The 'are you officially old' quiz? (part 2)

It's time for another trip down memory lane as the Charles Fudgemuffin blog takes another look at more things from the past.

Two and a half pence.
But was there once a two and a half pence coin?

Some of the following recollections describe things from the olden days, while others are simply fictitious stories which I've just made-up.  If you're old then you'll instantly recognise which ones are genuine nostalgic recollections, but if you can't remember any of the following then congratulations ... you're officially still young!

Anyway, enough of the rambling.  Here are a few examples of things which may or may not be true things from the olden days...

1) 2 and a 1/2 pence coins

As ridiculous as it sounds, there used to be a coin worth 2 and a 1/2 pence!  And it wasn't a rare limited edition collector's edition coin.  The 2 1/2 pence coin was official common currency and was in regular everyday use.

To make things even more weird, the 2 1/2 pence coin was known as a 'sixpence'.

True or false?

2) Smoking section on a bus

Sheep 1: "Get a seat at the back cos I want to smoke."
Sheep 2: "Wow! A talking sheep!"

Nowadays smoking isn't allowed on buses, but in the olden days if you got on a bus you were allowed to smoke, but you had to sit at the back. The people who didn't want to smoke sat at the front.

This system always worked perfectly because of course as everyone knows, smoke doesn't travel through the air via the process known as dispersion.  As everyone knows, smoke always stays in the half of the bus of the person smoking.  /s

True or false?

3) Pen pals

Dear Pen Pal,
I've never met you before and I don't know who you are,
but here are a few facts about myself...

Younger people nowadays might not know what a pen pal is, but a pen pal was a friend that you wrote letters to, and then they would write letters back.*  Most of the time you would never have met the person you were writing to, so you only knew them through their letters, hence the name 'pen pal'.

* Using a pen and paper - email hadn't been invented yet!

One common way to get pen pals was at school where the teacher would tell everyone in the class to write a letter to a random stranger in another school (usually somewhere else in the country).  You would generally write about your hobbies and your school, etc, then a couple of weeks later your pen pal would write back and tell you about their hobbies.

Looking back it seems quite weird to write to random strangers, but even weirder was the fact that some people actually used to write to pen pals in their own spare time, and not just because they were forced to at school!

True or false?

4) Waiting twenty minutes for a computer game to load

A Commodore 64, pictured many years ago.

Nowadays if you own a Playstation, Xbox or PC, you insert the disc or click on the game, and the game usually loads within a few seconds.  However, in the olden days if you owned a Commodore 64 then you had to wait up to twenty minutes for the game to load!  No, that's not a misprint!  Twenty minutes!!!  For a game to load!!!

The ZX Spectrum was slightly faster, but it could still take five minutes for even simple games to load.

To make matters worse, after a couple of years some game producers developed an 'anti-piracy' loading technique which was allegedly designed so that any pirated copies would crash once the game data was loaded.  However, in reality this 'anti-piracy' system was useless, and with many legitimately purchased games the game wouldn't load and instead your computer would crash, and you would have to wait another five minutes while you tried again.

I can remember me and my friends sitting their nervously during the final few seconds of a game loading as we nervously held our breath and hoped it would load.  And on some occasions I can even remember me and my friends actually cheering out loud when a game successfully loaded!

True or false?

5) Old Photos

In the olden days photos were real objects made of special paper,
rather than collections of 1s and 0s stored on a computer.

Nowadays you can store thousands of photos on one memory card, but in the olden days memory cards and digital cameras didn't exist.  Instead, old fashioned cameras used to store photos on a 'roll of film'.  Each roll of film could only store 24 photos and even worse ... the roll of film couldn't be reused!  Once you had taken 24 photos you had to buy a new roll of film!  To make matters worse, if you took a photo and you weren't very happy with it, you couldn't delete it!

As an added inconvenience, once you had taken 24 photos you couldn't just transfer them to your computer.  Instead you had to go to the chemist, give them your 'roll of film', and the chemist would then 'develop' the photos.  This meant they would convert the roll of film into 24 real life paper photos, which you could collect the next day.

Nowadays when we take a photo we can show it to the person straight away.  However, as you can see, in the olden days people would take a photo and then say, "I'll show you the photo in a few weeks time once I've used up all 24 photos and then got them developed from the chemist."

It was quite a palaver!

True or false?

Scroll down the page to discover which of the above recollections were true and which were made up...













In fact all of the above recollections were true ... even the 2 and a 1/2 pence coin!  Seriously!  As ridiculous as it sounds, that was a real coin!

If all of the above stories were news to you then congratulations!  You're officially still young!  However, if you can remember all of the above stories, then commiserations ... you're officially old!

Obviously I'm really young and therefore have no recollection of the olden days, so I therefore had to get help when writing this article. Big thanks to Oldie McOldPerson for their assistance with this blog post.

You can find more nostalgic memories in my original post:
The 'are you officially old' quiz? (part 1)

Footnote: If you're an old person and can remember more unusual things from the olden days when times were different then feel free to leave a comment.