The Old Days.

[fredgarvin]

I'm just in my mid 50's but started with goldfish in '59. Graduated to tropicals in the early 60's and had 'em again from the 80's to 90's. Ton of changes. Nitrogen cycle? Just "age" the water till it clears, add the plants let it clear again and drop in a pair of guppies or zebras and off ya go. Keep Igor and his test tubes away from my tank. We did things then that would make the modern aquarists' BIOHAZARD lights go off and the sirens howl. We swatted house flies and threw 'em in the tank. Fish LOVED 'em! Earthworms? Let 'em rest a day on a wet clean sponge and it's filet mignon for newts, gourami's & Angels and cut off a piece of lean for the smaller guys. Yet' I never once saw a foriegn creature in my tanks- not ever argus, but folks today seem to have everything from dragon fly larvae to flatworms to the creeping blorch in their tanks. Speaking of Bio stuff... in the 80's we were just starting to use antibiotics like Maracyn Maracyn 2 and RockyIII(hah!) and thus creating all the resistant horror diseases that infest tanks today. When I started out we used things like methyl blue, malachite green and even pennies (copper!) to treat the few diseases we found. That's RIGHT! We used CHEMICALS. A dirty word. We used electric air pumps to airate our filters (often box filter that used up tank space and were ugly to boot) that after a few months began to buzz like cheap alarm clocks. My first power filter was a Dynaflow. Ever hear of it? We bought our fish at "pet shops" and if we were lucky (like me) we knew a local commercial breeder who would sell us stuff and advise us at their site. Tanks were expensive then. Stainless steel frames and slate bottoms...would STILL be expensive if they were still available. I thought a Venezia 350 was Fiats latest roadster. Some unscurpulus stores sold a small brightly colored fish called a snakehead! "Sure put it right in with your lace angles!" AHEM! Anyway just a little look back at fish keeping before the internet made you worry whether your fish were getting too much ozone and how high your "night rates" were. Hasta Lumbago, Dudesickle!

 

[CFC]

Fish keeping does certainly seem to have become a lot more complicated over the last 20 years, i remember my aunts old aquarium with a box filter in each corner bubbling away and her planning her water change once every 6 months by having buckets and buckets of water in the front room "aging" before it could be used. She kept simple commonly seen species and rarely lost fish or had diseases, the fish got fed dried tubifix worms from a tub and once a week she bought a bag of water fleas in some strange pink water as a treat for them.
She thinks my huge tanks full of equally huge and strange looking fish which dine on human grade sea food are madness, "where on earth do you store all the water for your water change?" she once asked. When i have explained to her about the way we keep fish now she always says " well we never had to do all that when i had fish, and our fish all lived a long time" and i find myself wondering why does it seem to have got so difficult now when i read thread after thread about people fish dying from everything under the sun. Have diseases got stronger and the fish got weaker, or is just that now we can communicate with each other more easily the problems that were always there are just more openly discussed?

 

[fredgarvin]

All I know is anyone can complicate things. Read the directions on heating a TV dinner. It takes genius to simplify.

 

[confusion]

I recall in the 80's having an HOB filter that to the best of my recollection was quite similar to today's HOB, but we didn't have the cool disposable filter cartridges. It was a messy job of changing the filter cover and pouring in new carbon.

I had fish for probably 10 years without knowing what a "cycle" was. Did not know to change water - I would just top it off when the water got low and the filter got noisy.

Crazy times. I think I lost a lot less fish then than I do now

 

[fish482]

I have a fish house of 60 tanks for more than 20 yaers
i space heat the room so this means I get a fluctuating in temperature some times droping as much as 6 degrees it does no harm to the fish.

I don’t ues any filters I have a air tube in each tank my tanks have a inch or 2 of silver sand some have real plants and some with plastic plants

i do a water chang of 40 -50% a fortnight I ues water straight from the tap I don’t add any chemicals. And I don’t ues any form of test kits when I get a sick fish I treat them with cooking salt but very rarely need to ues chemicals for sick fish.

I do not recommend that any one should keep & breed fish the way I do.
What works for one person does not always mean it will work for another.

 

[OldMan47]

When I want to remember back to the 60s and 70s having fish, I remember that I could barely afford a 20 gallon because they cost at least $25. At that time, that much money was at least 5 hours pay for well paid craftsmen. Most of us thought of it as 10 or more hours pay. Today I would refuse to give 10 hours pay for any tank that would fit nicely into my house much less a 20.
The stainless steel frames were not so darned stainless. Any but the very best of them would rust if you didn't make sure you kept them wiped dry every time a drop of water got on the outside. There were almost no submersible heaters so keeping the water at a perfect level was absolutely necessary if you wanted to control temperature. There was no such thing as a heater with a temperature scale on it. Just turn the knob up or down until the heater seems to be at the temperature you want, then fiddle with it for the next week or 2 to get it where you really wanted it.
The only way to get most plants to live beyond a few weeks was to take your chances and put the tank near enough to a window that you might have a very hard to control algae problem. No there were no easily available ferts and nobody had figured out that we needed CO2 so the plants were very limitted.
As others have already pointed out, we seldom changed much water in the tanks and often lost all but the most hardy of fish. An established tank with fish in it would kill any new fish but the old stock just kept going and nobody realized we were killing them ourselves by shocking them with high nitrates that were never measured.
Yes I remember those bucolic utopian days of fish keeping, aka the good old days. If I had not learned from some of the more modern methods, I would have retired my tanks again by now. I don't deal with frustration very well.

 

[raptorrex]

Fish keeping does certainly seem to have become a lot more complicated over the last 20 years, i remember my aunts old aquarium with a box filter in each corner bubbling away and her planning her water change once every 6 months by having buckets and buckets of water in the front room "aging" before it could be used. She kept simple commonly seen species and rarely lost fish or had diseases, the fish got fed dried tubifix worms from a tub and once a week she bought a bag of water fleas in some strange pink water as a treat for them.
She thinks my huge tanks full of equally huge and strange looking fish which dine on human grade sea food are madness, "where on earth do you store all the water for your water change?" she once asked. When i have explained to her about the way we keep fish now she always says " well we never had to do all that when i had fish, and our fish all lived a long time" and i find myself wondering why does it seem to have got so difficult now when i read thread after thread about people fish dying from everything under the sun. Have diseases got stronger and the fish got weaker, or is just that now we can communicate with each other more easily the problems that were always there are just more openly discussed?

is it really more difficult, or is it just that we have more points of connection, between fishkeepers, now than at any point in the past. those rules that everyone in the club knew, and followed, begin to lose ground, when you find that there is a, perhaps, totally different way of doing the same thing, and that seems to work, just as well. but our life is far more complicated now than even ten years ago, my god even a toaster has five operating buttons and an lcd screen now!