Back in my day...

[Aldo]

I was reading "The Goonies" message board over at the IMDB, and came across a post of a guy ranting about how it was in his day and how much better kids have it now. So that got me thinking how neat it would have to have a thread posting about how it was in our day (ie: childhood) versus how good most kids have it now. I'll start off to give you guys an idea:

Back in my day...

-We didn't have the internet. Unless you were in the know you didn't know a movie was coming out until you saw an ad for it in the local paper.

-There were no such things as play dates. You wanted to play with someone you went outside and played with whoever happened to be out there.

-If you left the theater after seeing an awesome movie, well you better make sure to see it a few more times in theaters. Otherwise you'd be waiting at least a year before it hit video.

Oh yeah, and 'my day' would be considered the 1980s.

Let's see if this catches on, I think it could be interesting.

 

[RJDiogenes]

In my day, we not only didn't have the Internet, but we didn't have cable or any form of taping. I didn't even have a color TV until I was in junior high school. All we had was a couple of UHF stations that played genre movies on weekends and late at night.

 

[Pingfah]

I don't think that kids have it "better" now. They have more advanced electronic junk to play with, but I seriously doubt kids are any more happy or fulfilled than they were 30 years ago in "my day", and that's all that really matters.

You can't miss what you never had, and I am certain I had just as much fun with my etcha sketch and Pong game as kids have now with their playstations.

 

[spooky spice]

If you wanted to make a phone call you'd to go to a phone box at the end of the street

If you missed a show on TV tough, you had to wait for it to be repeated - there was no way to record it, or watch it somewhere else

You read books

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

In my day, no matter how hard we prayed to the big, black rock, we couldn't get anything but the Discovery Channel.

 

[Cicero]

We had Saturday morning cartoons (and after school cartoons on most weekdays).

Comic books were popular with kids.

Every year was better economically, technologically, and culturally than the last.

Reality television was confined to MTV's The Real World.

MTV and VH1 showed music videos.

TV and movie audiences were the largest they had been in decades.

The signal-to-noise ratio was higher.

 

[1001001]

Back in my day, you could make prank phone calls without any pesky "Caller ID" or "*69" to catch you.

Phones had cords. All of them.

TV's had dials, not remote controls.

Jerry Brown was the Governor...

 

[Mary Ann]

I don't think that kids have it "better" now. They have more advanced electronic junk to play with, but I seriously doubt kids are any more happy or fulfilled than they were 30 years ago in "my day", and that's all that really matters.

You can't miss what you never had, and I am certain I had just as much fun with my etcha sketch and Pong game as kids have now with their playstations.

Agreed. Sure, I grew up with rotary dial phones and was lucky to have cable TV (one of the joys of growing up in big cities), but I'm not sure how character-building all of that was. I read more than my kids do, but if I had the same internet access as they do I probably wouldn't have read as many books as I did. It's easy to say that kids these days aren't as patient as we were, but many adults who grew up in "simpler" times are equally impatient because we're all used to a faster-paced world. As long as kids are loved, happy and thriving all is well.

 

[TheSeeker]

TV's had dials, not remote controls.

Yeah, I remember when channel surfing meant sitting right in front of the TV and turning the dial.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I was born in 1981, so with that in mind:

* You had only one game console if you had one at all, and it was an Atari 2600, dammit. And maybe four games.
* Calling the next town over was considered "long distance" and cost 30 cents a minute.
* Eating out was an extremely rare treat. Getting a Happy Meal from McDonald's might happen once a month, if that.
* Milk came in powdered form, in boxes.
* You had one TV and one VCR.
* You had one CD player, and no, it wasn't portable.
* You got a newspaper every day, thrown into your yard by some kid on a bike.
* If your classroom had a computer (which it usually didn't), no one knew how to use it--especially not the teacher.
* Everything took AA batteries and you never seemed to have any.
* You were expected to play outside most of the evening, usually without supervision.
* Your parents didn't care if you spent the weekend riding your bike across town with no way for them to contact you.

My parents were pretty poor so a lot of the above can be attributed to that.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

It all started going downhill when bronze came along...

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTLyXamRvk4[/yt]

 

[RobertVA]

Before the Internet I would usually discover upcoming movies thru the trailers played in theaters before other movies. I suppose around here it's safe to admit I would learn about upcoming Trek films a little earlier through science fiction movie/TV oriented periodicals like Starlog. That was in my teen and young adult period though.

When I was really young theaters didn't ask people to leave between shows. It wasn't unusual for people to come in during the film, wait for the next showing and leave at the point in the movie "...where we came in."

The TVs had dial tuners (some weren't even equipped for UHF) and the kids were the remote "Son, get up and change the channel". The early remotes had spring loaded buttons that struck a little internal bar resembling a tuning fork (channel up and volume increase/power on/power off only).

We played outside until the street lights came on. I suspect there were some predators then, but what problems there were weren't often reported. I later learned about some people that were discretely avoided in certain circumstances.

 

[Tora Ziyal]

I don't think that kids have it "better" now. They have more advanced electronic junk to play with, but I seriously doubt kids are any more happy or fulfilled than they were 30 years ago in "my day", and that's all that really matters.

I totally agree. If anything, I think kids today are more stressed. The world is perceived as less safe, and kids are not allowed to be as independent as we were.

We walked to school alone, maybe with other kids, but certainly not w/ a parent. Or, if the school was further away, we waited for the school bus alone.

The Princess was as fancy as telephones got. My mother had a green one.

Offices mostly had electric typewriters, but homes didn't. I got all the way through my first masters degree with the manual typewriter I was given when I was thirteen. Obviously, no word processors, no personal computers.

Mimeographs and film strips in school.

Girls didn't have the opportunities they do now. (I'll spare the details -- that could be a thread of its own!)

No ZIP codes or area codes.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I remember learning about upcoming movies from the newspaper. The first Internet service my parents had was Prodigy, which we rarely used because the nearest modem number was long distance. I was allowed to use it 30 minutes a month. And the World Wide Web didn't exist at the time, so you pretty much had only Prodigy's walled garden to play in. I didn't know about Usenet back then.

 

[Captain Ice]

Jerry Brown was the Governor...

That's scary enough to earn an R rating right there....

I was born in 1981, so with that in mind:


* Milk came in powdered form, in boxes.

It still does....


In my day we had

• One TV and no VCR. If there was a show you wanted to watch, you made sure your ass was planted in front of the TV on time. Otherwise you got to wait six months to watch it again.
• Your video game console came preinstalled with one game. This was the only game you could play on this console. There was no switching cartridges or cds to play another game. Oh, yeah...and it was PONG.
• YOU were the television's remote control.
• No one had any clue what a microwave was.
• The closest thing we could get to an MP3 player was a portable 8 track unit.
• Computers cost a couple million dollars and took up an entire room
• Your governor was Jerry Brown, and he was considered an improvement over the former governor who was considered to be a dreamer (Ronald Reagan)
• If you saw a movie that you liked in the theater, you'd better go watch it in the theater again because otherwise you'd have to wait until it was broadcast on TV.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Jerry Brown was the Governor...

That's scary enough to earn an R rating right there....

I was born in 1981, so with that in mind:


* Milk came in powdered form, in boxes.

It still does....


In my day we had

• One TV and no VCR. If there was a show you wanted to watch, you made sure your ass was planted in front of the TV on time. Otherwise you got to wait six months to watch it again.
• Your video game console came preinstalled with one game. This was the only game you could play on this console. There was no switching cartridges or cds to play another game. Oh, yeah...and it was PONG.
• YOU were the television's remote control.
• No one had any clue what a microwave was.
• The closest thing we could get to an MP3 player was a portable 8 track unit.
• Computers cost a couple million dollars and took up an entire room
• Your governor was Jerry Brown, and he was considered an improvement over the former governor who was considered to be a dreamer (Ronald Reagan)
• If you saw a movie that you liked in the theater, you'd better go watch it in the theater again because otherwise you'd have to wait until it was broadcast on TV.

What I can deduce from your post is that you're old.

 

[Santaman]

I was born in 1981, so with that in mind:

* You had only one game console if you had one at all, and it was an Atari 2600, dammit. And maybe four games.
* Calling the next town over was considered "long distance" and cost 30 cents a minute.
* Eating out was an extremely rare treat. Getting a Happy Meal from McDonald's might happen once a month, if that.
* Milk came in powdered form, in boxes.
* You had one TV and one VCR.
* You had one CD player, and no, it wasn't portable.
* You got a newspaper every day, thrown into your yard by some kid on a bike.
* If your classroom had a computer (which it usually didn't), no one knew how to use it--especially not the teacher.
* Everything took AA batteries and you never seemed to have any.
* You were expected to play outside most of the evening, usually without supervision.
* Your parents didn't care if you spent the weekend riding your bike across town with no way for them to contact you.

My parents were pretty poor so a lot of the above can be attributed to that.

*smirk* We did have a classroom computer and the teacher indeed knew nothing, of course we kids did.. mwuhahahah

I'm from 1973, in those days you had an oil crisis, some middle east war and a car less Sunday.. yeah those were the days..

 

[Kirby]

Back in my day you had to ride your bike a few miles to go play Pac Man for 25 cents per game, and usually wait in line to do so. Now I can play it on my phone, which I don't do because, well, it's Pac Man.

 

[Kira's Mom]

In my day, MTV actually meant Music Television.

 

[doubleohfive]

Jerry Brown was the Governor...