcoming albums of older ones. Many would say , "CBS records presents - name of group-", or " CBS record's new stars " with names of a few groups or singers with pics of them on the front.

The albums and tapes you got depended on the market, so around here we got a lot of country, bluegrass, gospel.

Daddy wasn't a fool, and we had a rising customer base of black folks, so he had them throw some funk and disco in.

We always had a stereo on up front as you walked in, but when the car wash was open across the street on a Friday, which was payday, and the brothers were out cleaning up their rides, daddy would open the doors and throw on the funk and disco and crank it up.

Everybody in town called daddy Mr. C.O., or Mr. Cooper or just Coop. Cooper owned the chain until the 1920s when our family bought them out , Cooper Furniture Company, and since they had been in such good graces with the public, and the expense of changing names in three states and 12 stores was high,  they just left it.

Anyway, they'd walk over from the car wash and say " Hey Mr, Cooper, or just Coop, let me check out that stereo, I heard that way over at the car wash."  Daddy or myself would demo it, and they ask how much. We'd give them a good price, and they'd ask how much a week.  Daddy would ask them how much they could pay. They might say $5.00 a week, or $2.50, and daddy would shake their hand and say ok. We'd write it up and deliver it to them. All on a handshake, no contracts or anything, and we never had to pick anything up. Big difference in people now and back then.

We sold a lot of them that way though,especially in the late mid 70s and early 80s when the cabinets came with flashing lights and disco balls.

Of course I brought my own albums up there, and brought in the rock crowd, with AC/DC, KISS, and Black Sabbath, Styx etc. I'd rock them out loud while doing work up front, or just sitting in one of the recliners taking in an ICEE and watching cars drive by and girls walk by on the sidewalk.

I got smart, all the girls my age would walk up and down the sidewalks shopping on Saturdays, so I would bring one of my pups to the store then. They'd see him and come in and love on him. And I'd get to see one of them at the river later on.

I miss those days so much.

and Death From Above

That's awesome. All of it.

At the end of each day at the furniture store, and at the end of the week, month, quarter, we counted down money and receipts. Our adding machine was




Yes, it was from the 1906-1918 period. It worked. My grandfather, that also still worked everyday ( first man in the door, last man out every day until 1991 ), born in 1891 didn't care for the electronics, and insisted on using it.

He would use a more modern electronic model made in 1967 by IBM, but for final adding, it was the old Burroughs machine.

When we added up the receipts, we had to take that, and find the person's account in the ledger book, and write the amount of the payment and the date, and then subtract that from the total.

Now, my family didn't sell junk. We sold one level of furniture, and it was the best you could by, and there's a lot of beds right now, where people my age ( 45-55 ) have given it to their children once they got married. Many of those came from the early days of the store, and their grandparents and great grandparents were born on those beds. There weren't too many doctors, people gave birth at home out here with the use of midwives. Now, that's good furniture.

Anyway, we only sold the best, but we sold it to anyone that wanted it, for whatever they could pay a week or a month. Daddy wanted everyone to have nice stuff that would last a lifetime.

We had six ledger books always active. Two for people that paid in the store ( Poppy's customers ( granddaddy ), two for my dad's customers, and two for our other employee JC Broome. I went out in the den just now and took some photos of one of Daddy's.

Oh, and by the time I was about 10, I was doing all the counting down and ledger work for the whole store. It was very time consuming. I flipped these damn images, but they flipped back. Photobucket, I got to quit that and find another one.

I still have mine and it works!

I was redoing an old bathroom in Illinois and pulling out the cabinet there were thousands of old blades.

Carb adjuster.  Still have mine.

Microfiche reader.  The local library has a microfilm reader.

Fun tidbit. When my wife's grandfather (who was a NASA engineer during the Gemini program and remained close friends with Gene Cernan) died, we cleaned out his office and found his slide rule. It looked like hieroglyphics to me, but I knew what it was. I hope I get it when my FIL passes. I may even try to figure out how to use it and pass it along to our son.

Sounds like y'all were the business model for Aaron's and Babcocks. But with quality goods offered.

Thanks for sharing.

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Vacuum-powered windshield wipers.

When I was 13 or 14 I tried to get them to buy a few strategically placed warehouses so that we could order furniture as a large chain and get better prices instead of as individual stores, and link each store to the warehouses by computer so that we could see inventory at each store and warehouse. Of course we'd all still get deliveries at our individual stores, but the warehouses would stock a lot more, and we could draw from that. We'd never really be out of stock on anything or have to order something from a catalog that took weeks, so we wouldn't lose sales to other nearby competing stores. The only special orders from then on would be custom furniture.

Of course , nobody wanted to listen to a 13 year old, even though I was able to manage every operation and did when asked to ( I spent most of my time in the store learning from knee high to a grass hopper ). Of course, also, 1980 -1981, all of that was new, and it was expensive to buy computers that were able to run POS and Inventory at that time, and it still wouldn't have been instant notification of items sold like the inventory systems that came along in the late 80s.

Did anyone else use ledger books, or those old adding machines in their jobs ?