Also, no plastic garbage bags. Everybody just hauled buckets of trash to the big container to come back home with an empty bucket. This is also unthinkable now.
Still happens today in my city in Poland. The only changes are that the farmers have a car now and, more importantly, that they use an annoying megaphone over which they loudly announce their arrival on every street - the usual case of advertising adopting technology to make the world a worse place...
That's pretty much what I do with my recycling, except the buckets are white and from Ikea.
(With the amount of packaging stuff in Denmark is wrapped in, it's the majority of my waste by volume.)
I have born in 90s, but I lived in a block from that era and remember how chute for trash was a nice idea - in winter time I haven't had to leave building to empty the trash bin.