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

Jayrok said:
RE: TV guide.  I always loved the Sunday paper because the complete TV guide for the week was included.  Sunday after church I'd get it (dad got it first thing in the morning) and look through the enter week to see what shows were coming on and when.  I liked that guide better than TV guide.  
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That's a whole 'nother thing - the Sunday paper.  When I was a kid, the Sunday Star Ledger was an absolute requirement of my family.  And everyone took their parts or their turns with it.  I would have to wait patiently for my father and uncles to get done with the sports section before I could look at it.  There was no ability to read it before they did because if the first in line didn't have a clean newspaper to open there was hell to pay.

Granted, newspapers are still around but it's not the same nor is it really a necessity anymore. 

 
Yankee23Fan said:
That's a whole 'nother thing - the Sunday paper.  When I was a kid, the Sunday Star Ledger was an absolute requirement of my family.  And everyone took their parts or their turns with it.  I would have to wait patiently for my father and uncles to get done with the sports section before I could look at it.  There was no ability to read it before they did because if the first in line didn't have a clean newspaper to open there was hell to pay.

Granted, newspapers are still around but it's not the same nor is it really a necessity anymore. 
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We still get the paper on the weekends.  Sitting on my back patio with coffee and Sunday paper seems like a vacation.

 
We moved here in 97 and I remember the man meeting me on the driveway one morning with "Hi, welcome to the neighborhood, I'll add you to the paper route starting Monday morning and we'll get you set up."  I remember the look on his face when I told him I didn't need the paper but thanks.  He was shocked.  I said I get news from the Internet now so won't need the paper.  

In retrospect, I wish I had taken it, if for nothing else, to support him and the local paper.  

 
This thread is one of the reasons I bring my kids camping.  Cell service is usually pretty bad so they just go ride their bikes and play outside.  Sitting around a campfire is the same as it was when we were kids, except smores now have Reece's PB Cups or Twix in them instead of the more mundane Hershey's square.  

 
Sabertooth said:
This thread is one of the reasons I bring my kids camping.  Cell service is usually pretty bad so they just go ride their bikes and play outside.  Sitting around a campfire is the same as it was when we were kids, except smores now have Reece's PB Cups or Twix in them instead of the more mundane Hershey's square.  
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Peanut butter on the graham cracker is money.  

 
Bossman said:
Land line phones were our main source of contact ... other than just knocking on somebodys door to see if they were home and wanted to do something.

It was a major deal when the phone rang. Since the whole family shared the one phone, siblings would stop what they were doing and race for it when it rang ... hoping it was for THEM. "Dang, it's just grand-ma.", "yes, grandma, I'm fine, here's mom".

Now the few of us that still have a land line just ignore it (telemarketers).

I remember getting major nerves calling a girl for the first time to ask her out. Wasn't so easy like texting or snapface or whatever the teens are doing now.
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I haven’t read all the posts in the thread but this one sums up those times very well.

 
KarmaPolice said:
One thing that I talked to my son about being a blessing and a curse with the ability to have anything you want at the touch of a button as far as music and movies go is that you don't get those great attachments to things anymore.  Granted, I would have been all over Spotify and the like in HS if I had that technology, but there was something great about not having the money for a bunch of stuff, having to choose a couple albums, and since that's what you had in your collection you listened to it over and over an formed a connection with it and the band.  Same went for movies - I watched Karate Kid, Back to the Future, and Ghostbusters a ton of times because those where the 3 VHS tapes that we had in the house.  
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This is similar to how I feel about these things.

I LOVE having all the music and movies I want, prettymuch on demand. I love that I can just youtube a scene from a movie/etc. It's great.

But... something got lost, too. Like you said, the attachment to things. Why watch the original Karate Kid again when you can just YouTube a few favorite scenes and move on? Or listen to just the "good" songs on an album, and never really discover that song that only clicked once you heard it five times. 

 
Great thread!  I'm 40, lots of good stuff in here.  The death of the pop in really bothers me.  When did this stop?  I still remember doing it in the late 90s. 

I actually live in the same town I grew up in just on the other side of town....about a 10 minute drive, but I remember riding our bikes over here to play whatever sport.  Neighborhood vs neighborhood!  I barely even see a kid outside anymore or anyone really.  The first year the ex and I took the kids trick or treating like 4-5 people said to us "oh...you live in that house, you're the ones always outside."  Like we were crazy people lol.

We couldn't afford the Atari, so we had a Colecovision.  Just about all the same games, but cheap.  Had a rubbermaid bin full of them.

I remember trading baseball cards.  I still have boxes of late 80s/early 90s...not worth jack now.  Upper Deck Griffey Jr. Rookie Card was the one to have. 

I think the only thing better these days is the availability of info and GPS.  Even in the early 00s I remember printing directions of mapquest.  Road trips with the parents and maps was a blast.  My Dad would get the ones from AAA that had the big red line highlighting the route.

 
After church on Sundays my Mom would let my brother and I walk back to Grandpas(maybe a mile and half).  I wanted to watch the Browns on their glorious TV surrounded by lots of wood.  Those things had to weigh 500 pounds.

 
jwb said:
This is similar to how I feel about these things.

I LOVE having all the music and movies I want, prettymuch on demand. I love that I can just youtube a scene from a movie/etc. It's great.

But... something got lost, too. Like you said, the attachment to things. Why watch the original Karate Kid again when you can just YouTube a few favorite scenes and move on? Or listen to just the "good" songs on an album, and never really discover that song that only clicked once you heard it five times. 
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I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, that I never listen to full albums anymore. I know the audiophiles will :smh: at that, but who has time for that anymore? Some of my favorite music was the stuff that as you say, I listened to an album over and over again and a particular song really clicked with me or spoke to me in some way. Since then I've been trying to force myself to take the time and tell Alexa to play the full album of so and so, instead of just endlessly shuffling different singles together.

 
arctic_panzer_wolf said:
I think the only thing better these days is the availability of info and GPS.  Even in the early 00s I remember printing directions of mapquest.  Road trips with the parents and maps was a blast.  My Dad would get the ones from AAA that had the big red line highlighting the route.
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This is one thing I really love. In the old days my dad had tons of Time Life book series and I would spend endless hours reading through the volumes on the Civil War or World War 2 and such. Outside of school or a library, that was one of the only avenues to learn more about stuff like that.

I also really love just being able to google just about anything on repairing a sink, fixing a toilet, building this, repairing that. Back then if your dad or friend's dads didn't know how to fix or build something you just had to kind of wing it and hope it worked out.

 
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How about the first microwave?  I remember the old microwave cookbooks. Gross. The thing was huge and had a dial you’d crank to set the time. 

 
mr. furley said:
this is what i miss. friends. now kids have "play dates" and they have to be arranged days or weeks in advance. they're for pre-determined amounts of time and either mom, dad or both shows up to get the kid.... and only to get the kid. 

we used to get up in the morning, eat a bowl of cereal, watch a couple cartoons and be gone for the entire day. in and out of friends houses to grab a glove, or a ball, or lunch, etc. and if our parents needed to find us they yelled outside or called a couple parents to see whose house or park we might be at.

if parents had to come find us, we knew it wasn't to immediately leave... because dad was going to crack a beer or 8 with your buddy's dad and that meant you still had an hour at least.
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my 11&12yo boys kind of live like this.    They have phones though is the only real difference.   they bike all over the place at this point in life, granted we were doing that at a younger age but still.   They play videos games, sports and bike all over the place and I don't know where they are half the time, just like we did.

 
Yankee23Fan said:
It's life changing.  Especially if you get the marshmallow just right and it softens up the chocolate just a little before you bite. Magical.
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You are doing God's work here my friend.  We go camping on July 2, and I'm trying it.  So you do a regular smore but add PB?  

 
Great thread!

I am 50 and grew up in the country.  We did not have cable or Atari.  We had 3 channels of TV and a fuzzy fourth channel (PBS)  sometimes.  TV wasn't really much of a thing in our house understandably.  My brother and I were outside all the time.  When we weren't helping dad with farm work, we were fishing or playing sports.   We rode our bikes everywhere.  Fortunately, there were lots of kids about our age within a 1 mile or so and we were always busy doing something.  We made plans as the day unfolded.  Even the weather wasn't a big factor.  We played plenty of basketball in the rain or snow if that is what we wanted to do.  Being inside was a boring option and rarely happened. 

We ate lunch at the house that we were playing at.  A mom would bring out sandwiches, chips, and a pitcher of Kool-Aid, lemonade or iced tea.  Pop was something else we did not have much.  The pop came out on movie nights which of course had to be well-orchestrated since we didn't have a VCR either.  If there was a "good" movie or TV show on, it became a little event. 

We would leave the house in the morning and know to be back at 5 pm for supper during summer break/weekends if we didn't have chores to do.  Some days, we were told to be home for lunch so that we could bale hay after it had a chance to dry.  Sometimes, you worked all day and did not play.  That was ok and normal.   

We did a lot of stupid stuff as we got older and had more freedom.  All of us ended up getting dirt bikes eventually which led to middle of the night runs around the country roads.  A bunch of us would sleep in a machine barn most summer nights which gave us a lot of freedom.   We would push the dirt bikes down the road and then start them and be off. 

Life was good.  Kids have it good today but it is a different good.  I know that we had more freedom growing up than kids do today. 

 
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My mom would ring a dinner bell attached to the house to signal us to come home for dinner.  We didn't live out in the sticks or anything, but we would usually hear it wherever we were on the block and would head home.  She gave me a bell to hang on our house a few years ago, but I just laughed and it's somewhere in a box in the garage.  

 
General Malaise said:
My mom would ring a dinner bell attached to the house to signal us to come home for dinner.  We didn't live out in the sticks or anything, but we would usually hear it wherever we were on the block and would head home.  She gave me a bell to hang on our house a few years ago, but I just laughed and it's somewhere in a box in the garage.  
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We had an old school bell.  You could hear that thing for miles across the lake.  Several other families had something similar. You could learn to discern the tone of your bell from others.  You could also tell if a parent was pissed by the frequency and volume of the ringing.  "Damn dude, your Pops sounds pissed.  Here, have some gum, and try to straighten up!"

 
Sabertooth said:
You are doing God's work here my friend.  We go camping on July 2, and I'm trying it.  So you do a regular smore but add PB?  
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Yup.  PB on the graham (both sides) first, then drop the chocolate on the PB, add marshmallow, close it up, and then let it sit for like 10 seconds just to soften the chocolate if it isn't already from being outside.

 
We actually went outside to play. We had phones with cords. We had to call people if we wanted to talk to them or see them. We had real struggles.

 
Buckna said:
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, that I never listen to full albums anymore. I know the audiophiles will :smh: at that, but who has time for that anymore? Some of my favorite music was the stuff that as you say, I listened to an album over and over again and a particular song really clicked with me or spoke to me in some way. Since then I've been trying to force myself to take the time and tell Alexa to play the full album of so and so, instead of just endlessly shuffling different singles together.
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Well, if you have time to listen to 10 random songs on shuffle, you have time to listen to an album.  ;)

 
I started riding my bike to school by myself when I was about 7.  Nobody cared.  I used to play battleship, in person, with friends for hours.  Video games (when I was older) only worked on channel 3 (or 4, depending on where you lived - the consoles often had a switch in the back.)  You were less likely to accidentally run into a pedophile than you are on the internet, but much more likely to accidentally put one of your friends' eyes out by hitting him with a stick on a random Tuesday afternoon.

 
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jwb said:
But... something got lost, too. Like you said, the attachment to things. Why watch the original Karate Kid again when you can just YouTube a few favorite scenes and move on? Or listen to just the "good" songs on an album, and never really discover that song that only clicked once you heard it five times. 
Click to expand...
Not having the options was something, but something else that is a negative is the lack of sensory input when we are consuming these things, especially music and books.  There is something to be said about the texture, smell, feel of book while you are reading it.  When the music was physical we held the cases and liners, wrote the tracks on mixed tapes, etc..   We interacted with these things in a different way.  Now everything is done through the same phone or device and nothing is special as it all blends together.  I have given up the fight for the most part with music, but that is a big reason that I cling to my physical books.  I like that activity to feel different than checking my fantasy lineup on my phone.  

 
boots11234 said:
How about the first microwave?  I remember the old microwave cookbooks. Gross. The thing was huge and had a dial you’d crank to set the time. 
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I remember when we brought our first microwave home. I was about 10 years old. First thing we were going to make was instant hot cocoa. I grabbed my Scout-o-rama mug with the shiny gold rim. Ten seconds later there were sparks and the microwave quit working. 

Back then, the price of education was costly. 

 
arctic_panzer_wolf said:
Great thread!  I'm 40, lots of good stuff in here.  The death of the pop in really bothers me.  When did this stop?  I still remember doing it in the late 90s. 

I actually live in the same town I grew up in just on the other side of town....about a 10 minute drive, but I remember riding our bikes over here to play whatever sport.  Neighborhood vs neighborhood!  I barely even see a kid outside anymore or anyone really.  The first year the ex and I took the kids trick or treating like 4-5 people said to us "oh...you live in that house, you're the ones always outside."  Like we were crazy people lol.

We couldn't afford the Atari, so we had a Colecovision.  Just about all the same games, but cheap.  Had a rubbermaid bin full of them.

I remember trading baseball cards.  I still have boxes of late 80s/early 90s...not worth jack now.  Upper Deck Griffey Jr. Rookie Card was the one to have. 

I think the only thing better these days is the availability of info and GPS.  Even in the early 00s I remember printing directions of mapquest.  Road trips with the parents and maps was a blast.  My Dad would get the ones from AAA that had the big red line highlighting the route.
Click to expand...
Wasn't this the competitor to the Intellivision?  We had an Atari 2600.  Then my brother and I shared a paper route one summer to save up for a Colecovision.  We bought maybe five games before we discovered it was crap.  Some time later we upgraded to the NES and my world changed forever.

 
I have two giant boxes of CDs in my garage that I used to cherish.  I bought CDs like some people buy cars; lotta due diligence and reading reviews.  I wasn't plunking down $13.99 or whatever on just any release.  I haven't listened to any of those CDs in several years and yet, I can't bring myself to part with them.  If I sold them, I'd get next to nothing for them and would probably be insulted in the process.  So they just there, a monument to what I worked hard to collect in my formative years.  

 
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Buckna said:
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, that I never listen to full albums anymore. I know the audiophiles will :smh: at that, but who has time for that anymore? Some of my favorite music was the stuff that as you say, I listened to an album over and over again and a particular song really clicked with me or spoke to me in some way. Since then I've been trying to force myself to take the time and tell Alexa to play the full album of so and so, instead of just endlessly shuffling different singles together.
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This is actually a key reason I got back into vinyl (on glorious vintage equipment). The whole ritual of selecting an album, sitting down, and listening to the whole thing - it's something I really enjoy. 

 
Any APBA players? My cousin and I could play APBA Baseball for hours.

Getting the new set of cards each year was awesome. 

 
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Rustoleum said:
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.”
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We totally worked the Columbia House / BMG system in college.  I must have gotten 250 CDs over the course of a couple years moving from dorm to dorm.  We'd sign up under fake names and then do the "sign a friend up, get 10 free CDs" deal... again, fake names.  

Do stuff like that now and you're probably looking at a couple months in the clink.   :coffee:

 
General Malaise said:
I have two giant boxes of CDs in my garage that I used to cherish.  I bought CDs like some people buy cars; lotta due diligence and reading reviews.  I wasn't plunking down $13.99 or whatever on just any release.  I haven't listened to any of those CDs in several years and yet, I can't bring myself to part with them.  If I sold them, I'd get next to nothing for them and would probably be insulted in the process.  So they just there, a monument to what worked hard to collect in my formative years.  
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i have the same thing in my office.   I even digitized all of them, they're on the PC now.   Still can't get rid of them, its like i'd be tearing off an arm or something.

 
Prank calls, aaah the delight.   Call 1:  Hi, is your refrigerator running?  Yes, it is.  You better go catch it!     Call 2:  (Of course you look in the phone book for people with the last name Walls)  (ask real real fast so it sounds like Mr Walls)   Is there Walls there?  No he's not.  Then what's holding up your house?  

Then Porky's was made and blew us all away with Mike Hunt.  :tebow:

 
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In our early years of Fantasy Football (early 1990s) one guy in our league was having a rough time picking a QB each week as both of his kept getting listed as Questionable, and whichever one he put in seemed to sit that week. It was really hard to get good injury news back then without the internet. He got so frustrated, that he called the New Orleans Saints organization number to try to find out if Hebert was playing or not. They couldn't tell him anything, so it was a wasted effort, but we all laughed about it for a while.

 
boots11234 said:
How about the first microwave?  I remember the old microwave cookbooks. Gross. The thing was huge and had a dial you’d crank to set the time. 
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We had a small kitchen and the microwave was on a stand right behind my seat at our kitchen table.  My mom wouldn't let me sit down if it was on "because of the radiation".

 
shuke said:
We had a small kitchen and the microwave was on a stand right behind my seat at our kitchen table.  My mom wouldn't let me sit down if it was on "because of the radiation".
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Anyone else remember dishwashers that you had to connect to the faucet manually when you wanted to run them?

 
Yankee23Fan said:
I remember seeing HBO for the first time.  

The opening HBO title sequence used to be a big deal.  The big letters over a city or the letters themselves being a futuristic building of some kind.  When it changed it was a big deal.  HBO would actually run 30 or 60 minute specials on the making of their opening title sequence. 
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I can still hear the theme music...

 
Tin Cup said:
Anyone else remember dishwashers that you had to connect to the faucet manually when you wanted to run them?
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YES!  I remember that.  If my memory isn't playing tricks on me, our dishwasher had a wood top so that it could serve as a cutting board while it was being used since it had to be rolled in front of the sink to work.

My kids would lose their **** if they saw something like that now.  

 
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