Might be mistaken, but pretty sure boats were bought and sold long before the internet. ;)

Remember going to the library and pulling out a pile of books to try and find an answer to a question?

my office is full of books that I once had to have and use...still use the parts books and shop manuals for equipment here but that's slowly changing. when I purchase new equipment it comes with a CD now and no books, I have to ask and pay for those. LOL. hell the last update on a frontend loader was done via gps !!

We had the Bargain Hunters Guide. It was a weekly classified little book that always had killer deals in it. Much better deals that are found today. The internet opened the entire world up to sellers, so items that were once found really cheap go for a LOT more money. Back around '97-2000, there were still many people who where not PC savvy and still sold via the local classifieds, I would buy up dirtbikes/cars/boats and list them on a relatively new format, ebay and make a killing flipping stuff. Deals are much harder to find these days.

In those days you hit up the Boat Shows and/or drove many miles, sometimes across multiple states, to go see boats at the larger dealerships.....or you just went to Shooters and drank as you picked out the boat you were gonna buy next. Never forget the first time I saw an Apache idling up there, it was just so raw and bada$$.

Cheers,

Dave

Back then... there was no better deals for buyers than the way repo cars and boats were handled. A bank would take something back , put it in their lot or some building, and put a notice in some paper that they were going to auction it off in a week or so. The auction usually was run by some bank employee that did not know squat about what was being sold...... very few bidders would show up and items were bought cheap.

I laugh when I think of some of the steals I got!!!

.

Used to go to the Miami show every year before the web and go home with all the latest info and what was going in the boat next. Went to the show a few years back and looked around at everything I had already seen on the web. The show is still great but some of the excitement was gone.

I remember going to the MIAMI show in like 80/81. There was a (formerly) nice MAGNUM that had delaminated badly parked out front and spray painted down the side was a rip on Magnum and their construction and lack of warranty coverage. Bet Magnum didn't sell one boat that year.

Now a days we could read all the back and forth BS here. I Guess(?) it's an upgrade?

At LOTO I've really seen the change from the sheer volume, or lack thereof, of people on the lots. Not that boats aren't getting sold, just seems like the days of the "prop spinners" wasting a boat salesman's time is gone. Used to see tons of people in the lots sniffing around the boats on the lots... just not so much anymore.
I still spend my fair share of time mulling the free rags that everywhere down there but then go to the web to find out more about the boat and just save myself the drive and headache of dealing with the lot patrol.

keeping my collection of boating magazines dating back from the late 70's, just in case aliens zap our power grid and no boating content would be available online,haha.

bingo, that's why i moved out of the states, i drive all of my vehicles like i stole them, get a ticket, a 10 buck tip fixes it right there on the side of the road... weeds is not an issue, and when you go to the strip club you can bang the strippers in the back room for 20- 50 bucks depending on the club... ah life is good down here...

lmao, the cel phone generation...

Hot boat magazine was the highlight every month
No bag phone but you could make a call using your ship to shore radio and marine operator it was a collect call at around 1.40 a min (are you guys coming out to the beach today ,,,over) (bring more beer ...over)
Yep feeling pretty old here lol

I have beer but its a little cold for the beach. It may be snowmoboat time soon.

Yep ..............yo Dave get Rob's boat out of there so we can get KEELHAULIN ready for the ice regatta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elY_PfkYmQA

There was less of this...:D:D

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Do we need to start a thread for rat an pics?

I have a road atlas in the door of my truck always!!! GPS dont always get reception or it can die at any time lol

I have fought cell phones and computers from day one. I do like the internet ,but, could easily live without it. I finally got a cell phone a couple of years back and with the exception of portability I could live without that also.
Now my gripe about the cell phones. The last three women from 18 to 43 years of age (I'm 46) all coveted their phones so much that they wanted to take them to bed. That's where I draw the line. If your (woman or man) are so dependant on your phone you need counsuling (most do these days). Cell phones have made dating easier and more dificult at the same time. If you can't dedicate an hour or two of your precious cell time to me (sans phone) then your not the woman for me.

I think I still have a atlas from a 4 month motorcycle trip I took in 1990.

Used color highlighters as a way to mark Fun roads down to boring roads. Back then it was cool that you had a "card" you could put in a machine and get cash!
Lol

It must be difficult being a kid these days. In the old days you could hide stuck together pages under the bed. now adays I would guess it would be a little more difficult to keep mom from figuring out why the mouse is sticky...

you still using a mouse, i upgraded to a rat. lol

Assimilation by Electron
 

It can be quite a drug
If I was college age or younger it would be damn near impossible to resist total submission.

I've tried to manage it as just another tool, generally take what I can use and leave the rest.
Always felt beepers were being waaay too connected to suit me, but obvious advantages for some.

It takes a lot of energy to resist it. :cartman:

My technologically-challenged mother could never even figure out how to record a phone message on her answering machine.
She was proud of the fact that she'd never even been in a video rental store.

Different strokes...

At 46 I have a one strike rule then your out. If you interupt our conversation to text someone while we are out on a date I will get up and walk out in a SECOND! I have left more than one with the bill. I have yet to find one woman I couldn't live without. Lol

You are aware that most cell phones also take pics?

And video.

We all had a compass and a chart...and we new how to use them. we marked our courses that we ran regularly on the charts with a pencil and a straight edge/protractor and wrote the course bearing for both directions on the chart. If you didn't learn this here in South Florida and the Bahamas you phucked up a lot of props and lower units of drives...because you ran aground or hit reefs!!

Yep. I'm not photo worthy though. lol. I would love to have the latest camera phone, but I don't want to pay for a service plan. I have a LG slider that works excellent where I live on my lake. I sit in front of three computers ALL day. The last thing I want is more computer time after I'm off the clock.
I agree that all this technology is like crack to the general population (weak minded). 5 phucktards were all over three lanes of traffic on my 30 mile commute home last week. I think this is Darwinism kicking in to thin the herd, which I am fine with, until you drag or ram into me or my family. Then it's...............

Lol I remember my bagphone well. That thing stayed in the car because it was too big of a pain to carry around. I remember my first handheld cellphone too, a cheap plastic brick-sized thing that cost nearly $200/month for pretty much the convience of having it using maybe 120 minutes of talk time. I don't miss those or my pager I had.

I still do. In the last few weeks I've been to a bunch of bigger dealerships in the Chicago and Lake of the Ozarks. While the internet is handy, I'd rather go to the dealerships because when your there looking for something in particular they realize your serious and will dig deeper to find leads on what you want.


I'm still living kinda old school. Live 20+ miles from any Wal-Mart or major grocery store, strangers happily wave at each other while driving here, and a traffic jam is being stuck behind a combine on a narrow country road. The joys of living/growing up in a small rural farming community.