this is an off-shoot of an earlier thread asking dopers at what time in history they preferred to be in. most said now, implying a negatory stance on the current OP.
my own opinion is yes, given my purchasing power as against the quality and durability of goods i could buy back then, compared with the cheap disposables you see today.
let’s get insights from businessmen, artists, lawyers, athletes, hunters/outdoorsmen, investors, book keepers, others. 
Yes, the good old days in information technology lasted from 1996 - 1999. You didn’t have to worry about finding a job. You had to worry about being hounded to death to take a better paying job even if you didn’t want one. Post your resume on something like an early Monster.com and the phone would literally start ringing a few minutes later and not stop for weeks. Stock options - check. Pure cash - Check. I worked for a company that got sold and the new company kept me with tens of thousands of dollars of bonuses for 5 months and I didn’t even have to go to work. I just checked my voicemail once a day during a whole summer and raked it in. You didn’t even have to know how to do that much. The work environment was far less Draconian as well. You didn’t have all the legal compliance crap like you got post-Enron and Worldcom. I have had a few good strokes of luck in my life and starting my career during that period was great but also bad for the expectations from an employer I learned early. It isn’t that way anymore. I don’t know if I would advise a young person to go into IT unless they really like getting bounced around and working with a lot of people on the Asian sub-continent these days.
well, i miss the days when asia was a full continent. joking aside, who knows your IT slump may just be cyclical.
The good old days are any time in the past that you have good memories of.
The good old days of IT ran from the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s.
good point. my bone with the previous thread is that most people will not swap present conveniences for living in past “good memories.”
I sure miss the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s.
I meant mostly India which is commonly referred to as part of the Asian subcontinent. You didn’t see nearly as many Indians working in IT back in the day. I usually like the ones they send to the U.S. just fine but we usually don’t have all that much in common and I have yet to attend a kickass party thrown by Indian subcontractors.
My other love is aviation. The good old days then were definitely the 1930’s - 1950’s. Many of those planes are still in service and small planes were somewhat affordable to upper-middle class Americans and most people could afford to fly if they rented or shared. The technology rose quickly during that time and then stagnated for a very long time. The costs went through the roof and only the truly rich can buy something as simple as a new simple Cessna 1972 for about 300K let alone a fancier plane. You can still do it but you have to look at the extremely used market. They make the best planes ever now but that they are hopelessly unfordable to most any normal person. I would love to be in aviation at the end of the Great Depression era.
I think this is going to a be a fairly selective list. Most things are better now than they have ever been if you aren’t looking at the money involved. Given enough money, I would still choose today over any other time period.
When I was a kid I walked or rode my bike to kindergarten class. We new every neighbor on our street. Milk was delivered and it came with a little bit of cream at the top which us kids got. TV signed off for the night and kids played with each other instead of alone for hours in front of a computer. Fast food restaurants didn’t exist nor were there chain restaurants that relied on microwave ovens to serve over-salted pre-packaged factory food.
I was born more than a little premature. If it had been more than a few years earlier, I almost certainly wouldn’t have lived. And even if I had, I was very sickly until I hit 8 or so. Fun as it might have been to be a knight or a samurai, all things considered, I’m leaning towards no.
Though, coming to adulthood in the indulgent 70’s or self-centered 80’s would probably have been more fun than the 90’s. I’ve NEVER had sex without a condom.
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I would make a terrible knight and/or samurai.
I love all things retro and classic. However, I wouldn’t want to live in the past, because it seems ever era I like I don’t like the era following it. I’d love to see the 50s in person, but the minute the late 60s roll around, I’d want out until like 83.
I think I really would have preferred to have lived in a world without nukes. Of course, I wouldn’t have appreciated it because there were no nukes.
Yes. I grew up in a world very different from the one seen by today’s children. I was born in 1965. As I grew up, during the Summer, on weekends, and on school holidays, it was generally expected that kids would go outside soon after breakfast and any assigned chores. They’d play/fight/explore/experience life with other kids and very little in the way of adult supervision.
A bicycle was freedom in one of its purest forms. I could peddle anywhere in town, so long as I stayed off the highway…so could all my friends. Nobody ever wore a damn bicycle helmet. Any kid that did may as well also wear a “Kick my ass, please” sign to go with it. We’d get fed at whoever’s house was closest to where we happened to be at lunchtime, and then we’d disappear again until supper.
If we wanted money for the movies, we could go knock on doors asking for yard work–and usually find some. Lawns to mow, gardens to weed, windows/cars to wash. Kids worked, and adults paid them…no parents or lawsuits needed.
Once I was old enough to drive, I could go 15-30 minutes in any direction from my home and launch a boat or go hunting. Lots of kids openly kept guns in the trunks of their cars at school during hunting season . Today there would be headlines on CNN and possible Homeland Security concerns.
That world is gone now. Today’s kids apparently don’t cut the umbilical cord until puberty or longer. They get shuttled from one scheduled, supervised, sanitized for their protection activity to another. As such, they lack the independence we had…the freedoms we had…the opportunity to grow up we had. I pity them.
Yeah, I miss feeling free to harass or beat up someone based on superficial clothing, but then again, who doesn’t?
There is nothing wrong with being nostalgic over the good things in the old days but still wanting to keep all mod cons. It’s not that often that they conflict with each other, one counterexample of course being better availability of pay phones versus cell phone ubiquity.
One thing that does seem in conflict currently is big box stores versus a small town downtown area. If cars and gas go up a lot, we could see a renaissance of walkable neighborhoods since it would be cheaper to just walk to the store rather than drive to Wally World. Which might split the cash-savvy market into those that spend a whole day out in the boonies loading up their car with goods since the transportation cost would be spread out over a lot of goods (plus Wally World would be more expensive due to those same xportation costs), but walk downtown if they only want a Pepsi to save on gas and car mileage.
I second YaraMateo: I like classic and retro things but wouldn’t want to live in the past, and definitely not the late '60s or the '70s. I’d give my eye-teeth to visit either the '20s or the late '30s-early '40s, after the worst of the Depression but before the U.S. went to full-blown war. But it would have to be a round-trip. 
I heartily second Ludovic. I want to see a “now” with the best parts of “now” – modern conveniences like the Internet and smartphones; a more inclusive society with a black President, women judges, etc. – but with some of the better parts of pre-war “then” – walkable neighborhoods and real downtowns. I have a car, but I like living in a place and manner where the car doesn’t have me. :rolleyes:
While it’s pleasant at times to relive (in the mind) those “good old days” the truth of the matter has never been more eloquently expressed, IMHO, than by Alan and Marilyn Bergman in THE WAY WE WERE where (schmaltz aside) they say:
Say what you will, but that’s the facts.
I think nostalgia also has a lot to do with remembering a time when your mortality wasn’t staring you in the face and you had a lot less to think about. “It was a simpler time” pretty much means “it was a simpler time for me.” The world has never been particularly simple.
Oakminster, I’m not sure that I agree with your vision of a better past. At least not with regards to bicycle helmets and guns. For the sake of argument, let’s throw in seatbelts as well. One could argue that our current “wussified” world is a more sensible one. We currently enjoy fewer cracked skulls, bullet holes, and human projectiles.
And my best friend in middle school got a concussion that way, riding her bike over to my house without a helmet. I know now that she could have been injured even more seriously than that.
There are things about those times that are better than what we have now. The lack of use of bicycle helmets is not one of them.
She could have ridden by herself to my house with a helmet just about as easily as she did without one. Bike helmets are not what’s keeping kids from experiencing freedom on their bikes.
No. God, no. Today is the best its ever been.