When I was a kid....

[SUBMAN1]

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears With their tedious diatribes about how hard things were
When they were growing up; what with walking Twenty-five miles to school every morning ... Uphill BOTH ways

Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, There was no way in hell I was going to lay A bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it
And how easy they've got it!
But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of
Thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You've got it so easy!
I mean, compared to my Childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today you
Don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet If we wanted to know something, We had to go to the damn library and Look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!! There was no email!! We had to actually write Somebody a letter...with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and Put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters!
You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the Beginning and @#*% it all up!
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting!
If you Were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either!
When the phone rang, you Had no idea who it was! It could be your school, Your mom, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer,
a collections agent, you Just didn't know!!!
You had To pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Play station video Games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games Like 'Space Invaders' and 'asteroids'.
Your guy was a little square! You Actually had to use your
Imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or Screens, it was just one screen Forever!
And you could never win.
The game just kept getting
Harder and harder and Faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such Thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy Or some old broad with a hat Sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were Just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that Was only like 15 channels And there was no on screen menu and no remote Control!
You had to use a Little book called a TV Guide
to find out what was On! You were screwed when it Came to channel surfing! You had to get off Your ass and walk over to the TV
to change the Channel and there was no Cartoon Network either!
You could only get cartoons On Saturday Morning.
Do you Hear what I'm saying!?!
We had to wait ALL WEEK For cartoons, you spoiled Little rat-bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat Something up we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire..
Imagine that!
If we wanted Popcorn,
we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing And shake it over the stove
Forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about!

You kids Today have got it too easy.

You're spoiled.

You guys wouldn't have lasted Five minutes back in 1980!

Regards,
The over 30 Crowd

[Sailor Steve]

:rotfl:

Of course I go back a few more than that. No cable TV - five channels and no rabbit ears. I remember my dad going up on the roof and fiddling with the antenna until the picture looked sort of-almost-maybe good.

My daughter once asked me what kind of computer I had when I was her age. When I told her we didn't have computers at all she stared at me and then said "No, really. What kind of computer did you have?"

I remember Jiffy-Pop! I could never get it to work right...kind of like microwave popcorn. But then cooking it on the stove seems to be a lost art.

No cell phones either. Ever have your dad say "GET OFF THE PHONE! I'M WAITING FOR AN IMPORTANT CALL!"?

[jpm1]

1 week for a mail , i lived in Colombia when i was a kid when we wrote to the family in Europe it took 3 monthes for the letter to arrive concerning the Amiga the caution message about epilepsy we see in the games date from this time i still remember the electronics bips and the games one couldn't end because of the difficulty . i agree life's too easy for kids today but in the same time i'm sure our parents could have said the same concerning our lives :rotfl:

[bookworm_020]

The time before ATM's, internet, credit cards, VCR's, microwaves, personal computers (before C64's and the other tape loading computers!), FM radio and sunday shopping. I can remember!

Boy that does bring back memories!

[Monica Lewinsky]

When I was a kid, "D" batteries just got invented, back then they were the rage and cool to have/own.

Way back then there was the adventure series BOOKS - yea you were FORCED to READ a book, by Tom Swift. "Tom Swift and the Nuclear Caves of Fire" was my first book- was a COOL thing to do in 1959 - READ and imagine an adventure. Now considered - boring.

[bookworm_020]

Originally Posted by Monica Lewinsky

Way back then there was the adventure series BOOKS - yea you were FORCED to READ a book, by Tom Swift. "Tom Swift and the Nuclear Caves of Fire" was my first book- was a COOL thing to do in 1959 - READ and imagine an adventure. Now considered - boring.

Be careful what you say next about books and reading. I'm a librarian and I'm not afraid to SHHHH! you!

[Platapus]

Kids, I don't know what's wrong with these kids today

Kids, who can understand anything they say

Kids, they are so ridiculous and so immature

Noisy, lazy, sloppy crazy loafers, and while we are on the subject

Kids, you can talk and talk to your face is blue

Kids, they only do what they want to

Why can't they be like we were

Perfect in every way

What's the matter with kids these days

<bowing>

[Rhodes]

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that Was only like 15 channels And there was no on screen menu and no remote Control!

In your contry, since this in mine, at the same time we got 2 Tv channels, and the second only opened at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon... But at 6 we got the dukes of hazzard....

[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