# Without saying your age, what's something from your childhood that a younger person wouldn't understand? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 25, 2021, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138 "2021-10-25T01:08:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 43
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/843 "2022-03-15T01:24:29Z")
You’re welcome! – but I’ve never understood the enthusiasm for eating things that have been charred black, even if just around the edges. That just tastes to me like burned food. I know a lot of other people like their food partly burned, though; whether it’s veggies or meats. Tastes vary! – which is good. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/844 "2022-03-15T01:52:47Z")
I was in sixth grade in the years 1966=67. Thirty five years later I went to the retirement party of my teacher in that class. My class had been his very first, and I took our class photo with me. A young girl who was in sixth grade and she looked at my picture with interest. She noted in surprise “you’re all wearing dresses!” meaning the girls of course. I told her that we only got to wear pants once a week, on gym day. She replied “Oh, I’d just die!”, to which I said “No, you wouldn’t” ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/845 "2022-03-15T02:48:26Z")
We’re on our tenth president since I was born. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/846 "2022-03-15T03:22:19Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > I was in sixth grade in the years 1966=67. Thirty five years later I went to the retirement party of my teacher in that class. My class had been his very first, and I took our class photo with me. A young girl who was in sixth grade and she looked at my picture with interest. She noted in surprise “you’re all wearing dresses!” meaning the girls of course. I told her that we only got to wear pants once a week, on gym day. She replied “Oh, I’d just die!”, to which I said “No, you wouldn’t” Girls wearing pants to school? Never! Not only that, but their skirts had to touch the floor when they knelt. And no patent leather shoes. And you had gym only once a week? > [@Hypno-Toad](#): > > We’re on our tenth president since I was born. 14th for me. ---
**Author:** ![sunstone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunstone/32/3372_2.png) [@sunstone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sunstone)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/847 "2022-03-15T03:25:24Z")
Marbles. Clamp on roller-skates for your shoes. Gas station road maps. Ordering pulp paperbacks at school every month (they were about 10 cents each). Riding on the running boards of cars. Hopping freight trains. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/848 "2022-03-15T04:02:32Z")
> [@sunstone](#): > > Clamp on roller-skates for your shoes. And keys. ---
**Author:** ![Tj54](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tj54/32/17945_2.png) [@Tj54](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tj54)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/849 "2022-03-15T04:26:04Z")
3 for a quarter, one for a dime. What the jukebox cost to play songs - records. 5 cent pinball machines with no flippers. You had to nudge it, but not tilt it, to get the ball n in a scoring hole. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/850 "2022-03-15T06:04:38Z")
14 presidents for me too. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/851 "2022-03-15T07:25:51Z")
> [@Cardigan](#): > > Cigar boxes were once quite common and were handily re-used as containers for storing all sorts of things. This is before our time even, but the [title sequence](https://youtu.be/v04pqVoH7rE) for _To Kill a Mockingbird_ illustrates that. ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/852 "2022-03-15T07:37:12Z")
> [@Tj54](#): > > 5 cent pinball machines with no flippers. You had to nudge it, but not tilt it, to get the ball n in a scoring hole. In my day, it was two games for a quarter, five balls per game. Then it became three balls per game. Then it became, a quarter for one game of three balls each, but two quarters for three games of three balls each. And now, from anybody under 60, it’s “What’s pinball?” ---
**Author:** ![Railer13](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/railer13/32/9742_2.png) [@Railer13](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Railer13)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/853 "2022-03-15T13:52:54Z")
My Mom passed last December. She was born in late 1920, in the waning days of the Woodrow Wilson administration. Joe Biden was her 19th president. Biden is just the 13th for me. ---
**Author:** ![commasense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/commasense/32/3017_2.png) [@commasense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/commasense)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/854 "2022-03-15T14:45:44Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > Heh. First computer had 30MB. It had a number of programs on it. To use them, you would have to zip down one and unzip the other. My first computer (circa 1982) had two 256K 5.25-inch floppy drives and no hard disk. You put the disk for the program you wanted to run in the top drive (A:), and wrote your data to the bottom one (B:). [![](http://oldcomputers.net/pics/kayproii.jpg) ](http://oldcomputers.net/pics/kayproii.jpg) The next one we got had a 10 MB hard drive. We thought, “Ten megabytes? That’s like infinity!” > [@Ricc](#): > > Not to be bragging, but I had 8 megs of RAM in that computer at 50 bucks a Meg. Lol Years later, in the early 1990s, I worked in the IT department of a major museum, and we bought 1MB (_not_ GB) of RAM for a PC for $1,000! ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/855 "2022-03-15T15:26:10Z")
My maternal grandmother was born in December and died in late November of 2012. She voted in a presidentail election in 1928, and when she passed she’d already voted for 2012. To be able to match that now a person would have to live to 102. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/856 "2022-03-15T16:34:13Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > I know a lot of other people like their food partly burned, though; whether it’s veggies or meats. Tastes vary! – which is good. Yeah, we all like different things. I love charred broccoli, too! ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/857 "2022-03-15T16:41:31Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > Girls wearing pants to school? Never! Not only that, but their skirts had to touch the floor when they knelt. Touch the floor? No, an inch of fabric on the floor. And it didn’t occur to anybody, teachers or students, that the teachers might not have the right to demand that we kneel to prove it. > [@Spoons](#): > > In my day, it was two games for a quarter, five balls per game. > > Then it became [etc.] A quarter ran the washing machine at a laundromat. Computers took up a whole room, somewhere. Not anywhere I was remotely likely to be. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/858 "2022-03-15T18:34:30Z")
> [@commasense](#): > > My first computer (circa 1982) had two 256K 5.25-inch floppy drives and no hard disk. You put the disk for the program you wanted to run in the top drive (A:), and wrote your data to the bottom one (B:). My first computer was a Commodore 64. As the name suggests, it came with 64 KB of RAM. Guess how much RAM the Commodore VIC-20 had? For budget-minded storage, I started with a Datasette, which wrote data to audio tape cassettes: > **[Commodore Datasette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette)** > > The Commodore 1530 (C2N) Datasette, later also Datassette (a portmanteau of data and cassette), is Commodore's dedicated magnetic-tape data storage device. Using compact cassettes as the storage medium, it provides inexpensive storage to Commodore's 8-bit computers, including the PET, VIC-20, and Commodore 64. A physically similar model, Commodore 1531, was made for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4 series computers. > Typical compact cassette interfaces of the late 1970s use a small controller in the c... You could store 100 KB of data on one side of a 60-minute tape, but it would take 30 minutes to load. Later on I upgraded to the 1541 disk drive: > **[Commodore 1541](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541)** > > The Commodore 1541 (also known as the CBM 1541 and VIC-1541) is a floppy disk drive which was made by Commodore International for the Commodore 64 (C64), Commodore's most popular home computer. The best-known floppy disk drive for the C64, the 1541 is a single-sided 170-kilobyte drive for 5¼" disks. The 1541 directly followed the Commodore 1540 (meant for the VIC-20). > The disk drive uses group coded recording (GCR) and contains a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, doubling as a disk controller... Not only was it faster, but you could put 170 KB on a 5-1/4" disk. If you cut a notch in the disk’s plastic outer shell, you could flip the disk over and put another 170 KB on side B. > [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Computers took up a whole room, somewhere. Not anywhere I was remotely likely to be. There are still some computers that take up a whole room, but they do far more than they used to: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/S2EcUa9-tpw/maxresdefault.jpg "The Heart of Yellowstone: Inside the NWSC Supercomputer") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2EcUa9-tpw) ---
**Author:** ![commasense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/commasense/32/3017_2.png) [@commasense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/commasense)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/859 "2022-03-15T22:12:33Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > My first computer was a Commodore 64. As the name suggests, it came with 64 KB of RAM. So did the Kaypro II. Here are its specs: | **Released:** | 1982 | | --- | --- | | **Price:** | US $1595. | | **Weight:** | 26 lbs | | **CPU:** | Zilog Z80, 2.5 MHz | | **RAM:** | 64K | | **Display:** | 9" green phosphor screen. | | | 24 X 80 text only | | **Ports:** | Serial port | | | Parallel port | | **Storage:** | Two internal 5-1/4" | | | SS-DD 195K drives | | **OS:** | CP/M, SBASIC | ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/860 "2022-03-15T22:59:11Z")
> [@commasense](#): > > My first computer (circa 1982) had two 256K 5.25-inch floppy drives and no hard disk. I’ve seen those, never had the ‘opportunity’ to work with one. My previous job back in ~ 1988 we had a room with the elevated floor for cooling the beast/s. It was a DEC if I recall. Tape drives. Was a cold job to switch out the backup tapes. This was al UNIX stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/861 "2022-03-15T23:04:39Z")
Live TV shows for kids. Dirty Dragon was a favorite of mine. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2022, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138/862 "2022-03-15T23:15:11Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > _The_ TV Guide was for moneybags who could afford 25 cents a week. What we called TV Guide was about the size and thickness of a comic book and was tucked inside the funny pages of the Sunday paper the thing was a lot of the time they were wrong or nothing but ads … > [@Mama\_Zappa](#): > > > [@Bonum\_Legatum](#): > > > > “Mom & Pop” stores. (Are IGA stores still a thing?) > > They are indeed! > > [https://www.iga.com/](https://www.iga.com/) Our iga closed in '89 Here’s my contribution… A busy signal …I have had kids and teens look amazed when they encountered one … Heck I remember when mom paid for call waiting and missed important call because I didn’t know what the weird beeping on the phone was … [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138.md?page=42) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/without-saying-your-age-whats-something-from-your-childhood-that-a-younger-person-wouldnt-understand/953138.md?page=44)