A Message For All You Youngsters

[Matthew Currie]

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

CAble? I still can't get cable where I live.

Of course, when I was very little, I remember that watching TV was walking down the street to look in the window of a store where there was a real live one. When I was about six my dad finally bought a set, so we could watch the Army-McCarthy hearings. It was a Hallicrafters, with about 30 tubes, which seemed to blow at a rate of about one a month. Remember when you could snatch all the tubes out of your TV and take them down to the testing machine in the drugstore?

In western Mass, where I lived for a while after that, we still didn't have dial phones. We called the operator. Our number was "2234." Unfortunately, the Fire Department was "1234." So occasionally when the operator screwed up we'd get panicky calls from someone in the night saying "my house is burning down," and we'd have to say sorry, wrong number.

When we moved to CT in 1955, it was a technological adventure. We had a dial phone and a refrigerator with a freezer, and with our enormous "stacked-yagi" TV antenna, with a 3-way switch on the back of the set, we could actually get 3 channels, 4 when the sunspots cooperated.

And here I am now, sitting in that same living room (visiting) with my Pentium laptop, connecting to the far ends of the earth in seconds....suits me fine.

 

[w_howey]

I still want my MTV!


Hey anyone else have Boomerang???
We have it on Dish Network, and I watch it all the time with my kids. I remember most of the cartoons on it. My kids think Dad isn't so freaky anymore.


One of the houses we lived in had a number of 2600, the bank was 1600, we used to get calls for the bank all the time.

The first VCR we had, was the size of suitcase, weighed more than one, had a cable for the remote And was BETA!!

 

[knifeboy2]

I was 2 in 1984 and grew up with Atari, Nintendo, He Man, the Transformers (more than meets the eye!!!) and such. I actually brought my old Atari system to college with me freshman year cause it was cool. Pitfall is the best game ever!!!

As much as you all gripe about getting old cause you can't control it.....ya gotta admit all this new fangled technology is pretty darned cool. I can't wait to see what my kids will be playing with when that day comes.

 

[Rob Mayercik]

'80s insider check: "Now we know!"

Finish it.

"And knowing is half the battle! <insert chorus singing "G-I-Joe" here>"

Transformers? Definitely my favorite from my younger days.

Along the same lines:

A friend (a bit older than me) of mine is a elementary school music teacher in a district near where I work. She apparently took some of her Beatles 45's in for a unit she was doing on the group.

She held up the record in class, and some kid asked, "Mrs. ****, what the heck happened to your CD??"

Sigh. Kids.

Rob

 

[ChEwBaCcA]

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.

Anyone ever have an Atari 5200 ? With the joysticks that would break after 2 weeks EVERYTIME! The membrane pads would go bad and there was no way to start the games! We had one of these....it was far better than 2600 but never really caught on....... Ahhhh the good ole days!

Atari is cool
Chewy

 

[xjwoody]

I grew up in an Intellevision family. After a while we got a Timex Sinclair 1000 computer. It was our first: black and white, goofy membrane keyboard... Then we had the Commodore 64. One of my faves was Beach Head. We also had Quantum Link, which was really something...

And let's not forget Voltron, in all it's forms.

You gotta watch "Freaks and Geeks".. That'll take you back.

 

[OT]

You gotta watch "Freaks and Geeks".. That'll take you back.

When and where is that show on?

 

[xjwoody]

Ahhh.. Therein lies the rub. You gotta buy it, or rent it.. Cuz it's been off the air for 2 or 3 years, now..

Freaks abd Geeks

It's definately a worthwhile purchase.

 

[XTrmXJ]

Posted what was said before, I dont care what anyone says about this tread, as long as people keep getting older there will alway be someone saying " when I was growing up" or "You kids have it easy" Bla Bla Bla .. Like I said I dont care who you are, everyone wants to campare how hard they had it... But if you stop and think about it you were in the same position with the older generation saying the same dam thing, so in turn you are talking about yourself when You say a "Message For All You Youngsters".. Shit Im 24, It doesnt take Age to be wise, it take Heart and Mind.. Im not trying to be a dic or anything I just wanted to state my $.02....

 

[seanR]

I grew up in the seventies, I lived out in the country (I never had cable until last year when Laura moved in) I remember when the Pres. was on we were screwed for the night, no TV.

We got a TI99-4A computer around 1980, when I was in H.S. It could talk! I threw it out three years ago.

I paid $.75 for my first gallon of gas and $.95 for my first pack of smokes.

We also had a touch tone phone that had to "click" for each number you dialed, remember those? I clicked once for one, and twice fro two etc. ect. and ten times for 0.

I also remember driving to Texas to see my grandparents at the breakneck speed of 55 mph! Some times I drive on I-90 at 55 just to show my kids what it was like in the "good old days", Wow! what a difference between 55 and 70+ now you can drive.

I remember not having any cup holders in cars and you had to put your coffee cup on the dash and hope it didn't tip over and run down the defrost vent.

 

[Eagle]

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? Seriously...point me to a link, would love to see the tech they used.... fun to see how stuff changes.
Glenn

Negatory. Motorola did mobile phones back then, but they didn't use cellular technology. That didn't arrive until the mid- to late 80s.

 

[RichP]

Posted what was said before, I dont care what anyone says about this tread, as long as people keep getting older there will alway be someone saying " when I was growing up" or "You kids have it easy" Bla Bla Bla .. Like I said I dont care who you are, everyone wants to campare how hard they had it... But if you stop and think about it you were in the same position with the older generation saying the same dam thing, so in turn you are talking about yourself when You say a "Message For All You Youngsters".. Shit Im 24, It doesnt take Age to be wise, it take Heart and Mind.. Im not trying to be a dic or anything I just wanted to state my $.02....

Never said I had it hard, would not want to be growing up in this day and age. The upcoming generation are going to be used to the govt controls that are being put in place, loss of rights and privacy, every law enforcement organization wanting to be in your face knowing what you are doing. Can't carry a pocket knife on an airplane, up close and personal searches cause you set off a metal detector, having a medal of honor confiscated because it 'Looks Dangerous' by airport security, pulled over by police for 'suspicion of something unspecified'. Thats just wrong but kids today are being taught that it is OK if uncle sam wants to check out your colon for smuggled drugs and you must be a terrorist if you object to the latex glove treatment. After all, it's for the children... Nope, not me. the only real regret that I may have is that long range common everyday space travel will never be a reality in my lifetime. atriot:

 

[ryurabbit]

Hey, I did that too!!! It was pitfall and you could win a t-shirt or a $100.00 gift certificate. Sent in the poloroid and they siad that my score wasn't high enough and they had run out of t-shirts! My first major LIFES DISSAPPONTMENT!.

Rabbit

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....

 

[5-90]

"When positive ID is required at all times it is time to go elsewhere. The nice thing about space travel is that it makes it possible to go elsewhere." Robert Anson Heinlein.

Yeah - I object to the filmy illusion of security that is being thrust upon me, and object further to the fact that it is not an illusion for so many. I was taught that if you want to be secure it is YOUR job and YOURS ALONE to make that happen!

I really like when I hear that "I don't have to protect myself, the police will do that for me." There are two fatal flaws - one moral and one legal.

Morally, one cannot expect another to do something that one is not oneself willing to do to one's own benefit. Someone who benefits from the action of another is just as morally responsible for that action as the actor.

Legally, the police and the government have a responsibility to the body politic AT LARGE, but no responsibility or duty to the individual members. This is a legal principle that goes back about four hundred years into English Common Law, and it is that system from which much of American jurisprudence is derived. The police are largely historians, and their responsibility it to enforce the decisions and will of the state. Any protection directly extended to individuals is not in the interest of the individual, but in the interest of the state. "To Protect and to Serve" is the wool pulled over the eyes of the public. (Nothing against any serving or former cops we have here, but none of this is your fault anyhow.)

"What about Witness Protection Programme?" What about it? Its history and success rate is really quite depressing - I'd sooner keep my own moniker and take my chances, as they are probably better that way.

I'm not as old as RichP (I'm quite certain...) but I remember a time when a pocketknife was not a problem anywhere, and one could still take a .22 to school so you could hunt small game on the way home. What happened to that? Of course, that was still when public schools were still producting functional adults, so there's probably a correlation...

I guess I'm starting to rant, so I'll switch off now.

5-90

 

[Glenn B]

Negatory. Motorola did mobile phones back then, but they didn't use cellular technology. That didn't arrive until the mid- to late 80s.

Hmm, guess I should contact all of the sites that gave me the information I posted. Will tell them "Eagle said so" and let you guys argue. I will get some popcorn.... as I bet it would never end.

 

[Lou]

Hmm, guess I should contact all of the sites that gave me the information I posted. Will tell them "Eagle said so" and let you guys argue. I will get some popcorn.... as I bet it would never end.

The mobile telephone technology that existed prior to that period was 'cellular' (due to antenna pattern?), but it was much less ssophisticated than what we know cellular today.

There were cells, but automatic transitioning from one cell to another did not exist. As I understand it, it required manual switching at the cell base. And switching was not always possible.

 

[Scott Mac]

I remember the predecessor to cable, HBO, and not 5 HBO's, just one. This was before remote controls. If you wanted to watch it you had to get up and switch a box that hung from the back of the TV. It was right next to the box that turned on the Intellivision.

I remember a buddy of mine had cable too. But they called it ON TV.

 

[Urban Redneck]

ONTV was a microwave signal sent out. I remember having a small tiny antenna on the roof. Small is relative, considering that the "regular" antenna was about 6' long. Used to be able to catch the picture scrambled on my tv in my room. Turn up the sound on the radio and "watch" a scrambled picture of the Blackhawks games. Since Chicago never broadcast their home games, you had to pay for Sportsvision on ONTv.

 

[OT]

Posted what was said before, I dont care what anyone says about this tread, as long as people keep getting older there will alway be someone saying " when I was growing up" or "You kids have it easy" Bla Bla Bla .. Like I said I dont care who you are, everyone wants to campare how hard they had it... But if you stop and think about it you were in the same position with the older generation saying the same dam thing, so in turn you are talking about yourself when You say a "Message For All You Youngsters".. Shit Im 24, It doesnt take Age to be wise, it take Heart and Mind.. Im not trying to be a dic or anything I just wanted to state my $.02....

Sheesh. Cool it, man.

I never said I wasn't a youngster at the old age of 30.

Even a 100 year old man is a youngster to a 110 year old man.

I was referring to the 18 to 20s. Guess I shoulda added that, huh? Then maybe y'all anal types can find another thread to nitpick on. This thread was intended for entertainment value only.

I suppose "youngster" is a relative term. I look at it as, by the time you graduated high school, I had already been in 20 different countries and had earned the right to be a member of my local VFW.

 

[2offroad]

the good old days of the '80s. 150hp was alot of power, most econo boxes have more now. i like seeing what is around the corner.
okie terry is right this has been entertaining.