When I was a kid....

[Tchocky]

Kids today are always troublesome :p

[kurtz]

Away from my books at the moment but their is a record of a guy in the 14th/15th centuries going on about the introduction of chimneys as he thought the smoke cured diseases and that was why kids in (his) modern times always had coughs and sneezes. My Parents blamed it on central heating:hmm:

[AVGWarhawk]

I had to laugh the other day. My 10 year old daughter was explaining to me a device she saw on TV. She said it went tap, tap, tap and the paper was in this thing that went to one side and a bell would go off. At that point, the user pushed the paper holder to the other side and started tap, tap, tap again. I fell off my chair....I said it was a typewriter honey. :rotfl: This is what I used in college but I was ahead of the game. It was a Smith Corona and electric.


TV, we had about 10 stations that came in good with the rabbit ears. Yes, cartoons were for Saturday morning. However, I did get to watch the Three Stooges before school. Cable did not show up until I was about 14 years old.

I could go into the druggist and get my Mom cigarettes without being ID'd. It was $1.00 for two packs of cigarettes. However, model glue was a different story. Mom and Dad had to be called by the store owner if kids were buying model glue. Apparently the stuff was darn potent back then if sniffing it was your thing.


The internet was a group of books called encyclopedias. A guy would sell sets from door to door.

There are numerous others but most covered in the first post.

[clive bradbury]

Talking of ATMs, does anyone else remember the first designs? It would be the late 1970s, and Barclays introduced an ATM which used paper vouchers. They were about six inches by three, and worth (I think) about £10 each. To use it you pulled open a drawer, placed the voucher on two lugs, and push the drawer back in. If you were lucky and didn't crease the paper, you got a ten pound note back.

Anyone else ever use them?

[clive bradbury]

Further to the above, a bit of web research shows that they were indeed first introduced (in the UK at least) by Barclays in 1967 - no photos, yet, unfortunately. Did you have them in the USA?

[clive bradbury]

Ah...now a photo:

http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article.php?id=8541

Apparently this was the world's first, and the vouchers WERE for £10 each - so my memory isn't quite as poor as my wife says...

[AVGWarhawk]

Check out the first fax machine...note the rotory dial. This was high tech stuff in my day

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1250/...6b0d532c_o.jpg

[ReallyDedPoet]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

I could go into the druggist and get my Mom cigarettes without being ID'd. It was $1.00 for two packs of cigarettes.

He, he, my Dad would get me to go up street and get him pipe tobacco Still remember the brands: Irish Mead, Borkum Riff were a couple.


RDP

[Stealth Hunter]

Yeah... uh... we didn't have a TV... we had a radio that was about 15 years old, but no TV.

Had an old typewriter that dad constantly used (it must have been from the 1930's or 1940's).

We had an old car. What kind it was, I'll never know. I remember that it was a silver color and the interior smelled like leather; looked a lot like a Lincoln (but it definitely wasn't a Lincoln...).

We never had a computer. The first one we bought was from a friend, and it was an old Microsoft computer in the mid-1990's.

We ate "Aash-e Anaar", as my mother called it, every single night. Tasty? Yes. Repetitive? Yes.

Nobody in my family smoked or drank... though dad occasionally snuck a pipe out onto the deck and took a few puffs of it around dusk. Mother didn't approve of it, and caught him more than once.

I walked to school every single day with my brothers and sisters, and we walked home every single night. If it was ungodly hot, we still walked. If there was a slight blanket of snow on the ground, we still walked.

The "beta" version of the Internet to us was a few shelves packed with books on the West side of the house, including some which were strewn about in the basement closet.

The phone we had was from 1947, and wasn't very reliable. Still, when we needed it, we were happy to have it.


I really don't remember much else from being a kid. I wasn't a noisy person, though. I was very quiet and very shy. I was always reading and always being teased or picked on by the older boys because I wasn't like them at all (I was short and skinny; shortest boy in the entire class when I first started school). I liked to run and to swim (when dad drove us to relax by the sea, that is), but I wasn't a very athletic boy. School was packed, and I hated my teachers (ALL of them; constantly banging things about and yelling; gets quite old).

I wasn't like the other kids in my studies. I loved to write and I loved history. The first book I read all the way through was a Charles Schulz "Peanuts" book that my Uncle Sayyed sent me from England (and I must have been about 5 or 6 at the time; I just remember that I was very short). Though our family was Muslim, we really didn't believe in it. We just went with the crowd. Dad taught me to read and write English, and he made me perfect it (under the pain of being smacked on the knuckles!). He taught at the university in Tehran as a professor in history; mother, of course, was a house-wife. She fed me sweets constantly and I was close to her as was I to my father.

That's all I can sum up.

[nikimcbee]

Okay, everybody needs to read Turgenyev's "Fathers and Sons."

On a side note, it was pretty funny when my grandparents got their first computer.:rotfl: . Entertainment at it's best.

[nikimcbee]

It was really funny when I did my student teaching. Keep in mind, I was only maybe 6 years older than my students, but I discovered that the gap was greater than I thought. I discovered, just how old they thought I was. I was like some ancient fossil compared to them. You listen to Pink Floyd, that's so old.

[StdDev]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

Kids today are always troublesome :p

Troublesome!!!! Thats got to be THE understatement of the year!!!

[bookworm_020]

My Parents complained when there dryer died a month or two back. It only gave 25 years service! They got twenty out of a frying pan (then they gave it to me when I left home and I got another 5 years out of it till my wife demanded a new one!)

There original Colour TV gave close to 35 years of service!

[clive bradbury]

Tell the kids of today and they wouldn't believe that:

1. To change TV channels you had to get up and walk to the box
2. You had to wind car windows down by hand
3. You could not afford 'designer' clothes - which didn't exist anyway
4. Not everyone on the planet wore a baseball cap
5. You had to eat proper food - not burgers
6. To become a celebrity you actually had to achieve something first
7. You had to buy your first car yourself, instead of having Daddy and Mummy buy one for you
8. Almost everybody smoked
9. If you talked back to an adult, they would be very likely to hit you, and all the other adults would approve
10. Trains were still cheaper than air travel.

[kurtz]

Originally Posted by clive bradbury

Tell the kids of today and they wouldn't believe that:

2. You had to wind car windows down by hand

Some time ago due to being in straitened circumstances I bought an old Ford Escort with wind down windows, my kids thought it was the best invention since sliced bread-a window grownups couldn't stop you opening