He may have meant bill changers as in will give you change for the washing machine and such. Back in my day, those were the only ones. Vending machines didn’t have them.
“Peter Rooter, that’s the name! Just flush your troubles down the drain!”
RIP George Carlin
Born in winter of 1971. I think digital cameras are a big change.
Sure we had Polaroids, but I considered cameras, for the most part, to be for adults only. And it was kind of a big deal to have your picture taken. Now you can’t go anywhere with out some one taking your picture.
When I started driving in '87 every gas station had a garage.
Huge shopping malls did not exist. When the first big one opened here in the mid '80’s it was a big deal.
I still carrry cash, mainly because I think the debit card readers may not work and I won’t have any way to pay.
Video games? When I was a kid (born in '57), we had to play board games. Monopoly, Parcheesi, Scrabble, you name it. We actually had to roll dice and keep track of all kinds of cards and game tiles and move little pegs around a game board. When Pong came out, it was literally the most amazing thing any of us had ever seen.
You still have gas stations that let people pump their gas without prepaying inside or running your card at the pump (before the gas flows)?! :dubious: I find that very surprising (unless you live in New Jersey). Also any restaraunt that takes credit/debit cards is going to have an old-style manual imprint machine in case the network goes down. That being said I usually keep about $20 in my wallet, but never more that $50 (unless I’m making a big purchase in cash). I also wear a watch virtually everwhere I wear clothing. I’m 25.
I’m in the same province as Sam and I’d be surprised to find a gas station that does make you pay for your gas before pumping. Not every place is the same as what you know, you know. 
We actually had to work for our porn back in the day! Waiting for mom and dad to go to bed so I could just maybe see an unscrambled titty on tv for a few seconds was glorious.
Woods porn was always a special find. Sometimes I would come across a few old magazines just out in the middle of nowhere and then try to find a safe and dry place to store them for later use. Taking them home was completely out of the question.
I was the remote control for the tv in our house. :mad:
I didn’t have to walk to school but the bus stop was nearly a 1/2 mile away and yes we did sometimes trudge through shin deep snow to get there dammit. 
No AC at all in our humble home. My bedroom was a converted attic. I just wanted to die in the Summer.
My first car was a 67 Chevy Impala that I bought for 75.00 dollars from a farmer who had it sitting behind his barn for a couple of years. I think I used my first three months of paychecks on Bondo just to patch up all of the rusted out holes in the body.
On the plus side the trunk was large enough for two full beer kegs with room to spare and the hood was solid enough for me and my girlfriend to lay on the hood at the drive-in without fear of crushing it. The backseat was also huge which led to life changing moments with the opposite sex. So it wasn’t all bad.
I’m only 33, but, due to (mostly) family circumstances, I’ve experienced most of the things the 40+ crowd here lists. My first taste of the Internet was around 2000, and I had spent probably a total of 10 hours at a computer before that. I regularly purchased music cassettes up until the mid-90’s, and never had a VCR growing up, or even living on my own. I still listen to my music on CD’s, and feel they’re a huge step forward compared to those C-cassettes, which I still sometimes listen to. I got my first ever laptop just last week, and learned the basics of Photoshop, Excel, Powerpoint etc. about two years ago. The last twenty years pretty much passed me by.
E: yeah, porn. I’d be forced to browse through “a Tour around the World”-type coffee table books to get a glimpse of a (mostly Polynesian or Southern African) breast. Woods porn was really the only way to see actual sex acts, and always a rare treat.
born summer 1971.
agree with most of what the similarly-dated folks observed. thanks for the trip down memory lane (tv ‘warming up’, cheap gas, payphone stuff etc.)
i got a 13" color tv for my 13th birthday (along with a commodore 64, a major step up from my vic-20!). that was the Best Birthday Ever!
about 5 years ago i gave up on the watch thing. i always have a cellphone in my pocket so it seemed redundant (and just an excuse to show off for too many people). even though i work in tech, and silicon valley, and have done so for ~15 years, I still don’t really “get” what the heck teenagers are doing texting THAT DAMN MUCH. i resisted Facebook for a long while, but was eventually sucked in 
oh and i DO try to carry cash (also the $40 - $350 range) at all times because you really never know when you’ll need it. and, i like garage sales. and they don’t take plastic
my parents still have the same early 80s microwave that they bought used, in the late 80s, while I was in high school.
i was watching some old clint eastwood movie and he has to always tell the dispatcher at the precinct (he’s a cop, of course) where he’ll be. they often have to call his downstairs neighbor or somesuch to go roust him out of bed during emergencies. i bet that doesn’t resonate with “kids these days”.
i worked at radio shack between h.s. and college and i remember when we got the first “reasonably sized” cell phones in, they were competitors to the motorola “brick” phones, and cost $999 and we all lusted after them mightily, as status symbols.
when i was < 13 i remember my parents borrowing $20 bills that grandpa had given me, from my piggybank, on a weekend night when the babysitter came over, because they hadn’t gone to the bank (!)
i grew up in a fairly nice part of detroit, but hell, it was still detroit, (although admittedly a few years before the advent of large-scale drug gangs like Young Boys Inc.). all summer I’d freely bike and wander wherever basically as long as I gave some notion of when I was coming home, it was fine. This was probably between ages of 12 and 16, when my bike was only transport. But alone and with friends, we’d go all over the neighborhoods, miles away, etc. I don’t know if people let their kids do that in large urban areas anymore. or at least, not without cellphones. i do remember making calls from faraway payphones if i was going to be a lot later than planned.
i saw a bbc special (“upgrade me” I think it was called) where 13 year olds in Britain were given one of the old school-style record players in the heavy shell (it closed up like a suitcase sort of) and it took them a while to figure out what it was, period (even after opening it!) and I don’t think they ever really figured out how to make it work. and all but 1 of the 200 (?) students had a cellphone, iirc. it was a little scary.
i’m certain my kids would have no clue how to dial a rotary telephone.
it also took my son and his friends a while to figure out what a walkman (the old cassette-playing kind) was for. and then i think it was only because one of them took language lessons on cassettes at school (!) that they worked it out.
Some of my mother’s stories about growing up in rural Mississippi during the ‘50s sound almost like tales of growing up on the frontier. When she was small, she remembers when her family got indoor plumbing, namely, a toilet. Before that, they’d used an outhouse. I think they got a black-and-white television sometime in the 60s. Her father was a bit of a rebel and he loved Rock n’ Roll, ‘the devil’s music’; she remembers him dancing to it. He ran moonshine, too, and she and her sisters used to walk along the side of the road, picking up empty bottles motorists had thrown out their windows, so he could put moonshine in them.
When her parents got married in 1932, my grandfather took my grandmother to a county fair and bought her an ice cream cone, the first one she’d ever seen. She didn’t know how to eat it, so she bit the bottom out of it and all the ice cream fell out and she cried.
My maternal grandmother also remembered when her family, in their little car, crossed the bridge across the Mississippi river from Mississippi to Louisiana when they left Alabama for Louisiana. I think this must’ve been the Old Vicksburg Bridge, which opened in 1930, because it was brand-new at the time. Anyway, she and her siblings were so nervous crossing that big bridge over that big river! None of them had ever done anything like that before. Just think about that, whippersnappers, a time when driving over a bridge in your horseless carriage was a nerve-racking experience!
Remember when we had capital letters?
Growing up in a small Saskatchewan town in the sixties/seventies, I remember when we got water piped in, too. Before that, we had a cistern that my dad filled from the town water supply, and a five-gallon pail with a toilet seat on it that he emptied in the outhouse in the back yard. Everyone in town had a serious garden and did a lot of canning every fall, too (not to mention the everyday baking). We went into the big city about once a week, on Saturday, for a grocery shopping trip. If we were very, very lucky (and very, very good), we might get to see a movie that afternoon and have supper at a real live restaurant that night!
I was a Geauga Lake guy myself, loved the rocket ship ride.
I am 49 years old, born in 1960. I’m too young to be a boomer and too old to be gen X, I wonder what I am?
Anyway, the childhood! How could it have been better? I don’t know. I’m glad I did not have a computer, I still don’t have one at home, after 8 to 10 hours on one at work the last thing I want to do at home is stare at another computor screen. Never did get into video games.
I spent my childhood watching as much TV as I could, but after the cartoons and monster movies were over it wasn’t even noon. I still had all day long to ride my bike and build treehouses and swim at the park. I can’t concieve of not being either outside playing, or sitting and reading & drawing. As long as we came home at dark we were good to go. Mom never worried about where we were.
As I got older and the phone became more important, I would have liked a cell, but again, I’m glad I didn’t have it. I would probubly wasted a lot of time. Half the time I leave it at home when I go somewhere. Camera, internet access, no thanks.
On the one hand, I know things change. I know that kids today feel that they are in paradise by comparison to what I did not have technologically.
On the other hand however, it’s probubly rose-colored glasses and all that, but I feel that I had it better than kids today. I know that’s wrong intellectually. I know my grandfather would have thought that he had it even better. So can we really define anything without getting subjective?
I don’t think so.
On the gripping hand, now I’m mopey with nostalgia. I need to buy some neighborhood little kids an ice cream off the truck, that’ll cheer me up.
I remember when I was a kid and Saturday morning was a big event because we could watch cartoons.
Things are definitely different for kids now; I don’t know how much is better and how much is worse. I think most people born in the fifties or sixties valued our independence and freedom greatly as kids and adolescents; we were always out doing something away from the parents, and couldn’t wait to get our own apartment. Modern kids don’t seem to have that same drive to get away from the family that we seemed to have. I’m not sure what caused this difference; I know one thing - my parents didn’t go out of their way to make my home life a wonderful experience for me, and staying at home forever would have been torture. Is it better or worse that modern parents do try to make their children’s lives as pleasant as possible now?
I think this is more tail than dog. There was a time when young people expected to move away from home and that was the societal norm. Then various factors like diminished job opportunities, increased educational opportunities, rising real estate prices, and an increase in single parenthood caused young people to stay with or move back in with their parents. As this became more common, the social stigma against it relaxed and that in turn made it a more acceptable possibility for people.
I think 1980 is the cut-off for Gen X. I’m 1978.
-We didn’t have cable until I was about, oh, 10? (Well, we had it when I was little – until I was four, but that was because it came with our apartment. I was too small to really remember all that much). It was a really, REALLY big deal. We didn’t have a remote, and it was only on one TV. It had one of those dials that you turned that had the different numbers on it, to get to the channel you wanted. You actually had to pick your ass off of the sofa to change the channel. And there was only cable upstairs – the one downstairs didn’t have it. (In fact, this was the first time we had two tvs).
Originally, we only got it in the first place was because the reception here was absolutely shitty. (This was in 1988-89)
My grandparents had a remote control – they didn’t have cable – after my grandfather started getting sick and it was harder for him to get up off of the sofa. It didn’t turn the TV on – you still had to get up and do that. It just controlled the volume and changed the channels.
-Prank calls – nowadays, you really can’t make too many prank calls, what with caller ID and what not. My friends and I used to make them all the time. Our favorite was to call people up and ask, “Hello, is John there?” “No? Then what the hell do you pee in, a Dixie Cup?” Much yuks.
-Instead of texting in class, we wrote notes to each other. It was much easier, because it looked like you were taking notes – you just had to make sure the teacher couldn’t see what you were writing. Then, when you had the chance, you’d fold them up (most of us knew fancy ways to tuck them around – almost like folding a flag), and then we’d pass them back and forth between classes.
-I started my first job in 1994, working at a local grocery store. We didn’t take credit cards until about two years after I started there.
And what’s this crap about not getting music for free? Dammit, we used to tape our favorite songs off of the radio. And we LIKED it, goddammit! And if a DJ happened to talk over the end of it, well, too bad! (Seriously, you’d keep a blank cassette in your stereo tape player and wait until your favorite songs came on the radio so you could record them. Of course, the sucky part was if the tape happened to run out before the song was over. 
(Saturday morning cartoons = WIN)
I can remember when my parents went on vacation out of state, they had to make plans for having money during the trip. Credit cards were rare and most businesses wouldn’t accept an out-of-state check. So they had to go to the bank and buy a bunch of what were called traveller’s checks. These were basically like a money order to yourself. You paid for them at home and then you had to find places at your destination that would redeem them for the cash you needed. Inconvenient obviously but the only alternative was carrying a huge wad of cash with you for the trip. And if you ran into some emergency and needed unanticipated extra money you’d have to call somebody back home and have them “wire” you money, which was a system where they paid money to some company like Western Union and that company then passed the money (minus their fee) on to you.
Late at night, we would call up the parents of someone we knew was out running around, say we were the police, and they needed to come pick the kid up at the station. 
I used traveler’s checks when I went off to college in the mid-1980s. This was because I didn’t yet have any credit cards, and I didn’t have a local bank account right away.
I also used to get traveler’s checks when going out of the country. In the early 1990s, though, I discovered that ATMs in Germany and the U.K. would dispense local currency with my U.S. ATM card, and at a good exchange rate, too. This generally dispensed with the need thereafter for traveler’s checks or to go to a currency exchange place.
I continued to take traveler’s checks with me when going to Europe for emergencies–such as my ATM card not working or if no ATMs were available.
It depended where you lived, though. I’m the same age as you, and it seemed like every place got cable just as we left. (My stepfather was in the Army, and we moved around a lot.)
There was no cable available anywhere that we lived before I was 12. The Army base we lived at in San Antonio got cable in 1980–the month that we left. Our neighborhood in Tennessee also didn’t get cable until after we left. The Chicago suburbs we lived in in the mid-1980s all had cable, but not on the Army base we lived on. :rolleyes: I didn’t have cable until I went off to college in 1986.