What's Changed During Your Lifetime?

In My Humble Opinion
41

A lot of things, of course, but two really BIG things:
1.) Attitudes towards Sex. Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn has a scene where the female lead, in order to call the male lead’s bluff, offers to walk right into his bedroom and have premarital sex. Everyone acts as if this would be an unthinkable thing, to be avoided at all costs for the sake of mores and society and decorum, and acts to prevent it. Just a few years later that scene could not have happened. Today, I don’t think kids would even understand it.

People talked about it, before, of course. Playboy became a big seller by presenting the lifestyle of unfettered and carefree young folks, engaging in pleasurable sex whenever they wished to, but when Playboy started publishing 50 years ago, it was a pipe dream for most people. Premarital sex and cohabitation were done on the sly, not openly. Times has changed.

2.) Computing power. When I was a kid our family got invited to a company presentation where they gave away, as souvenirs, little pieces of magnetic tape from the computers. A computer was a huge, bulky, unwieldy, expensive thing. Hand Calculators became available when I was in high school, but the glitziest thing an affordable one could do was square roots. I stuck with my slide rule, which was cheaper and faster (An HP-35, which could do trig and log functions, cost $395). I continued to use my slide rule for my first two years of college, until the HP-25 came out for $195. A friend built his own computer, with a hard drive scavenged from a mainframe – it was as big as a refrigerator. I programmed on mainframes until my senior year, punching instructions and data on punch cards. Programs and subroutines filled entire drawers. God forbid you should drop your pile of cards and get them out of order.

I still read in reprinted science fiction stories about rocket guidance using cams (!!!) (See Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo or George Smith’s Venus Equilateral, both still in print in the 1960s and 1970s). If there’s one thing the old SF authors failed to predict properly, despite the ubiquity of robots, it was the pervasive and powerful influence of computers. (Although, surprisingly, quite a few effectively predicted the Internet.)

Today, of course, the small size and huge capabilities of computers are evident. They have transformed several fields, and I think that people even today would be hard pressed to do some of the things that were done until the 1960s totally without the aid of computers. Navigation, guidance, optics calculations, artillery ranging, iterative calculations, making change, keeping accounts, banking, library systems, cataloguing, inventory. Imagine doing this nowadays without computers. Damned near impossible.

42

Speaking of using cams, I recall going into a machine shop in the 60’s that used Swiss turret lathes. Think of a C-N-C machine that operates off of cam wheels. 6 or 7 cams on a shaft, each one controling one tool’s operation. Fun to watch.
Other changes I have seen:

[ul]
[li]Changes from party line to private line[/li][li]private rotary dial to puh button[/li][li]Construction of Freeways, and the interstate system[/li][li]Most of the kids carried knives to school, and this was not considered a bad thing[/li][li]Emission controls being added to engines[/li][li]Introduction of all digit dialing on telephones, and the introduction of area codes[/li][li]introduction of zip codes[/li][li]Duck and cover drills at school[/li][li]Kids getting toy guns for Christmas and the most realistic gun was the coolest.[/li][li]Using a slide rule in Chemistry class, and then when Apollo 13 came out digging it out to explain how it works to my kids.[/li][li]Main street shopping, BM (Before Malls)[/li][/ul]

43

Yeah. Most people. :rolleyes: :frowning:

44

I’m a Type I diabetic and I’m 18. I was diagosed “way back” in the fall of 1988 and even from then, things have changed radically. When I was first diagnosed, my parents carefully and cautiously weighed everything that I ate. I had to take four injections every day and had to eat exactly at 7:30, 11:45 and 4:30, with snacks at midmorning, midafternoon and at 8 PM. It took about two minutes to check my blood sugar, and there was no way I was ever going to get my hands on a Snickers bar, let alone a slice of key lime cheesecake. (Oh, cheesecake! How I love you!)

Now it takes me ten seconds to check my blood sugar, tops. Thanks to the insulin routine I’m on, I can eat whatever I want whenever I want. I don’t even have to eat breakfast if I don’t want to. (People have trouble comprehending why being allowed NOT to eat is pleasure.) I don’t have to eat every two hours. The minimum number of injections I need in a day is one. If I wanted, I could have that wonders of wonders, an insulin pump. Diabetes is no longer a death sentence, though it never really was in MY lifetime. Maybe we’re that much closer to a cure, should there be one.

One bad thing regarding diabetes, which really has changed in my lifetime, is the number of Type II diabetics. There are millions of them now, and many of them aren’t middle aged, whereas before they were. That is very sad, since Type II diabetes is in many cases preventable.

Sarah

45

Besides the “constant” changes like TV, music, and radio content…
A wall has fallen and 1s and 0s have become more important.

Wow… Depressing. I was born 4 decades too late.

:frowning:

46

Oriental is a rug. (I came from a time when Oriental meant something from the Orient, including people)

47

i’ve another one:
electronical music. When New Beat came out in the 80’s, not that many people liked it, even House wasn’t all that popular.
look at the music scene now…
also when I grew up, “drugs” were only taken by losers and criminals. Now the whole club scene can’t do without extacy.

:dubious:

48

Many of my childhood photos were shot on 110 or 126 film. Nowadays 35mm is the standard. Digital cameras, of course, hadn’t even been thought of. Most cameras used flash cubes or flash bulbs, which had to be replaced (no built-in flash on anything but high-end cameras).
The car only had AM on the radio. The speaker (just one, no stereo sound) was mounted in the dashboard. Tuning the radio meant turning knobs. Preset stations were set by mechanical buttons that moved the pointer to the selected point on the dial.
An adding machine was a large, heavy mechanical beast which only output the result on paper, no digital display. IIRC the one my mom and dad had could only add and subtract.
The playground wasn’t as safe. The slide was metal and on a hot day it was too hot to touch because of the sun. The fixtures were mostly metal, in fact.
Color TV sets cost around $700 (a lot more money back then when you adjust for inflation). No stereo, no cable-ready, no remote, just knobs you had to get up from the chair to change the channel. Black and white TVs were more common. Today a color TV can be bought for under $200.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned about phones yet- there was no caller ID, call-waiting, call-forwarding, etc. I had long ago thought about a caller ID system and wishing there was such a thing, so I was glad to see this become a reality.
We weren’t allowed to wear shorts in school until I was in the sixth grade (1982).
The no-smoking section in restaurants was smaller than the smoking section in most restaurants. Cigarette vending machines were commonly placed in the lobby where children could see them. I know this is how a lot of kids in junior high and high school bought their smokes.
Even the mildest of swear words (damn and hell) were not allowed to be spoken on TV. There was also a time when sex and pregnancy could not be openly discussed on a TV show. A husband and wife had to be shown sleeping in separate beds. They couldn’t even show a toilet on older TV shows.
TV stations signed off at the end of the broadcast day usually by playing the national anthem and a continuous shot of the American flag before going off the air. 24-hour programming was nonexistent.
Pulling into a gas station meant that you could stay in your car while the guys outside did all the work. Not only did they fill your tank, but they also washed the windows and checked the oil. A “service station” these days, with garages and service bays, is a rare sight and a dying breed.

49

Let’s see…

I’m also old enough to remember when TV and appliance repair shops were common. Even a small black & white TV was expensive enough that people were willing to pay a lot to have them serviced (you’d always see people at the drug store testing out tubes).

Today, almost nobody bothers to repair a TV or any other appliance. If it’s on the fritz, people just buy a new one.

50

Today, almost nobody even knows what “tubes” were in a TV! (Just us old people.) In the first computer class I took the teacher was describing the first computers and how they used vacuum tubes like the ones in a television. She got a (nearly) complete roomful of blank stares. I was the only one in the class who knew what she was talking about.

I also tell stories about fending off dinosaurs with my looseleaf notebook on the way to & from school – uphill – both ways.

51

Hey I remember tubes in TVs and I refuse to believe that I am old!

My parents had this huge red case of tubes that my father must have snagged from one of his many odd jobs. Whenever the TV would flip out he’d pull it away from the wall and have one of us sit in front of it while he changed tubes.

static "is that better? … no … ok … that? … no still static… Now? Well we have sound and static… How about this? Yay a picture!

Oh and my job in the house was remote control. Go change it to channel 5. Hey put on 38 there’s a movie I wanna watch. I used to think it was why they had kids…

52

I’m almost 39, FWIW. These may have already been alluded to, but here goes anyway:

  • No carseats or seatbelts used in the backseat of the car. We had seatbelts, but nobody used them. My sister and I would stand in the backseat with our arms draped over the front, bench seat. We used to fight over who would get “the hump”–the raised part of the floor for the transmission to get the power to the rear wheels–which would help you see better. (That is, of course, when we weren’t sitting on our our knees facing backwards out the rear window.)

  • No children unattended in big cities. When I was in elementary school (early 70s), my father owned a store on Jeweler’s Row in Philadelphia. On Saturdays, I would often go to work with him. With the store being the size a typical walk-in closet, I used to get bored and go out for a walk. I’d visit the toy sections of the department stores (anyone remember Gimbels?) and record stores (anyone remember records?). As I look around Philly these days, I don’t see many 7-year-olds out on their own.

53

I’m almost 39, FWIW. These may have already been alluded to, but here goes anyway:

  • No carseats or seatbelts used in the backseat of the car. We had seatbelts, but nobody used them. My sister and I would stand in the backseat with our arms draped over the front, bench seat. We used to fight over who would get “the hump”–the raised part of the floor for the transmission to get the power to the rear wheels–which would help you see better. (That is, of course, when we weren’t sitting on our our knees facing backwards out the rear window.)

  • No children unattended in big cities. When I was in elementary school (early 70s), my father owned a store on Jeweler’s Row in Philadelphia. On Saturdays, I would often go to work with him. With the store being the size a typical walk-in closet, I used to get bored and go out for a walk. I’d visit the toy sections of the department stores (anyone remember Gimbels?) and record stores (anyone remember records?). As I look around Philly these days, I don’t see many 7-year-olds out on their own.

54

I know I am submitting myself to a “shock and awe” flaming, but the average American body weight is the most dramatic change, in my perspective. Too many people spending WAY too much time on their computers, or working too much, or whatever. When did exercise become so inconvenient?

Don’t hurt me!!

55

I’ve been around since the 50s. The biggest change that I’ve noticed is that people of differing colors are now often seen talking casually to each other without noticable shoulder tension and stiff, artificial smiles.

56

The Internet. The Internet. The Internet.

Video game parlors had games that didnt have to do with street fighting or auto racing.

Rather than 5%, a full 25% of songs stations played were good.

Berlin Wall fell.

57

Debit cards.

I distinctly remember listening as a teen to someone ahead of me in the check out line talking about how *one day in the future we will never touch cash again. it will all be on debit cards *.

I thought, *You’re nuts *.

I also miss my passbook savings account.

And no obnoxious cell phone chatter in stores.

And **Reckless ** you are very right. We eat more, and more poorly too, move less and watch loads of TV. We are a nation of heart attacks waiting to happen. That’s just my opinion, though.

58

“Doesn’t it suck that it rained so hard on Irish Independence Day?”

I remember a time (10-15 years ago) when to say that a given thing “sucked” was almost like using a swear word. Now, the word seems to be employed by educated, respectable adults.

59

CELL PHONES!!! ARRRGH!!! It seems that everyone above the age of 2 is equipped with one of those God awful, mind numbing, worthless piles of junk. Name one time when you have actually over-heard something like “Prep the Operating Room, I’ll be right there”? All you hear is pointless, trivial crap that ya don’t really want to hear “Like, NO WAY, really?”. Also, all morons who are barely capable of driving in the first place, PUT THE PHONE DOWN!!! I would very much like to see some stats on the increase of auto accidents since the cell came out.

Oh, ya, and the internet.

My 2 cents.

60

Zenster, it’s not for Lent, it’s for Passover. Corn is not kosher for Passover.

I’m 24 years old, so…some of these changes are before my time. The first thing I thought of was the end of the Cold War. That’s probably the most important change of all to happen within my lifetime. Even more so than the advent of the internet.