Growing up Gen-X

TarSpiel said:
It's crazy to me thinking about growing up in the 70's and 80's.

We had 24 inch TV sets with 3 channels, and a TV guide we studied to know when we wanted to watch it.
We had phones that had to be plugged into the wall.
We did not have microwaves.

What the hell did we do with all our time?

Read books, I guess, went for walks, played outside. Sat in our room and listened to cassette tapes and flipped slowly through books or magazines with pictures in them...
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Slowly flipped through magazines...

National geographic? AmIright :unsure::cool:😁
 
BoonetheAiredale said:
Born in 67. So 70's am radio, Saturday morning cartoons, wrestling on WRAL on Saturday nights...in studio, Evel Knievel wind up motorcycle toy, K-Tel records, Kiss albums. Then the 80's...high school, 80's music (specifically U2, Simple Minds, the Police, and Big Country), fumbling through the cassette tape case while driving, OP t-shirts, first iteration of mullets. 86 off to Carolina where I heard the Replacements, REM, 10,000 Maniacs, Hoodoo Gurus, among a thousand other new sounds on 2nd West Granville. Noon football games, litte frat court after game parties, Glass Moon playing at big frat court (Sigma Nu porch?), really bad fake ids, He's Not, eary Dillon Fence in the basement of some frat, lots and lots of beautiful sundresses in spring. Gen X has been very good to me.
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Challenge of the Superfriends (Superfriends v. Legion of Doom), Isis, Shazam!, Land of the Lost, Dr. Shrinker, Flash Gordon, were all money back in the day on Saturday mornings.
 
I love to tell people how I studied abroad in the mid-90s and I would BEG my friends back at school to go to the computer lab and sign up for an email account. We could stop writing letters through the mail and get messages immediately, what a concept! It was a hard sell though... the computer lab was kind of a hike, and everyone used their Brother word processors for their papers so that they wouldn't have to go to the computer lab. I wish I had kept some of those letters from that time in my life.

I just watched The Holdovers the other night. The setting is an all-male New England boarding school in the 70s. In one of the scenes, the boys were sitting in their dorm room with nothing to do... one of them was just throwing a ball against a wall over and over again, another was reading, others were talking. I had a distinct thought that this just wouldn't occur now -- they'd all just be staring at their phones -- and it made me sad to think about how much we have lost by the introduction of the internet and smart phones. I swear, every day I'm tempted to just throw away my phone.
 
tallheel95 said:
I love to tell people how I studied abroad in the mid-90s and I would BEG my friends back at school to go to the computer lab and sign up for an email account. We could stop writing letters through the mail and get messages immediately, what a concept! It was a hard sell though... the computer lab was kind of a hike, and everyone used their Brother word processors for their papers so that they wouldn't have to go to the computer lab. I wish I had kept some of those letters from that time in my life.

I just watched The Holdovers the other night. The setting is an all-male New England boarding school in the 70s. In one of the scenes, the boys were sitting in their dorm room with nothing to do... one of them was just throwing a ball against a wall over and over again, another was reading, others were talking. I had a distinct thought that this just wouldn't occur now -- they'd all just be staring at their phones -- and it made me sad to think about how much we have lost by the introduction of the internet and smart phones. I swear, every day I'm tempted to just throw away my phone.
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"Mindfulness"....heh
 
aGDevil2k said:
I had an IBM PC Jr. That was cool. I just enjoyed living a life without the addiction of screens and the psychological damage that kids experience from social media.

Did anyone else have that terrible "football" game where the metal table vibrated and the players moved around with this little foam ball? I was never sure how it was supposed to work. Dumbest gift ever.
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I had a Commodore VIC-20 and C64 later on. I remember trying to learn programming on them by reading books and magazines on the subject but never got very far and lost interest. My interest peaked again a few years later when my high school offered a computer class my senior year but it was the most basic of basics (I had forgot more from my own previous studying... than that class taught) and I lost interest again. My teacher was from North Carolina (this was in KY) and he and I shared a UNC basketball fandom, so that was cool. I made a UNC logo over a basketball for our final assignment and he loved it (other people were only making things like a rectangular houses... because that was the extent of what was taught).

Don't remember the magazine but it had lines of game code that you could put in yourself and run the game. It was tedious work and one mistake would crash the game, which then meant going over everything looking for the mistake. I did finally learn the hard way that sometimes you could get an idea where the problem was by how long the game ran and that would allow you to skip checking hundreds of lines.
 
milom98 said:
I had a Commodore VIC-20 and C64 later on. I remember trying to learn programming on them by reading books and magazines on the subject but never got very far and lost interest. My interest peaked again a few years later when my high school offered a computer class my senior year but it was the most basic of basics (I had forgot more from my own previous studying... than that class taught) and I lost interest again. My teacher was from North Carolina (this was in KY) and he and I shared a UNC basketball fandom, so that was cool. I made a UNC logo over a basketball for our final assignment and he loved it (other people were only making things like a rectangular houses... because that was the extent of what was taught).

Don't remember the magazine but it had lines of game code that you could put in yourself and run the game. It was tedious work and one mistake would crash the game, which then meant going over everything looking for the mistake. I did finally learn the hard way that sometimes you could get an idea where the problem was by how long the game ran and that would allow you to skip checking hundreds of lines.
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Those old pre-error logging debug techniques.

I recall many a command line print message like, "in function block 1" to help narrow down the issue.

The misplaced semicolon at the end of an "if" function block has cost me many a night's sleep.
 
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Use to see these everywhere in the early to mid 80s. We had one when you could watch everything for free. That meant HBO, Cinemax, Showtime... and sports feeds for every team. I did get in trouble once (wink, wink) for watching some channels of the adult variety.
 
Despite having raised two that age and maybe 3 depending on where 1986 falls, I don't trust my judgment and sought counsel.

 
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