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

Video games

I didnt have much money growing up but was fortunate to have a Nintendo and about a dozen games. 

To play them it was this crazy idea of just pressing power...sure you would have to blow on the cartridge, tap the game up and down or getting rubbing alchohol and swab it but now i tried to play a game and i need tonset up an account, remember my password...ugh. i dont even play. My kids do and every 3 hours my sons comes running upstairs asking if he xould apend $4.99 for some axe. 

In my day if you wanted the magical shield in Zelda you had to earn that ####!

Playing a game with your friends online is cool but what was cooler was talking to your friend on the phone and giving him the play by play when you were in level 8 of Super Mario Bros. Now they can just watch you i guess.

 
Prank calls were very easy to do.  Call a cab to go to a neighbor's house and we would watch from a window or across the street.

Calling late nite pizza deliveries to the houses of friends or even kids you didn 't like , always got a laugh.

Calling the local Bowl O Mat "Do you have 10lb balls?  You do, I imagine it must be hard to walk".

While in college we graduated to late night drunken calls to the girls dorms saying you are someone else.

Sucks for today's kid as they can't even commit petty crimes 

 
Played Atari 2600 Space Invaders.  Would spend hours at the arcade playing PacMan, DigDug, Joust, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Centipede, Asteroids.  All the kids played and was kinda of a big thing to get a high score and put your initials in the game. I remember when we finally got cable tv.  You could use the "tuner" behind the UHF or VHF to watch MTV if you got it just right.    HBO, and Cinemax (skinamax) trying to stay up to catch a glimpse of boob.  Chained Heat was such a classic.   Watching MTV to actually see videos.  The first crush I can remember was Martha Quinn.  Watching ESPN and hoping that Loyola Marymount was playing.  Getting your own landline (same number of course as the regular house phone) in your room was big-time stuff.  Trying to listen to your older sister talking to her boyfriend.  Talking to a girl for the first time and trying not to sound like a total loser. First girlfriend on the phone telling each other "No you hang up first."   Cruising in your car if you were lucky to have one.  Just driving around the main street or whatever drag talking to friends.  Maybe get lucky and find a keg party somewhere.  People used to have a lot more parties at their houses when I was a kid/teen.  If a parent was out of town WOW NEELY!   Skinny dipping in the lake, or pool.  Simpler times man.   I can remember when HIV scare happened and our world pretty much changed.  When Magic Johnson was diagnosed (27 years ago)  it seemed that we were not invincible any longer. 

 
elguapo07 said:
Prank calls were very easy to do.  Call a cab to go to a neighbor's house and we would watch from a window or across the street.

Calling late nite pizza deliveries to the houses of friends or even kids you didn 't like , always got a laugh.

Calling the local Bowl O Mat "Do you have 10lb balls?  You do, I imagine it must be hard to walk".

While in college we graduated to late night drunken calls to the girls dorms saying you are someone else.

Sucks for today's kid as they can't even commit petty crimes 
Click to expand...
 Toilet papering someone's house

I saw someone put hundreds of plastic forks in someone's yard    silly times 

 
I haven't read nine pages to make me feel old so excuse me if someone talked about kites already.

My daughter and I saw a father's day ad with a guy flying a kite with his kids.  Now I flew cheap dime store kites with my friends and my parents.  It wasn't just me; there were always people flying them at the lakefront and it wasn't uncommon to stand around a playground watching some other kids with kites.I didn't do it all the time but there were always a kite or two on the wall of the garage ready to go.  The plastic ones lasted a little longer than the paper ones but a crash landing on the pavement could be brutal. 

Maybe it's just because I live in a city with a lot of electrical lines and gusty winds but the only kites I see nowadays are elaborate, expensive looking ones flown by adults.  I asked my daughter if she had any fond memories of flying kites with dear old dad.  Her response was along the lines of yeah we did that a couple of times but it was kind of lame.

 
Summer nights in the city.

Growing up in a city it was normal to have 20-30 kids on your block. Specifically summer nights where kids and parents would hang outside on the steps for what seemed like all night long but it was really like 930.

Sports

My daughter likes softball, she has never played a pick up game but from time to time well go outside a play wiffleball and ill invite a few kids from the street to play.

My daughter is 12...if she only knew that by 12 her dad had won 3 AWL (Adams Street Wiffleball League) world series, 4 MVPs and 2 triple crowns.

We would run leagues on our street every year, keeping stats and pooling money to get tropheys.

We live in a small working class suburb now and a few years ago my job relocated and we considered moving closer which could have meant a bigger house in a nicer area. I decided i wanted to stay in our town as it reminded me of my childhood on some level. I wanted my kids to have that experience. Bunch of kids running around. Kids knocking on my door for my kids to come out and play, daughters friend who lived behind us would just show up at our back door while we were eating dinner. Those things might annoy others but it always brings a smile to my face.

Yea, my kids still have play dates and some scheduled stuff.. .i just dont think our childhood can be replicated today but there are kids running around and and we know lots of people in our neighborhood, seems like every weekend some kid is sleeping over here, we see our friends in town every weekend and the kids outnumber the adults. I have friends and family living in nicer areas with bigger homes and they haven't seen the kid who lives down the road in 2 years. 

 
Prank calls

Lol...some of the best ones were when me and a friend would wach have 3way calling and we would time it right and he would dial a Portuguese restaurant and I would dial the Chinese restaurant. 

Hearing 2 guys trying to speak english and take each others order was hysterical.  

 
10 PRINT "what is your name?"

20 INPUT "...(Enter Your Name)...", a$

30 PRINT

40 PRINT "hello, "; a$; ", I am your computer, nice to meet you."

50 GOTO 10

 
nirad3 said:
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.
Click to expand...
We didn't know what we didn't know. 

Sometimes I make myself uncomfortable to remind me life wasn't always this easy. 

 
Before the internet when you did something nice for someone they would say thank you and that was it. 

Now, it appears when you bring in your neighbors trash can they have to publicly praise you on Facebook, Instagram and twitter.

 
comfortably numb said:
Before the internet when you did something nice for someone they would say thank you and that was it. 

Now, it appears when you bring in your neighbors trash can they have to publicly praise you on Facebook, Instagram and twitter.
Click to expand...
More likely you take selfies doing it and then post it plus send it to the local newspaper and TV stations

 
Before the internet if i wanted to lose my money gambling i would have to call a number and give the guy my code name, confirm my spread and meet up to pay him. Now i can lose $75 on the Mets while i take a ####

 
Sabertooth said:
What's sex like now? We most certainly did not live with the avalanche of porn available now.   I have to think it's pretty meh to finally feel a boob when you've been watching sex and what not constantly for the past few years before actually getting to experience it.  
Click to expand...
This has to be a big red X.

Im 40, married, have had sex and watched much porn. The thought of experiencing the touching of a new boob is making me feel giddy right now

 
We'd play kick the can.  You set up a High-C can in the Alley.  One person was it.   Everyone would hide.  If he saw you he'd step on the  can and say '1-2-3 on john!' and youd be caught. You only got out if someone kicked the can.

Great times.  Now the little craps play Fortnight.

 
IvanKaramazov said:
Yeah, I came in here to mention the Porn Fairy. 
Click to expand...
I grew up a few miles from a division 3 college campus.  After the spring semester we’d walk down the alleys behind some of the off campus housing and find all sorts of good skin mags amongst their trash the left behind when they moved home for the summer. 

Usually it was Playboys but 1 time I hit the jackpot and found a couple of High Society and Hustler magazines.  I was extremely popular as those made their rounds through the neighborhood.

 
Making ugly potholders with a plastic loom was a thing that I actually thought was fun when I had to stay indoors. Rolling pennies was also a blast. Televised baseball games always ended way too quickly.

 
I rode my Schwinn Varsity 10 speed to junior high, probably 3 miles away.  Crossed multiple major streets with no crossing guards.  No helmet.  Same route my brother had taken when he got hit by a car 3 years earlier.  On the way home, I'd stop at All American Market and buy a full 16 oz Coke in a glass bottle and a Hershey chocolate bar for 25 cents, plus you get 5 cents back on the bottle when you were done.

 
needanap said:
I rode my Schwinn Varsity 10 speed to junior high, probably 3 miles away.  Crossed multiple major streets with no crossing guards.  No helmet.  Same route my brother had taken when he got hit by a car 3 years earlier.  On the way home, I'd stop at All American Market and buy a full 16 oz Coke in a glass bottle and a Hershey chocolate bar for 25 cents, plus you get 5 cents back on the bottle when you were done.
Click to expand...
I did the same thing in HB. Would stop at the 7/11 on Brookhurst/Atlanta

 
My buddy heard from his cousin that if you put a really strong magnet on top of the cable box it would unscramble all the scrambled channels, meaning you could watch the adult channel. So we pooled our leave raking money, hopped on our bikes and headed to the mall to find the strongest magnet we could find. We went into any store we thought may sell them. Imagine us two horny 12 year olds asking clerks in every store if they sell magnets.  Laughing right now thinking about it. I think it was Brookstone where we found one that looked like a horseshoe but was about twice the size of one. The thing was heavy. Bright red. We were so fired up when we found it. So we get it home, go down to his rec room, pop that sucker right on top of the cable box and turn it to the adult channel. Nothing. Scrambled. We move it all over. Hold it above the box. Behind the box. Wave it around like a wand in front of the box. Still doesn't work. I tell him maybe it's this particular box, it doesn't have the right kind of metal (what a scientist I was!), upstairs the box is a little different and we should try that one. So we go up to his living room. His parents were home but upstairs in their bedroom. He pops the magnet on top of that cable box, turns the volume down and changes the channel to the adult channel, all the while listening for his parents, making sure they weren't coming down the stairs. Not working on that box either. We hear someone coming down the stairs so he puts back on an unscrambled channel and turns it off. We head back down to the rec room.

We end up watching MTV, play a little pool. About a half hour later his mom calls down the stairs and asks him to come up. As he's walking up the stairs I hear her say, "what the heck is this thing on top of the TV? Is this yours?" He had left the magnet up there. I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs listening intently. My buddy immediately starts hemming and hawing. He's totally folding under her questioning and her questions aren't even tough!  First he said he didn't know what it was but he was so weird about it she picked right up on it. After maybe two minutes he cops to buying the magnet because I told him you could get free HBO if you put it on top of the cable box. Lies and sells me out for no reason! So his mom calls me upstairs and asks me where I heard about this. I tell her I heard about it from my cousin (and shot my buddy a "that's how you do that" look). His dad had come downstairs now and mom tells the dad about the magnet. So dad asks, "does it work?" We shrug and he starts testing it out. His dad was pretty smart so we're thinking this is good because maybe he'll get the thing to work and we can see some unscrambled knockers. He tries HBO and it's not working. He tries another channel, still no work. He's moving up the channels going through all the scrambled channels and hits one that looks kind of semi-unscrambled. It's the adult channel! They had it on that channel for a good 30 seconds. There were definitely two people having sex. Cheesy music was playing. You could hear the moaning. It was still scrambled pretty good so tough (for scrambled adult channel amateurs) to make out what they were seeing. Both mom and dad are completely oblivious to the obvious lovemaking happening on tv. My buddy and I exchange a "holy ####" look. Anyway, the picture never unscrambles and he eventually he changes the channel back to a regular channel. We head back downstairs with the magnet laughing our asses off.

Maybe 6 months later a kid at our school said you could open the cable box with a Phillips-head and if you "bent down some prongs" you'd get every pay channel free. We gave that a shot at my house and, of course, broke the cable box. I didn't tell my parents what happened, just that the box seemed broken. Cable guy came out, checked out the box, gave it a WTF look but didn't say anything and just replaced it. If we had put half as much effort into school as we did getting that channel unscrambled we'd have gone to Harvard. Ah, youth. 

 
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Nipsey said:
My buddy heard from his cousin that if you put a really strong magnet on top of the cable box it would unscramble all the scrambled channels, meaning you could watch the adult channel.
Click to expand...
On ours it was a series of buttons/levers, so if you got the right two halfway down just right it would unscramble the channel.  Pennies to lock this in were worth gold.

 
Nipsey said:
My buddy heard from his cousin that if you put a really strong magnet on top of the cable box it would unscramble all the scrambled channels, meaning you could watch the adult channel. So we pooled our leave raking money, hopped on our bikes and headed to the mall to find the strongest magnet we could find. We went into any store we thought may sell them. Imagine us two horny 12 year olds asking clerks in every store if they sell magnets.  Laughing right now thinking about it. I think it was Brookstone where we found one that looked like a horseshoe but was about twice the size of one. The thing was heavy. Bright red. We were so fired up when we found it. So we get it home, go down to his rec room, pop that sucker right on top of the cable box and turn it to the adult channel. Nothing. Scrambled. We move it all over. Hold it above the box. Behind the box. Wave it around like a wand in front of the box. Still doesn't work. I tell him maybe it's this particular box, it doesn't have the right kind of metal (what a scientist I was!), upstairs the box is a little different and we should try that one. So we go up to his living room. His parents were home but upstairs in their bedroom. He pops the magnet on top of that cable box, turns the volume down and changes the channel to the adult channel, all the while listening for his parents, making sure they weren't coming down the stairs. Not working on that box either. We hear someone coming down the stairs so he puts back on an unscrambled channel and turns it off. We head back down to the rec room.

We end up watching MTV, play a little pool. About a half hour later his mom calls down the stairs and asks him to come up. As he's walking up the stairs I hear her say, "what the heck is this thing on top of the TV? Is this yours?" He had left the magnet up there. I'm standing at the bottom of the stairs listening intently. My buddy immediately starts hemming and hawing. He's totally folding under her questioning and her questions aren't even tough!  First he said he didn't know what it was but he was so weird about it she picked right up on it. After maybe two minutes he cops to buying the magnet because I told him you could get free HBO if you put it on top of the cable box. Lies and sells me out for no reason! So his mom calls me upstairs and asks me where I heard about this. I tell her I heard about it from my cousin (and shot my buddy a "that's how you do that" look). His dad had come downstairs now and mom tells the dad about the magnet. So dad asks, "does it work?" We shrug and he starts testing it out. His dad was pretty smart so we're thinking this is good because maybe he'll get the thing to work and we can see some unscrambled knockers. He tries HBO and it's not working. He tries another channel, still no work. He's moving up the channels going through all the scrambled channels and hits one that looks kind of semi-unscrambled. It's the adult channel! They had it on that channel for a good 30 seconds. There were definitely two people having sex. Cheesy music was playing. You could hear the moaning. It was still scrambled pretty good so tough (for scrambled adult channel amateurs) to make out what they were seeing. Both mom and dad are completely oblivious to the obvious lovemaking happening on tv. My buddy and I exchange a "holy ####" look. Anyway, the picture never unscrambles and he eventually he changes the channel back to a regular channel. We head back downstairs with the magnet laughing our asses off.

Maybe 6 months later a kid at our school said you could open the cable box with a Phillips-head and if you "bent down some prongs" you'd get every pay channel free. We gave that a shot my my house and, of course, broke the cable box. I didn't tell my parents what happened, just that the box seemed broken. Cable guy came out, checked out the box, gave it a WTF look but didn't say anything and just replaced it. If we had put half as much effort into school as we did getting that channel unscrambled we'd have gone to Harvard. Ah, youth. 
Click to expand...
This is fantastic

 
Pipes said:
I grew up a few miles from a division 3 college campus.  After the spring semester we’d walk down the alleys behind some of the off campus housing and find all sorts of good skin mags amongst their trash the left behind when they moved home for the summer. 

Usually it was Playboys but 1 time I hit the jackpot and found a couple of High Society and Hustler magazines.  I was extremely popular as those made their rounds through the neighborhood.
Click to expand...
My work study in college was the mail room. Guys would subscribe to Playboy but use fake names for whatever reasons (plausible deniability, shame, try to skip out on paying for the subscription, whatever). 

This strategy worked for them maybe 50% of the time (delivery from the publisher to college mailroom was probably 95% successful, it’s just the other 45% of the time one of us “couldn’t match the name to the mailbox” and kept it, lol.)

It could have the right box number and literally be one letter off ( think Chanandaler Bong from Friends) and it was “nope, nobody here by that name - what a shame, it’s the Girls of the <your favorite conference here> Issue too. Can’t let that go to waste.”

 
I remember watching Ali fight on ABC.  I remember watching MNF with Howard Cosell and Dandy Don and then Frank Gifford.  I would write in my journal for language arts the play by play until I got the necessary 4 pages for the weekly A.  

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Sand said:
On ours it was a series of buttons/levers, so if you got the right two halfway down just right it would unscramble the channel.  Pennies to lock this in were worth gold.
Click to expand...
If I could make out the outline of a boob there was definitely going to be a stiff towel the next day. 

 
The first time the neighborhood gang found one of the dads stash of playboys we started looking at them and about 5 minutes in one of the guys stands up and exclaims "I have to GO home!".  We thought nothing of it at the time .....

 
Hot Diggity Dog said:
I remember watching Ali fight on ABC.  I remember watching MNF with Howard Cosell and Dandy Don and then Frank Gifford.  I would write in my journal for language arts the play by play until I got the necessary 4 pages for the weekly A.  
Click to expand...
I remember when you had to watch these things when they'd happen or you missed out.  I watched the Miracle on Ice, Heiden win his 5 golds, Kirk Gibson's homer, Doug Flutie's throw, Borg beat McEnroe in 5...  and Harry Cary sing about a zillion times.  Don't regret those memories a bit.

 
Hot Diggity Dog said:
The first time the neighborhood gang found one of the dads stash of playboys we started looking at them and about 5 minutes in one of the guys stands up and exclaims "I have to GO home!".  We thought nothing of it at the time .....
Click to expand...
My first best friend, who lived in Baltimore So I'd see him a couple times a year growing up, had a mother who was a sex therapist.

They had a ####### porn library. Like a dull room of well manicured material from ALL the Playboys to Hustler et al.  It was, quite literally, more than I knew what to do with. 

Don't think any of my parents (four parents, 70s/80s kid of divorced home) ever knew.

 
Sand said:
Heiden win his 5 golds
Click to expand...
I was about 6 then. It was it's own mania, one of the first I remember. My house was built into a hill, so basement then two stories, with the stairwell running through the center. As such, you could 'circle' from the living room to dining to kitchen to den and back around. For a week I would just be doing "skate races" in my socks around and around my house.

I'll say this... with the limited number of media outlets and distractions, the focus on the one football game on during a time slot on Sunday was huge. Or prime time thursday night... or whatever. There is something to be missed about having few enough options that most everyone was watching one in particular, all at the same time, and not particularly distracted while watching, at that.

 
Koya said:
I'll say this... with the limited number of media outlets and distractions, the focus on the one football game on during a time slot on Sunday was huge. Or prime time thursday night... or whatever. There is something to be missed about having few enough options that most everyone was watching one in particular, all at the same time, and not particularly distracted while watching, at that.
Click to expand...
wow,  that is true 

 
Maybe its because I grew up fairly poor in woodsy areas of CT but despite being born in '89 I had a remarkably similar childhood to you guys, lots of extremely similar stories, although the technology was a little different. Makes sense I guess since we didn't have dial-up internet until I was in middle school I think, and I was only allowed to use it for homework. So it wasn't too different. No cell phones for most of my friends until I was a junior/senior in HS and I didn't get one until my Freshman year of college was almost done. 

But riding bikes everywhere, always being outside and playing neighborhood sports, disappearing for a dozen hours at a time in the summer and always trying to eat and stay at a friends house, that was all the same. Parents having no idea where we were unless they called around. Playing in the woods and buildong forts and having pine cone fights. Having to call people's house phones and get through a girl's parents before you could get her on the phone at night. 

My buddy a few blocks away (but only a one minute sprint when we cut through people's backyards--lots of woods in our area) was the ultimate hangout spot. For one, his dad worked the latest, and was the nicest, so the rules were the most lax. No one would hang out at my house because my dad was an absolute hard ###. They had the most money so they always had the best snacks. He had the above ground pool (which was rare in our area) in the summer and the flattest driveway for basketball the rest of the year. He also had a power line that ran from the street, across his front yard and over his roof right where his house ended--the perfect homerun marker for whiffleball. 

That same buddy's dad had the best adult mags in the neighborhood...and he never even knew it. They were super religious and we were always afraid he'd rat us out to his parents (it was a good call, he would later tell me in our college years that he didn't masturbate because he thought it was a sin, he thought it was like cheating on his future wife--he's still not married). So we'd wait for him to fall asleep when we had the main group together for a sleepover and then sneak into their basement and check out the forbidden porn mags, which were all pretty old. I remember hitting highschool and being pleasantly surprised at the lack of bush in the real world. 

In the summer in highschool there wasn't much to do besides party where we lived. Usually deep in the state forests somewhere behind someone's house. When it got too dark for sports in the summer we'd usually switch to playing what we called "Manhunt"--basically hide and seek with a home base element. The older we got the more often you'd see guys and girls pairing off to go hide together and make out. 

Things communication-wise really did start to change when I was in highschool though. AIM, cell phones, the internet in general. 

Still, its cool to see such similarities in childhoods between you guys growing up in the 70's and 80's and me growing up in the 90's/00's. Maybe I was just lucky and my experience isn't typical for millenials my age. 

 
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Nigel said:
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.
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I'm really curious how often this happens these days compared to the 70s/80s/90s. 

I don't have kids, but I work with parents of teenagers, have teenage nieces, etc. I just don't hear about it at all, or see any signs of it around town. If it does happen a lot less frequently, I'm sure the social media factor would be part of the reason. Harder to control, and there's no way for pics of the party not to show up everywhere. Though, I suspect, if it doesn't happen as often, it's more the lack of driving and desire to "gather" as much.

When I was in HS (mid-late 90's), some house party every weekend was just a given. Parents in the town generally had good knowledge that it was going on, maybe just underestimating the size of it. Most didn't get too worked up, as long as you didn't mess up the house too bad. 

 
Koya said:
My first best friend, who lived in Baltimore So I'd see him a couple times a year growing up, had a mother who was a sex therapist.

They had a ####### porn library. Like a dull room of well manicured material from ALL the Playboys to Hustler et al.  It was, quite literally, more than I knew what to do with. 

Don't think any of my parents (four parents, 70s/80s kid of divorced home) ever knew.
Click to expand...
My brother is 4 years older than me, and loved porn. Had a large VHS collection. This made me extremely popular in middle school during the summer. 

Looking back, it's going to sound odd, but there'd be 3-5 guys all watching porn together. I can't imagine this would happen these days, but for these guys, there was no other option to watch porn. So that's what we did between games of basketball. I didn't particularly care for it, personally, because I could watch by myself when nobody was home.

And my buddies didn't go home when they'd had their fill. They'd go to the bathroom on the other side of the house. 

 
If you are in your mid 40’s you are the lone generation who made “mixtapes” as a sign of love and affection. Mixtapes were a BIG deal  

No cd’s or mp3s. If you wanted a particular song you had to buy it (expensive, and then you needed a double cassette player) or wait for it to play in the radio and hope to press record quickly enough. A good mixtape took a lot of thought and work and time  

“Record” is a little red button nestled in with the “play” button. 

 
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