: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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was born in 1965. I don’t remember kids ever wearing helmets and pads to ride bikes, skates or skateboards. No car seats either, and seat belts were optional. We were free to roam about the neighborhood - no one worried about child abductions. Grocery stores didn’t provide complimentary sanitary wipes for the carts.
We did have one cool thing back then that kids today never will: Lawn Darts.
Hell, you didn’t necessarily even need to thump them. When I was a little kid (mid-70’s), one of my favorite days was when one a relative would fly in to visit, necessitating a trip to Newark Airport. We’d get there, I’d find out which gate I’d have to go to to meet back up with my parents later, and then I’d be off to check the coin slots of the hundreds of pay phones throughout the airport.
I’d usually bring back six or seven bucks in change – a veritable fortune to an eight-year-old kid back then. I couldn’t understand why no one else was cashing in on this, and figured I’d make checking pay phone coin slots a career when I grew up.
This is in response to a few of the responses, not really to the OP, because I’m 28 and don’t fit the criteria.
In high school I do remember being all, “OMG these people are downloading music for free!” Now, I wouldn’t even think of paying for music. And I remember going to the library for any research. That sucked.
Anyway though, what really makes me take note is the difference with what kids are allowed to do, because I had (have) a mother who is crazy overprotective, and I myself try not to be crazy overprotective with my own daughter.
Still, that doesn’t stop my 10-year-old from constantly telling me that, “It was different then.” That’s because she is timid about certain things and I encourage her to do them anyway and I sometimes use my childhood as an example. Also, my mom (the same overprotective mom who let me do this stuff!) likes to tell me I “can’t” let my daughter do the same things. So I’m always having to remind her that, hey, I did Thing X when I was younger than my daughter is now.
That’s my main basis for comparison. In hindsight I think it’s surprising that my mom let me do certain things, but I figure that if she did, it can’t be way off-base, since my daughter is only 18 years younger than I am.
Though I reject the calssification, I was born in 1963, and thus am considered part of the tail end of the “Baby Boom” Generation, also known as “the Generation that believes they invented everything from leisure time to parenting to grandparenting to retirement, and refuse to be called ‘Grandma’ and ‘Grandpa’ lest it make them sound old.”
So, Captain Midnight, you can blame those stinkin’ Boomers for the whole generation-naming thing in the first place.
I could post a laundry-list of stuff we didn’t have when I was a kid, but to be honest, I really don’t feel like I missed out on anything. Childhood was pretty awesome. It seems as if today’s over-organized and over-structured kids are expected to be more like mini-adults, and I find that sad.
Going to the library back in the good old days was fun. Especially when it was 8:30 on Monday night and you just remembered you had a report due tomrorrow and the library closed at 9:00 so your parental unit would have to throw on shoes and a coat and step on it to get you there in time. And when you arrived you could stand there for 40 minutes while the librarian tapped her foot and glared at you as you stood there trying to figure out which of the 500 books on WWII you wanted so you could finish the report.
Kids in the internet age will never have an experience like that.
I was born in the middle part of the 20th century and am personally responsible for everything that has gone wrong since about 1970 or so. heh heh heh.
Obviously the technological wonders that we blithely use everyday are astounding but I think the societal changes are rather more interesting.
It is important to realize that I was born in Atlanta, Georgia and much of what I have to say comes from that place and time. Attitudes elsewhere in the US were different, and in fact were MORE different than they are today. TV, the Internet, free long distance and cheap air travel have all homogenized the cultural landscape to a significant extent. The South of the the early 1960s was a far cry from the culture experienced by the inhabitants of LA or New York of that era.
In the 21st century, we are still plagued by racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia, but none of these are acceptable behavioral norms any longer. They most certainly were just a few decades ago. Women in the workplace were looked down upon as sex objects and menials. Non-whites were treated as potentially dangerous menials who couldn’t be trusted. Homosexuals were treated (when discovered) as sinful abberent weirdos who were likely to seduce your children into their evil lifestyle. And foreigners of all flavors were treated as if they came from a different planet.
I am employing some hyperbole in order to make a point, but my thesis is sound.
Those changes are much more fundamental than the technological ones that have been highlighted by others. They are also, in my opinion, more important and in some cases more fragile as well.
One significantly unpleasant trend recently has been a tendency toward intellectual laziness. The post-war US was fascinated by science and the children were steered in that direction. Now, the rise of the neoconservative movement and its evil stepchild, fundamentalism, have endangered the foundational principles that allowed the US to be the leader in many realms of science and technology.
I would like to close this by stating that there were no ‘good old days’. Things were much less pleasant just 50 years ago than they are now for the majority of the citizens of the US. The desire of some (perhaps many) to return to ‘those halcyon days of yesteryear when life was simpler and everyone knew their place’ is an active threat to our continued cultural evolution. I believe everyone should be thankful for where we are and work hard to make things better in the future. That was our mindset ‘back then’ and it should serve us well into whatever future we make for ourselves and our progeny.
Yeah… I’ve got a crappy Windows Mobile phone. It’s got unlimited data and all that, but it’s so unusable that web browsing and such is nearly impossible.
I borrowed an iPod Touch for a long trip, and was amazed at how useful the thing was. So I bought an iPad when I got back, and I’m going to get an iPhone 4 when they’re available in Canada.
However, I still don’t do texting and tweeting and staying in constant connection with my circle of friends. That’s just kind of alien to me. I like having my private space, and I don’t want to constantly be pulled into an external social sphere.
My daughter, on the other hand, is communicating with someone constantly. We’re watching TV, and she’s texting. We’re eating breakfast, and she’s texting. And people nowadays broadcast their locations, and set up facebook to spam their wall every time they do something. To me, it’s all kind of big-brotherish. I grew up with an expectation of privacy and a strong sense of private space, and I suspect that won’t change.
