Quoted from amkoepfer:

Colecovision 1982 price-175
Intellivision price-299 dropped to 249 within a couple months
2600 original price-200
I guess intellivision was the cadillac of gaming systems

Quoted from OLDPINGUY:

A couple of my favorites!

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Quoted from OLDPINGUY:

Oh the Roadtrips in the 60s and 70s from NY to Florida...up and down 95.
This kept the 4 boys fighting in a 69 Cutlass Wagon, from fighting:
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Quoted from OLDPINGUY:

Not much going on off the highway in the 60s, and nothing in the car, except fighting with my brothers. The signs served a distraction, but I was itching for fireworks as a 9 year old.

Quoted from Rezdog:

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Quoted from EdisonArcade:

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Quoted from mooch:

I remember playing with this old version of the Fisher-Price cash register when I was in pre-school about 60 years ago. I also banged out some tunes on their xylophone.
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Quoted from bingopodcast:

This talk of movies and recent nostalgic pangs have me thinking about my time as a projectionist for a movie palace, the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, VA. It opened and has been in continuous operation since December 24, 1928. Pretty amazing for a single screen theater!
Here's the interior:
https://images.app.goo.gl/US1MggVRRxqqRcYYA
I started in the box office, but always wanted to work with the machinery in the projection booth. After a couple of years, I got my chance.
We were one of the last theaters still running carbon arc lamphouses to light the film. In the 70s(ish) most theaters converted to Xenon bulbs as they were far safer and much less expensive to run (you'd burn through a negative carbon in three reels, and a positive carbon in six-ish. A Xenon bulb lasted for quite a long time, and started to dim rather than just turning off, so it was easy to tell when a replacement was needed. The Byrd upgraded to Xenon lamp houses once another area theater closed. It was a huge upgrade, as the only carbon manufacturer left was producing carbons with large air pockets. When these were hit, the arc would sometimes stop or sputter, which obviously wasn't ideal... and modern movies were not made to be lit by a (relatively) wimpy arc lamp.
This is a carbon arc lamphouse, which was very similar to the lamphouses we had. You'd pop open the side and swap the carbons out (when the machine was off, of course - very high Amperage DC current ran through these. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 40A per projector (there were two, not counting the Brenograph slide projector for ads). There was a huge rectifier room below the projection booth.
https://flic.kr/p/AVKPkX
(hey, they've got a scope lens in! Our lamphouses were also Simplex, with Strong projector. We did not have reel covers any longer, and had much larger four reel hubs mounted.)
Carbons looked like this:
https://flic.kr/p/6S1eKA
Carbons burning viewed through the welder's glass built into the lamphouse:
https://flic.kr/p/6S6uw4
The Brenograph - this device had two (small) projectors mounted on top of each other, with a lever-controlled iris. When the projectionist wanted to swap between projectors, they pulled this lever which would simultaneously close one and open the other. Clever and allowed for some nice (manual) fade effects. I built the ad slides, local businesses would advertise with us. Show start time was 5 minutes past the advertised. We did not run traditional movie trailers (it was a second run theater).
https://flic.kr/p/6FNwgy
We did however run a special "litter trailer", which was campy and fun. I recall there was a large expense with getting another print made or the copy we had restored. It ran every show for years and years. I also "built up" the movies from shipping reels, and that included splicing this trailer onto the front of reel 1:
Speaking of manual fade effects, check this out:
https://flic.kr/p/ehe3CG
This is a small view of the four color switch board we had for lights. You could turn any one color on or off, and all switches were ganged together for a color, so you could fade one section or all lamps off at once. You could also override the gang for a particular lamp if desired. It was really neat, and I'm probably not explaining it well. Big switches, fun to pull.
Working in projection, there were several different jobs needed, this is a tool I really only wanted to use when building up or tearing down a print:
https://flic.kr/p/cdR9AL
The splicer was a fancy hole puncher with tape and a sharp blade on the side. I couldn't find an image of a cue cutter, but I'll explain that in a minute. If you used it outside of build up or tear down, it meant the reel fell off the projector or some other catastrophe happened. Misthreading or under-spacing a film meant that any mechanical problem and the film would get stuck in front of the lamp. All films when I was operating used 'safety film', which was basically polyester coated. This allowed a hole to burn in the frame that was stuck, but the whole film wouldn't catch fire. Projectioning used to be a very dangerous job, when nitrate film was the standard. The entire supply and uptake would catch fire almost immediately. Scary stuff. I was always proud that when a problem occurred, I was able to fix the film for subsequent showings without removing more than absolutely necessary (usually 1 frame). I also took pride in my splices as they were very very hard to detect even for someone trained and looking for them.
Speaking of training, this is a cue:
https://images.app.goo.gl/gcRSrJzwRc1M4pDH6
Learning about these spoiled every movie in theaters for me afterward (though now everything is digital so these are obsolete. ). Basically there are two sets of cues on every reel. A typical movie is somewhere in the 5-9 reel range depending on length. Each set of cues is actually four frames with a small circle of the coating and print stripped away. The cutter was a spring loaded cylinder that you'd press on the film and turn. There were different lenses used to project. "Flat" lenses projected a circle. Cinemascope lenses projected as an oval. When the bell rang to alert the projectionist of a pending reel change, you'd walk over and turn on the second lamp house. For carbon arc, that meant slapping the rods together and then spacing them approx 1-1.25" apart. When you saw the first cue, you'd turn the second projector on and open the dowser (this would allow the second film to project onto the screen if control was switched.
The second set of cues happens (I think, tough to recall) 8 seconds later. On that cue, you'd swap the sound track and hit a foot pedal to switch the active projector. Really cool to do, and invisible to theater goers.
This manual counter could be used to find the appropriate spots for cues.
https://flic.kr/p/anzeNr
Once the film reel was done and pulled from the uptake, you'd take it over to the bench to rewind. I always manually rewound it because it was faster than using a motor (and some of our larger reels were bent, which made motorized operations more risky, at least in my mind).
https://flic.kr/p/Y83zFy
Soundtracks! Endlessly fascinating, each major type had their own (limited) space on the print. Dolby using the space between sprocket holes was always funny. In my time, we only used the analog soundtrack, which used an optical reader/amplifier. After my time, Dolby donated a digital setup and had technicians flown out to install! Really nice.
https://images.app.goo.gl/JWV2k4xxdzCT98E16
The theater was built in a time when lavish organ setups were much more common than you might expect. Wurlitzer was the king of theater organs, and the Byrd has a beautiful organ. It controls a number of instruments and has GIGANTIC multi-story pipes behind the back curtains.
https://images.app.goo.gl/PoiUPyen9JvY12Cm6
It's unfortunate that 35mm, much less carbon arc projecting, is a lost art these days. There are fewer and fewer 35mm prints, and most of those are actually archival. No 35mm prints can be 'built up' into larger reels, having the heads and tails removed. I loved lugging those film canisters up to the booth on the fourth (or fifth?!) floor, building up the prints, and just the day-to-day operation. A lot of memories tied to that theater.

Quoted from pinwiztom:

Shoot. These OP short cordouroy shorts are going for $75 to $100 a pair. I used to wear these things a lot in the 80s. Wonder if i still got some amongst the dozen of other clothes i no longer fit into.
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Quoted from pinnyheadhead:

I am still kind of a short shorts guy. You may like Jordan shorts but this was my guy and still kinda is. High and tight. Maybe the shorts were the reason why he didn’t jump and stayed low to the ground handing off assists??
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Quoted from Zartan:

My family drove to Disney World a few times when I was a kid. When we would pass through Ohio, we always stopped at a fireworks store! I would buy as many as I could possibly carry! We lit a field next to a railroad track on fire when we got home with the fireworks!
Edit. Not on purpose!

Quoted from Azmodeus:

Orange crush!