If you are 30 or older...

[Tiger]

;D 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 my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!
But now... :o

I'm over the ripe old age of thirty and I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.
They've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, they live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it but kids today don't know how good they've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet... :o
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 !!!... :o
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!... :o
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!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting!... :o
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!... :o
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!... :o
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! You could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! . Just like REAL LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating!... :o
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-bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire ... imagine that!

If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid 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 rotten... ::)

You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!... >:(

Regards,

The over 30 Crowd  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

[kwells]

we had microwaves...but then again...we are in a TOtally different country.... :P

[YellowJacket!]

we had a microwave in the 70's.  My dad worked for Philips/Magnavox.  We got one as an experiment.  It was huge.  I was also the first kid ever... thats EVER...to have a home video game hooked up to my TV.  It was the very early 70's and it was called the Magnavox Oddesy.  It was a white box with two corded remotes each with two knobs and a button.  We played Pong on it and another game called the maze.  We used the controllers to move the paddles or move the cursor around the maze.  Later on we got a shotgun to hoop up to it to shoot the square.  One of the engineers working on it painted some plastic overlays to stick on our TV screen to make it look more realistic.
Also had a 10lb calculator that would add, subtract and multiply but not divide.  It used the neon-like tubes for the display.  In the late 70's we got a personal computer called the Commpdore PET (I still have it).  It used a tape drive, had 4k of RAM and you "programmed BASIC" on it.  It has a 10" green screen.

My humble claim to fame. ;D

David

[kwells]

10 print "kwells did some basic long ago"

20 end

[Lucky]

Anyone remember FORTRAN?
I don't anymore, lol

[h2olawyer]

I still don't have call waiting, caller ID or MP3 player.  The theater in Steamboat had stadium seating when it was built in the 1920s.  Not as great a difference in height between rows as modern "phone booth" theaters but still a good slant to the floor.  Never had the 2600 - had to settle for original Pong.  Still have it along with my Atari 800 computer.  No special monitor, just hook it up to a TV.

Thanks for reminding me of basic - glad I forgot it.   ;D  Never learned FORTRAN or COBOL.  My brain just doesn't work that way
Great post, Tiger - you're right, I laughed at most of them.  AND kids do have it easier today.  When I was walking 5 miles to school uphill through 5 feet of snow both directions, teachers weren't afraid to fail anybody doing substandard classwork & corporal punishment was still a viable option.

H₂O

[don_vanecek]

A couple a years ago I found a March 1970 Popular Science magazine with an advertisement for Internationals Microwave oven, price------$695.00 in 1970 dollars-what's that about $1500.00 in today dollars???  From the picture it looks like the inside of the oven is about the same size as what you would only pay about $100.00 for today. The same issue also tested four station wagons, all with 455, 440 and 429 cu in V8's, they got between 7.6 and 10.8 mpg. And these were 1970 models that still had high compression engines with very little in the way of pollution controls.

Electronically, I thought I was way ahead of everyone when in the late 60's my brother built me a Heath Kit combination tach, dwell and voltmeter. I could do real good tune ups on mine and other peoples cars with that handy meter. Still have it to this day, but haven't set any points in years-but the voltmeter is sure handy!

Ah, long gone is the old toaster oven, and the basement is full of old computer games the kids will most likely never play again!   

[Night Vision]

a couple of years ago......

.... in 1907.. the average life expectancy was 47 years old  :o

[Superfly]

I was the first kid on the block to have the Atari 2600, it was the coolest thing back then!  I bought my daughter a Xbox 360 for xmas, and we played that thing with her for many, many hours... man, how the times have changed!  It made my 2600 look like pong.  Watiminute... pong was on the 2600!

[h2olawyer]

I had Pong the first year of release.  Was envious of those who waited for the 2600.

Anybody remember Infocom & Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and some of their other text games?  I was even a subscriber to "The New Zork Times" until they were forced to change the name & finally were bought out by Activision.  Yes, I did finally get the babelfish!  ;D

H₂O

[Superfly]

I had Zork on my ol' Commodore 64...
Load "Zork",8,1

I also remember the oregon trail... but that was waaaaaay back in the Tandy TRS 80 days....

[Brian Moffet]

Load "Zork",8,1

Oh dear.  You woke up some brain cells I thought had died off.

They're waking other ones up too.

GAAHHHHHH!

[Lucky]

HaHa!! I had a Trash 80, i forgot!  ;D

[h2olawyer]

My favorite command in Infocom text adventures:  "Maximum Verbosity"

I used a friend's TRS-80 until I went really up to date with an Atari 800XL!  I even had 5.25" floppies instead of casette tape storage.   ;D

H₂O

[kiawrench]

my first was timex electronic calendar- 4 inches by 18 lot of cables ,and a keyboard that really sucked-- 587 pages of typing ,and you too could have a on screen day/date display. my second was a commode-64
all sorts of floppy disc with games, and a monochrome display,you could hook it up to a tv, but then the graphics were a bit sour. i still have the 64, but the games have long ago faded from the 5 1/4 floppies-- custer's revenge,BC, peanuts ,frogger,pong, galigula space invaders,,, had the top games for the time.

  now, i can fire up computer from dead strt,find my info,print it and log off the computer in same time it took for commode 64 to run the post screen!!

[YellowJacket!]

HaHa!! I had a Trash 80, i forgot!  ;D

I still have one and it works. ;D

David

[Sable]

Anyone out there remember "Computes Gazette"? I remember spending hours sitting in front of the Commodore VIC~20 programming the gaming programs listed in the back. Then saving to the tape drive, hoping to get the counter numbers right to reload the program to finnish it.

[Tiger]

a couple of years ago......

.... in 1907.. the average life expectancy was 47 years old  :o

:o Oh bugger.....I died 6 years ago  ;D ;D ;D ;D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

[kwells]

I remember the Oregon Trail back in grade school...tape drive.  Had to answer academic questions right?

[h2olawyer]

a couple of years ago......

.... in 1907.. the average life expectancy was 47 years old  :o

:o Oh bugger.....I died 6 years ago  ;D ;D ;D ;D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Pretty good sense of humor for a dead guy.   ;D  Guess I need to make this year (my 47th) a good one, eh?

Noticed the other day that the crystal in my palm is flashing.  Must be time for renewal . . .  (actually should have gone 17 years ago - where is the Sandman?)

H₂O