This Is For Anyone Who Was Born After 1986

[Dragon]

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning ... uphill BOTH ways.. yadda, yadda, yadda.

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that...I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy!

I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter ... with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself Or you had to

wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

And talk of about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony PlayStation video games with high-resolution

3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600 with games like "Space Invaders" and "asteroids" and the graphics sucked a$$! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! .. Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theatre there was no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your a$$ and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire ... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

[martymas]

yes dragon i agree

i was born before the eightys

so it was even harder then

funny you mentioned letter writing

i havent written a letter for 4 years

and before i got internet

i used to post 3-4 letters a weeks

my god you have posted a few home truths

in the future it will be even easier

if we arnt all blown to peices

before then .

you post makes interesting reading

marty

[Matt]

And not a day goes by that I don't thank God for birthing me in 1990

[hitest]

LOL, I feel like a geriatric case in this thread........you guys are lucky:-) I was born before 1960...........................ye Gods I'm old...................48 to be precise.

Excellent observations, Dragon, reminds me of when I was a kid!

[Dragon]

yes dragon i agree

i was born before the eightys

so it was even harder then

funny you mentioned letter writing

i havent written a letter for 4 years

and before i got internet

i used to post 3-4 letters a weeks

my god you have posted a few home truths

in the future it will be even easier

if we arnt all blown to peices

before then .

you post makes interesting reading

marty

I was born before the 80's too. I still remember the styrofoam cartons that Big Macs came in, you could go to your local pharmacy and buy a malt for $1.50, and you got two glasses worth out of one order. The only people who had computers were working for the government. My first computer was an apple ][e. To play Super Mario, Super Mario Brothers you had to go to the local arcade.

you could buy bubble gum balls for a penny, Snickers bars for 39 cents, and a gallon of gas was 65 cents. gas choices consisted of Regular (which contained Lead), Unleaded or Diesel. Richard Petty was the Nascar driver everyone wanted to be like.

you could buy a house for $40,000 or less, a brand new car at the dealer cost $2000. You paid 50 cents to see a movie.

Of course I also remember when Cd's came out, you couldn't buy one for less then $40 and that was after you paid $250 for the cd player to connect to your stereo. If you wanted an album, you bought a record and you had to replace those friggin turntable needles once a month if you played it alot.

I personally blame the internet for illiteracy. One thing that post i made forgot to mention, was if you wanted to talk to a friend while you were out, you had to use a payphone, or go to their house, you couldn't afford a cell phone unless you were rich, but then again, you didn't have a cell phone unless you had it installed in your car either. FM radio stations were something new, and the stereo to handle it cost $150. Minimum wage was $3.50 an hour.

[blim]

LOL! I'm loving this!

Yes, the "good old days"....Believe it or not, kids, televisions did not have remote controls. In fact we were the last family on Earth to have a color tv---because my artist mom would not buy one until the manufacturers made the color more realistic (remember the old color tvs where everyone was orange, and those plastic screens you could tape on the tv to "colorise" it?? )

Remember rotary phones (there's a reason why we say "dial") and numbers that started with letters (ie: TW3-6635) Remember only having to dial the last four numbers in a local call?

I'm saddened, though, when I look at the tv guide and see informercials on Saturday mornings instead of cartoons. AND in the old days, when the power went out, you still had heat! Kept my old Gravity Fed Furnace till it died just for that reason.

I still hang laundry on the line. Can't beat that smell and no ironing needed.

Hitest! You're 48?? Don't you have a toddler? You're my hero!

Liz

[Honda_Boy]

1988 here. (18th B-day sneakin up in less than a month) man can't imagine bein my bro when He was this age .............6 years ago. a Pentium III and an nVidia TNT2 the best you could get. The original Half-Life and Counter-Strike being pinnacles of gaming excellence. Oh man. Having a Gateway with a Pentium III and 64MB of PC133 with Windows Me with a Riva TNT2 Vanta in a UT Dorm. (Shivers). Glad I'm startin college at a local Community college (my bro had 1 semester at UT Knoxville then came home to go to the community college, then off to MTSU for a few years), and building a brand new system, hopefully able to support SLI and running an Athlon X-2 or FX with 2GB of RAM.

[blim]

When we bought the Possessed Gateway (Pentium 2) we were told by many, many people, "You'll NEVER fill up a 10 Gigawatt Hard Drive"....now that was before Napster was invented.....

And Community College is the way to go, HondaBoy! English 101 is English 101, whether you take it at a CC or at Harvard--and the money you save is soooo worth it and you stay out of debt! Make sure you stick with CC till you get the transfer degree, though.

Liz

[screi]

hahaha...you all crack me up...try 1949...with a 7 y/o and a 12 y/o...you better believe my girls get the "..you don't know how good you have it..." speech

blim...you might remeber when there were no snow days off for school in Michigan..haha.. no busing so everyone walked to school...lol

shoot... we were the last to get TV but the first to have Stereo...big Stromberg-Carlson in a cherry wood(real) cabinet...state of the art Audio in 1956...had an old shortwave radio that would pick up classical concerts from Europe...if you could finess the dial ever so carefully...LOL..and FM radio was an exotic...outlaw band that really was rare until sometime in the 70's...

wow you got me going on this one..the electronic/digital age has exploded so fast it's hard to remember how little of it there was growing up in the 50's and 60's...

Edited March 20, 2006 by screi

[blim]

You got a few years on me, Screi, but WHS did NOT mean Whitehall High School--it meant "Will Have School"...We never had snowdays, and we had busses! Boy did we get jealous when Montague, located just across the river, called off school all the time! OK, it was farmland that got humongous drifts, but who cares, WE had to go to school, darn it!

And remember listening to the country western music station (ugh) hoping for the school to close? Not on television back then....

Liz

Edited March 20, 2006 by blim

[screi]

i can remember only one school day closed...and we didn't find out until after we had walked thru a g*d awful blizzard to get there and were told to turn around and walk home..my mom didn't believe me and called the school...but the lines were down...so she couldn't get thru...it wasn't until some of my friends came over to ask me out to play that she finally realized i was being straight with her...it was that rare of an occurance....

in Grand Rapids the plows were good and fast and always running...but that storm even stopped them from running...but we were back in school the next day...

[bearskin]

oh christ...don't remind me...1941...about 6 weeks old when pearl harbor was attacked...4 miles to school and sometimes we were lucky enough to have a bus...kerosene lamps...battery powered radios...wind up victrolas...no tv and no electricity...5 cent movies when we could afford the nickel...out houses...wood cookstove...drawing water from a well...crank telephones...I could write a book.

[screi]

how much it has all changed...and so fast..in our 50 something or 60 something lives..could you ever have imagined chatting with folks on a computer on the internet even only 15 years ago..??

my my my...

[medab1]

One used to have to buy film & flashblubs for cameras...

Take the film to the drug store & wait days for the pictures to be developed...

Go back to the drug store & pick them up...

A home movie camera needed a projector...

And a screen to show the movie on...

Now there are digital cameras with built in flash & digital camcorders with directional microphones in stereo with high definition quality...

Software to remove "red-eye" & other defects...

Printers to print your own pictures...

[bearskin]

how much it has all changed...and so fast..in our 50 something or 60 something lives..could you ever have imagined chatting with folks on a computer on the internet even only 15 years ago..??

my my my...

I agree...history will record the microchip and the computer to be the things that have changed the world the most..I could never dream that I would be chatting with someone from australia or england....I hope I'm still around to see the technological advancements in the year 2020.

[TheTerrorist_75]

I still remember our old B&W RCA TV. My mother didn't replace that with a new color TV until 1974 and she worked for GE. My parents got cable at the same time. It was a box setup with buttons and a long cable that allowed the old man (step-dad) to set it by his chair. He ruled the TV. She was happy with that B&W. My old man (real father) had bought it new when I was born. Our foolish dog figured out how to turn it on. This usually occurred at midnight when everyone was asleep. When I moved out at 16 in 1970 the first thing I bought was a Zenith combination color TV and stereo for my apartment.

My first bike was a 20" Schwinn that lasted until I was 14. It only had one gear.

I never owned a calculator. I used a slide rule or my head.

The only time I rode a bus to school was during weather that they now shut down schools for. I preferred walking or riding my bike the 3 miles to school, even in the rain.

I bought my first computer in 1998. It was a used Gateway 2000 P166 with 32MB of memory. 28K dial-up. I used it at my bar. I could click on a site, walk from my desk to the cooler, go grab a Bud with a shot of Jack then come back in time for the page to open.

I can remember paying a .15 to see a movie, .19 gas, .25 for a pack of cigarettes out of the machine, .10 16oz draft beer, .20 for a bottle of Bud, .25 for a shot of Jack, 3 quarts of Bud for .89 and only needing to spend $10 to take my g/f out on a date.

I paid $60/month to rent a 3 bedroom apartment with utilities included that was attached to the bar where I worked part time (I ended up leasing the bar from 1989-2002).

I paid less than a $1000 for muscle cars in the late '60s and early '70s that now bring $50,000+ in decent shape.

I started working when I was twelve at different farms to buy non-essential items because my mother couldn't afford it (dead beat dad).

The kids today are spoiled by us because we knew how tough life was.

Edited March 20, 2006 by TheTerrorist_75

[Dragon]

I tell ya, if only we had it this easy when we were growing up. I remember when the color monitor came out for a computer, 8 bit graphics, as close as you could get to the type of graphics they had on the video games at the arcades.

10 cents to play a pinpall game, 25 cents to play a video game, and you waited in line at the arcade to play the newest one. sometimes up to 2 hours before you got on it.

ya know, I never realized how much I missed the days when I was growing up until now. If we had the tech that these kids do now, life would have been sweet.

I remember my mom going to school to learn how to run a punch key for the new computer at her job. what a pain, had these little cardboard cards you had to punch holes in so the computer would calculate the info and return the grades.

These were how you told a computer what to do, A keyboard was on an Organ or Piano.

[JDoors]

... a Pentium III and an nVidia TNT2 the best you could get. ...

Uh-hem. Are you laughing at me or what?

[martymas]

my first venture into compts was

commadore play station

that was ------years ago

then the sega came along

and i used to help a farmer neighbor

to feed chooks

to save up enough money to buy the sega

i year it took

and i guarded it with my life

i still have that machine which now is a collectors item

and i still have 20 cartridges

but very rarely play it now

as we can now, go on the net and

play games with people round the world.

yes times have changed

to be honest im now a compt addict

and is the reason i joined these boards

once the only contact was by phone

or letter

yes the world is changing all the time

marty

[xxkbxx]

Born in 1989 (dangerously close to another birthday)

But I honestly believe I was intended to be raised in the 80's (mainly because of my music taste)

[flashh4]

Games were fun back then .... '46........ remember the best " tall " or "perry" i ever had ( marbles ).

Hied n seek was fun if you had girls to play.

Kick the can..... how may stubbed toes... lots !

Red rover send the smallest first.

And for us boys was mumble peg or stretch, knives & toes so close.

And my favorite " spin the bottle " !!!!!!! Proably some here don't remember that one.

Enough for now, gonna ask my wife if she wants to play if i can find a bottle, proably have to be a plastic one !!!!!!!!!

Remember when ...................

[screi]

in my "hood"(lol) you weren't cool unless you had a leather marble pouch...usually made as a cub scout project...mine was extra cool because my dad let me have a piece of deer-hide...cats eyes and steelies were the phat...hehe

lost a best friend for a whole summer because i won all his favorite marbles...we made up in time for the start of school...

..ah the memory of stiff blue denim on the first day of school..with pant legs rolled up to allow for those growing spurts...and the resulting chaffe marks on the inside thigh...

[blim]

Oh, Flash, I think "Spin the bottle" has survived the ages.... (you are so naughty!)

And what a good excuse to say "I lost my marbles" and folks don't think you're crazy!

Marty, my son has a Super Nintendo--he has had so many offers for folks wanting to buy it. Nope, he won't sell it, he likes the classic cartoony look. And NOW he appreciates me unplugging and putting the controllers on top of the fridge when he threw them when losing a game, because it still works.

Liz

[baker7]

LOL! I'm loving this!

Yes, the "good old days"....Believe it or not, kids, televisions did not have remote controls. In fact we were the last family on Earth to have a color tv---because my artist mom would not buy one until the manufacturers made the color more realistic (remember the old color tvs where everyone was orange, and those plastic screens you could tape on the tv to "colorise" it?? )

Remember rotary phones (there's a reason why we say "dial") and numbers that started with letters (ie: TW3-6635) Remember only having to dial the last four numbers in a local call?

I'm saddened, though, when I look at the tv guide and see informercials on Saturday mornings instead of cartoons. AND in the old days, when the power went out, you still had heat! Kept my old Gravity Fed Furnace till it died just for that reason.

I still hang laundry on the line. Can't beat that smell and no ironing needed.

Hitest! You're 48?? Don't you have a toddler? You're my hero!

Liz

Liz:

I was born in 1972 - I was just a baby when President Nixon resigned in 1974 - But I remember what it was like when we wanted to do something - we asked our parents for PERMISSION and if we didn't get it, then we would **attempt** to rebel, and we would be punished - My mom used to tan my backside, with a wooden SPOON, or slap my face if I used bad language or if I "Mouthed off" to her - and MAN - when you were punished, it meant something back then. Nowadays, you can't "discipline" a kid the way you used to because everyone would be calling Child Protection Services.....egads

Yes, we had an old color console tv, that you had to change the channel manually, and until recently, I still had a dark green 70's era couch that my brother and I remembered - The couch is as old as he was: 36 years old - We had a rotary phone, but we didn't have to dial words on the phone, and I remember just dialing for example - if our number was 802 472-0011 - we would dial 2-0011 - those were the days.

Liz: I also remember watching Saturday Morning Cartoons, when they were actually allowed to show Wylie Coyote smack into the ground, and something would hit him on the head and crush him - and we would laugh - and when we could go outside and play without stangeness happening - you could actually get away with NOT locking your doors - Nowadays that is GONE.

Also, you respected your elders, or you got punished - You would never tell your parents to "shut up" or whatever kids tell their parents today - You said "yes please" "No Thank You" and you would be greatful for what you get from those who love you.

Today, kids have alot that I didn't have when I was growing up - But I did have the best parents around, and even though I had Cerebral Palsy, and had a disabled brother to boot, I think my parents did a wonderful job raising me. Times Change, things happen, and sometimes I wish that I could go back to those days and do some of the things I used to do with my family - the Baker clan used to do alot of camping and outdoor activities that I could get involved in: I have some friends that think I was too sheltered, but I think that my parents gave me as much opportunity to be enriched as the next guy, and I am PROUD to have what I have.

I used to use a Typewriter, now I use a computer

I used to have just 4 channels, now I have Digital Cable, with hundreds of channels

I used to use a TRS-80, now I have a PC

I used to use Dialup - Now have DSL

There used to be no Americans with Disabilities Act - Now there is

I used to have an Atari, Now Have a PS2 and XBOX

There are hundreds more things that I could talk about - But I don't want to bore you - Kids should be greatful for what they have, as well as for what they had in the past - The past can be remembered, and in some ways, relived, but you have to live in the present and be prepared for ANYTHING - Your family should be treasured and not shut out - Fathers and Mothers and Grandparents and whoever is closest to you are like tools, or reference books that should be used. Children can learn from the experiences of others - Good and Bad - and they should be nurtured and loved, and the Remember: Our sons and daughters will be taking care of us someday Raise them right and they will be shining example of ourselves, learning from our mistakes and the good things we do

Agree with Dragon - Kids have it easier in some ways, but harder in others

Brian

[martymas]

some thing else,

i feel has changed. the way children grow up

i remember when my children used

to come and get into bed with me

especially my daughter

and i used to feel proud when

she said daddy i love to cuddle you

now ide be branded a dirty old pervert

and that is the reason i feel youth has lost their way

because there is no bonding with children

and parents espcially- dads

my children grew up with us

and today i can say thank god

they were born then and not today

marty