When I Was Your Age....

[Jester]

Your school must have had some really OLD maps. Did it list "Persia" where Iran is now? How many stars were on the American Flag? Was Arizona still listed as a Territory?

[Racket_Man]

I'm younger than everyone ( born 1987) but I still remember a lot of things that aren't around anymore.

My sister and I shared a bedroom, we were the first kids on our block to get a TV in our room. It was a B/W 13" monitor that had a wire hanger jammed into the back for an antenna. For some reason, we didn't get ABC but we got FOX, CBS, NBC and some sort of televangelist channel.

.

and that would have been channels 2, 4, 5, 11, 24 (the televangilist) and 30. what no PBS 9 LOL

[tropicsgoddess]

I remember...

....rushing home after school to catch Most Wanted Jams on MTV (hosted by Bill Bellamy) or Pop-Up Video on VH1.

....when the duet with Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men came out, and it was HUGE.


....all of the buildup to the N64 release. Being completely disoriented when I first started playing because of the 3D perspective. Being completely disappointed at how easy it was to beat Bowser (seriously, he is the easiest villain to beat, EVER. Hop on his head, grab him by the tail, or just get around him and take out the bridge).



...when toys had a palpable amount of danger to them...Slip'n'Slide, Sit'n'Spin, riding bicycles on gravel without helmets.

....waking up at 5 am on Saturday to watch cartoons (nevermind that they didn't start until 6 or 6:30). Cartoons that were good enough to actually get up that early for (heck, I'd still get up early for Muppet Babies or Looney Tunes). The rest of the time, we had to watch what Mom and Dad wanted to, or the TV was actually turned off.

I LOVED pop up video!!! I remember that song! "One Sweet Day". I have that and I used to LOVE Boyz II Men (I still have one of their CD's at my parents' house) . The toys and cartoons back then were so much better than the ones they make these days. I remember how it was a big shift when N64 was the last of the nintendo consoles to have cartridges and the gamecube being the first to have CD's.

[Caveat Emptor]

'73.

Pic of me and my bro in courduroys ("whiffwhiffwhiffwhiff..." )

First PC was an Apple II+. 64K; The Commodore has 128?? WOW!!!

(c. 1987) Who would ever need a modem?

Whoa. Check out the Mac in the shop! It has a cool program called "Paint!" And a MOUSE to move the cursor!!

A movie ticket is $4.50??? Too much!!! I remember when it was $3!!

We got a VCR with VHS! Cool!!

I want a Trans-Am when I grow up, just like KITT!!

A pay phone now costs 25 cents? (answer now: "What's a pay phone?")

Crawl into the back of Mom's stationwagon while it's going 55 on the highway. (Seltbelt law? What's that?)

I put coins in the pouches on my Kangaroos.

[BookstoreEscapee]

I swear half the pics of me when I was little involve some article of clothing in ugly orange/brown/yellow plaid. What was with that color palette in the '70s, anyway? Thank god I was too young to be picking that crap out, or even remember wearing it.

[tropicsgoddess]

I swear half the pics of me when I was little involve some article of clothing in ugly orange/brown/yellow plaid. What was with that color palette in the '70s, anyway? Thank god I was too young to be picking that crap out, or even remember wearing it.

I could deal with that as opposed to the bright ass color palette of the 80's (I was born in '84 btw).

[DGoddessChardonnay]

I swear half the pics of me when I was little involve some article of clothing in ugly orange/brown/yellow plaid. What was with that color palette in the '70s, anyway? Thank god I was too young to be picking that crap out, or even remember wearing it.

I've got pics of me back in 1st grade (1975) of me with a short shag haircut and wearing a white blouse with Winnie the Pooh characters all over it.

God I hated that hairstyle . . . I looked like a boy. The following year's pic looked better though . . . I had long hair that was pulled back and I was wearing a red and white checkered dress with a white bodice.

I wouldn't wear the browns or oranges . . . on me they didn't work, so it was usually reds, whites, pinks and blue.

Mom usually saved the brown and orange shades for the inside of our house. Interior Desecrations has nothing on her.

[Der Cute]

It's kinda funny.

I was born in 1975, but a lot of the clothing I wore during my toddler and young school years were handmedowns from my cousins, who are at least 5 years older than me.

So after the corduroys were OUT OF FASHION I had to wear them.
Yeah.

But:

I remember before FOX was a network

TV sizes were no larger than mid 20inches. And large, heavy FURNITURE pieces at that.

Tupperware was the rage, and it was green and orange and yellow colored.

321 Contact

Cool Sesame Street

Dad selling the Ford Ranger so we could get a F150 for driving to AK

Walking to school and playing outside all the time.

Beanbags.

Original Nintendo with Dr. Mario and Tetris.

Having to dress UP to go to Sears.

Cutenoob

[1756GR2]

Guys in Nehru jackets with medallions on chains.
My first pair of bell-bottomed jeans, hip huggers with a wide really-red plastic belt.
Sunday pot roast after church.
Helping the neighbor iron sheets on a mangle.
Playing all over the neighborhood at friends' houses or the playground all day, coming home at the noon whistle for lunch, 6:00 for dinner, and home for the night at the 7:30 whistle.
Seersucker jammies put on after the evening bath.
Falling off my big sister's two-wheeler into a pile of gravel and getting peroxide poured on the nasty wound, followed by iodine.
Key-clamp roller skates that kept falling off the front of my sneakers.
My best friend's Phi Zappa Crappa poster.
The division of "types" in town - bikers and hippies, aka Hoods 'n Heads.
My first Hayes modem opening up the world of BBS's.
Walking across town to school. (Only the rural kids had buses.)
Tom Terrific and Manfred the Wonder Dog.
Crusader Rabbit.

I need to stop. I'm feeling rather elderly at the moment....

[BookstoreEscapee]

God I hated that hairstyle . . . I looked like a boy.

My mom did the pixie thing on my head when I was 4. Is it any wonder I haven't had my hair more than an inch above my shoulders since?

I wouldn't wear the browns or oranges . . . on me they didn't work, so it was usually reds, whites, pinks and blue.

They don't work on me, either I can't wear orange or yellow...they make me look ill. Brown I can do, though.

I could deal with that as opposed to the bright ass color palette of the 80's (I was born in '84 btw).

But neon shades are so flattering.

Tupperware was the rage, and it was green and orange and yellow colored.

I had kid-sized Tupperware
And we used to fight over the brown cup...I have no idea why.

[AdamAnt316]

First PC was an Apple II+. 64K; The Commodore has 128?? WOW!!!

Yep, the Commodore 128 was quite the capable machine. Mine carried me through high school (late '90s/early '00s) equipped with a 40/80 column color monitor, two massive 360K double-density 5.25" floppy drives, a staggering 512KB RAM expander, a decent dot-matrix printer, and even a mouse. Ran software which made it work like a Mac. (see below) Though the Apple ][ series was no slouch.

Whoa. Check out the Mac in the shop! It has a cool program called "Paint!" And a MOUSE to move the cursor!!

My Commodore 128 had one of those. Only worked with a high-falutin' operating system called GEOS, but it did a darn good job of moving the cursor around that crude graphical interface. Also made cutting-and-pasting a breeze, when used with GEOS's WYSIWYG (when was the last time you saw that acronym?!) word processor.

We got a VCR with VHS! Cool!!

Yep, I grew up in a household which still used a classic Quasar top-loading VCR well into the '90s. Had two tuning knobs on the front and everything. Only stopped using it when the little lightbulb inside that was part of the tape-sensing mechanism blew out.

A pay phone now costs 25 cents? (answer now: "What's a pay phone?")

For some odd reason, in my area, local pay phone calls remained 10 cents into the late '90s. They eventually went up to 25 cents, then finally to 50 cents in the early part of this decade (got freaked out once after putting 50 cents into a newer style payphone, and hearing Darth Vader say "Thank you for using Verizon." )

Crawl into the back of Mom's stationwagon while it's going 55 on the highway. (Seltbelt law? What's that?)

Yep, that was the great part of having a '78 Olds Cutlass Cruiser wagon. That, and lying down in the trunk as it drove. Speaking of station wagons, anyone here remember sitting in the rear-facing third set of seats that folded out from the trunk floor of some station wagons? Was kinda freaky being able to see the cars behind us rather than in front of us; big surprise that they got rid of those...
-Adam

[BookstoreEscapee]

and hearing Darth Vader say "Thank you for using Verizon." )

hehe...did you know he does the Bible on audiobook, too?

[Jester]

I could deal with that as opposed to the bright ass color palette of the 80's (I was born in '84 btw).

The fact that you didn't live through the horror of the oranges and browns of the 70's is probably why you prefer them to the pastels of the 80's.

I lived through both. The pastels were somewhat obnoxious, sure. But the puke colors of the seventies were barf-inducing. Whoever came up with them should be shot in the balls.

[ParkingWitch]

Ultimate Fashion Nightmare

Yep the Ultimate

Purple

Paisley

Bell Bottom


Corduroys

[Jester]

Something I may have forgotten in previous posts....I remember when Pac Man came out when I was a kid (early Eighties), and what a hit it was, and how I mentioned to a friend that "this game could be really big."

While it seems almost quaint in its simplicity now, especially compared to modern video games and the technological advances they are making in that industry on a ridiculous pace, when Pac Man came out, it was considered to be almost revolutionary, and literally changed the way video game makers thought about and designed their games. It inspired "Pac Man Fever," which some of you my age or older may well remember.

And at various bars and arcades, this game is still being played, sometimes with great popularity. Kind of hard to believe that the graphically-simplistic Asteroids was Pac Man's predecessor on top of the video game food chain, huh? And when I was your age, I remember when it all started.