memes

And then, every so often, when the moon was in the right phase and the stars aligned, it would come in perfectly clearly for a few glorious seconds.

Party lines! You'd share your phone line with one or more other households. When the phone rang they all rang with alternating short-long rings to identify which house on the line the caller intended to call. So if someone calls you at 2am, several of your neighbors know about it because their phones rang too. Even better, being a snot nosed kid I knew how to take a set of headphones and clip them onto the line. You'd hear both sides of the conversation of any house on the party line without dropping the call voltage too much and getting caught. That meant no one talked about anything private on the phone, everyone else could be listening.

Lol I had one like that - I made a copy for a friend, but it wasn't just one code word, it could be any one of about a hundred - but he was dedicated, he figured it out somehow over the course of a few weeks.

You could copy the manual on a xerox machine. Of course some publishers were smart and printed the manual in such a way it any copies came out as an illegibly dark mess.

So naturally you took a legitimate manual, manually transcribed it, and made copies of the copy.

IIRC, it was Greg Norman's Shark Attack that had a thing where it would give you a small pixel art picture of the top-down view of a golf course, and you had to go through the game manual and enter in what page that golf course picture appeared on... so we just got a photocopy version of the manual

I edited the file to change 'now' to 'not' just for grins.

Oh man, I still remember when Windows finally powered your computer off when you shut down. My poor Nana spent half an hour trying to turn off my uncle's computer because she kept hitting the power button just after that showed up (as was tradition) but after the computer transitioned to power off, so it just kept turning on.

Also:

Internet you could hear, literally.