the good ole' days

[PlatyPius 5]

I had barely heard of a computer until I was in high school; had certainly never seen one. In high school, I took BASIC, which involved working on TRS-80 Radio Shack/Tandy computers. Windows didn't exist. My first computer didn't have a hard drive; it ran entirely on floppies.

The house I grew up in was built by my Mom and Dad. It was featured in Better Homes and Gardens back in the 50s after they completed it. Now it just seems "odd", but back then it was considered futuristic. The television, a black and white one, was built into the wall in the living room. Dad bought a console TV, removed the guts, and slid them into a housing he had built into my closet (on the other side of the wall). We also have/had a built in gas oven. Nothing exciting about that now; was very cool back then.

I remember when Pong first came out; and still have one. Atari was the ultimate in home gaming, but came out when I was getting too old to want to sit around fighting Mom and step-dad for a chance to play.

My first car was a 1971 Nova with a 427 and a Powerglide. Gas was 68 cents/gallon. I blew the engine up at the race track, and the car is STILL sitting in the garage at Mom's house. My next car was a 1977 Vega. I only drove it 3 times before it died. Bought a 1980 Honda Prelude after that and drove it for years.

We didn't wear bike helmets that made us look like rejects from Aliens when I was a kid. No one ever suffered a horrendous brain injury either, although it would seem that we tried. I was 6 or 7 when we temporarily moved to California. BMX was just starting there; it wasn't even heard of in Indiana then. I saved for a long, long time to buy a BMX bike via mail order.

I remember riding bikes through the woods before mountain bikes were invented by Joe Breeze and a bunch of other scruffy hippies in California. In this case, I'll stick with the newer technology if that's ok. lol

I used to ride my bike to "Sutherland's"; a mom-and-pop General Store here in Greencastle. As mentioned above, there was real penny candy. There was also a big red metal cooler for 6.5oz Cokes. You put in your 15 cents and slid the bottle down the rails until you got to the opening. Coke was much, much better in the 6.5oz green bottles. Sidenote: The green bottles originated here. The old glassworks for Coke was where there is now a nature preserve. The sand there makes glass that is green. The nature preserve is called Fern Cliffs, and is where Sian and I got engaged.

When I was a kid, I used to ramble through the woods for hours. I was always outside, not sitting inside pushing buttons on a gaming console. I created things from cinderblocks and scrap lumber (A Fort!), collected leaves and learned the names of trees, watched the life cycle of tadpoles as they became frogs, fell down and cut myself, put some mud on it, and kept playing.

Ah well, I've rambled enough. I kinda miss the "old days", as you can see. People may live longer now and have more "stuff", but are we really better off? I don't think so.

[ieldanth 0]

50 years from now:

"Yeah, must have been pretty cool living around the turn of the millenium, but how did you get by without teleportation?"

[fish_oinc 0]

Disco still gives me nightmares.... and the stupid places around here have to try to bring it back callin it "retro"

8 track tape in my first car

then tape

first cd players were over $400

gas was about $.35 when my dad was drivin about

drinking age was 18 then 21 when my sister turned 18, but since we moved to germany where its 16... no biggie for me

fast food was a treat, not a staple

framers markets were the bong! fresh produce at good decent prices, not the jacked "organic" stuff now

Walter Cronkite

20/20 when it was actually news, not political bandstanding

Yeah I remember bongs too.