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People that grew up before the internet age, how was life different? (1 Viewer)

tri-man 47 said:
Stamp collecting.  Some of us would collect stamps ...buy a big book organized by country (with pics of the main stamps through the years), and then we'd buy sets from some company, trade them, and put them into the books with little sticky things.  I had a big collection, and hung on to it.  A few years back (after having it for about 50 years), I took it to a local store that still handled stamps, coins, etc.  He offered me $3 for it all.  :kicksrock:  
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Did you take the money??  

 
Da Guru said:
I pitched in HS..I ruined my arm for a whole season from playing strikeout everyday with a tennis ball.  Trying to hit 90 with a ball that was way too light is not good.
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I ruined my arm the same exact way. I was a Catcher with a cannon, Strikeout took me down

 
Does anyone play bridge anymore?  Bridge night meant 2 or 6 other adult couples came over, had a Manhattan or Old Fashion and then played bridge for a few hours.  And if they smoked, my parents would break out the ash trays.  And I stayed in the family room watching TV and did not bother the adults.  

 
Yankee23Fan said:
OMG.  So true.

And then there was my grandmother who had potato chips and pretzles delivered to her house in tin cans - Charles Chips!  
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Yes! And a fridge full of Coke and Ginger Ales, in the glass bottles.

playing stickball with an old cut off hockey stick as a bat. Taping the handles with cloth tape or duct tape. Every sport, there were always enough kids around for pick-up games of everything. 

 
Mr.Pack said:
I ruined my arm the same exact way. I was a Catcher with a cannon, Strikeout took me down
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Didn't do strike out,  it same happened to me with stickball. 

I had a terrible arm. Fastest kid on the block (almost the island) but #### ### arm. So I'd junk it, eephus pitch, sidearm, anything to change it up to give my 62 MPH fastball some appearance of zip.

But over throwing a tennis ball hundreds of days for years and years destroyed my shoulder. 

 
Asses Up 

(edit to clarify: the game with the rubber handball, and you had to touch the wall without getting pegged by someone. If you got hit, you had to stand against the wall and get the balls thrown at your back) 

 
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So, I ran track to gear up for football... sprinter and we sprinters HATED distance day.

We knew how long it took to run 5 miles, so we'd all run across the street of the high school to my friends house. Half us is would drink soda (usually coke), the rest milk.  We'd then do like 1/2 mile to work up a sweat before jogging back in the expected order we'd be in if we all ran the 5 miles.  Good times. 

 
In the summer you'd wake up, eat breakfast, hop on your bike with your glove/bat and head to the park. Play baseball until you went home or to a buddy's house for lunch. Fire down a PB&J (or my favorite cream cheese and jelly), then back on your bike and return to the park to play baseball until dinner time. If there was an odd day when not enough kids showed up for a game you'd mix in some other sports or play hot box (they called it pickle too). Sometimes we'd go to a friend's house and play hot box in his yard with a slip & slide going into one of the bases. You'd always be listening for those ice cream truck bells. If you heard the bells the game would instantly stop (didn't even have to yell time out) and mad dash toward the truck ensued. If you were lucky enough to have money it was snow cone time. If you had no money you had to watch to see who was paying with big bills (5's) and hit them up for a loan.

 
Collecting beer cans and comic books with my brother. Used to go to Aard-Mart, i think it was called, was an old swap meet place and look over all the shops there. 

When my brother turned 15, he sold both collections for pennies on what we had invested. to buy weed.

 
glvsav37 said:
Asses Up 

(edit to clarify: the game with the rubber handball, and you had to touch the wall without getting pegged by someone. If you got hit, you had to stand against the wall and get the balls thrown at your back) 
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This sounds a lot like suicide which I mentioned up thread... I think the rules were you threw the ball at the wall, if someone caught it on a fly, hey could peg you until you touched the wall... of your throw didn't make it to the wall either you had to run or it was the penalty where you stood "asses up" with either a free shot from someone or everyone got a free shot at someone. If trying to catch the ball you picked it up but fumbled it and dropped it, then you would have to run to the wall and others would try to peg you on the way. 

Oh, and as mentioned, we once played it with a lacrosse ball

God we were ####### idiots. 

 
Koya said:
This sounds a lot like suicide which I mentioned up thread... I think the rules were you threw the ball at the wall, if someone caught it on a fly, hey could peg you until you touched the wall... of your throw didn't make it to the wall either you had to run or it was the penalty where you stood "asses up" with either a free shot from someone or everyone got a free shot at someone. If trying to catch the ball you picked it up but fumbled it and dropped it, then you would have to run to the wall and others would try to peg you on the way. 

Oh, and as mentioned, we once played it with a lacrosse ball

God we were ####### idiots. 
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YES!—you're a Long Island kid....so you know it well. 

 
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If you wanted to watch a porno the only option you had was the scrambled adult channel on cable. Once in a while you'd get lucky and the picture would be kind of descrambled for a few seconds and you could make out a boob. If you were watching that channel with a group of friends it was the only time when the room was completely silent. One night, we're probably 12 or 13, about 6 of us are hanging out at my friend's house and someone turns it to that channel. One of the kids who was there was an Indian kid from the neighborhood whose real name was something like Juwanchewatell but everyone called him "Chewy". So that channel comes on, the room goes silent and after about a minute Chewy gets up and leaves the room. 5 minutes go by and no sign of Chewy. My buddy turns to me and says "where the hell did Chewy go?" We start looking around the house and find that Chewy locked himself in the bathroom for some alone time. One minute of scrambled soft porn and it was go time for Chewy!

 
I could post on this all day.    When my wife and I were dating we used to have so much fun just doing whatever...playing miniature golf, grabbing beer and going to the park.  Just enjoying being with each other and not knowing we were missing anything.

Today if you did that you would look on FB or Instagram and get all pissed off because people you know are on a boat drinking, or at a concert and everybody is having more fun that us.

One of our favorite thing to do on a hot summer night was grab some beer and drive to Detroit Metro Airport.  There was a street on the end of the north-south runway where you could park. There were always a bunch of people hanging out drinking there.  Jets taking off and landing would scream 100 ft over our heads. It was crazy at how close we were to the planes.

One time I thought a 747 was not going to lift off in time and I grabbed my wife and started running.

Of course that all ended after 9-11.  The closed the street and you can`t get near any of the runways anymore.

 
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Sabertooth said:
What age were you when you first got served in a bar?  I was 17.  
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15, played bar softball with my much older friends. We were going to party at the bar for my 18th, but realized i had been going there for the past 3 years, so we had to tell them it was my 21st.

 
bosoxs45 said:
How was life different before the internet? Im a “ millennial “ and am curious how did you guys stay in touch? How did you find out where to meet people? What did you do at night without a TV to watch? How did you get around the city in which you lived? What kinds of clothes did they wear? What kind of food did they eat? Basically, how did you live?
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The internet ddn't change all of that. Smart phones did a heck of a lot of it. The early "dumb" versions of phones really were too cumbersome, to expensive to be much of a game changer. Yeah, you could change a meeting or get directions but it didn't change much. Having the internet at your fingertips all the time was the game changer - together with the next thing below.

And the change with the internet, IMHO, only became obvious with the advent of real search engines - principally google.

 
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Da Guru said:
I could post on this all day.    When my wife and I were dating we used to have so much fun just doing whatever...playing miniature golf, grabbing beer and going to the park.  Just enjoying being with each other and not knowing we were missing anything.

Today if you did that you would look on FB or Instagram and get all pissed off because people you know are on a boat drinking, or at a concert and everybody is having more fun that us.
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I've read studies that suggest that is why more and more folks are depressed these days.  I would be the first to admit I totally succumb to this.  I don't get pissed off, I just have a ton of envy for those that seem to be constantly traveling or out doing a ton of fun things... while I'm stuck in a boring job and with no money to take vacations.

 
Sabertooth said:
#### it, think 30 years ago when you actually may have been able to fix the car.  Nowadays not so much.  
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About 25 years ago I lived in Chicago and had a smart new car (bought used) which decided to die on me about 5 miles from Jesse James's caverns in Missouri, not too far from St Louis. My sister was visiting and we remembered a gas station a couple of miles up the road (we'd come in the same way as we were going out) so we hiked until we got there. 

We told them about our predicament and a friendly guy offered to help, and drove us back in his pickup truck. He took one look at the engine which had electronic injection and stated he couldn't help us (because of that), then drove us back to the gas station. We then found the nearest dealership in the phone book, called them, found a tow trucking company to take us there. They quickly identified the problem ( the electronic injection gizmo) but didn't have the part, their St Louis office had it, though. But they could only get the part that following Monday. Problem was, my sister's plane home was that Sunday, So I rented a white, red velvet interior pimpmobile from them so I could get back to Chicago with my sister. And then I had to drive back down to return it and pick up my car again. That used up most of my vacation

 
A lot that was similar to what's been posted: spent a lot of time outside, you either made plans in advance or you hung out in certain spots until you ran into somebody else. It really wasn't that unusual to just hang out by yourself sometimes if you didn't run into someone and just spend the time living in your imagination. In my teen years, there were certain spots like the local Sonic that you would drive by to see who was there, stop if it was people you liked or fit in with, keep driving if there wasn't anyone or people you didn't like there. I grew up in a small-ish town of 10~15K at the time in a national forest, so spent a lot of time in the woods, hiking, biking, building forts with friends, playing pine cone wars, etc. As you got older, said forts would be the hiding place for found/stolen playboys and such.

Directions from people to new places usually consisted of "go to main street, turn right at the grocery store, go two blocks, turn left, 3rd house on the left" type things. Nobody talked on the phone (guys at least) until you got a girlfriend in junior high or high school and they always wanted to talk for hours. Prank calling people with friends "do you have Prince Albert in a can? Well you better let him out!" Or getting random calls from younger girls who had a crush on you and were dared by their friends. I was laughing the other day, because I was just scrolling through Netflix over and over again and it reminded me of weekend's with my dad where we would hit the video store and walk up and down the aisles for like an hour trying to decide on a movie to rent. No rotten tomatoes or other websites with reviews and such, just had to read the back of the box and hope the description sounded like something good.

I was a  :nerd: and read a lot, wasn't unusual for me to spend an entire day listening to the radio while reading LOTR's or tons of other books. If you couldn't afford to buy much music, you listened to the radio a ton. GB the day I got a cassette recorder stereo hand me down and start recording songs I liked off the radio and making mix tapes. Used to have to time it just perfectly to get your song as soon as it started and cut it off before the next song started or the stupid dj started talking. Have to listen for hours just waiting for that one song you loved to be played again to get a copy of it. I still have a bunch of old mix tapes in a box in my basement, when mp3's 1st became a thing I used to look them over in search of certain songs that I couldn't find anywhere else. Still a handful of songs on some of those that I can't find on streaming sites and such.

My mother had a modem at her work office and I convinced her to give me the security codes to the building so I could use the computer and the fledgling internet my last year in high school. I'd finish my homework or writing my paper in no time and then spend the rest of the time playing computer games or surfing for porn (just some grainy, usually scanned pic's, no video's yet.) Had one girlfriend my senior year that we would regularly "go to the movies" on Friday nights when really we were parked on some dead-end road in her station wagon. I'd look up the movie on the internet before our dates and she would tell her parents the plot when she got home so they could be sure we went. :lol:

 
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Hosting a party when your parents are out of town these days must be a truly terrifying experience. Impossible to keep one somewhat under wraps/under control.

 
Sullie said:
Oh yeah I remember Ghoulardi, I'm not old enough to recall him live but my sisters used to tell me about him.  I thought I had seen him in reruns? Anyway, my brother and I were hooked on Big Chuck and Little John when we lived there over on Channel 8 (I think it was a CBS channel and then it became a Fox channel later?) oh and Channel 43 also had Superhost (Marty Sullivan) and The Prize Movie with John Lanigan! :)
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Yeah, I was big on BC and LJ back in the day. To this day, I can hear the knee slip/laughing sound effect in my head for one of their comedy bits.

 
Sweet J said:
5 mississippi blitz (or if someone was feeling their oats, 3-mississippi).  Once ever 4 downs the defense was allowed to blitz, rushing the QB without waiting for the mississippi countdown.  But our rule was you HAD to scream "BLITZ!!" before you ran in (or as you were running in). Even in the old days, defensive coordinators were working the rules - we occasionally added a delayed blitz. ("One Mississippi, two Missi--BLITZ!!!!").
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Definitely 3 mississippi before rushing.

When we only had 3 guys we played "pass-intercept" game.  Each guy had their own score as the receiver (you also got pts for intercepting) - the qb had to throw it after your first pattern instead just running around everywhere.  

 
Don't Noonan said:
I can remember playing Atari and Intellivision but the first Nintendo was huge.  My buddies would spend entire weekends playing a Baseball Stars or Tecmo Bowl tournament.

Whiffle ball in the backyard was huge and so was playing basketball in the front yard.  I remember after my high school basketball won state my senior year my next door neighbor sent me a card saying "all those years shooting baskets in the front yard paid off!".  

I used to love visiting my Grandma's house because it was a 2 hour drive and we would sleep over most times.  My brother and I would sleep on the couch in the living room.  We quickly figured out her cable had a "scrambled" porn channel.  It would flicker around but every 3-4 seconds you would get a glimpse.  We were hooked.

I played rotisserie baseball and was the commissioner of our league.  Every Tuesday the stats for American league players came out and Wednesday was National league.  I had to buy these in order to enter in the stats on Lotus 123.  What a pain in the ###.  Also, watching sportscenter at night was a must to find out how your players did.
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We've come a long way baby.  Dad brought home a Pong game in 1977.  Minimalist to say the least.

 
Da Guru said:
One of favorite thing to do was grab beer drive to Detroit Metro Airport.  There was a street on the end of the north-south runway where you could park. There were always a bunch of people hanging out drinking there.  Jets taking off and landing would scream 100 ft over our heads. It was crazy at how close we were to the planes.

One time I thought a 747 was not going to lift off in time and I grabbed my wife and started running.

Of course that all ended after 9-11.  The closed the street and you can`t get near any of the runways anymore.
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Houston IAH used to have a road that ran around the end of one of the runways between the light stands.  Those planes got VERY close.  After a while, they put a fence around the airfield, so we couldn't drive under the airplanes any more.  Rats.

 
Ok, so I'm a little older born in '58 and grew up in S. Miami.

Internet?? Hell, we didn't even have air conditioning. My parents regarded themselves as progressive "mods" so we had an artsy fireplace in our living room. They didn't add AC until around '72 because they couldn't sell the house without it. My poor mom would move a box fan around me and my brothers and sisters rooms all night, you'd hear one of us holler, "Mom, Timmy has had the fan long enough!"

I listened to Orioles games on the radio every night. I ran to get the paper every morning to read the box scores.

We got our first color TV in '71 on Christmas day and celebrated as the Fins beat KC in the longest playoff game ever- Garo was one of my paperboy clients.

 
gianmarco said:
Oh, and inviting friends over to play....went very much like...

"Hey Mom, can Bryan come over to play?" or "Hey Mom, can Bryan stay for dinner?" (Bryan standing behind me)

95% of the time was a yes and he'd just come on in.  And the other 5% of the time it'd be no and Bryan would just turn around and go back home. 
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Thinking about this is getting me mad. 

Nowadays, if my son is going to have a friend over, it usually starts with an email to his parents asking when he's free 3 weeks from now. I then hear his friend's baseball and swimming schedule and find out he's got a 2 hour window after school on a Thursday. Then we've got to send an email to school letting them know their kid will come home with us so he can be released to someone else. Another email to parents making sure no allergies for any snacks we might give. Exchange of emails and phone numbers in case anything comes up during the next 3 weeks. 

The special day finally arrives, they #### around on an iPod for a couple hours and the kid leaves when his mother is outside for a couple minutes after picking up his sister from ballet and needs to go soon so they aren't late for piano.

That kid is probably a 10 minute bike ride away too.

 
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Had a buddy that lived next door.  His dad had a real good pr0n stash.  Not playboys... the good stuff.   We built a "fort" in his garage for the sole purpose of getting to those mags.  I'm 99.9% sure his dad knew what we were up to in there.  Also saw my first sex scene at his house.  He had "ONtv" or was it "SelecTV", I forget... anyways, saw Terminator there and was like  :oldunsure:    :shock:    :excited:

 
Joe Mammy said:
Ok, so I'm a little older born in '58 and grew up in S. Miami.

Internet?? Hell, we didn't even have air conditioning. My parents regarded themselves as progressive "mods" so we had an artsy fireplace in our living room. They didn't add AC until around '72 because they couldn't sell the house without it. My poor mom would move a box fan around me and my brothers and sisters rooms all night, you'd hear one of us holler, "Mom, Timmy has had the fan long enough!"

I listened to Orioles games on the radio every night. I ran to get the paper every morning to read the box scores.

We got our first color TV in '71 on Christmas day and celebrated as the Fins beat KC in the longest playoff game ever- Garo was one of my paperboy clients.
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When I was a kid in Portland, OR everyone had a fireplace and no one had air conditioning. 

In the fall, winter and spring people would burn their garbage outside. This was before the Indian chief cried on TV. We had far more pollution then vs today

 
tommyboy said:
When I was a kid in Portland, OR everyone had a fireplace and no one had air conditioning. 
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Born and raised in SoCal, less than 5 miles from the beach.... absolutely no one had a/c that I knew.

My parents still live in the same house, and just got a/c a couple years ago.  I honestly don't know how we survived without it when I was growing up... yup, even that close to the beach.  

Probably because we were always outside.

 
needanap said:
Does anyone play bridge anymore?  Bridge night meant 2 or 6 other adult couples came over, had a Manhattan or Old Fashion and then played bridge for a few hours.  And if they smoked, my parents would break out the ash trays.  And I stayed in the family room watching TV and did not bother the adults.  
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And they would break out the Galiano for screwdrivers for the women and Drambuie for Rusty Nails for the guys.  Let you eat all kinds of snacks and stay up late because they were having a good time.  

 
We used to have street wars...kids on one street vs kids on another.  Big battles.  10-12 kids on a side type stuff.  In the winter it was snowball fighting.  During other times of the year we used acorns, buckeyes, and crab apples.  The whole neighborhood was a battlefield.   Fortunately, there were only a couple of buckeye trees around, because those things hurt like hell.  On more than one occasion a kid went home in tears, but it was all in good fun.  No one was trying to cause serious injury.  We were just dumb kids.  I may, or may not, have broken a window on one occasion.  

 
We climbed the fence at the airport, laid in the grass at the end of the runway, and smoked pot and drank beer as the planes came in low over our heads.  Wearing camis, of course.   Jesus we'd get thrown in the clink if we tried that now, if we weren't just shot on sight.

 
Had a store in the mall called McCrorys Dept Store that was one of the last to get bar code scanners at their register. So we would peel the price sticker off of something cheap, like a pack of pencils and slap it on sports equipment and more expensive stuff. The kid working the register never noticed or cared. 

 
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