The "Back in my day!" thread for us old timers...

Wow - I have found a really great forum for those who like to reminisce even more
Do You Remember

reply to post by facchino



I remember when;

Cracker Jack had real toys in the boxes

One bottle of soda was shared buy you and 3 friends each taking a sip off the same bottle

cigarettes were 60 cents a pack

a huge bag of chips was 25 cents

25 cents could get you a comicbook

If you climbed the neighbor's tree and fell out you got a cast and a ass whipping and not in that order, never sued anyone.

Never wore seatbelts

When the streetlights came on it was time to go home

VIC 20,need I have to say more?

reply to post by LargeFries


Did it cost you .25 cents for a movie......and were most people good mannered?

My first car, gas was 25 cents a gallon, filled a twenty one gallon tank with five dollars. I saw my first calculator in my first semester of college. LED read out ,It had a pen with a metal tip to touch to the brass plates that passed for keys. No floating decimal point, had to set that with a switch.Those of us who couldn't afford the high price of the calculator had to settle for a slide rule. There were no home computers. Pong came out in the second year of college.

reply to post by Silcone Synapse


the bigtrak was the coolest toy you could get.....i could get mine all over the house and not hit anything...........left 6 forward 2 fire,fire....the funny thing is...it would be a big seller today....

Originally posted by TheLoony
reply to post by kdog1982

 

No, but I remember H.R. Puffinstuff. Weird freakin' show, I'd bet the creators of that were no strangers to hallucinogenics.

Yes,HR Puffinstuff.And ,yes they were puffing stuff.

Back in my day my parents whooped my butt with a wooden paddle, I could t leave the table til I finished all my food, we didn't act up in the grocery store or mom would spank us right then and there, we came in when the street lights came on, we listened to our neighbors like they were our own parents, we had to beg our parent's to let us play kick the can with the neighborhood kids, we played baseball in the field at the end of the block, and if we talked back to our parents we would either get a slap to the mouth or had soap put in it......there's probably more, all I can think of right now lol.

reply to post by Christarella

I've been thinking for a while now that we have way to many choices these days. It can make you crazy trying to decide things all day. For example, how many different types of bottled and flavored water does one little shop really need to carry? And did you ever think that one day it would cost more for a bottle of water than it does for a bottle of beer?

Tell me about it. It is really pathetic, isn't it. There are too many distractions, always telling us that there is something newer, better, different. "the grass greener" syndrome. Everyone has to have the latest car, gadget, gizmo, what have you. Very few people actually fix their broke-down machines. Instead, they throw away the old, and get a new gadget. Though I must say, sometimes that can be beneficial to a scavenger recycle-type such as I. My last computer, i found in a dumpster. It only needed the bios flashed and a new memory stick. My last car, a 1985 Caddy, I got from a wrecking yard for $200, it only needed a new battery, distributor cap, and the EGR valve cleaned out.
It makes me sick to my stomach when i see just how wasteful people in this society has become.

back in my day,

you drove up to restaurants


rock 'n' roll bands were actually friendly guys on tv


and single artists were .....unique


computers required you actually type in all the lines of code to a game in order to play that game


till they came out with premade games! a huge leap!


and then, and then, well, at 50 cents a pop, this got expensive real fast.


tv got real interesting





(i'd do more but too many videos clog up thread)

Back in the day,you could work on your own car.
Like,replace the brakes,change spark plugs.
Now your little light comes on and you take it in and it's some damn emission control device that cost $1000!
Computers and cars,should have never happened.Should have been alternative fuels instead of hanging on to fossil fuels.
Just like we were promised jetbacks and flying cars,back in the day.

Candys where a penny each, pop only came in glass bottles, tron was the sci fi movie with the best spcial effects.

Originally posted by adraves
I will start off the thread with:

Back in my day music came on a thing called cassettes. Cd's were a privilege, and no one had anything other than a boombox to listen to personal music.


Back in my day a 32" TV weighed 140 pounds and had 3 inputs on it! Svideo was cutting edge!

Back in my day we got 3 TV channels on a black and white TV that had no remote control!

Back in my father's day he grew pot for fun as a hobby! No one cared.

When I was growing up there was no internet! We used something called an encyclopedia.

When I grew up school was taught on a chalk board and tests were taken on paper....and we didn't have calculators!

Back in my day there were 9 planets!!!!

Back in my day we read goosbumbs!

Back in my day it took 4 hours to download a 30mb copy of south park because cable didn't carry the channel.

Anyways have anything else to share? Time seems to be moving so fast!

edit on 26-8-2011 by adraves because: (no reason given)

LOL... kids.

We didn't have new fangled things like cassette tapes, Hell we didn't even have 8-track in cars until the late 70's.

The first TV we had was also a "Hi-Fi" stereo and record player all built into a cabinet about 5 feet long. It had no "inputs;" you got ABC, CBS, and NBC with your rabbit ears, and maybe a low watt UHF channel once in a while if the weather was right. You also had to get up and cross the room to turn the channel. No video tapes, no DVD's, no XBox - not even Pong - but we did have a playroom with a jukebox, an electric train set, and a ping-pong table. Still, playing usually meant going outside and running around in the woods.

My father didn't even know what pot was.

We had one phone in the house for everyone to share. Boy was my mom happy when we got a second one for the kitchen (with an extra long cord.)

You could buy candy "cigarettes."

We had to walk 5 miles to school, and it was uphill - both ways.

I remember when I was 15. Gas was .45 cents a gallon, KISS had just released ALIVE II, and Cheech and Chong ruled the box office. Speaking of KISS, tickets to their show in Ft. Lauderdale were $14 each. Albums (you know, the round black vinyl discs with actual grooves in them) were $7.99, and a matinee movie ticket was $2.00. I saw Jaws 16 times the summer it came out in 1975, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show over 150 times.

I was stationed in Hawaii when I was in the Marine Corp. Plane rides were a straight up, non-stop party for the length of the flight. One of the best parts of going on leave was the plane trip from Honolulu to LAX and vice-versa. After boarding without having to go through so much as a metal detector, just a carry-on x-ray, we'd gather in the rear of the plane - coach mind you - where there was a bar set up, and a smoking area (smoking was allowed anywhere on the plane, but it's really best enjoyed socially) where we smoked and imbibed, played loud music, and told jokes. Those were the days my boy, long before some numbnuts, foreign and domestic, decided to ruin it for everyone.

My first computer was a TRS-80 with 4kb of memory. The programs were loaded into the RAM via a cassette tape deck, and Compuserve was the only way to get on the "internet." This was 1983.

I remember watching the first video that MTV ever played; back when MTV actually played videos.

The sexual revolution of the 70s was beginning to wind down by the time I came of age, but girls were still spreading their horizons. The best part is, there wasn't anything going around that a shot couldn't cure. No AIDS, no Herpes, none of that. The late 70's and the early 80's were a great time to be young, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Then I met my wife in 1989 and my whole world changed. As much fun as it was being a single young man, being with this woman for the past 22 years as a husband, and a father, has been my ultimate achievement. It is the thing I am most proud of out of anything I have done over the last 48 years. So enjoy your youth, but look forward to being a man. Your life will change, but it brings with it a unique set of rewards.

Laters.

reply to post by OldCorp


Dude,I was 13 years old in 1975 and my first album and concert was KISS. Next album was Aerosmiths Toy's in the Attic.On LP of course.
Good times.
Hush puppy shoes, corduroy slacks and long hair.
God,I miss my hair!

Originally posted by kdog1982
reply to post by OldCorp

 

Dude,I was 13 years old in 1975 and my first album and concert was KISS. Next album was Aerosmiths Toy's in the Attic.On LP of course.
Good times.
Hush puppy shoes, corduroy slacks and long hair.
God,I miss my hair!

I still have my original 12-inch LP of "Toys," AND the original 1/4lb rolling paper that came with C&C's "Big Bambu" album!

And I miss my hair too. There was a time when it was almost down to my waist.

Now I'm the Epic Bald Guy (with grandchildren and gray in my beard.)

Back in the day I bought my first car for 150 bucks it was a 68 T'bird with a 429 thunder-jet under the hood. I blew that engine up in a month. So my dad and I replaced it with a modified 429 super cobra jet you could stomp on the gas pedal and watch the gas gauge go down. After losing the sheriff for about the fifth time he and my dad decided it would be best if I sold the car.

Nobody worried about music piracy back then. The Grateful Dead would even set aside a section in the audience so people could bring in recording equipment. If your into the dead the internet archives has a lot of their concerts you can download for free. The Grateful Dead Miracle ticket anyone?

Captain Kangaroo was the show for kids back then and the scary show late at night was tales from the tomb.

And the crazy comedian wasn't George Carlin or Robin Williams it was Jerry Clower.

When I was a kid, I remember going outside to play with friends...keep me in the house, nonsense

Kids actually listened to their parents

There was never any talk of gloom and doom end of the world non-sense

We believed and trusted what the government was telling us.

Atari 2600 was king

reply to post by OldCorp


Same as you have said without the grandkids.My kids are 12 and 9.
Cheech and chong!,I bet that one is worth some money on ebay.

Originally posted by adraves
Back in my day we ate straw and # gold.

Back in my day we crapped rainbows and # butterflies! We had an immigration tax on the elves that popped out. We took there lucky charms for laughs!


lol...off topic I suppose. It made me laugh at least.

Originally posted by adraves
Back in my day we ate straw and # gold.

Back in my day we crapped rainbows and # butterflies! We had an immigration tax on the elves that popped out. We took there lucky charms for laughs!


lol...off topic I suppose. It made me laugh at least.

Made me laugh you must have been a child of the sixties like me. What a blast that was, the world was changing and we were riding the wave I wish I could go back for just one day!!!

Originally posted by Mr Moon



I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

I went into a library a couple of years ago and asked for the location of their card file....the kid had no idea.

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our BUTTS! Nowhere was safe!

Yeah I remember. "Be home before it gets TOO dark" Playing at dusk was the best...cept for mosquitos.

Really had a ball running through the cloud of DDT that was sprayed in the neighborhood!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

I found some vestigial remains of some of these from when I was a kid. I even found a taped station ID for a local station. KZEW. dallas. fort worth. "RRRRRROOOOARRROAARRARRR" (sound of the zew beast).

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

My daughter of 12 years of age actually got one of these on her cell the other day and was perplexed..."Mommy....umm....what does this noise mean?" My wife said she nearly wrecked due to laughter!

What would some of these kids do with one of those old black bakelite phones with the rotary dial?

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

I remember when arcades still had old games from the sixties. they were electro/mechanical. Blacklit planes flying and metal pop ups that we shot with a vibrating "light" machine gun! I saw a few with monsters. Kinda cool.

I remember the old 2600's. Controls were craptastic. You had better have a little bit of electronics understanding if you wanted them to last at all! Pong Tanks were my favorite!

We also lived by a code in the arcades. The "quarter" code.

Remember the "quarter" code? If some dude put a quarter on the game (usually on the name plate or the screen edge), he had dibs for next up. It was never questioned.....and NO ONE stole the quarters! On a new game their might be nearly 6 bucks on one!

Tempest, Galaga, and the ever evil...DEFENDER!!!!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your BUTT and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

Grandparents had an old zenith b/w 24" console when I was about 6 or 7. Sometimes the fine tuning could get a little off and the knob wouldnt hold where you wanted...what to do? MATCH BOOK! Fold it up and jam it into either the VHF or UHF selecter knob and you were good!

I always thought it was so cool that after watching a b/w movie for a while, you forgot it was not color. your brain converted it!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

6am. Bowl of cereal, speed racer, scoobie, and whatever else came on till 12. At twelve it was lunch and then "outside mister!".

I remember vividly a conversation (early development of conspiracy forum) in the 70's when I was in elementary

"Hey, I heard some places they have cartoons on at NIGHT TIME!"

us
"No way, that would be soooo cool! we could watch cartoons forever!"

When i was about 18 I was working the 3p to 12a shift. I came home one night to find Danger Mouse on tv!

Cartoons at night had been realized!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!
And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were luckily, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!
See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

Kids have so lost out on what we experienced. Its a damn shame.