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I remember when you actually had to look up the store's phone # in a book, and then call them to find out if they were open. If the phone rang and rang, they weren't. And if someone answered, they were.

I looked at an old 1980 phone book once recently. There was no 'Computer' or related category. :eek:

I'm too young. I was born in '96 but all I can remember is the old Windows 98 computer that we used to have.

Nearly every technology in your life basically didn't exist a few years before you were born. The internet, laptops, CDs, DVDs, MP3 players, LCD screens, mobile phones, wireless headsets and everything else, digital TV, ATMs, USB periphrals, colour printers, microwave ovens, the list is endless.

Things will change must faster for you though as someone born today will not know a world without iPads by the time they're old enough to start schoool before you're even 20. In a way, this makes it more pressure on the younger generations to continually keep up and waste time learning things that won't exist in a few years. Take texting for instance. Just three years ago it was the ultimate cool being able to text stupendously fast. Now it's just a sign that you've just got an old out of date numeric keypad phone.
 
Nearly every technology in your life basically didn't exist a few years before you were born. The internet, laptops, CDs, DVDs, MP3 players, LCD screens, mobile phones, wireless headsets and everything else, digital TV, ATMs, USB periphrals, colour printers, microwave ovens, the list is endless.

Wait, what? The internet (maybe you're specifically thinking about the web), CDs, LCD screens, mobile phones, ATMs, color printers, and especially microwave ovens were around long before 1996. I'll give you mobile phones, laptops, and LCDs because they weren't ubiquitous, though. :)
 
Wait, what? The internet (maybe you're specifically thinking about the web), CDs, LCD screens, mobile phones, ATMs, color printers, and especially microwave ovens were around long before 1996. I'll give you mobile phones, laptops, and LCDs because they weren't ubiquitous, though. :)

A 'few years' before, I said. As you say, they might have been around, but they were either very expensive or not like they were by the mid 90s. Laptops for instance in 1990 = Mac Portable. Ditto mobile phones = heavy housebricks.
 
I'm old enough to remember spending over US$3,000 for an IBM PC with a Hercules monochrome graphics card, 640 KB of RAM, and 20 MB hard drive. That US$3,000 today can get me a top-quality desktop computer with Windows 7 Home Premium with a BD-ROM/DVD burner drive, 25" 1920x1080 computer monitor, HDMI cable to connect the two, a very nice set of computer speakers, and STILL have enough money around to get a good quality 40" LCD HDTV and Blu-ray player!

Gawd, an single episode of TWiT Network's This Week in TECH audio edition wouldn't even fit on that 20 MB hard drive anymore.... :rolleyes:
 
The thing I most love about my iPhone is the way it feels like I'm living in the future, and I'm only 21.

I miss taping songs off the radio. I'm just old enough to have lived before the internet really exploded.
 
Demolition Man! FTW! LOL

OK, Recording off the radio and timing it right so you didn't hear the DJ.

Mix Tapes for you girl :eek:

You remember the first Walkman and thought how cool it was.

You longed for the invention of rechargeable batteries, because batteries were more expensive than your walkman!

Going out and having fun, no playdates, walk out your front door, walk down the block and knock on your friends door to see if he/she could come out and play. At 5 years old, you were out all day without supervision and knew to come in at the same time each night for dinner. You earned priveleges and knew the consequences of getting out of line.

Respect for adults and others.

If you had a problem with someone, you talked to them face to face. No anonymous facebooking / twitter / whatever else. If you couldn't resolve it, you fought and then made up, because these were your friends.

Wall posters.

Head shops. Explaining to Mom that tall glass tube was a vase! LOL Never worked though.

Places to play. Here in Long Island, everything is overbuilt, and there are no empty lots any more. You need a permit to play in the park. Makes it tough to get a pickup game going.

To the OP, I had a TI 99/4a with pretty much an identical setup. I learned assembler and game programming on it. It launched my career as a Software Engineer.

I had a Pong Knock off with two position switches instead of knobs!

I remember getting Cable for the first time. We lived by the airport and would lose reception each time a plane flew over. There were many moments where you would watch for 2 hours and at the end "And the killer is... Roooaaar"??? WTF, no DVR to rewind and figure it out. We became pretty good at lip reading! and calling friends to find out who did it. That cable box with the 50 ft. cord was a Godsend...

Oh, getting up to change the channel!

You really have to wonder what memories our kids will hold on to...
 
I'm 30 and remember listening to my parents records when i was younger they had a turntable that had a radio built into it and it was "Solid State".

Then when i was younger we had a cable box that was push button LOL back when you had to pay extra to get the disney channel.

My first PC had a 486 processor in it and it was a packard hell and my parents had an older PC and they were using AOL on DOS. And then the first Tech show i watched was a Cnet show that had ryan seacrest on it.

We had Macs at my school and i was pretty geeky i used to read the manuals that they had laying around for it. And also people interacted more we didn't have twitter and facebook etc. People actually talked and read books and stuff.

I also remember getting AOL discs in the mail and i was digging thru some items at home and found a AOL 3.5 floppy :eek: One day it will be considered an ancient artifact. And when i was a little geek i found a Stash of Omni magazines :) I thought and still think they were really cool. And i used to have a Poster of Carl Sagan in my room LOL

I actually miss going to blockbuster and other video stores when i was growing up my family used to rent my NES games from them and later SNES.
 
I was late to the computer game, relatively. I grew up listening to mom's old 45s that he had collected.. And we had a Betamax machine. That was as technologically advanced as my family got before the computer(s).

-

Who else thought of that Far Side cartoon where the family's all just staring the wall? The caption is something like "Before we had TV." :D
 
Nearly every technology in your life basically didn't exist a few years before you were born... microwave ovens, the list is endless.

Microwave ovens were invented in the 40's (a spin-off of WWII radar technology), were available in the 50's for home use (albeit expensive - $1,295), and by 70's were becoming quite common in American kitchens.
 
Microwave ovens were invented in the 40's (a spin-off of WWII radar technology), were available in the 50's for home use (albeit expensive - $1,295), and by 70's were becoming quite common in American kitchens.

You could say that personal computers were invented the 70s, but really it wasn't until the mid 90s they became standard fixtures in every home (like a TV). I'm really talking about every kid growing up with them, not reading about them or envying the rich neighbours having them. Like car phones were around in the 60s and even Nokia mobile phones were still too expensive for most people before the mid 90s so they were mostly business/yuppie gadgets. It wasn't really before the late 90s before kids started growing up with computers or mobile phones as commonplace technology in their lives like TVs.
 
Microwave ovens were invented in the 40's (a spin-off of WWII radar technology), were available in the 50's for home use (albeit expensive - $1,295), and by 70's were becoming quite common in American kitchens.

You could say that personal computers were invented the 70s, but really it wasn't until the mid 90s they became standard fixtures in every home (like a TV). I'm really talking about every kid growing up with them, not reading about them or envying the rich neighbours having them. Like car phones were around in the 60s and even Nokia mobile phones were still too expensive for most people before the mid 90s so they were mostly business/yuppie gadgets. It wasn't really before the late 90s before kids started growing up with computers or mobile phones as commonplace technology in their lives like TVs.

I'm afraid you're going to have to let your microwave example go, it just doesn't qualify. All of your other examples were excellent analogies to the OP's theme.

By 1975, sales of microwave ovens would surpass that of gas ovens for the first time. By 1976, more people owned microwaves than a dishwasher, now in 60% of American homes (or about 52 million).
 
cassette-tape-breakdown.jpg


"Anyboy got a pencil?!? I need to fix this tape again."

This is definitely something out of my past. Made me laugh, thx.
 
At some days, I force myself to not turn on my computer. Those days appear to me way longer than days where I spend much of my time on the internet. It's crazy how much time I waste on the 'net....
 
I'm 30 and remember listening to my parents records when i was younger they had a turntable that had a radio built into it and it was "Solid State".

Then when i was younger we had a cable box that was push button LOL back when you had to pay extra to get the disney channel.

My first PC had a 486 processor in it and it was a packard hell and my parents had an older PC and they were using AOL on DOS. And then the first Tech show i watched was a Cnet show that had ryan seacrest on it.

We had Macs at my school and i was pretty geeky i used to read the manuals that they had laying around for it. And also people interacted more we didn't have twitter and facebook etc. People actually talked and read books and stuff.

I also remember getting AOL discs in the mail and i was digging thru some items at home and found a AOL 3.5 floppy :eek: One day it will be considered an ancient artifact. And when i was a little geek i found a Stash of Omni magazines :) I thought and still think they were really cool. And i used to have a Poster of Carl Sagan in my room LOL

I actually miss going to blockbuster and other video stores when i was growing up my family used to rent my NES games from them and later SNES.

I'm not quite as old as you ;) at 25, but sounds pretty familiar. I must have just caught the end of the "good old days". Everything has moved on pretty fast.

We had a P166 Packard Bell (with MMX no less). What a POS, so much crap loaded onto it too, but it all seemed cutting edge at the time. I'd forgotten all about the hundreds of disks AOL must have sent to my parents when I was a kid! When we first got the internet I remember my dad getting really angry at the phone bill (back when you had to pay by the minute!). From then on we were all limited to a few hours per week, until the first flat fee providers came along (still on dialup).

I never had a SNES or a NES. I had an Amiga 600, but always longed for a 1200 with it's extra megabyte of RAM and a second floppy drive too. I remember my favourite game (Monkey Island 2) coming on 15 disks! What a pain, you had to change between pretty much every screen.

Copy protection (DRM) was always more fun in the 90s. Some sort of wheel that came in the box that you had to line up and read a code from or having to find a particular word in the manual.

Finally, I do remember having to stand up to change between one of the 4 channels on our TV. I remember getting cable too and getting up to a massive 40 channels! We didn't pay for Disney though!
 
I remember my favourite game (Monkey Island 2) coming on 15 disks! What a pain, you had to change between pretty much every screen.

Copy protection (DRM) was always more fun in the 90s. Some sort of wheel that came in the box that you had to line up and read a code from or having to find a particular word in the manual.

That was an awesome game i played that and day of the tentacle but i never finished it though :D
 
I... I remember my favourite game (Monkey Island 2) coming on 15 disks! What a pain, you had to change between pretty much every screen. ...

Oh good Lord, I had completely forgotten about those days of multiple floppies!!

I remember installing OS/2 that way. It was something like 20 floppies to install the base OS, and then another 20 to install the included applications, drivers, etc. You basically just sat there all afternoon and read and listened for the beep to let you know it was time to change floppies. Or to curse not so silently because one of floppies (always near the end) was corrupted and you were going to have start again as soon as you managed to track down a copy of the offending floppy.

Then - you got to do it all over again with the 36 floppies that came with the WordPerfect Office Suite.

On the plus side, they really knew how to write manuals then. On paper. Bound and with colour. Made great door stops. :D
 
What a great thread! ...ironic, but still great. :)

I'm 29, so I'm just old enough to remember life before the internet really took off. I grew up on a farm, so there was always something to do, but...

I remember getting my very first record (a Disney compilation) and thinking it was so cool!

I remember having to get up to change the channel on the TV (because my dad made me...heh). Thankfully it wasn't too long until we got our first "tv remote." It was a huge brick with two small buttons that only changed the channel and nothing more. I remember when we got our first VCR, and we rented "Howard the Duck" with it.

I remember using our ancient set of Encyclopedias for research.

Technology pretty much stayed stagnant in our house until about 1994 when we got our first computer. A $3,000 IBM with a 486 and a DOUBLE speed CD ROM. It was amazing. With it's "upgraded" 20 meg hard drive, running Windows 3.1 with Navigator.

...........

The thing I worry about with kids growing up in this society is a lack of imagination. We played make-believe all the time. We made up games, and when we went outside the possibilities were endless! I worry that technology is going to destroy that element of childhood.

So that being said, I make sure and play with my four-year old son every chance I get. We play with my old hot wheels cars, and we pretend we're dinosaurs and fighter pilots and anything else we can think of.

Don't get me wrong. We have a very technology oriented house, and he already knows his way around everything that I use. Heh. But I refuse to let that be ALL that he knows. Kids need a healthy imagination. Imagination is what keeps us as a species moving forward. It's what drives us to become something better. It gives us a vision of the future that technology just can't provide.

I just hope technology doesn't kill the imagination.
 
That was an awesome game i played that and day of the tentacle but i never finished it though :D

If you are feeling nostalgic, this will let you play loads of point and click adventures on your Mac - http://www.scummvm.org/. You will have to find the games somewhere yourself (you can probably find most of them on shady websites etc.)

On the topic of encyclopaedias, does everyone remember using Microsoft Encarta? That was one of the first bits of software we ever had on a cd-rom! I remember there being a game where you worked your way through a maze answering trivia questions, groundbreaking stuff (multimedia at its best!).

There is a BBC documentary on this page from the era I was just getting into computers http://waxy.org/2008/04/bbc_twos_horizon_on_the_electronic_frontier_in_1993/
 
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