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A Message For All You Youngsters

OT

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Jensen, UT
"When I was a kid adults used to bore me to tears :bawl: with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up. :lecture:

What with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards :yap: carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse :yap: where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill :yap: where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way I was going to lay that on kids :nono: about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But....

Now that I've reached 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 Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. :geek: If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves! :read:

And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen! And then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like three days to get there! :dunno:

And there were no MP3s or Napsters! :music: If you wanted to steal music, you had to go to the record store and shoplift it yourself! :eyes: Or, we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up! :doh:

We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal! :phone:

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was, :dunno: it could be your boss, your Mom, a collections agent, you didn't know!!!

You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

And we didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! :geek: With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids"! Your guy was a little square! You 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 faster until you died! :badpc:

Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater, there was no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy sat in front of you, you watched his hairstyle!

And sure, we had cable television, :tv: but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!

And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning... D'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled! :soapbox:

You guys wouldn't last five minutes back in 1984!"

......I'm not the author of this list of truths, but man, I might as well have been......
 
Oh you are soooooo true :viking: I remeber those times and you got me thinking about the game topic and I never can remeber any one actually beeting some of those games yet the games today seem easy.
 
REDXJ4FUN said:
Oh you are soooooo true :viking: I remeber those times and you got me thinking about the game topic and I never can remeber any one actually beeting some of those games yet the games today seem easy.
Nope. Not with Atari, Coleco, Intellivision, or anything.

Then there came NINTENDO. It finally gave one hope of actually accomplishing something.

The first game I ever beat was "The Legend of Zelda". But hey, that was all the way into the early '90s.

Remember how the rubber covers used to come off of the Atari joysticks? And the only way to get a different screen was to switch from color to black&white.
 
30?!?! g'lord child, you still have milk on your breath... why if I were 30, I'd, I'd..um..what was the question again?
I actually beat one of those games, where it had 'if you get 1 million points, take a picture of the screen, and send it to us'...took me 3 days...did it, took the polaroid, shut off the game..and the polaroid didn't turn out..no proof....
 
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Cable, you had CABLE, sheesh we had to put a antenna up on the roof and then only got channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 all NY stations and THAT WAS IT. The TV stations stopped broadcasting after the tonight show and did not start again till 5am with a farmers show and 'The Big Picture' [military propaganda show], cartoons were B/W and Bettie Boop was a hot chick :heart: The ONLY one who showed cleavage... We had a TV, most did not and on sat morning all my buds would come over at 7am to watch cartoons for an hour and maybe Roy Rogers N dale evans. Then we got kicked out of the house to go play stick ball in the street with broom handles for bats...
Calculators were the size of a toaster oven or bigger if it did division and had to be plugged in.
Transistor radios were $50 and that was when the middle income average weekly check for a full time job was only $75...
We were lucky, we had a freezer on top of our refigerator, neighbors on the street used to get ice DELIVERED 2x a week.
More than two phones in a house was unheardof unless you worked for the phone company. There were only 48 or 49 area codes, one for each state.
Car phones cost $3000.00 and were $5 a minute, very rare.
Nobody had A/C in their house let alone their car...
Chinese food, HA, Chung king in a can with white rice was about as chinese as most people got.
NOTHING was open on ANY holidays, you filled up the car the day before for that trip to grandmas or you didn't go..
Street cars on tracks were common in NYC and Newark NJ, some areas in North jersey they were still pulled by horses.
You could go to Newark Airport and walk around with the pilot as he inspected the plane before takeoff and get your hat blown off when they turned it around for departure..
This was 1959 no less... ;)

And unlike a lot of others I CANT WAIT TO SEE WHAT NEW TOYS COME OUT NEXT :D :D :D :D
 
You forgot some. The remote control was your ol' man saying, "Go over there and change the channel". Even if you were in the other room. Music didn't come on CD. It was a record. You could actually see the detail in the picture on the jacket. It was 12" in diameter and used a needle to play.
Want to feel real old? I just got home from a concert. $35 bucks for a ticket. One ticket! And $45 for a tee shirt. $45 BUCKS!!! I can't believe it. And if my sister tried to get out of the house in what these girls are wearing these days...sheesh. And I'm only 37. My first concert was $10 and a shirt was $12.
 
RichP said:
Car phones cost $3000.00 and were $5 a minute, very rare.
Huh? In what year again? Motorola did Cell in 73/74 ish..... what the heck did they use back then? Long spools of copper wire? :D Seriously...point me to a link, would love to see the tech they used.... fun to see how stuff changes.
Glenn
 
haha, nice okie.

Even though I'm 20, I caught myself saying I didn't have that when I was a kid. I think there is a huge gap for people my age. I grew up with atari and nintendo. My lil brother grows up with PS2 and what not. That's a huge difference.
 
I remember when MTV 1st started and I used to set my ghetto blaster in front of the TV speaker to record the newest songs like "Rebel Yell" and "We Built This City (ON Rock and Roll)".

In the evenings, we used to watch "That's Incredible" and "Moonlighting".

Oh, man, parachute pants and zipper clothes.

At recess we would pull out the ghetto blaster and sheet of cardboard.

Remember Transformers and He-man? What about the hundreds of different G.I Joes.
 
Glenn said:
Huh? In what year again? Motorola did Cell in 73/74 ish..... what the heck did they use back then? Long spools of copper wire? :D Seriously...point me to a link, would love to see the tech they used.... fun to see how stuff changes.
Glenn
73' naw, thats too new, I'm talking 59-60's....
If you want to see the tech they used back then check out one of the old Dean Martin spy movies, I remember that his 64 T bird had one in it, it had a a DIAL and you had to go thru a mobil operator.
 
I can remember going over to my Aunts to watch their 12" Black and White TV to see some guy who wiggled his hips all over the place on the Ed Sullivan show. Was 6 at the time.

In Cleveland we had 3 channels. Anyone remember Goolardi? Best of the late night horror TV.
 
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