I am 40, you kids had it easy.

[Captain Midnight]

Howdy!

If you were a born in the 1960's or 1970's, what are some things that are common now in 2010 that they did not have when you were a kid.

OK, I am a member of .............Generation X. How I hate this term. Absolutely. I want to beat the person who coined this phrase. My generation fought the Gulf War. Our generation got jobs and raised children. We did not do so bad for ourselves. We are now about 40.

OK, you are 40, what is some stuff that your kids have now that we didn't?

As a child in the 1970's, there were only three options, ABC, NBC and CBS.

Because of this, if there was a movie out, you pretty much had to see the movie in the theater. Maybe, if the movie made enough money, it will be eventually on television, usually edited for content. If the movie sucked at the box office, you did not see it again.

There were no cell phones for the general public. There were phones, but they were prohibitivly expensive for most people and the size of bricks. If we needed to make a phone call, we had to find a pay phone or find someone who wasn't a dick to ask if we wanted to make a local or long distance call.

There was no internet. Well, there was experimental internet, but on internet for the general population. I wish to hell I had internat back in the day. We didn't.

I remmeber seeing the first CD player in a car. We thought it was the coolest thing. Before, we had to use tapes in cars. Tapes suck and had a low shelf life.

VCR's. Nobody uses these things anymore. Back in the 1980's, these were revolutionary and we could tape whatever show we wanted to see later.

We had to actually buy music. Now, I can listen to music on the internet. If there was an internet when I was in High School, I could saved several hundred dollars on music.

Keep adding on post 1960's generation. I could say Generation X, but that term makes me puke like a kid after a punch party. The 21st Century sucks, but the tech is good. How is the tech better now or how is life different than the heady days of Reagan and Van Halen?

[Cat Whisperer]

You think you had it bad? We had two channels, and one of them was French.

I've started calling the current generation Generation Borg. Just an FYI.

[RickJay]

Born in 1971. The major change is the Internet. It's a life-changing technology in the First World. I'd be hard pressed to list everything it's changed since I was a kid.

Cell phones probably come in #2, but a distant 2. It's all about the Internet.

[suranyi]

Even VCRs are kind of new to me from the point of view of this thread. I was already a young adult when they became popular. When I was a kid if you wanted to watch a TV show you had to watch it at the time when it was broadcast, or you didn't get to see it.

I spent quite a few evenings sneaking out of bed at midnight to catch something on the TV in our basement.

[An Arky]

Piffle. I had it better than today's kids growing up in the 60s/70s, because I could run amok at will, STDs weren't a worry, conservatism was still, at least for the time being, a silly notion held by weirdos. Drugs were fun, drinking was a joke, etc. Kids today have an awful, commercially-driven shitworld they're growing up in. I don't envy them one bit.

[suranyi]

Originally Posted by RickJay

Born in 1971. The major change is the Internet. It's a life-changing technology in the First World. I'd be hard pressed to list everything it's changed since I was a kid.

Cell phones probably come in #2, but a distant 2. It's all about the Internet.

Very true. Just one example that people can't even imagine today: When doing research about some news item, I used to have to look into the hard copy "Readers Guide to Periodical Literature" to get a (very incomplete) list of articles that discussed that subject over a certain period. Then I'd have to look up those articles individually. It was exhausting. Compare that with searching on Google today.

[Harmonious Discord]

Only stores had air conditioning In summer the whole family laid in front of fans in the windows unable to sleep until one or two in the morning because of the heat and humidity. After a week you would kill to get some sleep.

There was no over the counter sinus medicine worth taking. You had to have a doctor's prescription for most of what is over the counter now.

Having easy allergy relief and air conditioning are the two biggest improvements for me over my childhood.

Getting a watch as a kid in the 60's was expensive and a milestone.

I purchased my first calculator in 1975 for about $70 and it did exponents. The display showed all the internal operations so numbers flowed across the red glowing LED display until the final answer popped up. This was cool. I still had to to use a slide rule for some science classes in 1977 because the teacher was ancient and retiring the next year. His spiel was you will have to know how to use this slide rule, because calculators will not be available in most places you will work. I thought that's OK I'll bring in mine.

[Sam Stone]

I still have a vast collection of magazines - hobby magazines, technical journals, political journals, etc. They used to be my reference library before the internet. If I needed a circuit for something, I'd think "wait a minute... I'm pretty sure I remember a BCD counter with a buffer stage in Popular Electronics, maybe five years ago!" Then I'd pull out my box of Popular Electronics, and start leafing through issues looking for it. I spent an awful lot of time before 1990 thumbing through old magazines looking for stuff.

The lack of cellphones is a big thing, but I don't think my generation (I'm 47) really learned to use the cell phone the way the younger generation does. I never text anybody. My cell phone sits in its little holster and rarely gets used other than to call my wife to tell her I'm on the way home, Maybe some of you older guys have managed to work into the core of your existence, but I sure haven't. It's just a convenience. But for people under 30, it seems like their whole social world is more connected and cell phones and texting are an integral part of their lives.

I was involved in computers very early (I had a TRS-80 model I in the 1970's), so my entire life has been spent in front of computer screens. I was also on the internet back when it was still the domain of universities and scientific research. So I guess I've kind of taken that for granted.

Not all the changes have been positive. Manned spaceflight was terribly exciting back then. Our sense of optimism was much greater. We all thought we'd have flying cars and moonbases by now. Some thought we'd have giant colonies in space by 2010, housing tens of thousands of people each. Aviation was much cheaper, and much less entangled in bureaucracy and regulations. We weren't so concerned with controlling our neighbor's health (and they with controlling ours), and we tolerated more risk as a society.

On the other hand, clothes were really ugly, and hair styles were embarassing.

One thing we take for granted now is high-quality audio and video. Most people have big screen TVs and high-definition sets. The audio quality from even a cheap stereo or a reasonable set of computer speakers is far better than the crap most people had in the 1970's and 1980's.

Cars run much better now. Back in the day of carburetors, it was common for cars to be running a little rich or lean, and the fuel-air mixture was inconsistent so you'd get stumbles and vibration. Cars today run smoothly and seem to last a lot longer. And bodies are much stiffer, so cars have fewer squeaks and rattles and parts falling off them.

Having a washing machine was common, but dryers were less common. Our apartment complex when I was a kid had square aluminum rotating clothelines in front of each door, on Saturydays the whole place looked very different because of all the clothing hanging out in front of each apartment.

Ovens were generally not self-cleaning, and refrigerators were generally not frost-free. So there was always stove cleaning and refrigerator cleaning, and many commercials on TV extolled the virtues of various oven-cleaning compounds.

[j666]

Another vote for "It's tough for kids today."

It was a lot easier to be poor, for one thing. There were just fewer 'things' that every one else had.

And line-dried sheets are illegal in a lot of places now.

And parents are much more likely to be au courant, with fashion and technology.

We used to be able to be kids.

[MovieMogul]

Disneyland had A through E tickets, and you needed a separate ticket to ride each attraction. None of your fancy all-access passes for us!

[Southern Yankee]

Originally Posted by An Arky

Piffle. I had it better than today's kids growing up in the 60s/70s, because I could run amok at will, STDs weren't a worry, conservatism was still, at least for the time being, a silly notion held by weirdos. Drugs were fun, drinking was a joke, etc. Kids today have an awful, commercially-driven shitworld they're growing up in. I don't envy them one bit.

43 and agree 100%. Kids played in the street then. My neighborhood is a ghost town after school with all the kids in their safe, structured activities <shakes fist.>

[Rain Soaked]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

OK, I am a member of .............Generation X. How I hate this term. Absolutely. I want to beat the person who coined this phrase.

Blame Douglas Coupland.

[Unauthorized Cinnamon]

Originally Posted by An Arky

. . . STDs weren't a worry . . .

Well, I'm only 37, but I distinctly remember seeing a PSA as a kid about STDs. Of course, back in the day, it was known as "VD." The ad even had a little jingle: "VD! It gets around!"

Anyone remember calling the reference librarian if you needed to know a factoid? Such an idea is utterly alien in the age of the Internet.

I remember seeing a TV show that discussed the newfangled invention, the VCR. They looked so cool, but it was sad because normal people could never afford one for their house or anything. It was something used in Hollywood, or giant companies or something.

Speaking of, I still remember my dad bringing me to IBM and showing me the giant room-sized computer, and the punch cards used with it.

And I for one am not going to praise the good ol' days too much. A lot of the "overprotective" stuff we do with kids now is due to our societal success at eliminating things that hurt and killed huge swaths of children, so that each year we wind up addressing more and more marginal risk. It is a good sign, helicopter parenting aside.

[LateComer]

Originally Posted by RickJay

Born in 1971. The major change is the Internet. It's a life-changing technology in the First World. I'd be hard pressed to list everything it's changed since I was a kid.

Cell phones probably come in #2, but a distant 2. It's all about the Internet.

Number 3? Pay at the pump at gas stations. I truly feel sorry for residents of Oregon and New Jersey who cannot enjoy this modern technological marvel. Imagine having to wait for somebody else to pump your gas!

[Digital Stimulus]

Originally Posted by Rain Soaked

Blame Douglas Coupland.

I was gonna point that out. If you (general "you", not Rain Soaked you) haven't read it, you should. IIRC, it was also the source of "McJob".

For me, it was the first place I ran into the (supposedly common) dread of nuclear war in the 80s (remember Claire freaking out when Dag drops the jar of nuclear-melted glass beads?). Granted, there was The Day After and Reagan in the White House to inspire that feeling, but I was a politics-ignorant teen and our family didn't have a TV (much less cable...imagine that now).

We've gone from that to terrorist attacks; hell, that's another difference -- for members of our generation, plane hijackings were pretty much gone to Cuba, not being rammed into buildings.

[RickJay]

Originally Posted by Digital Stimulus

I was gonna point that out. If you (general "you", not Rain Soaked you) haven't read it, you should. IIRC, it was also the source of "McJob".

For me, it was the first place I ran into the (supposedly common) dread of nuclear war in the 80s (remember Claire freaking out when Dag drops the jar of nuclear-melted glass beads?).

The characters in "Generation X" are so ridiculous that they really can't be used as a guide for what people of that age are like.

[Tethered Kite]

Age

80 - I remember sometimes at Christmas, if Ma and Pa had had a good year, we'd get an orange in our stocking. What a treat that was!

60 - We'd buy a dozen oranges at least once a month. If Mom was feeling generous, sometimes just for special, we'd get to waste a few by squeezing them for fresh orange juice.

40 - An orange a day for Vitamin C, but I would have rather had a juice box.

20 - You want me to peel that thing? Eff that thit! Gimme a Red Bull.

[luv2draw]

What the freak are you complaining about? I was born in 1949 and we only had TV in black & white. No color. And if you wanted to change the channel you had to get up off your fat ass and go to the TV and turn the knob.

I had a transistor radio when I was in junior high (they didn't get cute and call it middle school then). It was smallish--little bigger than an iPhone--but it only had one earplug not two.

There was no such thing as driver's ed in high school. You wanted to drive your Dad taught you. And I LIKE living in NJ where I do not have to get out of the car in bad weather to pump the freakin' gas and get my hands all gas smelly, thank you. Oh and when I learned to drive gas was 33¢/gal.

[Meyer6]

I was born in '77, which may or may not make be a Generation Xer, depending on who's defining it. Regardless, I grew up with older siblings who were firmly Gen X, so that influenced things too.

Anyways, absolutely the greatest change is the internet. It has changed everything. I went back to university 5 years ago as a mature student, and even though I was less than 10 years older than my classmates, they genuinely could not remember a world without the internet, which I definitely do. Now I teach first and second year students and occasionally regale them with tales of life before internet - some of them find the idea of going to the library completely unimaginable.

Having said that, I really don't think that kids have it either better or worse than we did, just different. Sure, the world has changed, but kids are kids - I don't believe they really change that much.

[suranyi]

Originally Posted by Meyer6

I was born in '77, which may or may not make be a Generation Xer, depending on who's defining it. Regardless, I grew up with older siblings who were firmly Gen X, so that influenced things too.

Anyways, absolutely the greatest change is the internet. It has changed everything. I went back to university 5 years ago as a mature student, and even though I was less than 10 years older than my classmates, they genuinely could not remember a world without the internet, which I definitely do. Now I teach first and second year students and occasionally regale them with tales of life before internet - some of them find the idea of going to the library completely unimaginable.

Having said that, I really don't think that kids have it either better or worse than we did, just different. Sure, the world has changed, but kids are kids - I don't believe they really change that much.

Yeah, the library -- before the Internet, it was the only place you could go if you wanted to get any information about ANYTHING, if you didn't happen to have it in your house. I used to go there several times a week at least. Now I hardly ever go there.

[LavenderBlue]

When I told a friend that my husband had this brand new thing called an email address at hotmail she thought hotmail was spelled hot male and wondered why he was bragging about himself.

[robby]

I'm a Gen-Xer in my early 40s, and I distinctly remember the various stages that I was introduced to the internet.

I got my first email address in college in the late '80s. About 1990, we were first allowed to send and receive email beyond the university campus.

I also discovered Usenet about that time. However, you were blocked from posting unless you filled out some B.S. form (and got it co-signed by a professor) justifying why you felt it necessary to be able to post. (The university was still getting used to the internet, and didn't want anything sent out that might discredit the university.) I can still find some of my posts from that time--they have my full actual name and contact info on my signature--we weren't as concerned with privacy or identity theft then.

The next big thing was the web. I distinctly remember one of my grad school profs taking class time to show us all the capability of basic search engines and their applicability to research. This was in 1997.

[Bam Boo Gut]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

snip

There were no cell phones for the general public. There were phones, but they were prohibitivly expensive for most people and the size of bricks. If we needed to make a phone call, we had to find a pay phone or find someone who wasn't a dick to ask if we wanted to make a local or long distance call.

Phones - you could thump them and get money out!

Apparently

[Digital Stimulus]

Originally Posted by RickJay

The characters in "Generation X" are so ridiculous that they really can't be used as a guide for what people of that age are like.

Of course not. They're not characters so much as caricatures. I view it as a...fable? No, that's got animals. Allegory? Nah, that's not it either. Eh, whatever...it crystallized the zeitgeist in a very entertaining way.

Or, at the very least, provided a narrative for the just-burgeoning 24-hour news cycle to latch onto.

[Voyager]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

OK, you are 40, what is some stuff that your kids have now that we didn't?

As a child in the 1970's, there were only three options, ABC, NBC and CBS.

Piffle. I'm 58, and you 40 year olds had it easy. You had UHF, so in a lot of markets you had a lot more than 3 channels. I didn't when I was growing up, though I lived in NY which had 7.

You probably had color TV. They were expensive and rare when I was a kid.

By the time you were a teenager, movie censorship was kaput. Not so for me. I was in college before the boobies came out in Hollywood film.

You could get a PC at a fairly young age. I already had a PhD in Computer Science before I could buy even a very primitive one. With an actual disk drive. I learned to program in high school on an old computer with 4K of memory on a disk, no assembler, and not even ASCII.

You also probably had a microwave at a fairly young age. If we wanted to heat up coffee, we put it in a pot on the stove and hope we didn't boil it.

[Digital Stimulus]

Originally Posted by Digital Stimulus

Of course not. They're not characters so much as caricatures...

Oh, sorry. I just re-read and realized you were specifically referencing the fear of nuclear war thing as not being accurate.

When I first read the book, I just thought that Coupland was simply fabricating a(n excessive) trait for his characters. Since then, I've encountered quite a few people of my (our?) generation that (claimed that they) experienced that fear. Furthermore, I know it's come up in other SDMB threads.

Weird, IMHO, and not something I felt personally, but some did.

[Voyager]

Originally Posted by Sam Stone

The lack of cellphones is a big thing, but I don't think my generation (I'm 47) really learned to use the cell phone the way the younger generation does. I never text anybody. My cell phone sits in its little holster and rarely gets used other than to call my wife to tell her I'm on the way home, Maybe some of you older guys have managed to work into the core of your existence, but I sure haven't. It's just a convenience. But for people under 30, it seems like their whole social world is more connected and cell phones and texting are an integral part of their lives.

I was like this also -until I got a Droid. That has enough functionality to be useful, and has the great feature of combining my phone and music player. It is especially useful for traffic reports. I don't use it as a phone anymore than I used to, but I text more now I have a dataplan - and audio texting is actually faster for me than typing, and amazingly accurate.

[Siam Sam]

Born in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration. Computers are the biggest change. Even the Internet pales somewhat with that development, because it's dependent on computers.

I recall the computers shown in the movies and on TV in the 1960s, those huge monstrosities with what looked like movie reels spinning around, and we thought those were the coolest things ever!

I remember when we got our first color television set to replace the B&W. That was so cool, too!

[Duckster]

Originally Posted by Bam Boo Gut

Phones - you could thump them and get money out!

Apparently

With a Capt'n Crunch whistle you could do it for free.

[SecretaryofEvil]

Originally Posted by An Arky

Piffle. I had it better than today's kids growing up in the 60s/70s, because I could run amok at will, STDs weren't a worry, conservatism was still, at least for the time being, a silly notion held by weirdos. Drugs were fun, drinking was a joke, etc. Kids today have an awful, commercially-driven shitworld they're growing up in. I don't envy them one bit.

Um, when did you live when there weren't STDs? I'm a young'un but I've seen some pretty nasty photos of guys with syphilis from around the Civil War era.

[SenorBeef]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

OK, I am a member of .............Generation X. How I hate this term. Absolutely. I want to beat the person who coined this phrase. My generation fought the Gulf War.

And what years of great sacrifice that required of everyone.

Our generation got jobs and raised children.

Certainly a unique feat that no other generation has matched.

We had to actually buy music. Now, I can listen to music on the internet. If there was an internet when I was in High School, I could saved several hundred dollars on music.

That's worse than people had it in the great depression certainly.

I actually sort of thing gen X probably takes too much crap, but after reading this post it makes me think maybe not. If these are the heights of your accomplishments and tribulations....

[Dag Otto]

What, no one mentioned GPS yet? I guess maybe the young'uns don't really use GPS like they use cell phones, but damn it still amazes me (43).

And I agree pay at the pump rocks, but 24 hour convenience store are cool too. You might not believe it, but the name 7 to 11 actually meant something at one time.

Speaking of pains in the ass, blue laws used to be much more common, and even if there were no blue laws a lot of businesses were closed on Sunday anyway. Even liquor stores.

And for some reason, the phone company (yes, there was only one) had us convinced that long distance cost a hell of a lot of money.

We did have something that kids don't have today - snow on TV.

[olivesmarch4th]

I was in high school when the internet made it big, early enough to make the transition smoothly but late enough to really get how lucky I was.

I'll never forget in college when that enormous blackout occurred, we were all sitting there wondering how we were going to find the the telephone number for X Company without any internet. Finally one of our sharper friends piped up: ''Uh, guys? How about the phone book?''

By that point I had seriously forgotten they existed. That was years ago. We don't have one in this house.

Today there was an older man -- maybe 60 or 70 -- trying to figure out how to pay for his parking pass at the automated kiosk. He was so bewildered. The guy beside me (roughly my age) helped him through the steps, and when he finally got his pass paid for, he was still lost as to next steps (get in car, swipe ticket, drive away.)

He turned to both of us and said, ''It's your world now.''

Poor old man.

[Cisco]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

There were no cell phones for the general public. There were phones, but they were prohibitivly expensive for most people and the size of bricks. If we needed to make a phone call, we had to find a pay phone or find someone who wasn't a dick to ask if we wanted to make a local or long distance call.

There was no internet. Well, there was experimental internet, but on internet for the general population. I wish to hell I had internat back in the day. We didn't.

I remmeber seeing the first CD player in a car. We thought it was the coolest thing. Before, we had to use tapes in cars. Tapes suck and had a low shelf life.

VCR's. Nobody uses these things anymore. Back in the 1980's, these were revolutionary and we could tape whatever show we wanted to see later.

We had to actually buy music. Now, I can listen to music on the internet. If there was an internet when I was in High School, I could saved several hundred dollars on music.

Originally Posted by Sam Stone

dryers were less common.

Ovens were generally not self-cleaning, and refrigerators were generally not frost-free.

Originally Posted by Southern Yankee

Kids played in the street

Originally Posted by Unauthorized Cinnamon

Anyone remember calling the reference librarian if you needed to know a factoid? Such an idea is utterly alien in the age of the Internet.

Originally Posted by luv2draw

we only had TV in black & white. No color.

Originally Posted by Dag Otto

Speaking of pains in the ass, blue laws used to be much more common, and even if there were no blue laws a lot of businesses were closed on Sunday anyway. Even liquor stores.

And for some reason, the phone company (yes, there was only one) had us convinced that long distance cost a hell of a lot of money.

We did have something that kids don't have today - snow on TV.

I was born in 1981 and I could've written all of this. A contributing factor is probably that I grew up in a small town in the southeast-- which I've always said put us at least 10 years behind in trends-- but I also feel like the world has changed more in the last 15 years than it did in the 50 years before that. I feel like there's a huge generation gap between me and the kids just a few years younger who've only known the internet, but not much of one at all between me and the baby boomers-- some of whom are decades older.

[Isamu]

Born in the summer of '69.

We had to write our university papers by hand. Which meant you had to carefully plan them first before you started writing (no copying and pasting back then). When computers and printers finally became widely used it was a great joy.

[Dereknocue67]

Grumpy Old Man's Voice On

You kids today have it too easy! What with all your fancy, smancy smart phones and them computer games and such! Why, back in my day, we didn't have none of that. None! No sir!

Why, when I was growin up, all I had for entertainment, if I was lucky and saved all my money, was a stick.Wow! I Loved it! Course, the only thing you could do with a stick was, poke your eye out because we were stupid too! AND WE LIKED IT! WE LOVED IT!

Grumpy Old Man's Voice Off

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1_NhnXMCKw

[Harmonious Discord]

Originally Posted by Isamu

Born in the summer of '69.

We had to write our university papers by hand. Which meant you had to carefully plan them first before you started writing (no copying and pasting back then). When computers and printers finally became widely used it was a great joy.

I was ecstatic that when I could cut and paste in a word processor and then print it. My use of a typewriter was hell as I always screwed it up. A one page report could take me days to type and only get a few white out corrections on it. Even a hand written page was a pain. It took a decade for the giant protruding pencil callus on my finger to disappear. My pinky finger that was always tucked under my fist when writing is bent slightly from writing in school.

[Harmonious Discord]

Many more men died from heart attacks earlier in their lives. Angioplasty has extended their lives decades. Dad lost many cousins in their early 40's. Dad lasted 20 extra years because of angioplasty in the 80's.

[Isamu]

Originally Posted by Harmonious Discord

I was ecstatic that when I could cut and paste in a word processor and then print it. My use of a typewriter was hell as I always screwed it up. A one page report could take me days to type and only get a few white out corrections on it. Even a hand written page was a pain. It took a decade for the giant protruding pencil callus on my finger to disappear. My pinky finger that was always tucked under my fist when writing is bent slightly from writing in school.

Oh gods yeah, it was a breakthrough. The only negative aspects I can see are that (1) my handwriting now sucks ass because I no longer seem to have the forearm/wrist muscles to control a pen properly and (2) I have become slightly sloppy in the way I go about organizing my thoughts when I need to write a long paper.

Other than that, it's all good news.

[Lightnin']

Video games.

When those of us in Gen X were kids, you couldn't win video games. The games just kept getting progressively harder and harder until you failed. There generally wasn't an ending- you were supposed to fail. The lesson we learned was that you could never win- all you could do was hope to hang on as long as possible. Oh, and that'll be a quarter, please.

Kids nowadays have it easy- games are designed to end. Yes, you too can be a winner!

[kiz]

Originally Posted by Sam Stone

The lack of cellphones is a big thing, but I don't think my generation (I'm 47) really learned to use the cell phone the way the younger generation does. I never text anybody. My cell phone sits in its little holster and rarely gets used other than to call my wife to tell her I'm on the way home, Maybe some of you older guys have managed to work into the core of your existence, but I sure haven't. It's just a convenience. But for people under 30, it seems like their whole social world is more connected and cell phones and texting are an integral part of their lives.

:nodding: I only own one because my husband insisted on it . It's for emergency use. I have it turned off most of the time. Texting? Eh. I'd rather call somebody.

I was involved in computers very early (I had a TRS-80 model I in the 1970's), so my entire life has been spent in front of computer screens. I was also on the internet back when it was still the domain of universities and scientific research. So I guess I've kind of taken that for granted.

We had a very small computer club in high school that was populated by the campus "nerds", one of whom was a good friend of mine. They were learning FORTRAN or BASIC or one of those arcane languages and I remember him trying to explain it to me in a way where my eyes wouldn't glaze over.

The computer lab at my college closed for lack of interest. Then again, my college didn't generally attract anyone with that bent.

Not all the changes have been positive. Manned spaceflight was terribly exciting back then. Our sense of optimism was much greater. We all thought we'd have flying cars and moonbases by now. Some thought we'd have giant colonies in space by 2010, housing tens of thousands of people each.

I still have copies of The Weekly Reader where they spun the idea that by the 1980s we'd not only have colonies on the moon, but we'd be zipping around up there in cars like the Jetsons did! They also predicted that by 2000, IIRC, that more people would be living on the moon than on Earth.

[kiz]

Originally Posted by Voyager

You probably had color TV. They were expensive and rare when I was a kid.

I remember the major networks' logos coming on the screen and someone announcing the upcoming show with the tag, "Now In Color!" I don't remember, though, when we got our first color TV, but I imagine it must have been when I was in grammar school.

You also probably had a microwave at a fairly young age. If we wanted to heat up coffee, we put it in a pot on the stove and hope we didn't boil it.

Microwaves didn't become a necessary appliance until after I'd gone to college. They were still a novelty when I was in high school -- great big hulking boxes that took up most of a countertop. There were also a lot of rumors going around about what would happen to your eyes if you stared at it while it was turned on.

[yojimbo]

Born in 1971.

I remember my parents getting our first colour TV. Our first video was a monster of a thing that top loaded tape and was very loud.

I remember walking down to a local take away that had the first Space Invaders machine. Every kid in the area was queueing for the game.

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum.

I also remember being scared of nuclear war for most of my childhood. Fairly regular nightmares about the bomb falling etc. I kinda took it for granted that at some stage some American/Russian was going to kill us all.

The biggest difference is communication/the web. The way we have become dependant on the web so fast is stunning. People are in constant contact. Local events become global in hours.

I had every phone number I needed memorised and can still remember most of them. Now I know about three numbers and rely on my phone(and backups) to remember them.

I've worked in IT for 10 years. The changes I've seen are huge. The numbers we deal with now in terms of memory, storage and bandwidth would have blown me away 10 years ago.

[Athena]

Originally Posted by SecretaryofEvil

Um, when did you live when there weren't STDs? I'm a young'un but I've seen some pretty nasty photos of guys with syphilis from around the Civil War era.

It's not that there weren't STDs; it was that there were no STDs that were not treatable and (mostly) curable, and people didn't really worry about them much. AIDS really changed the landscape on that one.

[Sevastopol]

Aye, we had it tough. For entertainment we were put to recycling comedy skits we'd seen on the BBC.

[Bam Boo Gut]

Originally Posted by olivesmarch4th

He turned to both of us and said, ''It's your world now.''

Poor old man.

My 72 and a half year old mother (you can start using the halves again at 70) likes gadgets, fancy phones etc but is not gadget friendly. It's easy, she says, you just hand it to the nearest 14 year old to program.

[x-ray vision]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

As a child in the 1970's, there were only three options, ABC, NBC and CBS.

I was born in '68 and I recall having several friends who had cable tv in their homes by the time I was about 12 (and I grew up in a middle class small town). By 1981 when MTV debuted, the majority of my friends had cable.

[Sigmagirl]

Originally Posted by ArchiveGuy

Disneyland had A through E tickets, and you needed a separate ticket to ride each attraction. None of your fancy all-access passes for us!

Never been to Disneyland, but I remember the first time we went to Cedar Point and didn't have to pay for each individual ride -- you could buy a pass and they stamped your hand. The next year you could get a colored string on your wrist with a metal clasp. The year after that you didn't have the option -- it was all one price. What progress that was.

[pullin]

For any boaters on this board.

The kids today will never experience this:

[quoting pullin, circa 1971] "Look way over there! It's another boat! Let's motor over and wish them a happy 4th of July!".

[Really Not All That Bright]

I was born in '82, and like Cisco, I could have said most of this stuff.

The one truly astonishing thing I see in day-to-day life is the smartphone. I mean, yeah, computers are a lot more useful, but the idea that I have more computing power in my pants pocket than the entire Department of Defense did until about 1972.

Not only that, but it's actually useful. I had a T-Mobile SDA (HTC Tornado) a few years ago with Windows Mobile, and it was useless. Other than a full browser and Wi-Fi, it didn't really do anything that a "normal" phone didn't. Now I have an Android phone, which offers turn-by-turn navigation, a full browser, a bazillion applications offering functions I never thought I'd need (a Tricorder? Really?) and holds hours of music, video, and so on. It's got an accelerometer, attitude sensor and thermometer, for chrissakes.