When I was your age (if you're 8 years old)...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

… a remote control was making my sister get up to change the TV set.

… a microwave oven was a new fangled invention.

… VCR didn’t stand for anything.

… neither did ATM.

… soda cans had pull tops.

… I still had to “duck and cover” in school.

… whenever “This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test” followed by a test signal would come on TV, it would scare the bejesus out of me.

… a show on PBS could be a big deal.

… watching The Wizard of Oz each year on CBS was a special occasion.

… an 8-track tape was a legitmit form of distributing music. And it was cool.

… scratching records wasn’t a good thing.

… gas stations would give you free stuff to get you to come in. And speaking of…

… S&H greenstamps were in every drawer in the house.

… a hard drive was riding in my father’s unair-conditioned car across town.

… phones still had dials, were hard wired into the wall and if it was cordless, it wasn’t going to work.

… I hoped I wouldn’t get cut or scratched up because that red stuff that mom put on it would hurt like hell.

… and Trans Ams were wicked awesome cool.

2

… Reel to Reel was still a choice when you joined Columbia House
… So was 8-track
… Star Wars came out and you could see it at a drive-in!
… Three Mile Island hadn’t happened yet
… Disco wasn’t yet dead
… John Lennon was still alive
… Ditto Keith Moon
… CHiPs, Fantasy Island and Love Boat all premiered
… We learned our English Grammar and History by watching Schoolhouse Rock!

Darn! That’s the end! :wink:

3

(This is stolen, I think from The Washington Post’s Style Invitational Column)

When I was 8 years old water hadn’t been invented yet so when we wanted a drink we had to smash our own oxygen and hydrogen atoms together, not like kids today.

But seriously, when I was 8 years old

-every NASA flight was on TV and Apollo 11 hadn’t flown yet.

-the NCAA Tournament wasn’t a big deal because UCLA won it every year.

-we were lucky if we could get 5 stations on the TV.

4

We got our very first ATM in town.

You didn’t leave voice mail, you left a message on an answering machine.

Those newfangled car phones weren’t available in this area yet, but it didn’t matter, since they cost thousands of dollars.

Nintendo was the coolest new video game system.

Big hair was just awesome.

Let’s go to the store and buy the newest Guns n Roses song on vinyl record. It would be cool to get it on CD, but CD players were way too expensive still.

The Berlin Wall still stood. The Soviet Union was still our big enemy.

VCRs were fairly prevalent by now, but it still cost a few hundred for a VCR and tapes were still $20 each.

When we needed information, we didn’t go online, we went to the library.

Does your car take leaded or unleaded?

The portable radio was still pretty expensive, and it had a tape player with it, not a CD player.

The Simpsons were those short clips that came during the Tracey Ullman show.

5

Let’s see, when I was 8 it was 1965…

We had TV, but it wasn’t color. And the screen was tiny! We would play outside for hours and hours, and not watch TV. Playing hide-n-seek at dusk was a blast! And all the other silly kid games - remember freeze tag? We explored the overgrown bayou (manmade drainage ditch) behind the house. There was a rope swing down the way…not enough water to jump into though! Oh, the neighbor would mow his slope, and we would ride flattened cardboard boxes down the grass, but watch out for the water! It will give you typhoid! :smiley: We would “tightrope” walk across big drainage pipes. We would take candles and flashlights and explore inside drainage pipes. We would ride our bikes all over the city above ground and in the bayous…

Almost 40 years ago…

6

Trans Ams (and Cameros) hadn’t been invented quite yet.

All boys wore crew cuts, even if we knew we looked stupid. So did our Dads and everybody else too.

Viet Nam was getting underway and it was fun to see the bombing movies on TV …

TVs were big blonde consoles sitting on 4 tapered cone legs and the screen had hugely the rounded corners. It also bulged out about 2"

The Project Gemini spaceflights were winding down and Apollo was winding up. Many of my neighbors’ Dads worked on one or the other.

“PC” was as meaningless a term as “QW”

Mom wore cat-eye glasses and thought they were very stylish.

Girls had cooties. (Except for Suzy two doors down; she was hot.) Although I can’t remember what word I’d have used instead of “hot.”

Kid’s movies usually had 5-minute cartoons before the main feature.

My Dad bought a new airplane for $6,000. A real one.

First class stamps were 5 cents. A couple years later they jumped to 6 cents, and Dad was outraged.

Life was fun and I was never tired unless I was ill.

School was boring and stupid.

Most soda came in returnable bottles. If it came in cans, you needed a can piercer (AKA church key) to open it. Those were hard to use at first, because the can top was thick steel. Later we got a bigger one so I had more leverage.

The Flintstones were prime time entertainment with one episode a week (sorta like the Simpsons now)

McDonalds was just getting started.

Our suburban town of 50-ish thousand had about 3 takeout restuarants total: a fried chicken stand, a chinese joint, and a fish & chips place. None were franchises.

Tonka trucks were the ultimate toy, except maybe for BB guns, which were still 2 or 3 years in my future. Oh, the crushing disappointment at birthday time; no BB gun yet.

Sugar was good for you. For breakfast I could choose from Sugar Pops, Sugar Smacks, Sugar Frosted Flakes, or Sugar something-else-I-forget.

Mom ate Grape Nuts. I wanted to know why they weren’t purple. She didn’t have a good answer. That confused me.

As the OP said, drop drills in school. And EBS tests. They never had much emotional content for me. I was just impatient for the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep to stop so we could get back to the Winchell Mahoney show or Roy Rogers.

Test patterns on the TV after the networks shut off at 10pm. That was our cue it was (past) time for bed.

CONELRAD.

Tom Swift books were great.

Gas came in two kinds, regular and ethyl. I never understood why they named a gas for a woman.

7

Let’s see, when I was 8 it was 1990-1991…

Well, we were still using a 300 baud modem. I don’t think we had a 1200.
The computer was a true IBM 286, running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.
The US was at war with Iraq. (Hey, I’m just saying.)
I enjoyed playing a copy of Pete Rose Pennant Fever (released, I believe, just before he was banned for life.)

You know what? This isn’t really the same as you guys up above. Here, try this (this is for my year of birth, not my graduating class.)

8

That would be 1976, in New Zealand.

…there were only two television channels. Both stopped sending overnight

…radio was AM or SW only

…Eight tracks were still around

…Punk was beginning to explode

…we had ‘carless days’, due to the oil crisis. Every car had to have a sticker saying which day of the week it was not allowed on the road

…Rob “Piggy” Muldoon was Prime Minister

…We did not need passports to travel to Australia
…

9

We had only one car, which my dad used to drive to work. If there was an emergency, he had to be summoned from the factory to come home. We went shopping once a week. In between, we got deliveries of milk, bread, eggs and chicken (from the same guy who delivered the eggs, of course). If we needed something else during the day, we walked. Or one of us would be sent on the errand on our bicycle.

Sputnik happened. Then Telstar – the first communications satellite.

The weather report was based on people reporting clouds, wind and barometric pressure and drawing isobars on a map. There was no such thing as a satellite photo or radar for weather.

You could see actual stars, including the milky way, in the sky at night.

Flying on an airplane to go someplace was a great big deal for which people would dress up.

There was some sort of mess going on in Korea, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

A computer was a huge machine. Huge. Mysterious. Awesome. The very idea of having one of your own would have been considered ludicrous.

In the autumn, leaves were raked into big piles at the curb, and then burned. The air was blue with smoke and nobody complained.

People smoked mostly anyplace they wanted.

Air conditioning was a rarity for ordinary people. A car with A/C would have been the epitome of luxury. Movie theaters advertised that it was COOL inside (with icicles painted on the letters).

10

Out of curiosity, did this mean that if you turned on the TV at night, you only got static?

Also, what’s SW? I’m not familiar with that.

My contribution: When I was 8, Windows 95 had just come out. Cell phones were still pretty rare, and huge. Car phones and pagers were incredibly cool.

11

You’re killing me!.

(Dad’s first plane was a 1970 Cessna 172 that he bought in 1976 for $10,200. I think the same plane today would cost between $30,000 and $40,000.)

I remember when TV would go off the air. They’d play The Star-Spangled Banner and then there would be static. Some stations would have a ‘teste pattern’ with a picture of an indian on it, and an annoying tone that would be on until they came back on the air. In the mornings they’d often have a recital of John Gillespie McGee’s High Flight, or show The Blue Angels flying. Then they’d start their broadcast day. Infomercials were almost unheard of.

SW means short-wave. When I was a kid they had radios with an AM-FM-SW switch on it, but I never heard anything on short-wave. I suppose you could pick up something if you knew where to look. I’ve heard that there are still short-wave broadcasts today.

12

Ah, 1986:

-Russia was our evil enemy and they could bomb us off the map if they wanted to

-Going to visit my aunt was cool because she had a VCR and I could rent a tape!

-Saturday morning cartoons rocked my world

-Our new microwave was so cool because we could make popcorn so easily

-I got my Jem doll, with real flashing earrings, and you could easily change into Jerrica Benton-just like on TV!

-I got my first boom box with cassette player-sweet. (Even if my parents would only pony up for batteries every once in a blue moon, so I had to use the cord)

13

[ul]
[li]Color TV’s were a novelty.[/li][li]Superman was George Reeves.[/li][li]Elvis was King.[/li][li]Comic books were a dime.[/li][li]There were 16 major league baseball teams. (There are 30 today.)[/li][li]The Chevy Bel Air was the hot car.[/li][li]Transistor radios were big sellers, and were quite expensive.[/li][li]There were still 48 states.[/li][li]There was only plain Cheerios.[/li][li]The milkman delivered.[/li][li]The world learns of Sputnik and the Space Race was on.[/li][/ul]
Man, that was a long time ago!

14

When I was eight years old, we had a phone with a dial like most people and I think it was still hard-wired to the wall. It was rented from the Post Office, the only telephone provider.

Those new commercial TV channels, in addition to the state-run three, created much controversy . How could you expect responsible behaviour from them if they were drive by business interests? OTOH who would even want to watch if they had commercials on every day of the week, every time of the day, even in the middle of movies? The real channels still broadcast a test image during the night. Trailers on TV were practically unknown and announcers introduced many programs.

Just like me a few years earlier, my brother learned to sing “Ten Little Negros” in kindergarten. Somehow that song disappeared fron the curriculum since then.

And 1988 wasn’t that long ago.

15

When I was 8, we’d not too long ago gotten our Very First Microwave. It was huge on the outside and tiny on the inside! It sat on a little table/cabinet all its own, because kitchens weren’t designed for the things and there was no space for this great big box on the counter. My mom had read the manual and knew how to work it, but my dad woke up one night and didn’t want to disturb her, so he tried to warm up a sausage biscuit and he put it in there for ten minutes! I can still smell it if I think about it.

We had a giant console TV, and since we were out in the country we only got 4 channels - the big 3 and PBS. In a year, I guess, we’d get Fox and that was a huge big deal. This was when Fox showed the Brady Bunch, like, all damned day. The TV had a remote, but we never used it because it didn’t work so well - it was really heavy and had two rocker-style switches on it, one for channel and one for volume. One of those also worked the power. The remote smelled vaugely metallic, like ozone. If the reception went to hell, you could put one hand on the TV and one in the air and sometimes it would get better. One would, of course, have to take turns being the antenna.

Some people, living out where we did, got a lot of channels because they had a satellite dish. It was, shall we say, somewhat larger than a Frisbee.

The Cosby Show was appointment TV. This was, I think, far before Olivia etc. We also watched Family Ties, and Cheers, and the Dukes of Hazzard. I was crazy about Saturday morning cartoons, which I don’t think exist anymore. You knew the cartoons were over when Soul Train came on.

Cereals were either Hyper Sugar Toy Inside For Kids! or bran. I didn’t quite get those “Fruit and Fiber” commercials, but looking back, everything was all about your colon. Watch Manhunter when they go into the grocery store and are talking in front of the cereal aisle; no less than three quarters of all those cereals have bran or fiber in the name. Colon Blow, indeed. The kids’ cereals had cool toys in them, though, none of this send away UPC code crap they have now. The coolest ones were those wall crawler things that you’d throw onto the wall and they’d walk down. They were neat but kinda gross and sticky.

We had computers at school; it was real exciting when we got the Apple IIGS to replace the IIC, because it had a mouse! My parents got me one, and it was the most exciting thing ever. I wasn’t allowed to have an Atari, because it wasn’t educational. Do you see how I suffered? But the Apple was neat. The printer printed color! It was dot matrix with a ribbon, but the color ribbon had stripes of cyan and yellow and pink as well as black. Nobody believes me about this these days. I played lots of cool games on the Apple, but our favorite was the Oregon Trail. It was in color! (Okay, it was in a few colors.) Recently I’ve seen what kids today think is the Oregon Trail. It makes me weep. You’re just supposed to take it on faith that that’s a buffalo; it’s all about using your imagination! Today’s 8 year olds would probably think it was a very blocky, very fast spider or something. I’d like to see you haul home a hundred pounds of that two ton spider you just shot, honey.

16

Oh, and by that time we had a VCR - it had a remote, but the remote had a cord. :wink: When you went to the video store, you had to be careful not to pick your movies off the Beta wall.

17

When I was 8 touch tone phones were novelties that were cool because you could play a tune by pushing the buttons.

We sang “Blowing in the Wind” in music class and the teacher told us that we wouldn’t have to sing it anymore in a few weeks because we were pulling our troops out of Vietnam.

A lot of people had hamsters or white mice, but gerbils were considered exotic.

My schoolmates argued about who was better, Nixon or McGovern. (In contrast, when I was 14, my schoolmates argued about whether Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse was the better 'toon.)

The Jackson Five and The Osmond’s were the favorite music groups for 3rd and 4th graders.

You could watch the “Dudley Do-Right” cartoons on the regular TV stations (no one had to have cable.)

No one worried about energy (that came when I was 9.)

You got actual food when you took an airplane trip, not just a coke and a bag of chex mix.

The Wonderful World of Disney came on every Sunday evening and you could see all these wholesome G rated movies about cougars, raccoons, or bear cubs.

The schools tried to teach students about good nutrition. I would listen, agree with the teachers, then go home for an afternoon snack of creme soda and candy.

18

I had Oregon Trail when I was 8! Granted, that was in 1997, and I think I had a version slightly more graphically advanced than the original, but still…

I also liked to play some game related to Star Wars Episode I, which I saw and liked. My school had a bunch of mid 90s powerbooks in the computer lab- we got iMacs in 2000 I think. I got an N64 for Christmas that year. The first game I got for it was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was amazed by its graphics.

I played Magic the Gathering when I was 8, but I was never any good and I rarely had anyone to play with, so I quit and sold my cards. Then when I went to high school I found other people who played, but at this point I was roughly 4 years behind the rule changes and I didn’t have any cards left. I occasionally watch them play.

When I was 8 I also had a slide rule, strangely enough. I had my dad show me how to use it, and I played around with it sometimes. But I never used it for actual math.

19

Gerald Ford was president.

My babysitters were named Carla, Paula, and Rhonda.

I had Meco action figures.

We had a party line.

We got three channels with our rooftop antenna, but our next-door neighbors, who had a tower antenna, got five.

My bike was a bright red 3-speed, with flames painted on the banana seat.

20

There were three TV channels – we had 3, 5, and 8. Channel 61 also started up some time around then and I was introduced to Ultra Man and Speed Racer . I had the G.I. Joe space capsule and deep sea diver sets. Also had Major Matt Mason, who wasn’t as cool as G.I. Joe, but who was small enough to take in the car when we drove to Akron to see my grandparents. I had a banana bike and I really wanted a mini bike.

School ran from 9 am to 3 pm and in the winter I had to wear bick black rubber boots with buckles that collected ice. When you went to take them off they’d dump snow into your shoes.

My parents let me play outside after dark and seldom knew exactly where I was, but as long as I stayed in the neighborhood they wouldn’t mind.

I had almost every 1/48th scale model airplane Monogram made. I tried building balsa flying models but couldn’t get the tissue paper on right. I made a Pinewood Derby racer by sanding the thing down all the way by hand.

Halloween was my favorite holiday of the year and we had a party in school in which witches, vampires and just about anything else we cared to dress as was permitted.

Curate