I am 40, you kids had it easy.

In My Humble Opinion
61

The college experience was way different back in the seventies.

No personal computers. You went to the library and took notes, wrote your papers in long-hand and then paid someone to type them up when required. You took notes in class with a pencil and paper. Calculators were available but expensive and kind of a big deal, you couldn’t use them in class because it wasn’t considered fair to the majority of the students who couldn’t afford one. Many classes required a slide rule, though.

My college imposed a curfew on freshman and sophomore women, although that practice was on the way out even in 1975.

On the other hand, the drinking age was pretty much a universal 18 and beer was served openly and frequently during on campus parties. Getting drunk 3 or 4 times a week was considered normal student behavior, not a life-altering dysfunction. An oz went for 15 bucks. Dating your professors wasn’t frowned upon as long as all parties were single.
While there were still STD’s(I remember a scandal where some young lady infected several men with “the clap”) they were all easily cured. It was a common saying in my crowd that sex was the only vice that wouldn’t kill you.

62

Luxury.

63

How could I forget? When we were growing up, if you wanted to buy stuff you could generally use cash or a check. I don’t recall people using credit cards day-to-day. At a super fancy restaurant, or to buy all your back to school clothes at a department store, maybe. For groceries? No way. For a cup of coffee? Dream on. Some places didn’t take checks, either.

So you had to make sure to get to the actual physical bank, during the hours it was open, and write yourself a check and get cash. The ATM was an amazing improvement on this, and now we’re one step away from vending machines taking plastic. It makes life so much more convenient!

Also, online bill pay is the shit. I order checks every few years, I so rarely use them.

64

I’m pre-Generation-X by a few years depending when you count the cutoff, but I remember more TV channels than that. In LA, beside ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates we had independent stations on channel 5, 11, and 13, (KTTV, KCOP, and ???) plus KCET the local PBS station, and a few others on UHF. In the early 70s we even had the Z-channel through cable, which was an early movie channel.

What we didn’t have was a remote control. Even with the cable box, we had to get up and press a button to change the channel. There were no VCRs of course, and a family generally only had one TV set.

65

It would be nice to leave politics out of this, but before we do, I have to say that that’s the most ridiculous, and dare I say intellectually lazy thing I’ve heard in this thread. Neocons are responsible for the trend towards intellectual laziness? Please. Frankly, I think intellectual laziness is a result of a move away from classical educations into areas such as deconstructionism, relativism, the 70’s (the decade when quality control over art and fashion was obliterated), and the societal convention that everyone should go to college, which has watered down degree programs and caused grade inflation. Intellectual laziness gets a boost every time someone says, “Who’s to say what’s right and wrong? It’s all a matter of opinion.”

Religious fundamentalism has been around since there’s been religion. As have all sorts of forms of mysticism. But there’s nothing more intellectually lazy than the new-agey ‘spiritual’ people who believe in everything from Tarot cards to the healing power of crystals to ‘psychic energy’ to homeopathic medicine. And by and large, these people aren’t neocons. They’re just stupid, or incurious, or they’ve been told by their teachers that they are much smarter than they are, and are therefore not willing to listen to arguments that might prove them wrong.

66

I forgot about this. I work with guys who are 10-15 years younger than I am, and two things really startled me about them:

  1. They don’t wear watches.
  2. They don’t carry cash. Only debit cards.

They don’t wear watches because they grew up surrounded by timepieces - on their computer, on the TV, on their clock radios, on the phones. I feel naked without my watch. When I asked my friend how he can stand to go without a watch, he said, “Huh? I just look at my phone.”

As for the debit card thing, that sort of baffles me. Because debit cards still aren’t as useful as cash. Often we’ll be going out for lunch, and before we can go someplace they have to check to make sure it takes debit. There are restaraunts that are off our lunch list because they don’t take debit cards. More than once, I’ve had to lend them cash when we were stuck some place that didn’t take debit.

But this really is a cultural difference - when I asked my friend why he doesn’t carry cash, he just looked incredulous, like it was a crazy thing to do. He asked me how much I carry, and I said, "Usually somewhere around 200 bucks. " He thought that was crazy and risky. What if I dropped it? What if I was robbed? How do I keep track of what I buy? What if I get a counterfeit?

Now, I think those guys are probably outliers, and most people, including young people, still carry cash even if they use debit most of the time. Am I right?

67

Someone asked about venereal disease. My whole eighteen years growing up I never heard of anyone ever catching one. And as small as my town was it would have been common news if someone had.

Drugs and alcohol? We skipped over the chapter in our health classes. Nobody knew anything about drugs except for the migrant workers who’d come in the summertime and help with the crops. I don’t remember ever hearing anything about crossover use.

We had a few town drunks, because that’s what towns had. Had nothing to do with health, just bad genes. (Surprise! We were half-right about that one.)

Later I learned about the barbiturate and then minor tranquilizer addiction some of the women struggled with as they were over-treated for the stress of daily life. But the town hoods - all three of them - may have a twelvepack or two among them now and then. Bad boys! I can’t imagine how they managed to get their hands on the beer. Town drunks function, I guess. :wink:

Nearly every school-age child took his turn having measles, mumps and scarlet fever. Most of us had our tonsils removed.

Divorce was all but nonexistent, church attendance high, kids didn’t skip school with any regularity. And a bad girl rolled her skirt waistband after she got to school to show off her knees. (That was moi.) Heh.

68

If you caught HIV, it meant you were going to die in a fairly nasty way. It wasn’t a chronic disease that can be managed with drugs until 1992 or so.

Parents were less paranoid, but the crime rate was actually higher when we were kids and teenagers than it is now. We were in more actual danger if we went out by ourselves than kids who do that now are.

There was a higher risk of being killed by a drunk driver. A classmate of mine in elementary school died that way.

You could ride unrestrained in the back of a van or station wagon. That was cool if there wasn’t an accident, but my best friend in elementary school broke her elbow riding in the back of her parents’ van.

You couldn’t get calls when you were out of the house, and anyone who tried to call while you were making another call just got a busy signal. So there were times when you sat around waiting for calls. You couldn’t use the phone while someone else was waiting for a call. The phones had cords, so you had to stay in the vicinity of the cradle while you talked. You couldn’t walk around or do other stuff while you were on the phone.

A few years later, you connected to the internet via the phone. You couldn’t talk on the phone and be on the internet at the same time. You might have to wait an hour between when you started trying to connect to the internet and when you actually got in.

When I was in college, not everybody had a personal computer in their dorm room (I didn’t, my freshman year). I wrote my papers by hand and then typed them up in the computer lab, and toward the end of the semester it tended to be crowded.

I’m going on a trip to Chicago today. Back in the day, there was no GPS. You had to use paper maps that were a pain to re-fold. There were no cell phones, so it was harder to call someone for directions if you got lost or ran late. Entertainment options on car trips were pretty much limited to reading in the car (if you didn’t get carsick) or a Walkman, or the radio, but the driver got to pick the station. When you got to the hotel, you either went to the hotel restaurant, or you drove around looking for something. There was no easy way to find out ahead of time if these restaurants were any good, or to find out what local restaurants were good, or to find out if a favorite restaurant had a location nearby.

My mom, OTOH, remembers summer car trips from Maryland to Nebraska with no air conditioning. I’m sweating a bit just thinking about that.

Yes! I dread bill paying so much less now than when I had to do it with checks.

You were supposed to balance your checkbook before online banking, too. That was a pain. I wonder how many people were like me, and knew they should do it, but almost never actually did. Now, I don’t have to feel bad that I don’t balance my checkbook. I don’t have to do any math to figure out how much money I have- I just go online and see.

69

Can’t speak for anybody else, but I think anybody who carries large amounts of cash is kind of weird. I never have (at least not since I was a kid and “a large amount of money” was $20), and I’m 45. I used to pay for big purchases with checks, and nowadays I use a debit or credit card. The largest amount of money I routinely carry with me is about $15 (change from the $20 bill I get to buy lunch from places that don’t take cards). On vacation I might have a bit more, but never more than about $100.

When I see people whip out hundred-dollar bills to pay for their groceries, or open wallets chock-full of cash, I wonder what’s up with them. Seems dangerous to me, or else flashy.

70

Born in 1966.

I remember around 1971 0r 1972 when my dad came home with this space age new invention called a “microwave oven.” It cooked food really fast, he said. It was gigantic and was as heavy and clunky as a safe. We thought it was awesome.

I remember three network channels and maybe PBS being all that was available on TV. Not only that, but there were no remotes. Some kids might find this inccredible, but you actually had to get up and change the channels by hand. This means there really wasn’t any channel surfing to speak of. You just kind of left it wherever it was during the commercials. You had to use this thing called a “TV Guide” to see what was on TV and then chart your night accordingly. Weekday afternoons were a complete TV dead zone for kids. Nothing but soap operas. We had to actually go outside and play. Back in those days, kids would just go outside and roam the neighborhood, never told anyone where they were going, and no one thought twice about it.
We eventually got cable, which made life a little more tolerable, but the big thing was really getting HBO in the summer of '78. That was a revelation. Swearing and boobies on TV. Whole entire, unedited movies. No commercials. You couldn’t drag my brothers and I away from it.

Then there were VCR’s. All the cool kids had Betamax. My dad bought a VHS. VHS won. Recording TV shows was almost too much to believe. It was like science fiction stuff.

In 1977, my uncle gave us a Pong game for Christmas – maybe the best Christmas present we ever got. A game you could play on your TV. Unbelievable.

In 1981 we got Atari, that was even better – Pacman, Space Invaders, Asteroids.

Personal computers starting getting popular. We got a Commodore 64. I never really could figure out what to do with it, but my brother could program games like Breakout and stuff, which was pretty cool.

You had to work to see porn when I was a kid. Found or stolen girlie mags, mostly, then when I was a teenager, there were tapes. You still had to be sneaky with the tapes, though, and they weren’t that easy to come by.

Kids really do have it easy today.

71

I take out $200 at a time, and use it until it gets uncomfortably low, then replenish. So I’m usually carrying between $20 and $220 on me. You think that’s excessive? Have you ever filled up your car with gas, then found out the debit machine wasn’t working? Or gone to a restaraunt, to discover the same thing? I carry enough to cover any reasonable expenses I might have to incur at one time. I still use my debit when I can, so sometimes my $200 will sit in my pocket for a couple of weeks before getting used. But I like having the money for emergencies. I didn’t realize that some people would find this weird.

Perhaps the ‘weirdness’ comes from the fact that I hate, hate using my credit cards. Experience early in life taught me how easy it is to buy things on credit when you get into that mindset, so I’ve taught myself that credit cards are only for very large purchases when the money to pay is already in the bank, or for situations where there is simply no other way to pay.

72

Actually, I bought a soda the other day from a vending machine with my credit card. It felt bizarre.

73

I remember supervision-free bonfires in high school with lots of booze. We’d go out into the middle of someone’s field, create a fire pit (or it’d have been created earlier if the party was planned), bring some hot dogs, chips and beer and a boom box (anyone remember those?) and party until the wee hours. It makes me sad to think that my son won’t have the same freedom.

I also remember when having a AAA membership was an absolute must if you traveled. You could call them and they’d plan your driving route for you, sending you a map with your route highlighted, plus a tour guide. I think they still do that (at least they did in 2005 when I drove from St. Louis to New York), but with the availability of directions online, I doubt many people use it anymore.

Hmmmm… What else? Taking a bike to the library three miles away on the weekends to luxuriate in the air conditioning was a regular occurrence, and so very much fun. There was a gas station along the way and I’d use my babysitting money or allowance to buy pixie stix, candy cigarettes, pop rocks and those ring pops and soda. We’d sneak them in and have a huge feast in the reference room. We would try so hard to muffle the sound of soda cans being popped open, but would get caught at least once or twice a summer.

74

I was thinking of AIDS and Herpes…

ETA What Athena said…

75

I was born in '86 and I remember my mom typing up on a typewriter some of the first little essays I had to do in school around Grade 5 or so. At the same time she was typing up my brother’s university papers. I’m stunned at how fast she can type.

Hell, like Cat Whisperer I remember only having 3 TV channels. I remember coming home from school and watching the TV series of Aladdin on CBC French because CTV and CBC had nothing better on.

76

49, and I never carry cash, mostly because my kids take it all for various school things. Schools still seem to require cash.

I still have most of my graduate student notebooks. Don’t know why, of course, everything is on them interwebs.

Yeah, we played outside mostly. Watching TV was a family affair. Everyone had to agree on the same show.

I can’t believe this is SD, and no one has mentioned how much porn has changed. First, it was a really big deal to get a copy of Playboy. And women had hair.

77

I’m about your age, and I remember writing all of my papers in high school out by hand, then typing the final draft on a typewriter. For my 17th birthday, my grandmother got me a fancy electronic typewriter which was far superior to the manual one I’d been using up until then. (My high school required a lot of papers to be typed.)

When I got to college, I was immediately introduced to the computer lab, where there were rows of little Macintosh 515K computers and dot-matrix printers. I never wrote another paper on that typewriter again.

I did this when I drove with my stepfather on a cross-country trip to go off to college.

78

One thing that’s only been touched on in passing: UHF TV channels. To get them, you had to adjust the UHF tuner very carefully so you got as good a picture as possible, without the static. It was a pain if one of your favorite shows was on a UHF channel.

Also, I remember the day our family got our first color TV. It was a big event. A Sony Trinitron, I still remember. Of course, it did not have a remote control.

79

I do the same thing, except that I take out a set amount every week. It’s a budgeting thing; it’s easier to keep track of my expense control if the money is physically visible in my wallet.

I sincerely doubt it’s “weird” for people to carry cash with them. As popular as Interac is, most people carry some cash.

80

I didn’t mean my use of the term “weird” to be offensive, and please don’t take it as such. Maybe “odd” or “unusual” are better words, and referring to the behavior, not the people who do it.

Maybe I’m the odd one. I just don’t like walking around with that much cash in my pocket, partially because it makes me nervous and partially because if I have cash, I tend to spend it. As for things like restaurants and gas stations–every gas station in my area has the little slot to put in your card, so if it’s not working, I know it before I start pumping and go someplace else. I’ve never been to a restaurant whose credit card machine was broken. Sometimes fast-food restaurants have glitches, but they always have a sign up so I know before I order. My local Popeye’s doesn’t take cards, which is highly annoying–I have to use their ATM and pay the fee, or remember to bring cash. If the place wasn’t 5 minutes from home and I didn’t like it so much, I’d just skip it. I’ve been after them to take cards for months, but the owner is adamant about it.