My wife worked at Suncoast for a while, back in the 90s, before we met.
A year ago, I got a great deal on a Dell laptop on ebay. It was about $72 total. It's from 2018 and was hardly ever used. Super-clean. I wanted it specifically for the cd/dvd burner. People have been posting awesome ambients for relaxation on youtube for a while now. My wife and I put them through an mp4 converter and save them to dvd. We have a great collection going. We bought a Samsung bluray player for $18 and that will play videos recorded as data. Mostly. Occasionally there will be one that it won't play, due either to a bad upload or some little quirk in our player. But, I would say it works fine for 90% of the time or better.
Here is a great site for all lovers of old catalogs:
346 Vintage Christmas Catalogs & Holiday Wish Books with 313,544 total catalog pages from Sears, Montgomery Ward and JCPenney over the years.
christmas.musetechnical.com
I browse through catalogs on there all the time and often save various pages. It's really cool that they have so many catalogs in their entirety!
There are TONS of vanished food items that I miss. Here are some at random, just off the top of my head:
Nabisco Royal Lunch Milk Crackers. They were changed a while before the end and were not as good.
Sunshine Raisin Biscuits....same situation as above.
Nabisco Crown Pilot Crackers....stayed alive a while in the New England states, but now I think they are gone.
'Reggie' candy bars.
Gator Gum....derived from the original Gatorade flavor.
Team Flakes cereal.
Raisins, Rice, and Rye cereal.
'Doo-Dads' snack mix....came before Chex Mix. It had the wheat and rice chex-style cereal, pretzel sticks, small cheese crackers, and peanuts. Something about the way the name appeared on the box made my dad reverse it, and so we always called the mix 'Spapoops'.
In 1976, for the Bicentenniel, an icecream company had 'Red, White, and Blueberry'. The red was raspberry. It was really good. We had a few half-gallon cartons of that over that summer and then it disappeared forever.
In 1979, Twizzlers came out with some limited-edition flavors. One was grape. The look was opaque, and not like the modern semi-translucent twists. Completely different flavor formula than any of their more recent versions of grape. Boy, do I miss those!
In this area, there was a sodapop producer called 'Fawn Beverage', based in Elmira, NY. Their cherry soda was spectacular! No other cherry soda I have had since even comes close.
Dairy-Lea brand milk. Back in the early 70s, that was still delivered to us....left in our galvanized tin, insulated Dairy-Lea logo hinged lid box on a big rock in our driveway! (The rock, long ago, had been used as a step to enter and exit horse-drawn carriages!)
Fast food:
We used to have one of the Carroll's chain of restaurants. I liked their hamburgers better than McDonald's.
There was Sambo's, before the name became politically incorrect and was changed to No Place Like Sam's. The food quality went downhill at that point, in my opinion.
A great department store was Newberry's. I loved to go there for toys, as a kid.
We got a lot of our stuff in the 60s and early 70s from Western Auto.
In the mid-70s, I got every AMT Star Trek model kit except the Interplanetary UFO, plus the books The Making of Star Trek, and The Trouble with Tribbles, from the Johnson Smith mail-order novelty company.
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