Damn right. Before domain addressing, you had to know the path to someone’s
computer to send email. Spammers were too dumb to spam, let alone 419ers.
And I remember when there was one alt.sex group (my fingers almost wrote grope) that had little enough traffic to keep up with. In fact, just about any newsgroup had low traffic.
Man, I miss the days of the internet before it had content.
Maybe it was because I was seeing it through the eyes of a kid, but the Olympics were much better when I was growing up in the late '60/early '70. First, there was the anticipation every four years (both summer and winter sports) of something special, not one or the other every two years. Secondly, there wasn’t this jingoistic approach to what sports or countries were shown. You got a chance to see a little bit more of (almost) everything, not just those sports where the U.S. was thought be a clear winner or medal contender. Those times when the olympics were being broadcast were special for me.
Better back then: Movie soundtracks, especially Mancini
Oscar winning songs
That’s media consolidation for ya.
Soda pop. I don’t think it’s just my imagination that sodas had more fizz back in the 50s and 60s. Made it more satisfying to drink.
Cartoons for kids. We had Rocky and Bullwinkle, Sherman and Mr. Peabody, the Road Runner, Popeye. And they were funny.
I was watching some cartoon shows with my grandson. All the shows teach lessons and are not funny. One show said if you make a mistake, don’t try to hide it. Tell an adult.
Another was about how it’s not nice to begin eating until everyone is seated at the table. WTF?
Working on your own car. Lifting the hood and seeing a finite and accessible group of contraptions you could work on yourself. Tuning your ignition timing, dwell, and carburetor mix by the way the engine sounds and how it responds when you yank back and release the throttle. Being able to get to your spark plugs with a standard socket set. Crawling under the dashboard with some tiny bulbs to replace the lights in the gauges, or some 3rd-party gauges and some wire to change what you’ve got (who needs a clock, here’s a tach!). Installing your glass pack mufflers inline on your dual exhaust system with an oxyacetylene torch, with no catalytic converters to worry about.
Forgetting your car keys and driving your car home by hotwiring the coil and then slapping an old screwdriver across the contacts on the starter motor, in the age before locking steering wheels.
When I was a kid I didn’t even have television; we talked to each other and we hated it.
We did have radio and we did hear the news: Gabriel Heater and Edward R. Murrow, IIRC. And movie theaters usually ran newsreels. I’m a 67 year old with no hope at all for the future.
Car bumpers. They were made out of chrome-plated steel like this and you could run into each other at full speed without totalling your car.
I agree with you about cars. But:
I think that cars during the 70s and 80s still looked better than the ones now, since the ones now all have homogeneous rounded “aero” styling that clashes, dreadfully clashes, with all the architecture around them. (When I bring up this point about cars clashing with architecture [what are the two things that you’re going to see the most when you walk outside? Cars and buildings] most people act like I’m speaking an alien language. Not a foreign language, a literally extra-terrestrial one. But since you’re a fellow vintage-car-guy, I take it you’ll understand.)
American cars may have been at a low point in design in the 70s and 80s, but European cars - BMW, Mercedes, Saab, Volvo - still looked great.
The 70s and 80s were a bad design period for American cars, but they were a great time for trucks and SUVs:
1979 International Scout Traveler
Creative colors, two-tone paint jobs, straight rugged lines, imposing front ends, and none of the gaudiness of modern SUVs and trucks. I am a huge fan of full-size trucks and SUVs from the 70s and 80s.
I remember when it was possible to have some faith that a presidential candidate was sincerely trying to serve our country. Ok, the belief was probably wrong, but at least possible.
Amateur athletes were actually amateurs.
There used to be decent public transportation in a lot more places.
True that.
The body, too.
When I was in high school, a friend’s dad had a 47 Packard in the garage, not restored yet but being kept for restoration. I guess I was rolling my eyes a bit while he was going on about how they don’t make 'em that way any more, and he picked up a standard claw hammer, raised it at full arm’s lengh overhead, and brought it down onto the hood of the car — not with full deliberate shoulder force behind it, perhaps, but definitely letting it fall at full arm’s extension — and let it bounce off the hood with a very impressive KLANGK!!! Nary a chip in the paint. It was like taking a whack at a guard rail.
Handed me the hammer and invited me to try that on my own car. And although my own car at the time was a far-from-insubstantial '65 Pontiac, I declined.
Web servers used to be efficient and quick, when they were made by high-technology companies. Now it looks like everybody’s in on it, and you get no response and timeouts and “Document contains no data” and “the message board is down while we try to resolve a problem.” That’s what you get when you run a board on the ElmoTron95 by Fisher-Price.
In the old days diet soda tasted good, thanks to saccharine. I actually drank the original Tab by choice. Now they all give me a headache, and I don’t touch diet stuff.
And yes I know about the dreadful cancer risk.
Yup. And then bounce around the interior of the cabin like a meatball in a cocktail shaker. 
The Future.
I want my flying car, stopover at Luna City Holiday Inn and voice controlled computers with a personality, dammit.
Movie theater popcorn tasted so much better once upon a time. Furniture was better made, it was built to last decades and was a reasonable price. Now you have to spend a fortune for the chance that your furniture will be good quality wood, and well made. Apples were better, now they’ve been bred to be large, and red, with no flavor, and an icky texture. They don’t know if they can ever bring back the good “old fashioned” apples on a large scale. The same goes for pears and peaches. 
Amen to that. I want an apple to be crisp, firm, and flavorful, not soft, pulpy, and bland. Organic is the only way to go for decent produce. I’m a firm believer in the idea of paying more money for better quality when it comes to certain things, and fruit is one of them. Also, once you eat wild pacific salmon, you will never be able to enjoy the farmed stuff again. (Any Atlantic salmon reading this - sorry if I hurt your feelings. I’m sure you’re perfectly nice fish, I just think you don’t taste as good.)
I used to drink the old Tab too, and it wasn’t so bad. The last time I tasted one it was nasty.
I remember cyclamates, and how good Mom’s Kool-Aid was when made with cyclamates. Then, just because lab rats fed the equal of 800 soda pops a day (or something like that) got cancer, the sugar industry got cyclamates banned. Almost all artificial sweeteners taste like ass or, like aspertame (which is in so many of the diet drinks now) really ARE bad for you.
I say, bring back cyclamates and/or decriminalize stevia.
Figured I should restate this in case Tucker missed it, since the post was directed towards him (but got dominated by the second page.)
