What was the world like when I was a kid?

Factual Questions
81

Although, without a blower motor, your heater was useless, and to be fair, you can always light a gas stove with a match or lighter.

This isn’t thread-pooping; there’s a point coming: I’m somewhat of a luddite for today’s software applications, especially the “social” stuff. Texting? Yuck. “Social Media” sites? Fake friends and followers. Twitter? Who cares. Facebook, etc.? No interest (and they mostly offend my eyes and ears). Instant messaging? Only in-game. For everything else, there’s email when it’s not urgent, voicemail when not near a computer, and actual live voice communications when needing to carry on a conversation. If texting were easy, I’d use it a little bit more; as is I treat it as a text-pager (you remember text pagers, right?), and only “text” né page when I’m at a PC to compose my message.

I was born in 1971, and via the intermediate school district and a family librarian (actual library science librarian), I had early exposure to all sorts of cool stuff, like Commodore Pets (the real keyboard version), Apples ]['s, media center gadgets, and so on. I was given a 2kb TRS-80 MC-10 computer when I was young, and started a paper route just to purchase a Commodore 128 (I wanted to one-up all the C=64 owners I was jealous of). The internet wasn’t sorely missing; I had BBS’s and Quantum Link. Instead of fighting my parents for a cell phone as do the kids today, I had to make the case for my own land line. I brought my computer to Speech class and did a multimedia slide show years before anyone knew of Harvard Graphics or PowerPoint. Man, I was a technology pioneer.

FWIW, here in Michigan you can still get smoking seating. You can in Ontario, too, as long as you’re willing to sit outside. During the summer, the popular places there are empty inside, and bursting at the seams on the patio.

We didn’t have cable, but we had Canadian broadcast television in addition to our own. We used to fake putting on our seatbelts when crossing into Canada, because they had some strange law about requiring passengers to use them! We would get gasoline there, because it was so much cheaper than in Michigan, even with the bridge toll. Getting across the bridge in either direction was just a matter of declaring one’s citizenship, without documentary evidence.

The family car had a separate set of tires for the winter versus the summer. You couldn’t just turn a key for a 1/4 second to start your car; you had to fiddle with the gas pedal. Cinemas only had one screen. Drive-in movies were still popular. A&W was a car-hop style restaurant instead of a drive-through joint (similar in function to Sonic today).

I didn’t have to wear a helmet on my bike, even living on a gravel road, even after having spilled one day and scraping myself up pretty badly all over the place. We could bike 1/4 mile down the road to lake Huron all by ourselves, and swim if we wanted to. I was eventually allowed to ride the city bus all by myself.

There was no such thing as Wal-Mart, and prior to Sam’s Club there was Pace Warehouse. Things cost money, but they were usually well made, and one repaired them when they broke.

82

I always thought my parents were the last people in the US to get those things, as well as a microwave. I think we got a VCR and a microwave in 1985 or so, an answering machine in 1986 or 87, and cable TV in 87.

I remember being told to let the phone ring for 10 rings when you tried calling someone. That changed with answering machines, which generally picked up on the fourth ring or so.

We didn’t have a remote for our TVs. We got up and changed the channel at the cable box. I’m pretty sure this was the case until I went away to college in 1993.

Programming the VCR to record a show was a complex process, and was not standard from one VCR to another. We only did it for something special. If you rented a movie on tape, you had to rewind it before you returned it, or Blockbuster (or whoever) charged you a rewinding fee of a few dollars.

We got call waiting in 87 or so. Before that, you had to stay off the phone when somebody else was waiting for a call. We didn’t get a cordless phone until after I graduated high school. Getting my parents to put a phone in my room (not a separate line or anything like that) was a huge deal for me as a teenager. Some people had multiple phone lines at their homes, but it was a big deal if you did.

I didn’t have a computer until 1994 when I was in college. I turned in hand-written papers in high school. In my freshman year of college, I hand-wrote drafts of final papers and then went to the computer lab to type and print them. The computer lab was more crowded than usual just before finals, so I doubt I was the only one doing that.

Multiplayer video games generally meant that one player played until they got killed, then it was the other player’s turn.

I had either dialup internet or no internet connection at home until 2001. I think Mr. Neville got DSL at his apartment in 1999 or so. Toward the end, he often had to wait an hour or more between first attempting to get online and actually getting connected.

I think bike helmets existed when I was a kid, but nobody wore them. A friend of mine got a concussion from falling off her bike and hitting her head.

I remember my dad refusing to wear a seat belt and being very unhappy with the new seat belt laws. I know he generally didn’t wear one into the mid-80’s, though he does now.

Restaurants in Maryland stopped having smoking sections sometime in the 1990s, IIRC. When I lived in California (1998 to 2007), they didn’t have smoking sections either. It was a bit of an adjustment to come here and find that there were still restaurants where people could smoke. That changed last year in Pittsburgh, much to my relief.

One of my previous jobs involved working in a classified area, which meant you couldn’t bring your cell phone into the building. A lot of my younger co-workers now are aghast at the idea of having to be away from their cell phones for a whole workday. They expect to be able to communicate with their SO or friends during the work day. For me, not being able to do that is normal.

Our furnace still does.

But there were no reviews or anything like that. If you didn’t know someone who knew which dog groomers, plumbers, or florists were good and which would rip you off, you were SOL.

83

I have one more.

Staplers worked.

You shoved the paper in, pressed down, and most often ended up with said paper stapled. No problem.

Today, there is a 60 % chance I will get some mangled piece of metal stuck onto the page just enough to ensure I will draw blood trying to remove it.

The electric staplers work fine, but I can never find the right size staples.

84

While technically DUI / DWI may not have changed much, the enforcement of those laws has changed hugely during the last 30+ years. It was not uncommon during that timeframe to get pulled over, and if you weren’t “too drunk” they might tell you to go home carefully or pull over and sleep it off.

MADD was founded in 1980 and started to make an impact during the 80s. Since then states have lowered legal blood alcohol limits and driving drunk stopped being cool or funny, at least for most people. The term “designated driver” didn’t really exist, or wasn’t in common usage, in 1982. Remember in the movie “Say Anything”, Lloyd was the keymaster and would judge if you were sober enough to get your keys back? That was filmed in 1989, and probably was about right. If you weren’t entirely toasted people would probably just send you on your way and tell you to be careful.

85

“Keep the line open. I’m expecting a call!”

86

My favorite “in-my-day” contribution is the fact that my dad had to climb up on the roof to turn the tv antenna, and we’d shout up “stop” when the picture was good. Later we got a motorized tv antenna turner that I thought was pretty high tech.

87

It is meant as a starting point. A foundation.

Also, I would suggest that those of us on the SDMB, on the whole are smarter, more information seeking that the given population on the whole. In so many words, the population of the SDMB is above average in intellect.

The gist of the list is for Professors to have a go to reference for their lectures. As we get older, time seems to speed up. Professors reference things that becoming increasingly out of date.

I had one class where we had to advertise a now outdated pregnancy test in a foreign market.

I had another class where we had to layout a gas station that had a drive through window for payment of gas.

Admittedly, you have to work the list backwards to get at the OP, but I think it works perfectly. It’s meant to add to the general idea of the OP, not standing on it’s own in this case.

88

This reminds me…the person who called you could keep your line tied up just by not hanging up! I don’t think this happens anymore with the new phone systems, but it was possible to block out a household that way if you had unpleasant plans.

I can still remember one night when I was about four or five (would have been in 1975 or 76), my father went away on a hunting trip for the weekend. At about 10 PM someone called our house but there was no one there, or at least no one talking. My mother said later that she could hear highway traffic, but no one spoke. And whoever was on the other side didn’t hang up. She was very afraid because it could be either nothing, my father having had an accident and managed to reach a roadside phone booth, or someone who knew my dad was away for the weekend and trying to isolate us by tying up the phone. Mom brought me and my infant brother into her bedroom for the night, grabbed my dad’s spare shotgun (unloaded…this was before she started target shooting competitively and she had no idea how to use it for anything other than intimidation of an intruder) and spent the night in the rocker in their bedroom while we slept in their bed.

In the morning, she bundled us all up and we walked to the neighbor’s house, where we called the phone company to close that connection and open up our line again.

That night is very vivid in my mind.

89

As a teen at that time, somehow I was conditioned by society to find girls with big teased hair, neon makeup, high-waisted mom jeans, baggy torn sweatshirts, chewing gum while smoking, to be attractive.

It wasn’t until seeing Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful that I was able to break that horrible brainwashing.

90

They had that in the Milwaukee area back in the early 80’s. It was called TV Q. You needed a special antenna that was very similar to the one need for the Dish Network today. All people got with it was HBO, nothing else.

91

Oh heck no. There was lots of leaded gas in 1982. The process of getting rid of it started in the 1970s, but it was still a commonly sold product in the early 80s and wasn’t gotten rid of until the 90s.

We’ve had whole multi-page threads about this (And Cecil once wrote a column about it too), but to sum up, I respectfully but vehemently disagree. Most goods sold in 1982 were no better than, and often a lot worse, than the stuff you can buy today. Anything you have that’s survivled since then is simply the best stuff and so of course it’s going to be the stuff that’s left over; the crap is long since in a landfill. Some stuff might have been better, but I can very easily name stuff that’s OBVIOUSLY better now. Cars - the single largest consumer good most people will ever buy - are, obviously, much better built now and protected by warranties that would have been inconceivable in 1982.

One of the reasons you fixed stuff was simply that it was expensive and people didn’t have as much money; the utility of hiring a TV repairman was still there. Now that TVs are cheap it’s not… and, you know, I can’t remember the last TV I had that broke.

92

There’s also the matter of most electronics are made very modular. They just don’t have a lot of parts to be fixed or tinkered with. Even a PC only has like 10 actual parts and any of them are relatively cheap.