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Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

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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 around 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 MP3’s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music,you had to hitchhike 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’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 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 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 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-*******s!

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!

Regards,

-The 30 Something crowd!

Angela Oliver
Allied Group Insurance Services, Inc.

Topic

Too old..

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

We didn’t have cable when I was a kid, but I thought UHF was GREAT. And I was in highschool when we got Pong. I played it for hours. Damn..I even remember the big switch from AM to FM.

Mae, did you at least have indoor plumbing?

In reply to Too old..

😀

I remeber the AM to FM switch too… but

In reply to Mae, did you at least have indoor plumbing?

What was it like before TV again M_A_R_K ? :^O

Funny you should ask that, surfer

In reply to I remeber the AM to FM switch too… but

http://techrepublic.com.com/5254-6257-0.html?forumID=99&threadID=177880&messageID=1865766&id=4176952

You know..

In reply to Mae, did you at least have indoor plumbing?

We did, but I DID go to school with some people who didn’t. Wasn’t so much that it was long ago as it was living in a rural area.

Oh..and f*ck off..

A “rural” area, huh?

In reply to You know..

Did you have to walk to school barefooted? 😀

I once knew a guy who grew up in the backwoods of backwater West Virginia (or maybe it was western Virginia). He claimed he didn’t brush his teeth a single time until he went to college.

Oh, and I wasn’t able to interpret that word. You had a typo. You hit the ‘*’ key instead of a real alphabet key. What were you trying to tell me to do? Have a nice day. 😉

We

In reply to A “rural” area, huh?

actually had a school bus. And it wasn’t West Virginia..it was Kentucky.

Did I make a typo? I’m sorry..what I meant to say is, thank you for your observations, I always welcome thoughts, ideas, musings, and so on, from others..

Hell, now I don’t know

In reply to We

if you meant it or not when you told me to f*ck off. ?:| If you did, it was uncalled for.

BTW, I’m from a small country town too, so that gives me license to razz you about your humble beginnings. But if a city slicker picks on us about it, then it’s time to grab the shotgun. 😉

And thanks for welcoming my observations, thoughts, ideas, musings and so on. It’s a nice respite when someone doesn’t get bent out of shape by a little good-natured teasing. Er…you did tell me to f*ck off though…maybe I’ll rescind this last paragraph.

Mark..

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

Have you read many of my posts? What are the chances that I meant it when I told you to f*ck off? Quit being so over-sensitive, b*tch.

Small country town?

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

Thats not the country, thats wannabes….

I grew up in the country, but not on a farm. Houses were cheaper in the country than the city, and we could have enough land to grow some things. On a once acre lot, we had up to a quarter acre garden and some apple trees. We also raised chickens, ducks and pigs on occasion.

We did have indoor plumbing, but shared one bathroom among 4 brothers and my parents.

I know city kids who had more opportunities for sports and recreation and stuff. But we had a real community. Farmers shared their surplus with their neighbours, or used their tractors to plow out their neighbours’ driveways – all without thought for praise or thanks. If someone was sick, their neighbours chipped in to take care of them. When our neighbours had power and we had none, they invited us into their homes.

I left that community to go to high school and married about 10 years after I left. I didn’t see many of my neighbours during that time. But they generously held a wedding shower for my wife, someone they had never met. They made the food for my wedding.

You know all these people who mock Hillary’s “it takes a village” comments, but while I don’t like her tone and attitude, I know my community helped make me.

Oh and while I know some of you were joking about indoor plumbing, I did know some farmers who didn’t have it till the 70s.

James

Rural, etc.

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

Green Bay had busses, but only if you were am ile or more from the school. When I was in grade school, the snow could get piled up on the side of the streets so high it would be over your head.

But they DID get the streets cleared in time for traffic in the morning, except that one time we had 15″ of snow overnight.

Mae

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

Bite me! :^O

A one-acre lot? That’s a wannabe country boy!

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

Gosh, I KNEW somebody would come up with “I’m more rural and country than you are!” post. 😐

I lived in a small farming town of 1500 people. It was only 20 miles from a large city so I think I had the best of both worlds–small town upbringing with a big city close by for fun when I got into my teenage years. My dad worked in the nearby big city but he owned a 200-acre farm five miles outside of my town where we grew farm crops. My brothers and I worked out there in the evenings (after school during school year and after work in summer) and weekends. During summer breaks in high school, my friends and I did various jobs for the local farmers. It was hot and hard work. Throwing around 60-lb bales of hay all day in 100 degree heat is no picnic. My grandfather farmed over 1000 acres and raised cattle. He lived on 100 acres a few miles from town that was half pasture and half grazing land for the cattle and I helped him when I had time. But my brothers and I spent a LOT of time out there growing up. One of my brothers lives in my grandparents’ house now (they passed away) and I am glad it is still in the family. There’s lots of great memories of that farm/ranch.

I had similar experiences about sharing and a sense of community. If a neighbor needed help, you just pitched in to help without even thinking why you were doing it. As you said, “it took a village” to survive some of the time. My hometown has changed alot since I left. I don’t know if there’s many places left like the ones you and I grew up in.

Mark

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

We’re on the same page.. 🙂

Touche’, Mae

In reply to Hell, now I don’t know

🙂

Used an Out house

In reply to Mae, did you at least have indoor plumbing?

Our cabin had an outhouse, and a vintage Zenith shortwave (30’s era)….. it was cool (except the outhouse in the winter, then it was just plain cold).

My dad’s cousing had a cinder-block outhouse on their farm (as close to a brick s***-house as I ever came) but it’s main purpose was to keep drity feet from getting inside the house.

An outhouse of old gives way to 21st Century species!

In reply to Used an Out house

If you been to an outhouse dated back before 1920, you should check out the new species of outhouses.

These outhouses are made of plastic, are blue and are modular. the most recent outhouses that I seen before the parade (I will not mention the name) had all the anemities included. Old-school function with 21st-century style!

-swg

Kids today have it hard

In reply to Used an Out house

I grew up in the country, walked barefooted to school because it sure beat wearing those stupid blister making oxfords. We had no TV till I was 12 when we could get 1 channel. Most of our small-kid playing time was spent at the river building dams, hooking for crayfish, exploring the river in inner tiretube caravans and breaking out into teams and having rotten guava fights. No adult supervision … some of us were just beginning to learn to swim. Halloweens found us walking the dark country roads (no street lights) with our jack-o-lanterns made out of gallon cans with holes punched out with nails. We were scared silly of being acosted by Larry the Crazy Man and dove into the cane fields everytime a car drove by. We had plumbing but my grandparents who still lived in the plantation camps had outhouses. They had electricity and running water (cold only), a kerosene stove and an icebox but boy could grandma put out a feast on New Years. Frankly I think the kids today have it H-A-R-D with all the pressures, isolation from family and community, drugs, scheduled “play” time.

Plumbing

In reply to Mae, did you at least have indoor plumbing?

I still have relatives that don’t have indoor plumbing. It’s by choice, but still…

sticking up for you Mae !

In reply to Too old..

:^O…

but what are we doing postin in cill’s thread… (we just can’t help it eh?) :^O

Why I’m posting here

In reply to sticking up for you Mae !

I’m hoping he’ll pick another fight with you guys so I’m here to watch.

I can’t help myself

In reply to sticking up for you Mae !

it’s a compulsion..a sickness. I’m hoping for medication.

Fights

In reply to I can’t help myself

Fights, flames and unacceptable comments don’t matter here.

I still talk to pretty much everyone here, even Max, and we’ve been through the ringer a few dozen times at least. Sleeping Dawg and I actually find more common ground than not, go figure! And even Garrion and I can share comments nowadays.

It really doesn’t matter, when all is said and done. You still have your life and I have mine, it’s only the Internet afterall.

I don’t count anymore…

In reply to Fights

… not even an honorable mention, when once upon a time, I was quite possibly the raciest/raunchiest member… but now I’m nothing more than a memory… a forgotten has-been, or maybe even a never-was. I’m going to take my barbies with their f*&^ed up hair and go home now. ]:)

Awwww., c’mon Jess

In reply to I don’t count anymore…

I still think you’re a rat bag of a bitch, if that makes you feel any better.

But I still say I’m a nice guy….for an a$$hole.

Aww Thanks

In reply to Awwww., c’mon Jess

That just warms the cockles of my heart, ya f*%knut. 😀

Queen of the Lap Dance

In reply to I don’t count anymore…

You are not forgotten at all by the dinosaur members still here.

You do lap dances and your hubby treats you liek a pig….

Even in out dotage, some of us have memory recall.

Pig?

In reply to Queen of the Lap Dance

By pig, do you mean that my husband makes me eat the scraps from his table, or that he makes me squeal? ]:)

Actually….

In reply to Queen of the Lap Dance

It was a reference to a statement you once made about a pig having orgasms for 30 minutes and that you were going to tell your hubby to treat you like one that evening….

Now THAT

In reply to Queen of the Lap Dance

I do remember… what a lovely evening. :p

Too old

In reply to Too old..

“We didn’t have cable when I was a kid, but I thought UHF was GREAT. And I was in highschool when we got Pong. I played it for hours. Damn..I even remember the big switch from AM to FM.”

I remember all those things also in about the same timetable. Crap. Now I feel old too.

Nah…

In reply to Too old

Remember..50 is the new 30. And I still have a ways to go before getting to 50. Besides, I look GOOD…

It’s all in the attitude..

I remember Pong… I was in college!

In reply to Too old

Anyone remember what a slide rule is/was?
My high school chem instructor would say “smoke that slide rule!’ when we had to whip out so many moles or whatever. My first calculator (TI – Texas Instruments) was when I was a senior in high school, mainly cause my dad was a math professor. It had 4 functions; add, subtract, mult, and divide with 1 memory. It was almost big enough to deserve its own backpack.
A computer in every household? That was a hundred years away yet, or so it seemed. It was only mentioned in sci fi circles.

Mine was a Christmas Present

In reply to I remember Pong… I was in college!

My Mom splurged my senior year in high school and got me a high-end Pickett. It came with a leather case and a ring for snapping to a belt hook.

I’ve still got it, I still use it. And I’m faster with it than some of these kids with their calculators. Accurate, yes. Precise, it isn’t.

older than dirt

In reply to Too old

Man, it only gets worse that way, as the ones ahead of you drop off the scene, and you’re the oldest one around, driving everyone crazy, talking about your bowels and the good old days! I just turned 50. I’ll soon be an old bag if I’m not already. But still I have alot of fun, just like the old days! Only now, people are really surprised to see it.

I remeber the days of the immortal Atari 2600

In reply to Too old..

I loved mine. Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man were my friends. Yes, u did have to use your imigination with those games. Missle Command…Donkey Kong… I was a little disappointed with E.T…I could never get anywhere with it. Oh, and you forgot about Colecovision (sp) and the other thing…

And I just turned 30 this past May.

I remember…

In reply to I remeber the days of the immortal Atari 2600

Intellivision. My first computer was an apple II+
with TWO, count em, TWO Disk drives 🙂 Heh heh

The Apple II…

In reply to I remember…

the quintessinal (sp) computer used by all in the 80s and early 90s when you were in public school. I used to enjoy playing Oregon Trail back then at school.

Opening VIdeo Game Museum Soon

In reply to I remember…

Seriously I have most of my older games. It’s going to be online only, but it should show the gamers of today that when we played Counter-Strike Source or F.E.A.R. at our age we had to use bb guns and nerf bats weighted with pennies! I think I might have taken one to many nerf bats to the cranium. Anyways, if you have any old systems or games you want to donate to posterity give me a yell. 😀

38 years old and still pwning it up!

See..if i really had sense back then…

In reply to Opening VIdeo Game Museum Soon

I would’ve saved my games. See, that’s why it doesn’t pay to be older because when you reminisce over things and then you don’t have them and then want them back…you can get them because they are gone.

And my old comic books. I had one of the 25th anniversary editions of Iron Man when I was a teenager. didn’t realize its worth, but I gave it away freely to a neighborhood kid. Thimgs like that…I had many-many video games, plus the games for my Tandy Model 2 and the Model 2 itself.

Solaris

In reply to I remeber the days of the immortal Atari 2600

One of the best and hardest games ever conceived! Out of all the games I have ever played in my life that is the one I could never conquer. Perhaps before I die I?ll beat it. I have a PS2 but I spend more time on my 2600. And who could forget “under 50 bucks! (50 bucks!)the fun is back o yes sir e it’s the 2600 from atari”

P.S. I’m weighing in at the ripe old age of 27

And you forgot about the price of the games…

In reply to Solaris

Too dirt cheap. Try to do that now? Be cryin all the way home and all that night and the next morning? Or is it just me that would do that?? *lol*

Dang now that I think about it…..

In reply to And you forgot about the price of the games…

The cost of games now is just about the price the whole atari system was!!! WOW! I need someone to slap me, i’m getting all retro, I feel a Mario Bro marathon coming on, but i’ll skip 2 cause it sucked just 1 and 3, while wearing my stonewash jeans, kanagroo shoes, with an iron on autobots decal on my t shirt!

The days of Mario ..on NES

In reply to Dang now that I think about it…..

Don’t you just love the secret codes or things u can do. Like at the very beginning of Mario with the turtle?If you time jumping on it right, you could get extra lives. It was hard trying to learn it, but once u got it, you couls almst do it blindfolded.

And Contra…up, up, down down, left, right, left right, B, A…I think that was the right combination.

Talk about going back……

In reply to The days of Mario ..on NES

Extra lives rocked! Contra was – Up down up down left right left right A B A B start I think LOL! Did you ever play top gun? Landing that thing was freaking hard! Well it was at age 12 I prob could do it with my eyes closed now. And what about Sonic the hedgehog instant classic!

Yeah, we had it rough

In reply to Too old..

Had to walk across the room to change the channel on the TV (to the ‘other channel’).

*Click..click..clack* The sound of the TV knobs

In reply to Yeah, we had it rough

The round TV knobs. It was fun when you tried to get that station on the UHF knob. It wouldn’t be exactly on the station, kinda like in between. ANd if the weather was right, you’d get that station that like halfway across the state. There was a station like that for me. I’d want to watch cartoons at 6 in the morning and around 4 in the afternoon. But the only time it would really show is when it was either raining or cloudly.

First television knobs, now remote controls. . .

In reply to *Click..click..clack* The sound of the TV knobs

I had my first experience with televisions, monochrome and colour, with VHF and UHF control knobs. That was before July 1984 when I had my first colour television with a battery powered wireless remote control!

I think I am going bonkers here with this 80s retro stuff. . . 😛

-swg

Heck

In reply to First television knobs, now remote controls. . .

We had a TV with a remote control in the ’60s! Of course, all it was was a motor attached to the back of the tuner and a cord with a single button on the end 🙂

Old species I have seen before the wireless remote. . .

In reply to Heck

I have seen these televisions with wired remote controls in older issues of magazines and archives, and you were right. Those species were there BEFORE the televisions with the wireless remote controls came out in the 1980s

-swg 🙂

You think you had it ruff?

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I had to walk 3 miles to school, if I missed the bus. And wrote my lessons on a slate computer (the small trs-80 one). With NO ethernet connection, only rs-232. And a printer that used silver thermal paper and was only 40 characters wide!

Then in college, we didn’t have no internet. We had to visit secure terminals in the math center to logon to the ArpaNet. Where we couldn’t play Zork till the MIT students went home at 5pm.

Then we’d wait till 2:00 am till they were free! And it only had 102 nodes, (and no porn sites!). And none of these ‘PC’s, We had to make due with system 360 mainframes! And we had to live with BASIC in Rom on the IBM minis, and learn REAL languages like Fortran, not this newfangled ‘coffee’ thing, or that gal Ruby who is on a Train Track Rails for some reason!!

dang Dr.

In reply to You think you had it ruff?

I was writing the OS/Communications code for Apranet that you were using (in assembler no less)… and my walk to school was 3 miles (uphill each way) in the snow… (I grew up in Michigan, which had snow on the 4th of July on several years)… and we didn’t have cable. or video games, or plumbing, or fire, or electricity, or, or, or… what were we discussing agian?

:^O

We didn’t have water

In reply to dang Dr.

. . . had to make our own by banging Oxygen and Hydrogen together. And we were glad to have it.

Ruff? Hahaha!

In reply to You think you had it ruff?

Oh come on! I had access to the latest and greatest computers the entire time I was growing up in Michigan. It was a cyber-utopia! An IBM 360 owned by Saginaw County School District. It was a few months older than myself.

We had our own email by 1979. Programmed by HS students. We called it (*drum roll*) ‘Mail’. It was great. CRTs were a luxury when you could get time on one. Most of the time we used DECwriters. Yes, DecWriters with an amazing 110 Baud rate and if you had the maximum 32 students on the system at one time the timeshare would groan.

Now ‘chillin. If you were around in 1980 then you missed a couple of things. Our parents removed those hills we had to walk up both ways years ago – big improvement.

When TV went from almost a near round black and white only picture to something more square and in color! Color! Can you believe seeing Walt Disney on Sunday night in COLOR!! Oh the pure joy!

Phones had dials not touch tone. Cable was for really, really rich people well after color TV!

Microwaves. Too afraid but they were around in the 1970s – still don’t trust em. I think my parents got their first while I was in High School. Weighed a ton.

Oh! You little ingrate! LOL. You still don’t know how good you have it. Guilt trip or not. Just imagine what your kids will say when they’re old enough.

– beads

In COLOR

In reply to Ruff? Hahaha!

And the few TV shows we had still had radio type announcers that would tell you which show you were watching, even though it was right there on the screen – “The FBI! In COLOR” or “The Beverly Hillbillies!”.

And none of your fancy transistors, TV sets had tubes in the back that glowed a really cool blue or orange color, and when a tube went out, you could take it down to the local store and put it on the tube tester just to verify it it was dead and pick out another from the rack below.

And another thing, music “oldies” are from the 1950’s, not the 1980’s.

Almost strangled my kids over that one

In reply to In COLOR

We were driving down the road all singing along to a Beatles tune, and when it was over one of my little darlings said: “Gee, I really love these oldies.” Hey – I was watching the Ed Sulivan Show when those 4 lads were on it – in black and white, I might add – for the first time.
Now several years later they LOVE my Zappa, Zeplin and AC/DC CDs. Still can’t sell them on Billie Holiday, but that’s oldies stuff, even for me!

Pops had a collection of 78’s …

In reply to Almost strangled my kids over that one

… need I go on?

Mine too!

In reply to Pops had a collection of 78’s …

And I was the only one who would sit and listen to them with him. Slaughter on 10th Avenue (I think that was the title) was my favorite. I still love that old music! I have a Delta Blues collection that takes up about 70 CDs. Gate Mouth, Bessie Smith, etc. Love that old stuff!

Life in the UK

In reply to In COLOR

We managed to get a third TV channel in 1967, and colour (although only on one channel and then only on selected programs).
Colour TV sets needed two men to lift, here in the UK, we had dual standard TVs, BBC1 and ITV on VHF in black and white and BBC2 in Colour. This needed what was basically two TVs (with all their valves) in the same box.
There was a bowden steel cable running to every panel on the set to change from VHF to UHF.
We only saw these when my father, a TV repairman brought one home to test for an intemittant fault.
TV remotes appeared much later, as ultrasonic clickers that allowed you to step through the 3 channels.
Some sets had a wired remote, which worked a motorised TV chanel changer on the set.
Teletext (via the TV) and Prestel (via the phone line) appeared in 1976. I remember going to a demo of teletext where the propotype TV had thumbwheels on the front of the set to select the page.

Somehow we managed to survive in those days.

David

Life in the UK

In reply to In COLOR

We managed to get a third TV channel in 1967, and colour (although only on one channel and then only on selected programs).
Colour TV sets needed two men to lift, here in the UK, we had dual standard TVs, BBC1 and ITV on VHF in black and white and BBC2 in Colour. This needed what was basically two TVs (with all their valves) in the same box.
There was a bowden steel cable running to every panel on the set to change from VHF to UHF.
We only saw these when my father, a TV repairman brought one home to test for an intemittant fault.
TV remotes appeared much later, as ultrasonic clickers that allowed you to step through the 3 channels.
Some sets had a wired remote, which worked a motorised TV chanel changer on the set.
Teletext (via the TV) and Prestel (via the phone line) appeared in 1976. I remember going to a demo of teletext where the propotype TV had thumbwheels on the front of the set to select the page.

Somehow we managed to survive in those days.

David

you had a computer?

In reply to You think you had it ruff?

I learned how to type on a manual typewriter and I had a nun teach typing who squirted us in the face with her squirt gun if we looked at the keys!
My high school graduation gift was an electric typewriter that I took to college with me!
And there was no spell-check and it was considered messy if you used white-out to cover typing errors – I had to make every page perfect. That was a pain!

We didn’t even have ArpaNet back then. Or phones in our dorm rooms – there was one phone on the end of each hallway – if you got a call, the switchboard operator would anounce it to the entire dorm and you would have to run to find an unused phone, pick it up and tell her who you were.

And they were – gasp – rotary phones!

How modern

In reply to you had a computer?

I remember our phone had no dial. You picked it up and a lady soon came on the line and said in a very nasal voice, “Number Please.”

The typical old-school operator on the switch board

In reply to How modern

There are still modern day operators on switch boards, although few in number, now that telephony system is like digitised.

-swg

Switchboard operator @ me job…

In reply to The typical old-school operator on the switch board

As far as I can tell, and know of, at my job, the switchboard operator uses the old-style system. And even has the same mindset. I don’t like calling into the job because the operator’s temperment (sp)is so messed up. Even though I can call direct to whatever office I want to call, sometimes I don’t always rememer the number…WHO DOES???

Did somebody mention rotary telephones?. . .

In reply to you had a computer?

I have seen these old-school species before the touch-tone telephones were in full effect in the 1980s. Hey, my father even had one, although today I am not quite sure where that specie was

-swg

Rotary Phones

In reply to Did somebody mention rotary telephones?. . .

I have the pleasure to work a railway museum in the UK, where we still use rotary phones.

Our engineers have managed to get the exchange (1980s vintage) programmed to use the fancy modern exchange functions (we dial a three digit code instead of # or *).

Spares are becoming more difficult to find.

Confuses the hell out of customers if they ask to make a call! Some can’t remember how to use a rotary phone, the youngsters haven’t even seen one before.

David

Beats what we had

In reply to You think you had it ruff?

You had it easy. If we wanted to play computer games, and chess was the only one available then, we had to enter our moves on the 029 keypunch, then wait for the sysop to decide to load the game, run all the moves (hopefully in sequence), and print the results.

Direct connection to the mainframe? Don’t I wish!

REAL languages!!!

In reply to You think you had it ruff?

Anybody else remember these?
Neat 3 (NCR)
RPG II
Collators, sorters, duplicators, and the all time favorite….
The MAIN communication interface with the ELECTRONIC BRAIN……(drum roll)…..
The I/O writer.

Oh yes, almost forgot, booting the machine. Better have the punch cards in the right order!

Do I hear that old ticker-tape running in the background??

Ah, the good ole days.

Don’t forget about the Real Computer’s!!!

In reply to REAL languages!!!

My first computer was a Timex Sinclar. It had either 2 or 4 K (Yes K) of Ram. I had the expander kit to bring it up 16K. It also had a membrain(sp) keyboard. The one cool thing was that it was faster than my dad’s IBM, when it was in fast mode with no video.

Oh I almost forgot, it was hooked up to my first TV, it was black and white with a loop antenna so I could get UHF channels.

Yea..that’s what I mean..computers connected to the TV!!!

In reply to Don’t forget about the Real Computer’s!!!

I was lucky to have a color TV to have my Tandy Model 2 connected to. And obligatory “black box” that connected the computer to the TV.

LOL! :-) This is so true – from another 30 something…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I was laughing as I read through your message! Right on! I need to send this to my sibling who is a 20 something.

The Burn-Smarts

In reply to LOL! :-) This is so true – from another 30 something…

Egad-zooks!!! CAN A TWENTY-SOMETHING GO OLD-SCHOOL, STAY OLD-SCHOOL, AND NOT GET SPOILED?!?

I must be out of my wits end here reading the threads…:D

-swg

Wow That brings back

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Memorys, I first got to the internet through a local BBS. At first you had to build your own TCP stack and the modem connection was 1200 baud. The best thing to come along was Mosaic not sure of the spelling but it was the first browser I used. It took hours to down load but it was the best thing around. It was with a 386 I think and a mono monitor. Around 3 or 4 thousand dollars.

What? Nobody walked those lousy 3 miles uphill and barefoot in the snow?

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Can anyone remember the IBM RAMAC507??? Programming in binary or machine code? Remember COBOL??? A knowledge of FORTRAN made it easier to learn C. Oh yeah, there was also a beast called UNIVAC. Unlike the RAMAC507 which required its own airconditioned room, screw the employees, that sucker required half an airconditioned building but only for the computer. Employees were SOOL.(Sh|t Out Of Luck). Can anybody ever remember spilling a box of punch cards??? Pu$$ies, all of you!!![b]LOL[/b] ;\

[b]Dawg[/b] ]:)

Well, SOMEBODY had to walk to a destination SOMEWHERE!

In reply to What? Nobody walked those lousy 3 miles uphill and barefoot in the snow?

Before I study C++, which is a progamming dialect based on C on the original FORTRAN, I four times walked long distances within the five bouroughs of New York City. AND I WISH THERE WAS SOME SNOW BLIZZARDS FOR ME TO TOUGH THINGS OUT! 😀

-swg

Puch Cards

In reply to What? Nobody walked those lousy 3 miles uphill and barefoot in the snow?

Yes, my first RPG II class, that Report Program Generator for those lacking the mystical joys of ancient computing (AC), used punch cards. Thousands of individual lines would be hand typed on to one and only one card. Joy! When you got to the point where you were running a 1500 line program you had 1500 cards. This became both cumbersome and rather heavy in no time.

Problem was at the time – RAM. No we didn’t have no stinkin’ hard drives. You wanted to run a program – you loaded the cards. And they had better in the correct order or you’d be sorted out the ABEND by hand. One stiff little card at a time.

Sorry, Dawg. I think the RAMDAC50 predates even me. I was using a Honeywell mini-computer at the time. Wasn’t the card machine (big as a full size desk and four times as heavy) called an IBM 2985 or something close to the affect.

– beads

Yeah RPG II!

In reply to Puch Cards

..how to make a programmer crazy – a card out of order….or even worse! a letter not in the correct column *augh!!* Worked on an IBM 3083 mainframe….with *gasp* COBOL & IBM 370 JCL…I like ColdFusion & Ecommerce better 🙂

Connect the dots programming

In reply to Yeah RPG II!

Thats what I used to call RPG II/III. You connect the dots properly and BINGO! It worked. Otherwise it was basically back to the drawing board.

Oh what memories!

– beads

All the respect in the world for those programmers

In reply to Connect the dots programming

I respect them. Having to basically be perfect in your programming or it all went to hell? Man, I’m sure that would be so inconceivable today. But, it made for a better programmer I would think. But then again…we did have the Y2K scare…*lol*

do you remember

In reply to Yeah RPG II!

do you remember the hollerith code? one of the first things i learned in data automation class in the usaf. That plus keying in programs by loading the individual program instructions on a toggle keyboard.

Then there were two

In reply to Puch Cards

kinds of punch card machines from IBM that looked the same but punched the cards differently – I found that out when I punched a deck at UT Austin (THE University) and ran it at the computer lab at American Technological University. Oops!

Maybe we should change the title to “40+”

In reply to Puch Cards

Since I have to classify myself correctly as not being over 30 but being over 40! What a bunch of memories from the punch cards to the paper datatapes fed into the IBM systems. You learned programming languages like COBOL, Fortran, RPG II to run the IBM System 36 or Time Sharing systems like the PDP or DEC systems.

The online world was BBS’s with a 2400bps modem and to get on a worthwhile board, someone had to vouch for you. Fun was actually learning how to phreak with a blue or black box. Of course, if you really want to go “old school” you worked for a time for a little known company called BBN and have some fun making some real IT history. But I’m old and slowly losing my marbles. Good thing its backed up somewhere, now I just have to find it! 😉

Punch cards?!

In reply to What? Nobody walked those lousy 3 miles uphill and barefoot in the snow?

My Dad brought home boxes of the things – we made wreaths out of them, spray-painted them gold, and hung them on the front door for Christmas decorations. My coloring paper was the back of Green-Bar.
Oh – and the pictures of Snoopy in ASCII characters on that same Green-Bar . . . .

Really Geeky picture

In reply to Punch cards?!

You just reminded me of my ultimate geeky kid thing with half inch green bar: “Foxx – A dirty picture.”

Some over achieving geek created a “Dirty Picture” of a woman on a bar stool in COBOL. No it was more of a silhouette of a woman on a bar stool. If you used your imagination she was nude. Oh! Did the school board have a fit over that, one. Simply scandalous! We thought it was weak back then, today it would be considered laughable compared to the Internet.

Yes and instead of using toilet paper to thrash our geeky buddies houses we used half inch green bar. Yep! That takes some effort to throw that up into a tree. Besides you basically knew who was behind such pranks as the material of choice was fairly unique. In that how many kids in the late 70s had access to computer paper? Let alone use it to TP someones house with it?

Sounds like a bad parody of “Glory Days” or “Geeky Glory Days”. Errr… something like that. Oh, I think I need coffee.

– beads

Yup

In reply to Really Geeky picture

Dad had copies of the dirty pictures too, but us kids weren’t supposed to know he had them, let alone get a peek at them! Oh – and Dad always had a “pot tweeker” in his pocket protector. Geez. Hadn’t thought of that thing in decades!

Gloria.bas

In reply to Really Geeky picture

Hey, I remember that picture. (Gloria.bas) It sure ate up the ribbon’s. I transfered it from my dad’s TRS-80 to by friends IBM. Ahhh thoose where the days at 110 baud. (We had a 300 baud modem but everyone else was still using 110.)

Bench Seat Volkswagon Bug

In reply to Punch cards?!

was created when on of the guys who worked at a bank began collecting these big bags of punch card punchings. One night we filled one of our friend’s VW with these punchings – he ended up with a bench seat courtesy of IBM. For years, when ever he turned on the heater or vent he would get some punches (chad I guess it’s called now) blowing out the vents. The stuff even ended up inside the head lights – don’t know how that worked.

jdg

Uphill both ways

In reply to What? Nobody walked those lousy 3 miles uphill and barefoot in the snow?

It is possible to have a situation where your run to and from school is uphill both ways. This happens if the school is on a hill and your house is on another hill.

I so remember COBOL and Fortran and punch cards. I didn’t spill any boxes of cards though, thank goodness. But others did that task for me once or twice.

I am old school too. And still am!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Uh, hello. You there behind the just_chilin image and pseudonym, I maybe 28 years old, going on 29, but I am old school, just like you.

While I certainly cannot deny that we who are born in the late 1970s through middle 1980s are a bunch of spoiled idiots, there are some of us twenty-somethings who would rather do without even a smidgen of technology.

I have the same experience of deprivation of material things, and for that, I am cool with it.

Of course I would have the microwave oven or the XBox or even the newly released Sanyo MM-9000 from Sprint PCS. However, even with a smidge of such I am still like the reclusive Amish people in Pennsylvania and other isolated locations throughout the United States. And I have found out, through my personal experience I can live without that stuff. You know, less is more.

Yes, I understand your angst here regarding us twenty-somethings. But there are other twenty-somethings, like me, who would rather be “paupers”, even though making plenty money. 😉

-swg

Angst?

In reply to I am old school too. And still am!

I hadn’t even heard that word untill the 1990’s.

I wonder if I suffered from in back when I was in High Scchool (1970’s.)

Oh, and in the 70’s, we didn’t have ADD. We were just ‘hyper’. They medicated us by not letting us have soft drinks or chocolate.

I’m amazed we survived at all.

Speaking of ‘hyper’. . .

In reply to Angst?

Unbeknownst to me I have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in the mild. And YES, I was told by my mother or somebody that eating anything sweet would make me hyper.

The simple carbohydrates and caffeine will make you hyper too. 🙂

-swg

Hyper

In reply to Angst?

We didn’t use helmets, knee-pads, elbow-pads or high tech reflective, LED laced, sneakers either and still by the very grace of God to survive! Oh the horrors! Bananna seats and chopper handle bars. Why a kid could go sailing right over the bike and still survive.

Today it seems 4 out of 5 childeren are ADD/Hyper. Still amazes me when I get 24 year old techs taking “Ridlin” (Vitamin ‘R’) these days.

Go easy on the youngsters. The generation before us was just as rough on us and we haven’t learned from their mistakes, now have we? LOL.

– beads

ADD diagnosis

In reply to Hyper

I know where its coming from, and it isn’t doctors…..

My kids school asked me to have my son checked out for ADD. He has trouble focusing in school, though none of the “bad” behaviours associated with ADD. He just gets lost in other thoughts – especially with boring teachers, or subjects where he knows the lessons backwards and forwards.

It happens that my family doctor knows a specialist in ADD and he set up an appointment. I took time off work to take my son myself. This specialist is one of the top in the field and is published in Harvard review of medicine.

He acknowledged that my son had a mild case, and urged me not to push for Ritalin despite what the teachers would suggest. He gave us some exercises and suggested some nutritional supplements (Omega 3 fatty acids like Primrose oil/salmon oil/tun oil).

The teacher was dissapointed. They feel they have too many students to deal with, and there are many english as a second language students, so they feel they have trouble coping with an ADD kid in the mix.

Truth is while there are many more ESL kids in the class than when I was a kid, my teachers had challenges too – teaching multiple grades in the same class for example. They sucked it up and did a great job.

My wife chairs the parent council, and while there are some great teachers, there are also some whiners. ADD is just another example of “lazy thinking” in terms of leaning on drugs to solve the problem.

James

ADD? We never had no stinkin’ ADD …

In reply to ADD diagnosis

(Repeating myself a little here)

We never had ADD. Dad had a leather belt. My uncle had grand-dad’s leather razor strop. The other uncle had “the board of education”.

Easy to pay attention when there is no other choice. Or to get put ahead a grade or two, because the easy stuff is boring.

Can’t do that now days, because the other little darlings might feel bad that they weren’t put ahead as well.

Dad and mom each taught (at different) 1-room schoolhouse for a while in Wisconsin. Grades 1-8 in the same room. “Kindygarden” was your mom stayed home with the kids and her and dad made sure you were ready for first grade.

ADD? no just bored

In reply to ADD? We never had no stinkin’ ADD …

When I was in 3rd grade, my teachers complained that I never paid attention, fell asleep and was just disinterested. Did they give me pills no, they put me in 5th grade so I would be challenged.
Of course that was back in the stone age and in Catholic school where corporal punishment was heartily endorsed through the use of a nice leather strap and or yardstick.
I am well over 30 and I agree that the younger set has it easy in very many ways, my 15 year old nephew has his own tv and playstation and cell phone. And he hardly has to worry about being called a ethnic slur by his classmates. But he has problems I didn’t have.
When I was growing up there were no designer drugs, no terrorism on our shores, we did have to learn to duck and cover though. If someone slipped and had sex without protection all they had to worry about was pregnancy or having to get a shot, they didn’t have to worry they would die (unless mom and dad killed them).
I love that I grew up when I did (the 60’s), I saw man land on the moon and was still able to play stickball in the street. I had to use my imagination and my LEGO/Erector/Fischertechnic toys for fun. It was a great time, but my nephew will be telling his grandkids how hard he had growing up. Time marches on…

corporal punishment

In reply to ADD? no just bored

I tell people: Look at the most successful and respected people in their community. Now ask them how they were disciplined as children.

I agree,

In reply to ADD diagnosis

I agree that some teachers don’t want to teach ‘difficult’ children, and would rather have them drugged up zombies than disrupting the rest of the class. Very often a simple cure is placing these children in a less distracting environment, but that means smaller class sizes, more classrooms and teachers, more money, etc. But people don’t want it. Many will flat out tell you that they would rather spend the money on “the kids who have a chance to make something of themselves”.

Truth be known, ADD children are almost always brighter than their ‘normal’ counterparts given the appropriate environment. In fact, it is this brightness that exacerbates the ‘problem’. They are aware of every external stimulus and each one must be examined and categorized. The trick to teaching an ADD child is simply to make sure all of the stimuli are ones the child will learn from.

ADD is not, in my opinion, an illness at all, it is simply an intermediate step in an evolutionary process. This is what the ‘normals’ are keenly aware of, and the reason they are pumping these kids full of drugs.

More ADD diagnosis details

In reply to ADD diagnosis

My eldest son was having problems in the 3rd grade when the school had a specialist check him for ‘learning disabilities.’

He had two. One was ADD, which was confirmed by an ADD specialist at City of Hope in the LA area. The other was the fact that he was doing 7th grade math and 12th grade reading in the 3rd grade and was BORED.

We solved the boredom side by putting him in a highly gifted class run by a different school district. The ADD was treated by small doses of a medicine that was NOT Ritalin.

Ritalin, unfortunately, is used as a crutch by some educators and doctors. If your child is on Ritalin, and not on it seven days a week, then it is merely being used for control while in classes. And if your doctor suggests such a medication plan, run far away from the doctor because he or she is a quack.

That’s pretty common

In reply to More ADD diagnosis details

in diagnosed ADD. The child (or adult!) They tend to excel in one or two areas. I’m not so sure whether it’s a problem with the child, or the inability of the school to fit this square peg in their round holes. They bend over backwards to teach diversity in all things yet cannot seem to handle it themselves 🙁

Younger Oldies?

In reply to I am old school too. And still am!

Agree completely – I was born in 1980. I was raised in a village in the English countryside.　Pre-school, I had to trudge through the mud with my mum to the portacabin selling food for the village. Later, I had to walk to school every day except when school was closed due to blizzards. When I hit high-school, they finally decided to add a bus service for the three and a bit mile hike.
I remember punch cards – my dad brought them home sometimes. I can use a slide rule. I learned to program in BASIC on a ZX81. We used to listen to music on 45’s, 78’s and reel to reel. I remember being given a lecture at primary school about how wonderful the new “Caxton” word processor software was because it gave you the amazing new property of “Insert” rather than just the good old overtype function that we had used for four years.
I hit Junior High and they installed an rs232 network where unplugging one machine’s connection would stop all the others from working.
These were the glory days where you turned on a machine (usually 186) and the first message you got was “Welcome, please supply an operating system”.
Got my first CD player then – 1990.
As I was entering highschool I heard about the internet for the first time and the year after I left, my highschool went online.
My first email account was 7 years ago at University.
Despite the lap of luxury that the world has for some, I am sitting here cross legged on the bare floor using a salvaged ps2 keyboard from a 286 and an Aptiva monitor (yes, still good after all this time) to run my Athlon XP. I could change/upgrade all this, but I feel I would be betraying my roots and my soul if I did.

Too true

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

But a FEW corrections, Atari 2600 was something brought to Earth by aliens, I remember just about peeingmyself when I opened my COLOUR pong game one Christmas! Atari was later on when video games were REALLY advanced!

As for writing a letter, at least we COULD write, look at some of th ehandwriting kids have today and it makes you want to destroy thier keyboards, I taught my kid caligraphy and drafting techniques, he now has ‘pleasant’ handwriting.

Uphill both ways to school, well actually it was Up a hill and down a hill to and from school, and yes it seemed like 5′ of perpetual snow living in Nova Scotia, especially because I was only 4′ and change! Dad DRIVE us to school? Gotta be kidding, ‘sling yer hook, mate!’

Oh the mixed tapes off the radio, weren’t THEY pleasant? But hey, every girlfriend got one, how special.

Ah, the origins of cable, I was SO excited when I could spend 20 minutes tuning in Banana Splits on theUHF dial! That was before the fancy corded clunky box with the three level selector came out so you could CLICK channels from the couch (and we STILL call the remote “the clicker”!).

But there were many things we had that kids today don’t have: health, an active lifestyle, social skills.

We played baseball, soccer, football and pretty much any other game you could play outside. We rode bikes for miles and got a suntan in the summer that was so dark you’d stay tanned most of the winter. We found great social activities, went to dances, the skating rink, Scouting, you name it, if it wsa outside we did it.

Now it’s actually cool to rarely meet your friends, text messages, email, cell phones who needs to visit a friend across town or meet in the middle after a long bike ride.

I’d take what I had over what they have today any day of the week. We had fun, kids today just seem to fill time.

not even remotely

In reply to Too true

funny Oz,
it’s just to true.

I get odd looks just mentioning walking from brookswood area to downtown vancouver on a saturday…then around the seawall and back home, with a stop at vancouver library. just for something to do that wasn’t in the house. 🙂

or hop onto the bike at dawn and return at sunset.

or, make arrangements during the week to spend the weekend doing a dungeon crawl…with the dice, on paper and all in the same room.

scary thought for kids today.

Walking

In reply to not even remotely

As someone with back pain I have learned that the best remedy is to walk, and walk, and walk and…
yup, now that’s therapy!

When I go to Hastings Park on weekends with friends, they all driv edown and I walk. It has urned into a runing joke for them now, everytime I turn up th efirst things they ask is “how long did it take you to walk in today?” I still haven’t kept track of when I left or arrived so I don’t know, turn on the tunes and head off to Lougheed, Willingdon, hastings to the track, before you know it you are there.

Sometimes I cheat on the way home though, after a few beers and Chivas’ I find I will get bored of walking by the time I get to Brentwood mall and I’ll hop the Skytrain the rest of the way (Sapperton Stn. by RCH).

My kid learned to walk long distances too, I simply wouldn’t drive him around everywhere when he was younger.

Like my dad said to me when I said I was to tired to walk any further; “Hope you have a good pair of gloves, because I’m not carrying you, when your legs give out you’ll have to crawl.”

In Enlgand people are walkers too, people living outside major cities anyway. People wander for miles, I just can’t believe how friggin lazy people are these days, who wants to sit in a car when you can cruise to the beat of your feet?

We used to live in a paper bag in a septic tank!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Ch?teau de Chasselas, eh?

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: A cup o’ cold tea.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Without milk or sugar.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Or tea.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:In a cracked cup, an’ all.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you happiness, son”.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Aye, ‘e was right.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Aye, ‘e was.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, ‘alf the floor was missing, and we were all ‘uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t’ corridor!

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would ha’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:We were evicted from our ‘ole in the ground; we ‘ad to go and live in a lake.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:Cardboard box?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Aye.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.

ALL:They won’t!

Sorry, anytime I hear someone say how kids have it easy, that entire sketch runs through my head. 😀

Ok Oz

In reply to We used to live in a paper bag in a septic tank!

You’ve GOT to tell me what that’s from. It sounds very Python, but then so does a LOT of Brit humour.

One of my favs

In reply to Ok Oz

Yup, it’s Python, coming from me, who else would it be? 🙂

gotta love MP

In reply to We used to live in a paper bag in a septic tank!

…thanks for that. Nobody beats Monty Python.

Talk about homelessness. . .

In reply to We used to live in a paper bag in a septic tank!

Your dialogue of the four Yorkshiremen is about how they were homeless for a time in their youth.

Gee, I WISH I was homeless!

I moved from one dwelling to another within the bourough of Brooklyn in New York City. I now know the meaning of temporary housing–very transitional.

Can we discuss about a time when computer technology was budding and how computers of old were as big as garages?

-swg

Yorkshire

In reply to Talk about homelessness. . .

Was a place of ONLY poor and VERY hard working families that made next to nothing and were worked to the bone day in and day out.
Things are much better for the Yorjshire folk these days, but it’s a sketch about four old boys talking about how they had it hard.

As far as homeless goes, I just think of how many THOUSANDS made homes from nothing and lived on nothing during and after the great wars. Not because they couldn’t find work, not because they couldn’t find the motivation to find work, they simply couldn’t FIND their homes amongst the piles of rubble. But of course they just held thier heads up and kept going, brick by brick.

My parents and thier parents make me feel like such a pu$$y when it comes to hard times. I’ve had what I consider hard times, but not anything even remotely close to what the old folk in Europe have faced.

The same situation in parts of the United States

In reply to Yorkshire

I have seen on television and read about hard-working people who made some measure of monetary means, just not enough to afford rent and/or mortgage (especially during the housing/real estate bubble here!) yet somehow these people made do with whatever they had.

Also brushes with homelessness just goes to show you that housing is temporary and transitional, as I had posted on an earlier thread.

Regardless of whether people made next to nothing(or nothing at all in the case of some) or chronically unemployed (or not) or even making $30,000.00+ annually for a household of one, somebody will have to go through a period of housing transition.

Trust me, I been through that transition, and wished I had a motor recreational vehicle to live in.

-swg 🙂

The post-script: I read in the New York Times Magazine in late 2001 about a man who had built for himself portable modular rooms, for he knew housing for him was temporarily. (something like the situation with the four Yorkshiremen) Also in 2004 in the New York Times Magazine, David Laurible of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus fame, travels with the circus. Mr. Laurible was technically homeless for he was traveling and working with the circus. He could not fathom anyone staying in one stationary place to dwell.

And

In reply to The same situation in parts of the United States

Some people are just happy with a minimalist lifestyle, are perfectly capable of growing and/or killing their own food, etc, and others look down on that. Or maybe they’re envious of the ability.

computers as big as garages

In reply to Talk about homelessness. . .

well, if you worked on one, you must of been in research or with the Government….

Do I look it?

In reply to computers as big as garages

Do I look like I worked for the United States Federal Government concerning these things? Not really. Do I look like I was doing heavy reseach at some firm? Not really at all.

As far as research concerns me these days, I merely studied how these computer species started back in the day, like the common Chinese abbacus. An excellent calculator I might say. And how these computer species evolved to the models of the 1950s and 1960s that were the size of garages, and even these ‘server’ species have gotten smaller to the size of towers today.

You may have assumed that I had did this thing when actually I was merely studying.

-swg

All seriousness aside

In reply to We used to live in a paper bag in a septic tank!

That is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Thanks… for the post. HAHAHAHAHAHA

Those were the days…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I had a nice big box to program, called PDP11

http://www.sm5sxl.net/~mats/graphics/images/computer/dec/pdp/pdp-11-peripherals-handbook-1976.jpg

It had all the nice stuff I could imagine- a hard drive, all the compilers and even some graphics. I pitied my predcessor, who had to work with teletype & punched tape in assembler on some old HPs 4kb box we then used as a cofee table. His intervention time was hour and a half. Programming cycle went as follows: tape with line editor in, tape with assembler source in, edit source on teletype,

http://www.sm5sxl.net/~mats/graphics/images/computer/teletype/teletypeASR33.jpg

punch source on tape, tape with assembler in, recently punched tape with source in two times for assembling plus one time for listing, punch tape with assembled code, tape with assembled code in. Execute the code, see what doesn’t work, find the bug by the means of mental debugging, and repeat the process.

And I could compile everything just by typing the command and pressing enter… WOW! There was even some sort of debugger, clumsy, but still useful in the rare occasions, when mental debugging failed.

Life of a techie was good back then, we could devote at least 10-20 percent of our time for study of professional literature, and personal projects, bosses were techies as well, and salaries were on the management level.

And then, in the 1980s… Bye bye reason! Human resources, motivation, project management, management fads… Guess I could pity the young folks as well, no matter how spoiled them might seem.

I still have 2 PDP’s

In reply to Those were the days…

I still have 2 PDP’s at home, and a VT52 dumb terminal, but without the built-in printer. Also have a VT180 terminal with Z80 CP/M processor and 4 daisy-chained 5.25″ disk drives. The PDP’s each have dual 8″ floppy drives, and I still have a couple of boxes of unopened 8″ floppies.

I also have my Franklin 1000 Apple][-compatible 6502 machine with Apple DOS, ProDOS, and 2 40-track 5.25″ floppies, instead of the standard 35-track ones.

I had to go to a neighbor’s house to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon as our 12″ b/w TV’s reception was too poor, and the neighbors had a huge color tv, maybe 17″?

I never got to watch Skippy on TV since we didn’t have cable, but I heard about it from the rich kids down the street who wouldn’t let us come watch it at their house. On the other hand, my wife, who grew up in the Soviet Union, got to watch Skippy, Rin Tin Tin, Flipper, and Lassie. And we’d always been told how bad they had it over there!

I remember punching cards for an IBM 360 and learning Fortran from an IBM self-study course which had quizzes on the World Book Cyclo-Teacher.

Saturday mornings we’d watch Supercar, and Fireball XL-5, the old Looney Tunes cartoons and Merry Melodies, the ones with old 20’s and 30’s songs where you’d read the words at the bottom of the screen and follow the bouncing ball. Later we could see the Monkees and Banana Splits, and some years later we’d catch H.R. Pufnstuf. Johnny Quest and Clutch Cargo were the more action-oriented shows, up until Space Ghost and some of the others came out.

In the evening we’d Sing Along with Mitch Miller, watch Ed Sullivan, and Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which was even more wonderful when we finally got a color TV in the mid-70’s.

Winters in NW Ohio were a lot more fun back then, with snow from around Thanksgiving until almost Easter, deep enough you could tunnel in it and make snow forts and snow men and still have plenty for snowball fights every day.

Walking to school wasn’t too bad, even in winter, since it was less than half a block away. Much later, after I got out of the Army, college was only 1.5 blocks the other direction, and it went a lot faster since I rollerskated to all my classes, including the classes I was teaching. Just had to watch out for the stupid campus cop who ran me off the road.

15 channels??

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

grew up on farm in canada..2 channels on tv..1 being in french..that was fun

now i have over 200…still nothing to watch..
*grumble*

15 channels??

In reply to 15 channels??

Yeah, actually, you’re right. I grew up in a mid-sized city and we only received the 3 local affiliates plus occasionally a UHF channel that nobody watched.

Oh yeah, and there weren’t infomercials or all-night television either. The Late show started promptly after the 10PM news and the Late Late show started at midnight on the weekends (I think) and then after that there was a test pattern then static on all channels until the sunrise service at 6AM.

Three network channels

In reply to 15 channels??

Three network channels, a PBS station that nobody watched and a UHF station that was too fuzzy to watch (lived too from city to get decent reception on UHF). When I was a kid, we always heard wild stories about a a future where people would receive 20+ channels on something called cable TV.

No TV on Thursdays or in July!

In reply to Three network channels

For the first 20 or so years we had National TV in Iceland (late 60s to late 80s) there was no TV on Thursdays and they all took their summer holiday in July and closed the station!

The programme started with news at 8 PM on weekdays and was finished by 11 PM and perhaps 1 am Fridays and Saturdays. Saturdays we had a sports show in the afternoon and Sundays at 6 PM there was a children’s program (in fact we still have that).

I now live out in the country where we get 2 terrestrial channels; the state TV and a subscription-based “Channel 2” (which I don’t subscribe to). Those living in bigger towns now have the opportunity to watch a number of TV channels over their ADSL.

15 channels??

In reply to 15 channels??

We had it better in SF, CA, since we had the 3 main networks, the education channel, plus The Movie Channel (it was free, too!), which played movies 24/7. I remember when it started. That weekend, my Mom & I crawled into my bed to watch it with bowls of popcorn, slumber party style. I think after watching it until 6 AM, we finally fell asleep. 🙂 Now that is sharing quality time!

Old-school television channel operation. . .

In reply to 15 channels??

Most television channels go off the air between the hours of 12 midnight and 1:30 a.m. They come on air between 5:30-6:00 a.m.

-swg

Rough? HA!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Where did you get Atari? I had a deck of cards, a monopoly game … hell, the little spinning wheel ont he Game of Life was high tech!!!

Cable? Channels 2, 5 and 11 (11 was a little shakey, as their tower had the worst location). We got channel 34 when I was about 10 or so, but you had to carefully tune it in, as there was no stops on the UHF: It had variable tuning, and when you took you hand away, the tuning changed, so you had to kinda guss which way it was going to go and tune accordingly.

Jiffy Pop? My dad didn’t believe in such frivolities. We had a 1950’s West Bend popcorn maker. You but some butter (REAL, from the cow butter) in the bottom, put in a quarter cup of kernels you got from a bag, and away you went.

All you wussies would not have lasted a minute in the 1960’s.

Speak for yourself

In reply to Rough? HA!

We had a black and white TV – somewhere about 24 inches in a console. It was attached to a tower and antenna. We could get the Hamilton station (20 miles away), the Kitchener station (30 miles) and a little fuzzy but we could get one Buffalo station (45 miles away). It was the 70s before we got a rotor and could move the antenna around. Daytime TV was way too boring – nothing good came on until after the 6 o’clock news. WKBW had a horror movie on at 11:30 on Friday nights – watched all the classics there – King Kong, Tarzan movies etc.

We too had the westbend popcorn maker – in avocado no less. You put oil in the bottom, then popcorn – it was kind like an electric frypan with a plastic dome lid that became the bowl when you were done. You put the butter in the top of the lid where the steam from the popping corn melted it and it drizzled slowly over the popcorn.

We lived 3 miles from the nearest store of any kind – it was a gas station that sold pop and chips and cigarettes. Sometimes if we were being too much of a pest, we’d get the money and ride our bikes or walk – that would get us out of the house for a long time and mom could get some peace.

But we weren’t bored. We helped some of the farmers with their haying – sometimes paid, sometimes not. We swam, rode our bikes and fished in the river in the summer, tobogganed and played hockey on a frozen pond in the winter.

James

B&W

In reply to Speak for yourself

We had the black and white TVs early on too. We didn’t get color until most of the programming was in color, and the color encoding made the B&W image almost unbeareable to watch.

We had rabbit ears to pick up the signals from “the hill” where all the TV and most of the radio station towers were located. I hung some tinfoil on them, and picked up an Appleton station once.

We lived in the city but only by some 10 yards or so. The village of Howard was on the other side of the road that was out back of our house.

I’d love to give it a try

In reply to Rough? HA!

Back then, when you left work, you left completly until the next morning. No cell, pager, Blackberry, etc.
You actually sociallized with people playing your card games and boardgame.
Today, you socialize with you keyboard more than people, and that’s if you can find someone who won’t throw obscenaties at you for no reason.
You still used and heard Please and Thank you. I good deed was still it’s just reward.

Simpler times, better times if you ask me.

You had a popcorn maker?

In reply to Rough? HA!

Man you were high tech back then. We just used a big pot, put oil in the pot (dad didn’t like when the butter would turn the popcorn brown) then in a smaller pot we had a stick of yes butter. Nobody was over weight from using the real butter either.

We had pong and that was such a big deal. Funny thing, we didn’t play pong until night time. We didn’t want to miss any action happening outside during the day.

TV, we had 2,5,7,9 and 11. We had 32 but like you it was always difficult to get a clear picture. As far as remotes went, we kids were the remote. Dad or Mom would say, kids turn on channel… And we ran to the TV and changed the channel. And don’t change the channel to fast either. Dad DID NOT want to call out the TV repair man.

Getting fat or not.

In reply to You had a popcorn maker?

My dad used to repair TV’s for spare $$ and fun.

Yeah, we ate things with real butter on them, drank whole milk, used real cream in our Eight O’ Clock coffee (50? a 3# bag at A&P!!) coffee. Cottage cheese. Bought stuff from farmers without a second thought. Bacon that actually had lean meat on it. Fuzzy Thurston’s and Max McGee’s Left Guard Steakhouse was a treat.

No one got fat back then.

My mother..

In reply to Getting fat or not.

Could not (and still can’t) cook. I grew up on chef boyardee pizza in a box, kraft macaroni and cheese, fish sticks and la choy chinese food. I still can’t look at that crap without my stomach rolling. My younger sister, however, still eats that crappy pizza as her comfort food..

Home cooking

In reply to My mother..

The two best things to happen to my Moms’ cooking were the smoke alarm and the timer on the microwave.

Ha!

In reply to Home cooking

We had to explain that the smoke alarm was NOT a timer. I never EVER ate the bottom of a biscuit growing up. We had to put two tops together because the bottoms were always burnt. Any type of meat was cooked to the consistancy of beef jerky. (My mother is terrified of ‘undercooking’) it drives her insane that I eat steak rare.

Meat

In reply to Ha!

Mom forgot to turn the chicken on the BBQ one time for a big family gathering and actually served the chicken pink on one side and black on the other. YUK! That was NASTY. But the grape jelly omelets were the worst. Do you know what color you get when you mix purple and yellow? Yack!

grape jelly omelets???

In reply to Ha!

That’s just not right.. Are you sure that wasn’t some sort of punishment?

Them Omelets? Could be . . .

In reply to Ha!

She had to threaten us to get us to eat it. But the rule at our house was you sit at the table until you finish eating – no matter how nasty it was. If she cooked it, we ate it. My brother sat at the table for a day and a half one time over a bowl of oatmeal. Then he taught himself how to spontaneously vomit . . .

You know..

In reply to Ha!

As a parent, I shouldn’t be impressed by your brother’s learned skill, I can’t help it though, that’s classic. I guess he found a way around that rule!

My kid had a chocolate cookie, a banana and a glass of milk for dinner last night. I’m not holding out for the mother of the year award..

Man, y’all are makin me feel really old

In reply to Rough? HA!

Looks like sleepin’dawg, Too Old For IT and JamesRL are fairly close to my age from their comments. Dawg’s RAMDAC unit is a bit before my day, but see how much of this you can relate to:

We only had channels 3, 10 and 13 once we got a TV which was black and white. Before that we used to listen to shows like the Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Flash Gordon, Amos ‘n Andy and others on a 1940 Capehart radio/record player. It was the most high-tech thing we had before TV. The radio had push buttons and the record player would play something like 10 records on BOTH sides… yep, it would flip each one over and play side 2 then stack them vertically.

I walked to school every day, we didn’t have a bus — it also doesn’t snow in Sacramento. My sophomore and junior years in high school I took a bus to school (17 miles) and WALKED home during tennis season after practice. That’s a nice 3 hour walk – especially in the heat of El Dorado County.

In the IT world I go back to the IBM 1620 programmed in machine language. I later worked on Philco 900, RCA Spectra 70(remember mag cards?), Burroughs 1620 (4.8K memory) no disk, 1800, 3500, 4700, IBM tab equipment including 024 CARD PUNCH
026 PRINTING CARD PUNCH
029 CARD PUNCH
047 TAPE TO CARD PRINTING PUNCH
056 CARD VERIFIER
059 CARD VERIFIER
077 COLLATOR
080 SORTER
082 SORTER
083 SORTER
084 SORTER
085 COLLATOR
088 COLLATOR
101 STATISTICAL SORTER
188 COLLATOR
129 CARD DATA RECORDER
402 ACCOUNTING MACHINE
403 ACCOUNTING MACHINE
405 ACCOUNTING MACHINE
407 ACCOUNTING MACHINE
420 ACCOUNTING MACHINE
513 REPRODUCER
514 REPRODUCER
517 GANG SUMMARY PUNCH
519 ORIGINATING PUNCH
523 GANG SUMMARY PUNCH
528 ACCUMULATING REPRODUCING PUNCH
557 INTERPRETER
and some others I just don’t remember.
Then there was the System/3 mod 10 and the 5496 data recorder (96 column cards), and there was a Data General Nova somewhere in there. Then came the IBM 360-40 and 360-65 followed by the 370-125 and 370-125 II, then a 370-135, 370-165. Then 4300 (very first model) then the 4331 and 4381. That was followed by a 3090, then a 9672, then a 7060-H50 (current system) and we now have a z890 being installed.

Of course with all those machines there was also a ton of associated peripheral equipment.

I’ve been primarily an Assembler and COBOL programmer with a few years of RPG (1967-75 on Burroughs and IBM) with a touch of Fortran.

I have also worked with PC and servers since the beginning including machines from Tandy, IBM, AST, HP, Gateway, Compaq, DEC (desktops and Alpha server) and Dell.

So what I turn 57 Thursday, I don’t feel like it, so I don’t think about it much at all. Life has been interesting so far. What will technology bring tomorrow?

Turn the Radio On …

In reply to Man, y’all are makin me feel really old

Seems like we always had TV, but mom would rather listen to Don McNeill’s Breakfast club and Paul Harvey on dad’s old Hallicrafters S-38 on top of the fridge.

Grandma had a 5-tube radio that had replaced an even older Atwater Kent.

On the other hand…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

We never had A.D.D.
A terrorist was something from a far away country.
We did not have to wonder if a crazy dude from a far away land, who did not like our way of life was going to come and kill us.
We did not know AIDS
We had no MAD COWS
We were not permanantly traumatized by age 5
The news was about what happen within a 100 miles radius and a little politics
We didn’t have to worry much about being kidnapped, raped, killed for no apparent reason
Having a mom and dad at your house was still “the norm”
Not alot of us knew what a gay or lesbien was or the contraversy they would “cause”
We did not have the dreaded “outsourcing” taking our future away to deal with
Your dad did not have a “career”, but he still had a job
We could play around at the pool all day, under the sun, without the need for sunblock, UVA and UVB could of been radio channels for all we knew
Lunch came from mom’s heart and hands, not from the freezer.
Dad actually came home at 6 and still had energy to play with us.

Need i go on?!?!?

To each his own i guess. We had it tough, they have it tough, just a different kinda of it. Makes me kinda like the innoncence that time gave us.

Never had ADD

In reply to On the other hand…

We never had ADD. Dad had a leather belt. My uncle had grand-dad’s leather razor strop. The other uncle had “the board of education”.

We turned out just fine.

We didn’t have to worry much about being kidnapped, raped, killed for no apparent reason .. tho we did have the occasional “dirty old man” we all stayed clear of. Except the girl in the too-tight shorts who would visit him now and again, and seemed to leave smiling. But she was a slut, and we stayed lcear of her too. Dad woulda whipped my butt until I couldn’t sit for a week.

You could come home from your tour with the military, get drunk the whole weekend, and start your job with the local factory Monday morning, and stay there 20 years. Company loyalty? Employee loyalty? Who knew?

Where did you grow up?!

In reply to On the other hand…

I grew up along the southern California coastline. We had air raid drills every Friday at 10 am. We had drop drills, where we had to get under our desks and cover our necks with our hands. We were constantly told to fear the Russians and other Communists. Then came Viet Nam and we got to see dead bodies on our TV sets every night, and the kid next door was scared that he was going to be the next one drafted. We talk about a gentler, safer time, but we were constantly barraged with things to fear, like nuclear war. And even though I was very young, I remember standing in line with everyone else in my community to get a Polio vaccine on a sugar cube. Cancer wasn’t as prevelant, but it was far more deadly, as were heart attacks and infections. Every generation has their own junk to deal with. Different isn’t always better – or worse!

Grew up in …

In reply to Where did you grow up?!

… Green Bay, WI

Went to high school for a year and a half in Green Bay, the rest in Rhinelander WI.

Sympathy

In reply to Grew up in …

You probably didn’t have to drop under your desk because there were Nike bases all over your community – but we never had to shovel sunshine off the sidewalk, so I guess it’s about even!

Shveling Partly Cloudy

In reply to Sympathy

Not sure about sunshine, but I’ve shoveled more than my share of “partly cloudy” out of the driveway.

Hahahahahaha

In reply to Shveling Partly Cloudy

Now that’s funny! Thanks for the laugh!!

Crazy dude

In reply to On the other hand…

“We did not have to wonder if a crazy dude from a far away land,
who did not like our way of life was going to come and kill us”

I know…Bush is a bit crazy

…

In reply to Crazy dude

I’m sure he was referring to the likes of Khadaffi, bin-Laden, and the ever popular nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

OTOH, I do remember when Chicago’s south-side graveyards were solid Kennedy during the Kennedy-Nixon election cycle. And we thought this was normal.

I hear ya Chilin

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I can relate to that…Where I grew up we did not get electricity until I was 13 y/o and I was the 12th born of 18 kids. TV was 2 channels (on a good day). We had one radio station AM until the time shortly before my high school graduation when they started an FM station and even then it was not even a stereo transmission.

We didn’t have video games and such…although there was one family on the road we lived on that had an old Atari system that I played once…Pong was the game if I remember correctly. Fun was riding bikes, sledding in winter, and what ever else you could think of outdoors. Indoor fun was board games and cards. But that was only if you had enough time or energy after doing farm chores and other necessities of living on a rural dairy farm in the early 70’s up here in northern Michigan.

My father jokes that for years he had a remote for the TV that never needed batteries…until all of the kids grew up and moved out.

Thanks for the lite blast on new times and a trip to yesterday…

Mike

Burbs of Philly

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Grew up a stones throw from the city line in Cheltenham. We had a nice suburban home with a wooded area behind. Kind of a “Leave it to Beaver”/Andy Griffith place to grow up. My grade school was across the street and there were plenty of kids to play with. Never had AC or cable (only 7 channels) and we had a partyline rotary dial phone!

When strapping my kids into car seats I marvel at how my Dad used to stick me on my older brothers lap with no seatbelts and drive a family of 8 down the back roads of Jersey at 90 miles an hour!

We all survived.

Lord i feel old

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

grew up in the ?burbs of Miami. elementary school was about half a mile away, jr high I was about 100 yards from minimum bus distance that was 2 miles
the 7-11(about a mile away) was open from 7am to 11pm and was enclosed by heavy bug screens (could have cut your way in with a butter knife but that would be wrong) our doors were locked when we left for more the a few days grocery store was a mile and a half with a movie and a little restaurant we walked every ware (didn?t have a car till i was in my teens. my mom didn?t drive) or took a bus. While there was no snow it was far more interesting to walk in a thunderstorm then snow would ever be
first encounter with a computer was in high school we got to learn programming on a mainframe at the collage(fortunately not on punch cards)we did build a kit computer (came with 1k but we added a 4k kit)and programmed it in machine code (with switches) and watched the pretty lights

You’ve got to be kidding.

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I can’t believe that I just read an article from someone just over 30 complaining about how good the youngsters of today have over his generation. I am nearing twice 30 and still work in this crazy, fast paced world of computer technology. The first IBM PCs hit the general market when I was in “The 30 Something crowd”. They did not have multi-gigabyte drives or memory but did cost thousands of dollars for a very bare bones system. If you could afford a hard drive, it was 10 MB or less. There were only a handful of applications and many of these did not run very well. Networking and the Internet? Networking was communications over modems at speeds often below 300 baud. Imagine getting any work done at that speed.

He references the Atari 2600 — I’m talking about Pong with two giant squares being bounced back and forth by two vertical lines. And, people acutally spent time playing these games. They did not have many other electronic game options. Home entertainment? There were no DVD movies (or even VHS)or cable. You received nothing but a few local channels with very limited viewing options and often needed to become part of the antennae system to get a viewable picture.

But, people played board games face-to-face instead of with some never-met stranger throw wires and switches. People talked on the telephone when they wanted to and not whenever some device in their pocket rang. People could drive and think or listen to the radio, instead of participate in a conference or support call while narrowly avoiding collisions on a very crowded highway.

Would I give up today’s technology for a return to a simpler world. You bet.

I remember black and white TV

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I was a kid in the 50’s and we had one small black and white TV console, maybe like 13″, that the whole family watched together. There were only 3 or 4 channels I think.

On Friday nights we all sat outside and listened to radio programs like The Shadow, honestly I can’t remember the names (senility). We played board games, like Monopoly and Candyland (my favorite).

Damn I’m old.

BW TV

In reply to I remember black and white TV

I was a kid in the 60s and we had one TV that was black and white. A Zenith. We didn’t get color TV until 1979. And we didn’t have cable either, just had the regular channels until dad added that convertor box on top that picked up the UHF signals so we could watch wrestling or reruns of the old Buck Rogers serials or Flash Gordon, Charlie Chan movies. We had one of those great big Zenith radios with the green “eye” at the top that received AM and shortwave radio. That thing was cool. Wish I still had it.

even older, dude!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Just to even things up – I don’t think just_chilin would have last 5 minutes in the ’60s…since there was no video games at all. We had to go outside and play…with the other neighborhood kids! Imagine that! Out in the sunshine and actually paying tag, hide and seek, or kickball, doing *shock* exercise! I remember when the Atari came out and bought it and sat there and played with it, teaching my eldest son how to play “Surround” (that thing cheated, too!). At the time, that WAS the cutting edge of technology. Otherwise, computers were mainframes that assembled the lines of code from the card readers and compiled into source code, to print out reports for business and research personal. Computer geeks were very booring at that time – not cool.

…but,I taught him everything I know

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Don’t be too hard on them,my little brother IS the Macintosh(well,one of them) security admin @ AOl in Reston-for real!Oh,and you forgot to mention our bbs’s,AT&T unix,my Apple1 in 1976,w/4k of ram!Or the controller of the research reactor at school,or charter membership of 2600.I’m very impressed w/the newest generation.Well,gotta go to work,the manager is out for a family emergency and those six benches aren’t automated yet!Then there’s the php the boss wants,the blades at the Pet Care center…

1980? Try 1960…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Don’t get me wrong I agree with you on the youth of today however why don’t you think 20 years before 1980. Hummm , first TV I saw was Black and White and only had 3 channels to watch. At the 50+ times I could bore you as well 🙂

Yes 1960

In reply to 1980? Try 1960…

That is when I started in the computer biz. Today, I feel like I am a billionaire with what I have on my desktop compared to what was available in the early 60’s.

It would have been impossible to match the performance and to match the storage, both memory and disc, would have cost billions of dollars at $1 per byte.

You had it bad??????

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Try remembering back to when TV was black and white, the screen was only 13″”.
The library was too far to walk to so you had to wait for your parents to take you and bring you back. AND they waited for you right there in the library.

Video games???? Computers????? I remember when I was in high school that my dad took a course at the U and had punchcards. When mom went back to school, homework was done on a Sinclar with the programs/memory on cassettes programmed.

No I did not have to walk thru snow (being in Tucdon we ask our parents what snow was) nor was I deprived of indoor plumbing. But the telephone was a party line and you had to make sure you answered on the correct set of rings. TV had three stations and the wide outdoors was our playground.

Oh, to be able to go back to the simple life of yesteryear.

It’s all relevant

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

The hardships of my youth do not translate directly to the issues young people face today. Kids and teens these days have their own set of pressures and hardships, such as:

1. Which songs to download for their iPod,
2. Getting to the next level of Grand Theft Auto,
3. Which meal to order at McDonald’s,
4. Which shows to TiVo,
5. …well… I guess that’s about it.

They are spoiled!!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Yep, kids of today are spoiled. I teach at a local community college and I have a class of high school juniors and seniors. They never bring their books, pens, or paper. They only want the ‘net and some site called “Myplace”. I’m in the electronic and computer maintenance department and we received around 30 IBM Selectrics as a donation. I had the students use them for a couple of assignments. I never heard so much crying and whining in my life. They used so much Liquid Paper it was funny. I had to teach them how to center and align the paper. I had to explain that their are no justification icons either. They had to do it on their own. Boy did I have fun those few days.

Abe

45 and don’t agree

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Hey,

I get your points (and heck…we only had Pong)…however,

We also used to be able to hang out without worrying about getting raped, busted, or kidnapped.

We used to be able to go play in the creek without worrying about those funny people that live down there. Sure, we had Ziggy the Creek bum but he was relatively harmless…he just wanted to show you his special rock collection and he smelled kinda strange.

There were drive in movies that you could pile people in the trunk and for a couple bucks you had a big outdoor party.

The air outside was nice.

The water that came to your house could be drank.

You could pick up a car for the weekend for $50.00 and you’d own it afterward.

Remember cruzing? Ya, that was when gas was 25 or 35 cents a gal! Ouch!

Come on guys…we had all kinds of $%^$^$^ we could do that are not options to kids now days…

And if we got caught…the local cop (we called em Pigs back them) would drive us home and have a good talk with us and our parents! Of course Mom didn’t have to work…but then that is another story!

Anyway…IMO things change and if you have a hard time dealing with the fact that things were different…or you spend time worrying about what others have today that you missed out on you will let the world pass you by.

Last night I went to a Staind concert with my 13 y/o…and had a blast. Don’t think the ringing in my ears will go away as quick as it used to. :~)

lucky you, didn’t have to worry about….

In reply to 45 and don’t agree

I grew up in the Vancouver suburbs and I’m older tehn 45. We did have to worry about the freaks (rapist, kidnappers et al) and I.T. was rough then. It’s rough now. So…. IMHO, bosses are meaner, wages are lower and we keep doing IT cause of the rush of actually “getting it”. Come on admit it – we are all just a bunch of IT junkies, waiting to just fix it and move on to the next problem, ie fix. Over 20, 30, 40 or 50 doesn’t make it any easier or harder. We are I.T. and if it was easy for more then a week we would be bored 🙂

To all you ancient tech nuts

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I’ll bet none of you remember the kits to build
your own crystal radio or the first radios run on a large drycell battery,having a old cylinder type phonograph,(Victrola with the little white dog on its front), electric lights that hung by a wire from the ceiling ( because fancy light fixtures were unavailable or too expensive. Central heating was to open all the inside doors in the house so the heat from the cookstove could circulate.And neon lights, marvelous! I have seen all this technology come and go and have enjoyed it all Can’t wait fo the next tech wonders

Second hand tech memories

In reply to To all you ancient tech nuts

While I didn’t experience these on a daily basis, I did see hints of it while visiting grand parents, especially in isolated farm houses.

Makes me glad I missed the early years that lead up to today’s technologies.

Kits are cool

In reply to To all you ancient tech nuts

I had a couple of the Radio Shack or I should say Archer Kits. You put the springs in the holes and connected them with wires. I think I also had a couple of the Heath kits….

73’s

How about those of us over 50?

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

When I was a kid we had no electronic games whatsoever. We played board games like Risk, Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land and Chinese Checkers and Chess.

We had black and white television with 4, count them, 4 stations (ABC, CBS, NBC and Channel 11). They all went off the air around midnight.

Jiffy Pop was the newest, coolest thing.

There were no Doritos, only Fritos.

There were no cordless phones. No pagers. No cell phones. No digital watches. No quartz movements for clocks.

We pulled up the dandelions in the yard by hand – there were no sprays to kill them.

When I was a little older, 16, we had one color tv set and 2 little black and white TV sets. I had a record player that played 78s and 331/3 and 45 records. It was mono.

I didn’t get a stereo record player with two speakers unti I was about 17 years old.

Reel-to-reel tapes were the coolest things to have – you could play the radio and actually record what was on it! The sound was awful, but it was like magic to us.

And then there were 8-track tapes and car stereos.

There were gasoline wars at the local service stations – I remember buying gas for as low as 18 cents a gallon.

All watches had to be wound.

Texas Instruments had not come out with a handheld calculater yet.

I used a 10 key adding machine.

FM stereo radio was very new.

When I went to college in 1971, the only computer science class offered was Fortran. We all carrried around shoeboxes full of our homework.

Most cities had a morning newspaper and an evening newspaper – owned by different people.

It was ok to shoot fireworks on the 4th of July – we had bottle-rocket wars in the back yard with my parent’s blessings. None of us were dumb enough to get hurt.

Playgrounds were fun – and you could get hurt playing on them – but they were fun!

I have seen amazing technological advances since I was a kid. I will never forget watching TV when we reached the mooon.

I make a good living doing stuff (Enterprise System Management) that had not even been imagined when I was in high school or college.

I can keep up with the stuff by learning constantly – keeps me young.

My children are 30-somethings

In reply to How about those of us over 50?

You only stay young by learning.

My latest learning adventure is a Palm application that exchanges data with a Web site, and I’m writing it on a laptop computer.

PDA, Web, laptop computer – things which once existed only in the imaginations of people such as Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.

Want to know what the next 20 or 50 years will bring? Read some good science fiction and let your imagination soar 😉

Just think of my granny

In reply to My children are 30-somethings

Yeah, I think I’ve seen tech change in my just-about sixty years, but I believe my Grandma saw more. She was born before the Wright brothers; crossed the Atlantic by boat before WWI; lived on a farm all her life. But she saw elecrification, TV (with 2 channels only), plumbing in the main house, but not the bunkhouse.

She was still going strong when she watched pictures of Armstong on the moon.

Now that life called for some flexibility.

My dad trained as an electrica engineer during WWII and his physics prof told him that space flight was an impossibility. The last days of his life were spent modifying computer hardware and trying to write minimal editting programmes for telecom students.

Yeah, we’ve seen change, and I’m sure there’s more to come.

Cell phone and Heinlein

In reply to My children are 30-somethings

Don’t forget the cell phone that one of Robert Heinlein’s characters had. It was in the saddle of the horse he was riding while at boarding school.

LOL

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Now that was funny! I am sure when our kids are in their 30’s they will say that their kids have it easy. No flying cars, people had to use money to buy things, people caught colds and got cancer. People died under 100 years of age and violent crime was possible. Man, our kids have it tough.

No Gambling Either

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

If you wanted to play the lottery, tough luck. The only place in town to gamble legally was Bingo at the Catholic Church. You would never had made it back in 1965.

You youngsters! I just don’t know…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

If you wanted porn in my day, you got it the honest way. You joined the Boy Scouts and worked on paper drives, collecting and bundling newspapers for recycling. The hardest thing about getting the porn–usually Playboy, something else if we were real lucky–was sneaking it past our mothers.

Atari 2600? The only 2600 I remember was my Flexible Flyer. (That’s a sled, by the way!)

Cable? Oh, you mean what connects the antenna to the TV. If we were lucky, we got all three networks–NBC, CBS, & ABC. If we were real lucky, we knew somebody who had a color TV and would invite us over to watch Howdy Doody. And _I_ was the remote control for my Dad.

You kids would never have made it in 1960.

Damn skippy … now turn down that wretched music

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

>>>We had the Atari 2600! With games like “Space Invaders” and “asteroids” and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square!

Some of couldn’t even afford this technological marvel and we were stuck playing crappy Intellivision or even worse Merlin, a stupid red hand held game that just beeped at you.

>>>You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel

And you didn’t push a pansy @$$ button you had to turn a friggin knob, which would ultimately break off and then you had to use pliers. Sheesh!

So quit your whining about $4 venti half decaf skinny lattes and listen to your elders!

Technology :(

In reply to Damn skippy … now turn down that wretched music

Our Family’s first TV was Black & White – that same one is where I remember watching the Assasination of President Kennedy…that was a terrible day but was brought to us by that marvel of new technology – TV.

🙁

Ah, yes – I remember

In reply to Technology :(

That day.
I was too young to understand all of the ramifications of the day, but I remember watching that film clip over and over. Even the air seemed heavy that day and the song of the birds was muted. Or was it my imagination?
There was the same eerie quietness when Elvis died and when Lennon (John) died. As if even nature oberved a moment of silence.

I have to use

In reply to Damn skippy … now turn down that wretched music

pliers to turn the heat on and off in my car. It doesn’t really have anything to do with this topic. I’m just to cheap to have it fixed or to buy the new car that I desperately need.

I’m Gonna Catch It For This One…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

but what the heck –

Since I’m part of the older generation here (it was on my advice that God decided to call it dirt), I’ll give you a couple of things I remember…

Our first TV in LA that I remember had the following channels:

2 – CBS
4 – NBC
5 – KTLA (local LA station)
7 – ABC
11 – KTTV (local LA station)
13 – KCOP (local LA station)

All black and white – remember the test patterns when the station was not broadcasting??

I still own a bunch of 78s and 45s and somewhere I have a 16.

Porn?? What was that? If you wanted to see naked people you got a copy of National Geographic.

Cars did not have seatbelts or air-conditioning (my first ACd car was my ’72 240Z) and we didn’t get AC in the house until we moved to our new place in ’57.

Schools were not air-condidioned. And the movies in class came on multiple reels (show of hands, how many A/V folks do we have here??) that had to be changed in the middle of the film.

My first programming was done in Machine Language on punch cards and sent electronically from our campus to UCLA to be processed on an IBM 1400 series machine and then the results were printed on our remote printer.

My first PC was a Heathkit H-89 with 64K of RAM and a single, single-sided, single-density 5.25″ floppy disk drive and CP/M for the OS.

One last thing – the Funny Paper Man used to read the Sunday Comic Pages over the radio every week. I’d lay on the floor in front of the radio and follow along as he read Dick Tracy, The Phantom and others.

I’ll quit for now – I know I’ve painted the target.

jdg

Your Schools Have Air-Conditioning?!

In reply to I’m Gonna Catch It For This One…

I live in Australia, and I don’t know of any schools that have airconditioning other than in the computer labs. The old days must still be happening downunder.

By the way – when I was a kid there were only pinball machines and it used to cost me money everytime I played it. The only other thing I had was a CB radio. Oh .. and one other small thing called the Great Outdoors. Catching fish and chasing girls was more fun than computers.

your first PC

In reply to I’m Gonna Catch It For This One…

was an Abacus

So what if you painted the target? At your age it’s not like it’s a MOVING target!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ahh, yes . . . but those were the Good Old Days!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

“Thirty-something”? What a kid . . . speaking from the vantage point of a wise old 56-year-old, I find that I must also point out a few other things – “hardships”, if you will, that also had a sunny side:

Living outside a small town in SE Pennsylvania, my only means of transportation was my bicycle. Really sucked in bad weather, but – I was NEVER over-weight, out of condition, or dependant on anyone else for a ride.

Whenever I did leave home to go visit a friend or go into to town to buy a new model car or other diversion, I never had to worry about locking the bicycle to something immobile. Only a thief would mess with somebody else’s stuff, and back then, one CERTAINLY did not want to be branded a thief, or any other unsavory person.

Y’see, back in those days, “honor” and “character” meant something to people. Of course, that was back before big government had it’s fingers into everybody’s lives.

I can so clearly remember my parents leaving for work in the morning and leaving me alone, to leave the house in time to catch the school bus; I was never lectured about locking the house, because it was unnecessary. We locked the house if we were going on vacation for a couple weeks, and that was as much to keep out the racoons, as to keep out any vagrants.

Until the 70’s, we never locked the car when we went shopping downtown. Again, there was no need. After all, who in their right mind would want to be known as un-trustworthy?

Computers weren’t even hinted at back then; for entertainment on a rainy day, a good book was just as much fun, a lot more educational, more portable, and much more memorable. Not only that, but there were other ramifications; for example, this entire text is written without benefit of any stupid “spell-check” program. I learned how to write by studying the writings of others, not by hearing about it on television. I also learned the value of proof-reading my own work, and making damned sure it was right before I sent it out for somebody else to read.

Yeah, I’m a geek myself – after Hurricane Wilma a few weeks ago, we were without broadband/cable t.v. for – ohmygod! – two weeks! The t.v. I hardly missed at all; I fudged around a little, until I was able to get one or two local channels via the built-in antennae, and that was good enough. But no broadband? That was pure hell.

I suppose you could say something about how “hard” you had it, ‘way back whenever, but you could also, just as easily, choose to remember how absolutely GREAT it was back then, when the biggest worry about going to school was that some bully might knock you down and steal your lunch – not that you might get shot.

Sure, technology has provided us with countless amazing new things, but unfortunately society has also introduced some new things – rampant drug abuse, including (especially) alcoholism; refusal of the vast majority of people to take responsibility for their own behaviors, and acceptance of the goody-goody response to criminal behavior, as so espoused by the illustrious (and horribly misguided) Dr. Spock, who was so afraid of traumatizing a child by administering actual punishment for breaking the rules . . .

I’d give up the technology in a heartbeat, if it meant I wouldn’t have to fear the world into which my children and grandchildren have come. I really pity them, for they will have to deal with an anti-christian society where all those traditional, time-proven values have disappeared.

God help them all . . .

Amen to that

In reply to Ahh, yes . . . but those were the Good Old Days!

Part of the reason we didn’t have to worry about people stealing our stuff was that besides having honor and character, the vast majority of us had at least one parent home to help with homework or whip our butt when we mis-behaved.

On top of that, every neighbor was like a second mom. If you mis-behaved at a friend’s house, their mom would scold you for it… then they’d go call your mom and when you got home you’d get your butt whipped.

I probably only got whipped 3 times when I was young, and to my parent’s credit, I have ot say I deserved every one. AND I never thought of running away, rebelling OR suing my parents for abuse. Kids today have absolutely no idea how easy they have it.

In The Way Back

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

The 80’s!! I was at the “Fort” in the 70’s where lots of things were happening but nothing like you can pick up at Wal Mart for a few bucks today. Incredible is it not? Now state that for the 50’s & 60’s as well “kid”…. I come from the vacuum tube generation and they are still way fun to get working. Stuff there is big enough you can hand-build your own components. I look at a SMT component thru magnification – OK I see it. So how do I pick it up?

TV and radio stations signing off early

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Do you remember those days?? And that’s fairly recents. In the late 80s, 2 of the local statios would sign off about 1 or 2 in the morning and come back up at 6. Even one of the radio stations. In the mid to late 80s, the station would sign-off at 7 in the evening everyday. It was an AM station at the time before it branched off into a FM station.

Did any of the stations in your areas (TV or radio) do that??

Work time…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Hi y’awl from sunny (not) Scotland…

I’ve come over to this discussion from an interesting one
regarding staffing levels for IT depts.

I notice from jobs that “we’re” all working in IT… I take it you
guys are posting in your home time. Though I feel that is not the
case!

If not, this forum may not be a good place to reference when I’m
asking for more staff ’cause we’re busy…

Keep up the humour… I’m so busy I don’t know what to do or
where to go next… so hey! I’ll just surf for a bit!!!

RCUK!

The hardware perspective… some guys give me the creeps!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I got into what we nowadays call IT at the age of 12, saved a year for my Commodore 64 Home Computer, learning BASIC from a school’s magazine, one episode per month. In those days one really needed to know a thing or two about computers! No knowledge, no action, just a blinking cursor and a lot of “syntax errors”! No fool-proof Windows “for dummies”-interface! My machine had 64K RAM, a lot more than that Vic20 my friend had! Using a tape drive at first (not the hard drive, no, a real audio tape), getting in gear with a TURBO program (the early winzip). But then the revelation came (after some hard saving time): the (really) floppy disk! No more REW or FF, no more “press play on tape”. Fast (it only took 3 minutes to load the next episode of “Summer Games”), cheap and handy!
I could go on sketching my view on the computer history, but there’s a point here:
When I look at the current clock speeds, the memory sizes, the persistent memory choices, the available resources, I get the creeps each time a newbie complains that his computer is not fast enough, that he can’t find what he’s looking for on the Internet, that he can’t get his program to work (but is so lazy he doesn’t even look at the readme or help files)!! “My browser on my P4 isn’t fast enough, shall I install a 160G hard drive instead of this 40G one to speed things up?” Please do! If you don’t care to get a basic knowledge of your computer, I don’t care if you misspend your money. After all, you’ve already misspent enough buying that pc in the first place!

This has been fun reading

In reply to The hardware perspective… some guys give me the creeps!

This brought about a lot of memories. I started with a deckwriter at a blazing 300 baud.

I love this field and am still at it after 25 years.

Many of the comments are really funny to me since I remember farther back. I am 74 and still working. Computers are the greatest.

We used a Decwriter

In reply to This has been fun reading

A long looong time ago. When we implemented new software, we took one of the decwriters to my boss’s house and destroyed it with a sledge hammer.

Decwriters

In reply to We used a Decwriter

I used one in University in 1980. There were a few CRT terminals but they were used by operators and the few that were left for students had line ups. So most of us did most of our work on Decwriters. I took a Fortran course, and learned SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) on one.

Believe it or not, we have one not 25 feet from my office. Its got label stickers on tractor feed and we use it like a typewriter.

James

You can still buy the ribbons?

In reply to Decwriters

This one I have to ask. But where does one buy ribbons for DECwriters? Some ancient computing support house out Brazil or something? LOL.

Actually, I am happy to know that someone is still using one.

Oh this is too much fun!

– beads

Teletypes and DEC Writers

In reply to We used a Decwriter

When I was in college, the teletype machines with tape punches were the state of the art in terminals. I played games like Star Trek and Hammaurabi on them for hours.

Then the school brought in the DEC Writers. Those were nice because of how fast they printed.

But nirvana was the time sharing system with the VT-100 terminals.

Then I got out to the real world where I encountered my first IBM 5250, a green screen terminal connected to honest to goodness IBM business silicon.

The thing was huge and had a keyboard that challenged the VIC20 in terms of size. But it lasted forever.

About five years ago, when the company I was working at was disposing of hardware, I picked up a 5250, just for the heck of it. It was still working when I got it.

It is good for showing the kids what it was like in the bad old days.

My 1st puter was….

In reply to The hardware perspective… some guys give me the creeps!

A Tandy Model 2. I got it after Christmas, the year of my 11th birthday. I got everything except the disk drive. If I had any sense I should have gotten it. And got a 2 books on programming. One was for BASIC for the Tandy and the other was for the MIC 20. To date, I have yet to ever see one, but it didn’t matter because the BASIC programs worked on my computer too. The first program I wrote successfully and was considered long was a program to play a Christmas song form the tape drive. I can’t think of the name, but it’s one of the famous ones everyone sings every year (any other time I can remember it…”almost” senior moment).

I resent that remark

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I am 22 and have been in the IT field for about 7 years. Thats right I started working at my high school when I was 15 supporting 500 – 600 computers with one other person. Where I live I am surrounded by 3, 300 acre farms. The area is quickly developing but I grew up in a farm. We have 5 acres with horses, cats, dogs, rabbits. I used to get up at 6 in the morning to help the neighbor milk his herd. When I got into video games the original nintendo just came out. That was the only game system my parents ever bought. I bought the rest. I also built my last three computers on my own. I have always had at least one job and am in my 5th year of college. I’m not sure what age category was originally tageted. I understand if you talk about the current youth say 10-12 and under right now but it wasn’t specific enough. My parents are the ones that bragged about walking naked in 3 feet of snow to school every day. Just wanted a clarification.

It’s called progress–thank goodness!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Unless some terrorist group actually does succeed in nuking the entire globe and we all (who are left) have to go back to square one, then each generation will ALWAYS have it better than the last thank goodness!
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I can guarantee you I wouldn’t have liked living without AIR CONDITIONING! Or without TELEVISION! My grandmother’s form of entertainment was a hayride or a bicycle, and when she was 25, she and her 6 (yes 6) sisters took a road trip across the country in an old Ford and it had NO AC–they took turns sitting on a block of ice to cool off! A practical joke was taking the Sears catalogue out of the outhouse so the next person had nothing to use as toilet paper.
I also like the fact that I likely won’t die of “influenza” or the black plague and that Jack the Ripper would likely not get away with his crimes today due to DNA testing!
So, you ARE correct… the kids of today DO have it better, and their kids will have it better than they, and so on and so on! It’s just the way the world evolves! … and we should all be thankful it does.

“Die of influenza”

In reply to It’s called progress–thank goodness!

Ooops! Possibly bad timing…

ur rt

In reply to “Die of influenza”

I actually thought about that when I typed it, but I hoped my point would still be made. I probably should have said “cold” instead of flu.

A different time

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

How ’bout this one…anybody remember when the first portable transistor radio’s were introduced to the public? Or better yet, the very first hand held calculators? Yeah baby now that’s climbing into the “way back machine”…(I stole that one from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, it is a time machine for you who are wondering) At first, the calculators were very expensive and then after a few years went by they became super cheap, some used them for give aways in promotions, Banks would put one in a check book for instance.

Transistors and calculators

In reply to A different time

I still have my Dad’s transistor radio and I also have my first calculator that I paid $400 for back in my first or second year of college, I also still have my slide rule (raise your hand if you have yours).
Let’s face it the good old days were fun but truth be told I’m having just as much fun now. Plus I can pull out my VIC-20 every once in awhile and do some real assembly language work.

Yep, still have mine …

In reply to Transistors and calculators

Still have my slide rule from senior year of high school (1965) – a Log/Log/Duplex/Multi-Trig/Vector (nope, not a brand name, just an indication of functionality).

Been in the business for 32 years now, still going strong.

Thanks to all for the stroll down memory lane.

Yes I remember….

In reply to A different time

We had some portables that were about 4″x8″x12″. I remember “fixing” one as my first exposure to circuit boards.

As for calculators, I remember “reverse polish notation” types. I actually got pretty good at it.

James

Mr. Peabody

In reply to A different time

Yeah, caught that – lol. I use the joke quite liberally with one of my developers – “Mr. Poohbody” He still wants to live in a computer world full of NT 4.0 and since he isn’t all that great (mediocre) he’s Pooh. More concerned about his honey than in doing work. He lives for the way-back machine. Too bad he doesn’t have a boy named Sherman as well.

By the way. Do you know why those cartoons were taken off the air? Because they promoted “drug use” among other things. Underdog used a pill to become Underdog. Ahhh… progress.

– beads

Transistor Radios and having it easy

In reply to A different time

I can remember I got a transistor radio for my birthday when I was about 9 and it had printed right on the outside of the case that it was a 2 transistor radio. imagine that 2 whole transistors.
I agree about our childhoods were very different however I do not agree todays kids have it “easy” in all respects. I grew up in the midwest and had no recollection of the following types of things.
1. School shootings
2. Cheap and available addicting drugs
Crack
Extacy
Crystal Meth
3. Gang warfare with guns, drivebuy shootings
4. Internet issues
Identity theft
Perverts trolling
Kiddy scripting sites to tempt me
5. Telcom issues
Constant cell phone connectivity
Parents freaking over your cell bill
Cellular speed gossip gangs
Inability to own a cell phone (OH GOD)
6. Family issues
Parents with dayplanners for everyone
Tiger Woods parent syndrom
Drugs for every perceived childhood issue
The need to work and own a $20000 car
The need to work and own a $20000 wardrobe
7. Social
If I contracted STD it would not KILL me
6 year olds were not sexual offenders
Everything was NOT someone elses fault
The world did NOT OWE ME ANYTHING
8. Television
500 channels and no substance
One sided religious/political crap
News you cannot believe
$100 television bills

I think you are correct in that things are not the same but I don’t know they have it “easy”
Just different.

Choices

In reply to Transistor Radios and having it easy

While you can’t control everything in the above list, you can control some of the items.

I don’t need and dont own a $20,000 car or wardrobe. I may be a manager, but my wife can’t work. I haven’t owned a “new” car since when I was single, and even then it was an economy car.

Most of us can and should wean ourselves off of cell phones. We don’t have to give our kids dayplanners or try to be Tiger Woods type parents. When our kids didn’t enjoy soccer, we didn’t push them to stay. And you chose to have $100 TV bills. I know some parents who don’t own a TV – they watch the occasional movie on their computer’s DVD player, and go out to the odd movie.

James

I agree James

In reply to Choices

I was not talking about myself in the above list I was trying to relate to what I see many of the kids today facing as the choices they are forced to deal with everyday. The point I was trying to make was the younger generations do not have it easier just different. They have been afforded much more responsability at a much younger age and I think it is very hard on them but they are not allowed to show it.

What?

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Internet? Cable TV? Atari 2600? You young whipper-snapper. When I was a kid, we had B/W TV, no cable, computers flled LARGE rooms, microwaves were used in radars (I still remember an ad for a RADAR Oven), FM radio was what the rebels and geeks (myself included) listened to, there were 8-track tapes (although I had reel to reel), and cassettes did not show up in the stores until I was 16. ‘Course, I had to walk 20 miles to school, uphill each way, in the snow and the dark.
Not only do the kids have it better now, but us (or should that be “we”) older geeks are reaping the rewards of the fantastic technology advances ove the past 40 years. Let’s hope the government doesn’t screw up the advances too much

Amen!

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Preach it Brother! Preach It!

40+ thats nothing try this ….

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

when milk tasted like milk
not this lactose intolerable gunk
and it came in one flavor… whole

captain crunch really scraped the roof of your mouth and you luved it
honey combs was mouth size not bit size

went out in skates without knee, elbow pads or helmet we were tough.. pain has a way of teaching
the lesson of “only doing that once”

batman had his own muscles

big macs were size of whoppers maybe they were that size because you had one only once a year

jeans in 1 style..501’s underwear in 1 color ..white converse in one color..white adding any color other then black for your name was an automatic ass kickin

brown was brown ..yellow was yellow ..blue was blue they werent nouns(chocolate..sunflower..tourquise)

CURES: depression..work anxiety..get a job
attention deficite disorder-terrets-any mild to severe disorders..ass wouppin

catholic school … you survived it… u know who u are

a bj with pop rocks …..well we invented it
there I said

RE:40+ thats nothing try this ….

In reply to 40+ thats nothing try this ….

Amen!

Remember Sears ToughSkins, not really denim and it took months to break them in.
Remember rolling down a hill in a refrigerator box with 4 other kids, no pads, no helmets and we did it again and again until the box fell apart.

Remember tackle football with no pads or helmets during recess. ANd God help you if you got your uniform dirty! Those nuns were tough.

what I really worry about

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

is kids growing too dependent on technology.

How many elementary kids actually know how to add without a calculator?

How many middle school kids can write a paper well without a word processor that has spellcheck?

How many high school kids can compute a logarithm or square root without a calculator?

How many students actually learn from books anymore?

To be honest, I find the overuse of technology in schools disturbing…especially university level.

Math calculations

In reply to what I really worry about

I’m not sure how many people over the age of 40 or even 50 could compute a logarithm even before the calculator.

Using logs, with slide rules or log tables on the other hand was something that most scientists and engineers could do.

Calculating square roots might be a bit more common for those age groups. I vaguely remember a couple of techniques.

Don’t feel too bad–Technology on the university level…

In reply to what I really worry about

isn’t being as overused as you may think…at least not at the college I work at. I would say in general, you make a vaild point abput the overuse of technology. But as our world becomes more technology-based, unfortuantely the young ones have to know…and know earlier and earlier. But when it gets to the unversity level, then technology usage gets blurred. I don’t see a technology overusage when students can send email all over the country using Hotmail and Yahoo or can chat to 5 different people in 10 timezones. Now, if those same students could use a multimedia projector connected to a laptop do show how to use a “Smartboard” to teach a lesson, then that’s another story *laughing*. But that’s basically how it is at the college I’m currently working at.

Technology isn’t used enough and then to add more injury, outdated technology that’s barely compatible with current standards. With all of that being said, it doesn’t matter if someone can find the solution to x^4-2^2=1 using computer #1 (the brain) or computer #2 because the answer will still be wrong because there was no knowledge of how to use either computer

God man…

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I just think about how bad the kids today would be if they didn’t have PS2 and Xbox…

All we had was Coleco and Intellivision and PONG and that stuff…and we were bad enough…

Oh yeah…some of the kids today are already killers…oh well…there goes my hypothesis.

Who can remember when the essence of cool was to have……………….

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

a roach holder or clip made from an aligator clip with the teeth filed down.

[b]Dawg[/b] ]:)

When I was young

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

We actually had to carry the dishes into the dishwasher. none of us had domestic robots, nosiree! And we had to type too! when we wanted to communicate, we had to hit the keys one at a time, none of this voice recognition stuff, we had it tough back then. And we had to clean our house too, put the laundry into the washer, change it to the dryer take it out and, get this, we had to fold it! and if you didn’t fold it, it got wrinkles!!

I tell you, kids now days are spoiled with their roombas and housecleaning robots and being able to surf the web by talking to the computer.

Oh, and we had to drive ourselves too! I remember having an old Chevy pickup, 1999 I think it was, that you had to turn the headlights off by hand. If you didn’t, the battery went dead after a few hours. And the cars ran on gasoline. No fusion back then! They tried of course, but all the could do with fusion is either use more energy making it fuse than it put out or blow the hell out of everything within a mile or so. And everyone was worried about Global warming, Heck we didn’t need those islands anyway!

Yea my 13 yr old doesn’t understand either

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

I tell my 13 yr old son about teh $3K I plunked down for an Apple ][ with a 5 1/4″ floppy and no hard drive, and he just says “Yea right”, like computers have always been as they are now.
I still remember working on an IBM AT !!!
But then my dad used to build his own tubes, and created Heathkit short wave radios. So times they are changing expotentially. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not IMHO.

Paid $500 for a calculator

In reply to Yea my 13 yr old doesn’t understand either

Hah! I remember my ex paying $500 for a kit to build your an electric calculator (Heathkit?). All it did was the simple +, -, /, * and it was about 5″x8″x2″ and had to be plugged into the wall. Try carrying that in your purse.

Never heard it put so well.

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

Man;
I ‘ve never heard it put so well.
It may be funny now as we look back but I assure you that it wasn’t fun then, it was just life. It somehow seemed a lot simpler.
We took it as it came and didn’t complain as if someone owed us something due to our mere presence. Although we had many wishes and desires, we had no expectancies. Looking back on those years, I find the kids far more honest, and easier to deal with than the spoiled, arrogance that we call attitude we get today. And where do we look for the reason of today’s kids,and their arrogance hubris and general composure and attitude? The Parents.
And don’t give me the crap about I have to earn a living, I’m a Single Mom that make’s me more vulnerable, I’m too busy and all the other stupid excuses as to why people can’t teach their kids common sense basic courtesy and respect. When I was growing up, kids were something cute to look at, now I’d rather look at anythign than yet another spoiled brat stepping into the world demanding what the world owes him/her.
A parent, is not a Title, it’s a way of life and I wouldn’t give a nickel for most of the parents of the day. Want and example?.
You’re sitting in a restaurant and some woman decides her kid need’s a diaper change, “Right there on the table next to you”. There’s a kid running and screaming while your trying to have a conversation with your meal, with no parent in sight. I’m sitting with my wife and the woman on the left decides to breast feed on the spot withought a care n the world. Makes no attempt at covering up what we don’t need to see. These are the very same people who would demand respect. I’ve seen other women cover that area as a point of courtesy for the rest of us, for which I was grateful. I know it will come as a complete surprise to some, but not all of us want to see a mother’s breast exposed in public. It’s still considered a lack of self-respect and a disrespect for those around you and so it should be. When I encounter these and the many other like minded situations, I do one of two things, I’m either all over the Parent, or I’m all over the manager, because this kind of garbage IS NOT what I paid for. I paid to eat a meal quietly.
So by all mean, look at the kids and put the blame where it belongs, Kids & The PARENTS who don’t even know what the word means.
You can always tell, when a kid was properly raised.
Need I say More.
Thank You
Aaron 🙂

AMEN

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

that is sooo right, but it seems like a past life or something.

Hilarious

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

lmao

Walked to school in WINTER

In reply to Growing Older (For the 30+ crowd)

YEAH!! And we had to walk Miles to School “UPHILL BOTH WAYS” in the dead of winter with snow up to our knees.Then ring our sock out when we got home. And at Christmas,we so poor that all we could exchanges was “GLANCES”, so think about it the next time you favorite game isn’t in on time.
Yeah! Those were the good days.
Regards
Aaron 🙂

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