View Full Version : Canadian Ghost Town - abandoned 1983 while still practically brand new
Youtube's algorithm really does know me. This video was fascinating. A company town built for resource extraction and abandoned less than 2 years later when it was no longer economically viable. Most remarkably someone bought the whole town and has been preserving it in the hope that one day it will be re-inhabited. Maybe a great opportunity if someone can find 1200 of their closest friends to come move in and make it come back to life! But seriously, everything is still pristine, 40 years later. Amazing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tVDdIg43Ms
Youtube's algorithm really does know me. This video was fascinating. A company town built for resource extraction and abandoned less than 2 years later when it was no longer economically viable. Most remarkably someone bought the whole town and has been preserving it in the hope that one day it will be re-inhabited. Maybe a great opportunity if someone can find 1200 of their closest friends to come move in and make it come back to life! But seriously, everything is still pristine, 40 years later. Amazing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tVDdIg43Ms
Bae, time to buy this and start our Simplelivingforum compound.
iris lilies
1-19-23, 10:43am
I’m not moving to Canada where 1st amendment rights are only lightly respected.
Besides, you guys didn’t invite me!
catherine
1-19-23, 11:33am
I think it would be fun as long as we had to live as if it were 1983. No cell phones, no computers, but don't forget your curling iron. Permissible music: The Police, Journey, Irene Cara. Dress code: parachute pants, stirrup pants, crop tops.
iris lilies
1-19-23, 11:38am
I think it would be fun as long as we had to live as if it were 1983. No cell phones, no computers, but don't forget your curling iron. Permissible music: The Police, Journey, Irene Cara. Dress code: parachute pants, stirrup pants, crop tops.
I was just watching an Irene
cara video coupla days ago!
littlebittybobby
1-19-23, 12:22pm
There's an Alaskan island that was a military installation, which has civilian facilities to provide services just as you'd find in a small town, including a McDees. Gotta has yummy & awesumm foood, right? But yeah---the base was all but closed down and evacuated, except for a small security force. Everything appears abandoned. Also, you have remnants of late-19th and early 20th-century mining camps in AK. One of them is quite substantial. Mc-Somewthing or other. A friend biked to it, last summer. You have a you-tuber, Wonderhussy, who makes videos of abandoned places in Nevada and also Californya's Death Valley. Yup. They're all over; you just gotta look. Also, don't forget abandoned Urbana sites such as Dee-troit, St Lo, Gary, Ind., and Pa. Yup. Just gotta know where to look. That's what you kids need to do---instead o' sitting for hours on an airliner to Paree to eat snails & see the useless Eye-full tower or Itally to see the flooded streets of Venice & eat spagetti, why not buy a microcar, and tour Abandoned America? How about Lanyon or Pioneer or Bradgate, IWAH, clear up in the middle o' nowhere? Stop in to the meat locker in Rutland, IWAH, too. Yummy awesome & amayzeen. Yup.
Free speech is pretty much curtailed here too, although not ostensibly by the government.
iris lilies
1-19-23, 8:10pm
Free speech is pretty much curtailed here too, although not ostensibly by the government.
Our Biden government makes secretive, behind-the-scenes attempts at tamping down wrong-speak, so I suppose you could say the government is not ostensibly doing it.
Our Biden government makes secretive, behind-the-scenes attempts at tamping down wrong-speak, so I suppose you could say the government is not ostensibly doing it.
Wrong-speak is tamped down in academia, in medicine, in nutrition, in probably countless other areas, by a combination of monied special interests, news outlet propaganda, social media censorship, etc.
ToomuchStuff
1-20-23, 3:07am
I think it would be fun as long as we had to live as if it were 1983. No cell phones, no computers, but don't forget your curling iron. Permissible music: The Police, Journey, Irene Cara. Dress code: parachute pants, stirrup pants, crop tops.
What do you mean no computers? I remember lots of different models and BBS's.
What do you mean no computers? I remember lots of different models and BBS's.
There wasn't much in the way of computers for personal use. In 1985, I was given the job of teaching the other secretaries at my job how to use the WANG word processor, which was as close to a computer for work as I got back then. In the late 80s, I was working for the Board of Education in my town, and the Director of Technology got all hyped up showing us the "wave of the future" laptops. I did have a Mac SE at that point, but there were virtually no emails floating around--that didn't happen until around 1994-1995 in the workplace.
My DH was an early adopter of CompuServe and we thought that was amazing!!! You could shop online! Of course it was so rudimentary it was useless, plus the cost of using the computer at a price-per-minute made shopping online pretty expensive!
In 1983, you may have seen computers, the way I did at NBC in 1978 when mainframes entered the picture, but the future was a twinkle in the eye in terms of computers shifting everyday culture in 1983.
littlebittybobby
1-20-23, 5:28pm
Okay---here's a photo of the 'bandoned McDees on Adak, which has also largely been abandoned, due to defense cutbacks for the Island waaaay out in the Aleutian chain. But yeah---thankk mee.5108
littlebittybobby
1-20-23, 10:38pm
Okay---I found at least one more photo of the 'bandoned housing on Adak Island, whicjh isd situated approximately midfway between See-yattle and Tokyo. But yeah---the military installastion was all but shut down, which in turn caused the civilian population to greatly decrease. There are a few stragglers, though. But yeah---homes sitting empty sinces the late-90's. 5112
ToomuchStuff
1-21-23, 1:17am
There wasn't much in the way of computers for personal use. In 1985, I was given the job of teaching the other secretaries at my job how to use the WANG word processor, which was as close to a computer for work as I got back then. In the late 80s, I was working for the Board of Education in my town, and the Director of Technology got all hyped up showing us the "wave of the future" laptops. I did have a Mac SE at that point, but there were virtually no emails floating around--that didn't happen until around 1994-1995 in the workplace.
My DH was an early adopter of CompuServe and we thought that was amazing!!! You could shop online! Of course it was so rudimentary it was useless, plus the cost of using the computer at a price-per-minute made shopping online pretty expensive!
In 1983, you may have seen computers, the way I did at NBC in 1978 when mainframes entered the picture, but the future was a twinkle in the eye in terms of computers shifting everyday culture in 1983.
Where I lived, I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, that had been my brothers. He had a Atari 800, several friends had Commodore Vic 20's, one had just bought a Commodore 64, the friend that ran a BBS had a Tandy, and my grandfather had three of them. Another friend had a TI99 and I believe it was the next year he brought home some kind of IBM clone with AT&T unix on it as he worked for AT&T. My father had won a suggestion award at IBM and bought a PC XT with a 10 megabyte hard drive, which his coworkers thought was nuts. If we didn't need a furnace and A/C at the same time, it would have had two video cards (one color and a color monitor), and had both DOS and Minix.
A year later, at least two I knew had Apple's, one or two upgraded to an Amiga (may have been around 85) and one converted it into a Amiga toaster.
Heck in 1987 I had to borrow dad's car and found out he had an IBM luggable and about $20K worth of computers in the trunk.
Punch cards were something I played with in the 70's.
By 1983 my interaction with computers was a high school computer class where we learned to program Apple II+ computers using basic. The machines weren't impressive and they weren't interconnected but the smarter people in my class were already thinking about the possibilities and doing some fun stuff with them. If I hadn't failed out of calculus a couple years later I probably would've followed those kids into computer programming as a career.
ToomuchStuff
1-21-23, 2:03am
By 1983 my interaction with computers was a high school computer class where we learned to program Apple II+ computers using basic. The machines weren't impressive and they weren't interconnected but the smarter people in my class were already thinking about the possibilities and doing some fun stuff with them. If I hadn't failed out of calculus a couple years later I probably would've followed those kids into computer programming as a career.
I remember those Apple II's.
My sibling did some programming for the school and was offered money or class credits. Foolishly taking the later, thinking it would cause earlier graduation.
Teachers who frequently left the gradebook program on the computer, so one could copy it to a floppy and make their own gradecards. I got out of them due to being expected to be just like my sibling and fix things for people. It really wasn't until the Pentium 233 I built and put NT4.0 on, that I got back interested in them. I could do things quicker manually, then programing them to do.
It might be fun to have a whole thread dedicated to "where were you when" computers did this that or the other thing. It seems crazy to think back that in college I took a class for word processing and spreadsheets where I had the programs on a floppy and my docs on a separate floppy. Or that my first job out of college I had a dummy terminal on my desk that only connected to a database on an IBM AS400 mainframe that only managed my employer's sales and donations transactions. I look at all that computers do today in comparison and it's kind of overwhelming how much things have changed in just a few decades.
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