To: THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!! If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!! 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 a round and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn 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 damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!! 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 MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitch hike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! 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 Play station video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! 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 theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a 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 on screen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were also screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass 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, you spoiled little rat-bastards! 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 Jiffy Pop 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! Regards, The over 30 Crowd
Remember "Adventure"? Your character literally was a rectangle. Oh, and we were broke-a$$es. I had Pong when everyone else had Atari.
What happens when the stuff on that list is light weight? I think we need a new list for the over 40 crowd. Those 30 year olds had it way too easy.
And then you had to decide. VHS or Beta.Plus no cell phones, except the big one Don (something) had on Miami vice.I remember as a kid seeing the wizard of Oz in Black and White, because we could not afford a color T.V OMR did you have tv's in youre day?:bang::-k:lol: Commodore 64 and the Oregon trail on apple.
Driving to work this morning I was thinking about all the advances in technology and stuff. I glad for it. In elementary school I could never figure out how the abacus worked. Those over 50 will know what I'm talkin' about. Then in college, the only class I flunked was slide rule. I would have had it made in math if I only had a calculator.
Hmm...wonder whatever happened to my tape drive for my Commodore 64. The tape drive was like...the best thing ever.
I don't know about OMR, but we couldn't afford even a black and white TV. The whole family would walk (10 miles through the snow) down to the local TV store on Sunday evenings and watch Bonanza and Disney's Wonderful World of Color through the windows, all the stores would close on Sundays back then.
Thanks for the great memories. We didn't even have a cordless phone until I moved out (yeah, in the 80's, I was 18yrs old) Imagine having a "decent" conversation with a girlfriend when you only had a 3 ft phone cord, there was a lot of whispering on my end, and a whole bunch of "WHAT?" on the other end. Booting up your computer (Apple 2c) with a 1ft x 1ft floppy disc, hey, it only took 5 minutes. Cable...15 channels...sheesh, you musta been in the lap of luxury, I think we had like 8 channels til I was 17. Well, I could honestly go on and on, but the OP has dang good list. I'm gonna go watch Electric Avenue once the tubes in my TV heat up enough to give a fuzzy picture at best.
"Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!" - Monty Python
with the same finger pointed at myself...I always wanted one of those pink and white GT Dynos, you know the freestyle kind 1985-1987. I thought that was the baddest bike ever built. I would have never dreamed of the bikes I have now or that are out there. man do I have it good now.
I remember having one Apple II cmptr in the whole school that go wheeled around to share among us students. (of course that could have been due to being in Nebraska :-k ) Now I have 4 in my classroom alone plus the computer labs! (and NOT in Nebraska) what a switch, eh? :?:
I remember we had TV remote.... I just threw a pillow at my little brother sitting 2" from the TV and told him to change the channel. No video games for years until some genius invented Pong. Instead we could play electric football and watch little guys vibrate randomly across a field. Ah good times -- it was so rough our boredom forced us to go outside to have fun.
