In a typical 1970s Boomer living room, the phone was bolted to the wall, and the phone book was thick enough to double as a booster seat. A set of encyclopedias filled a shelf in the den. Nobody thought twice about any of it.
For the roughly 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, this was part of the standard inventory of a household. A single smartphone now covers what used to take a telephone, an answering machine, an address book, a camera, and a paper map.
Other things simply fell out of style. Some are still sitting in Boomer homes, waiting for children who mostly don't want them. Stacker compiled a list of 15 household staples common in Boomer homes that younger generations rarely own.
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1 / 15Every year, a fresh directory landed on the doorstep, and finding a plumber, restaurant, or neighbor's number meant flipping through it by hand. Search engines put an end to that. Many publishers have since stopped delivering residential white pages unless someone asks for one.
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2 / 15Coming home meant checking for a blinking light. Standalone answering machines took off in the 1980s, recording messages on tiny cassettes that some families kept for years. Carrier voicemail made the box beside the phone redundant.
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3 / 15The good dishes rarely lived in the kitchen cupboards. Formal china was a wedding registry staple for generations, displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet and brought out for Thanksgiving and not much else. Casual dining and smaller homes have made the cabinet a hard sell. Plenty of grown children now turn down the family china when it's offered.
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4 / 15Every digit required a full turn of the dial (and a mistake meant hanging up and starting over). The Bell System introduced Touch-Tone dialing in 1963, but rotary phones hung on in many homes well into the 1980s. Today they mostly turn up as vintage décor.
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5 / 15By 1987, waterbeds accounted for roughly 1 in 5 mattresses sold in the U.S. Then the downsides caught up. A filled king-size model could weigh well over 1,000 pounds, and a single leak could ruin a bedroom carpet. Many apartment leases banned them outright.
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6 / 15Gas stations once handed out road maps for free, and most family cars carried a glove compartment full of them, rarely folded the right way. GPS units arrived in the 2000s. Smartphone navigation finished the job.
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7 / 15In the 1950s and '60s, the stereo was a piece of furniture. Wooden consoles housed a turntable, a radio, and speakers in a single cabinet, often as long as the sofa across from it. Component systems of the 1970s split the setup into stackable pieces, and the console lost its spot in the living room.
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8 / 15Rabbit ears sat on top of most TV sets, and getting a clear picture often meant someone standing beside the set, adjusting the angle (sometimes with a strip of aluminum foil for help). Cable and satellite moved most households off broadcast signals. Cord-cutters who still watch over the air tend to use flat antennas mounted out of sight.
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9 / 15Before the delete key, a typo meant correction tape, a dab of Liquid Paper, or starting the page over. Liquid Paper itself came from a secretary: Bette Nesmith Graham invented it in the 1950s to cover her own mistakes. Personal computers retired the typewriter from most homes by the 1990s.
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10 / 15The 8-track was how many Boomers took an album on the road. Ford offered the players as a factory option starting with its 1966 models, and the cartridges ran in an endless loop, notorious for cutting off a song mid-chorus to switch tracks. Cassettes had overtaken them by the early 1980s.
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11 / 15Built-in trash compactors were a selling point in 1970s kitchens, crushing household garbage into a fraction of its size. They also tended to smell. Most homeowners decided a bigger trash can did the job just as well.
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12 / 15Ashtrays sat on coffee tables even in homes where nobody smoked, simply because guests might. Many doubled as décor, from heavy cut glass to souvenir dishes picked up on vacation. As smoking indoors faded, the dish on every end table went with it.
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13 / 15The Rolodex, first sold in 1958, kept contacts on cards around a rotating wheel. Changing someone's number meant swapping out one card instead of rewriting a page in an address book. Contacts now sync across devices on their own.
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14 / 15Family vacations ended with a slideshow. Kodak's Carousel projector, introduced in 1961, held 80 slides in a round tray, and relatives gathered in a darkened living room to watch them click by one at a time. Kodak stopped making Carousels in 2004.
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15 / 15Multi-volume encyclopedia sets were often sold door-to-door and paid off in installments. For a school report, they were the first stop. Encyclopedia Britannica printed its last edition in 2012, after 244 years.
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