Do you remember or can you imagine a time where.....

[Paul_UK]

Many of you are of an age where you have had a lot of technology around you for the whole of your lives so probably take it for granted. So as a quick comparison to life when I was 16 back in 1980, do you remember or can you imagine a time where....


- There is no internet.

- Computers were vastly expensive and used only in limited numbers by big companies. The early 80s the home computers were just starting to appear with things like the Sinclair ZX80.

- There were no CDs. You bought your music on vinyl or cassette.

- There were no iPods or other similar small personal audio units. A cassette walkman was a new must-have gadget.

- There were no DVDs. You rented or bought films on VHS or Betamax tapes..... if you could afford a video recorder.

- There was no satellite TV and only a few areas had cable. Most people in the UK had a choice of just 3 TV channels.

- Quite a lot of people still used black-and-white television sets because colour ones were so expensive.

- There were no mobile phones. In fact there were not even many cordless phones in houses, many homes had just one phone in the hall.

- In the UK at least the main radio station that teenagers wanted to listen to, Radio 1, was on AM only. It sounded fairly bad (especially at night) and was mono only.

- Digital watches were an expensive novelty.


We've come a long way in the last 28 years.

[mrrolemodel]

oh ew. i would die.
sorry. i would.
i love all the shit we have. hahah.
im so glad im 16 in 2007-2008, instead of 1980.

[Paul_UK]

Remember though it is only by looking back and comparing that we realise what's changed. I bet if you were to look back in 20 years time you'd think what we have now is limited.

We obviously didn't know what was coming in the future so what we had seemed fine at the time (well apart from Radio 1 being on AM only - we knew that was crap).

The thing that would have helped me most back then would have been an internet connection and a site like EC.

I should have added too that there were no games consoles. You could get basic bat-and-ball TV games like this though....

http://www.arcade-history.com/images/game/2007_1.png

[xxAngelOnFirexx]

yeah i think about that then i look at all the junk the tiny tots today have! i would have loved all these little robots. i had like one when i was older of a cat and it was very... low tech and boring. yet i loved it. lol like i didn't already have many real cats. but yeah things have changed. i keep getting jelous i didn't group up later as to experience these new things. when i was little skate shoes where rare on not as popular now i can't walk through the mall without those damn kids skating into me! its so and it always will be. my neighbor is 96. she's been through both wars and war born not to long as cars were invented! of course she didnt update so she never really seem much. once i took my razr phone over adn was showing her what it did and stuff. it was really cute. i can imagine me at almost 100 marveling at like hoverboards, personal jet backs, and all this stuff i read in this futuristic magazine article. of course by then (as it said) people can live to like 150, 200 and have antiaging so a 70yr old mother looks the same age as her 30 year old daughter! crazy crazy techno stuff. when i was little i never had no video games i ran around outside! and i was the only kid in my class who wasn't chunky.in like 1-3 grade.

[sdc91]

Uh, my house circa 1993?

Well we had television (basic) and radio. lol

But I barely watched or listened, and I didn't have a video game system or anything until I was about 7. I just played around with Hot Wheels and stuffed animals.

[Miaplacidus]

Well. When I was like 4, I remember that:

* We had a VCR (VHS-based) and it was like, wow, a VCR.

* We had a TV set, no cable (it didn't exist back then in Uruguay)

* We didn't have a computer, but sometimes I got to use my uncle's. It was 386DX-based, running at 33 MHz and with (I think) 2 MB of RAM. It ran DOS and Windows 3.0. It had a VGA video card but a monochrome monitor.

* We didn't have an audio system. Just a little radio. Not even a walkman.

[Paul_UK]

I remember the WOW! feeling with being able to record television programmes for the first time. Video recorders were revolutionary machines when they were first released (despite initially being quite poor quality and going through several standards before VHS won).

I also remember the amazement of colour television. It seemed so futuristic, and we had one in our own home (even though it was rented and it was forever going wrong).

I don't think the technological advances have that sort of "wow factor" to the same extent now.

Another one to add to the list.... No digital cameras. Cameras used film and you had to take the film for processing to see what the photos were like.

[beckyg]

I remember one of my friends getting HBO and how cool it was to go to his house and watch relatively new movies on TV! Paul, the name of that game was PONG. I remember being addicted to it! lol

[InaRut]

You what though...I'd tottaly choose to live in the 1960's then now.
The music was empowering, the fashion was desirable, and the sex was wild.

Now we have hateful music, some really sketchy fashion, and sex that is a little too wild.
Haha

Just looking back what we have is the second worse generation (pop culture wise) next to the 80's at number 1.

[sdc91]

What, you didn't like the 80's music or clothing?
:roflmao:

[InaRut]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K4iTh1TL9g
*ahem*
Although the 80's had some great television...
Fashion...
Music...
Nahhh

[EthanS]

Id either probly go mental or go die of boredem

[Étoile]

I still don't own a cell phone or Ipod/MP3 player. I've still got my trusty Walkman lying around somewhere in my house. LOL

When I was younger circa '97-'98 we only had one cordless phone, one computer with no Internet connection, one of those A/C that went into the wall, no heating and air system, and countless rats and roaches. Surprisingly, I had my two trusty Sega Genesis and Playstation with hundreds of games. I was happy.:icon_wink So many things have changed in 10 years. Just think about how things will be in 2018.

[GunStarre]

I would be DEAD.
I mean, seriously, what am I suppose to do when I'm bored or when my friends are like busy and can't hang out with me? :p

[joeyconnick]

I used to do a lot more reading back then, and I still regret I don't do more now.

Anyway, I was watching Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS the other day (everyone should watch that show... it's SO interesting) and he had a guest on talking about how capitalism is broken and one of the reason he thinks that so is that so much money and effort is thrown into marketing stuff, creating needs that we don't really have, while meanwhile needs that capitalism could be fulfilling and making money from go unmet. And while I love gadgets like cool cellphones, computers, mp3 players, and digital cameras... they are DEFINITELY things that when you get right down to it none of us really NEED. Why do we know this? Because as Paul pointed out, 20 or 30 years ago we didn't have them and people then didn't think "Oh my gosh my life is over because I can't instantly send a message to someone on the other side of the world" or "Geez I can't call up so and so RIGHT NOW."

Not to say they are evil things or things that haven't in some ways enhanced our lives but they're not the necessities that they are made out to be in advertising, much of it directed at teenagers (and younger people). And of course, somehow it never gets brought up that probably 90% of the world's population has no access to any of this stuff. We tend to think that technology drives society but really society tends to drive technology just as much, so we get cool gizmos that are neat but aren't really fulfilling any higher purpose... or that we're not using for any higher purpose, since technology can be used productively or just as a time-waster.

Anyway, that's just some of my anti-marketing/anti-out-of-control consumerism speech. Advertisers don't want us to think, they just want us to WANT without any restraint or consideration.

[Jamie]

I am old enough to remember good old VHS cassettes, and recording programmes off of sky box office, before they encrypted it - lol. But I have to admit now that technology controls my life.

I remember a day of massive power failure around this area, couldn't cook, couldn't clean, couldn't watch tv to pass time or go on the internet. Even at work we had to close because without computers banks cannot function... It was totally crazy.

That being said though, I'd love to get away on a holiday somewhere without these mod cons and I love going camping out in the Yorkshire dales. So... I could survive if all these things disappeared. But I'd need time to prepare... and exchange telephone numbers with people ;)

[Steam Giant]

First of all, I loved pong ^^

Second, I remember quite a few of those things, because I was very interested with technology at an early age. I can still remember a text-based internet, our good-ole Commodore 64 that my dad used for writing sermons (it would regularly take 30 minutes to print!). We played attari, games on the commodore 64, on the commodore amega, and were absolutely astonished by the capabilities of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we picked up very early on.

It did take us a very long time to get into the computer scene, but when we did, we made sure to pick up something top of the line that would last us forever... a pentium 800-something with a whopping 4 gigs of harddrive space (my brother's tech-savvy friend had a 1.6 gig)! That sonofabitch cost us $2000.00, heh!

Oh, and my very first CD had instructions on how to care for this "new technology" written on the back, heh.

[Steam Giant]

I should have added too that there were no games consoles. You could get basic bat-and-ball TV games like this though....

The Commodore Amiga first appeared on the scene during 1985, and quickly became known as a gaming machine due to its graphical/sound capabilities. It was the most popular in mainland europe, and stayed popular there a long while after the world forgot it ever existed. Some modern-day video game companies can trace their origins to programming for the Amiga.

Oh, and nintendo first released its gaming platform in 1983 :thumbsup: which was first considered to be a network-capable family computer, capable of running advanced (for their time) video games.

So gaming consoles started appearing very soon after the year you're reminiscing about ^^

[CrimsonThunder]

I don't think the technological advances have that sort of "wow factor" to the same extent now.

Yeah it does, its just not enough companies are trying to push things further. Take the Wii for example its the only console to do something different, 360 and PS3 only went for graphics, wii made me go WOW.

With the iPod touch I went WOW because its awesome. Nothing new but its awesome.

[joeyconnick]

It did take us a very long time to get into the computer scene, but when we did, we made sure to pick up something top of the line that would last us forever... a pentium 800-something with a whopping 4 gigs of harddrive space (my brother's tech-savvy friend had a 1.6 gig)! That sonofabitch cost us $2000.00, heh!I can beat you there: our first computer THAT ACTUALLY HAD a hard drive had a 40 MB one. Note: megabytes. Not gigabytes. Megabytes!

Of course my mum worked for IBM in the late 60s and fed their computers code on punch cards, so everything is relative. :lol:

[s5m1]

I would be DEAD.
I mean, seriously, what am I suppose to do when I'm bored or when my friends are like busy and can't hang out with me? :p

It was actually not so bad. We used to spend a lot more time outside with kids in the neighborhood. You got to know every kid who lived within probably a square mile. Practically every day after school there was a pick up game of baseball, football, etc. It was also much harder to do homework. Imagine doing reports on typewriters! Without the internet, we also used the library much more. It's too bad we can't combine sense of community that existed then with the amazing technology of today.

[Kimi]

I still remember how dial-up internet connection was totally crap:grin:
It was 7 or 8 years ago!!

When I was 16 yo...

Cable internet connection.
I had my own computer.
I had CDs, MDs, and MP3s.
iPod was out there.
DVDs were standard, and we had a DVD recorder.
I think we had over 900 cable TV channels.
Plasma TV.
I had a cell phone.
Satellite radio was available.
We don't even care about watch anymore cuz you got a cell phone!!(btw, I had G-Shock)

After 20 years, everyone who is around 16 yo would be laughing at me:lol:

[panda]

The first record I bought was Little Richard-Tutti-Frutti on a 78rpm.We did have electric players and didn't have to wind it by hand.

[CelebrityHead]

We did have electric players and didn't have to wind it by hand.

That's a relief! :p

[Kimi]

We did have electric players and didn't have to wind it by hand.

That's a relief! :p

:roflmao:

[Paul_UK]

I don't think the technological advances have that sort of "wow factor" to the same extent now.

Yeah it does, its just not enough companies are trying to push things further. Take the Wii for example its the only console to do something different, 360 and PS3 only went for graphics, wii made me go WOW.

Yes, I think the Wii is as close as we have got recently. The WOW was not because of some technological advance though, but from a conceptual change in the way it is used.

I can beat you there: our first computer THAT ACTUALLY HAD a hard drive had a 40 MB one. Note: megabytes. Not gigabytes. Megabytes!

My first computer had no hard drives or even floppy drives. It was a Sinclair ZX81 (I think they were branded Timex in the USA) which used an audio cassette recorder for storing programs. Graphics were black cubes on a white background, and the standard memory was just 1kB with an optional 16kB add-on memory pack (yes that is kB not MB).

It was about my 4th computer before I had hard disk storage. That was a PC with 286 CPU and 40MB hard disk running DOS 3.3.

It was actually not so bad. We used to spend a lot more time outside with kids in the neighborhood. You got to know every kid who lived within probably a square mile. Practically every day after school there was a pick up game of baseball, football, etc.

Exactly. We played outside. We lived in a cul-de-sac (dead end road) and there were always kids outside playing. A lot less kids were overweight then, because we got exercise by running around, cycling up and down the road, and generally being active.

Parents didn't have the paranoia that there might be some unseen paedophile or mass murderer ready to attack their kids the moment they were out of sight either. Amazingly we all arrived back home with no more harm than the odd grazed knee or elbow.

It was also much harder to do homework. Imagine doing reports on typewriters! Without the internet, we also used the library much more.

My homework was all handwritten. So no spelling checkers and no chances to tweak the wording numerous times to get it right. Research was from the library, from the encyclopaedias we had at home, and from the school text books.

It's too bad we can't combine sense of community that existed then with the amazing technology of today.

Agreed.

The first record I bought was Little Richard-Tutti-Frutti on a 78rpm.We did have electric players and didn't have to wind it by hand.

My first record that I bought myself was a 45rpm single, "Never Ending Song of Love" by the New Seekers, which I played on the family record player. This was electric, used valves (tubes) so took a couple of minutes to warm up, and had an autochanger which let you put up to 10 records on and it played them in turn, dropping one on top of the other. By the time there was about 6 records it would often start skidding a bit.

[InaRut]

Well in my past life we use to have to practise sword and shield day and night in fear that the spanish would invade again. There was no RECORDS or COMPUTERS only a crystal ball that worked after visiting an OPIUM DEN. Alot of people had some strange diseases...The poor folk threw their garbage into the streets, and taxmen kept taking every cent they got, and the lot of us were uneducated and drunk.

And before that...In my past past past past psat past life, we didn't even have arms, brains, hearts, lung...no we have flagellums, and nucleuses and all we did was swim around (also no obesity becuase of all the exercise). Also we had to eat through a membrane! I tell you, you kids now are so spoiled!

[Ty]

Back in my day, you kids would be in the coal mines working for 1p a month... those were the days...

[InaRut]

Back in my day we didn't even EXIST! We all just sat around waiting for them big ole bang to happen!

[Paul_UK]

Now even I don't remember that far back.... :)

[SpikySpice]

Coparing you guy's old days to mine, you live in the US and UK and teh countries that have the faster rate of technologies

Back at those days, I had to watch black and white TV, and there were not enough channels and the sound system sucked, and most my friends who were pool, didnt have anything so they had to go to dirty playground and play soccer with a coco or something round

They had to go swim in teh river ofcousreback in those days teh water was super clean, the swimming pool costed a lot, I remmber mom told me when i was 3, all i did all day was to just ride teh bike to the neighboor, and one night I fell down to teh bottom of the river, luckily it was drough that dut dont know how i get up lol

[iPieman]

I remember 4 TV Channels (all of which went off-air at 11pm)
I remember the Test Card Girl [link] (http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test/tcf320.jpg)
I remember when the only way you could listen to music on the go was by taping it off the radio.
I remember JR being "just a dream"
I remember car phones
I remember the only games console being the Game Boy (and still have it)
I had a commodore 64
I remember the 8 inch floppy disc

[InaRut]

I remember POGS!

[Red87]

Many of you are of an age where you have had a lot of technology around you for the whole of your lives so probably take it for granted. So as a quick comparison to life when I was 16 back in 1980, do you remember or can you imagine a time where....


- There is no internet.
It was just picking up when I was in elementary school


- Computers were vastly expensive and used only in limited numbers by big companies. The early 80s the home computers were just starting to appear with things like the Sinclair ZX80.
These were already around when I was young, however I recently found a newpaper from like 1988 (I was 1 years old then) that my family had used as a spool for christmas lights, a computer was 3500$ and had like 8MB of RAM, a 200mhz processor, and a bunch of other stuff that must have been high tech at the time.

- There were no CDs. You bought your music on vinyl or cassette.

Cassettes were what I had all my music on as a child. I used to hate when the tape player ate them. A walkman was the cool thing to have back then.

- There were no iPods or other similar small personal audio units. A cassette walkman was a new must-have gadget.
As above, walkmans were the cool thing to have, I remember my first one.

- There were no DVDs. You rented or bought films on VHS or Betamax tapes..... if you could afford a video recorder.
Yeah, I had all my disney movies on VHS :D

- There was no satellite TV and only a few areas had cable. Most people in the UK had a choice of just 3 TV channels. We had just basic cable with like 30 channels.

- Quite a lot of people still used black-and-white television sets because colour ones were so expensive.
We always had a color, they were pretty mainstream when I was growing up, but my grandparents still used their B&W TV

- There were no mobile phones. In fact there were not even many cordless phones in houses, many homes had just one phone in the hall.
I never heard ofa cell phone until like 9th grade, and that was like in 2001, I remember seeing someone with a carphone and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

- In the UK at least the main radio station that teenagers wanted to listen to, Radio 1, was on AM only. It sounded fairly bad (especially at night) and was mono only. We always had a wide selection in Phoenix, AZ where I grew up - 100.1, the Edge was THE station to listen to.

- Digital watches were an expensive novelty.
They were cool, especially the big honkin' ones with the calculators on them.


We've come a long way in the last 28 years.

My responses in red :).

[Kenko]

Our first computer was a TI-994/A. I think my parents bought that before I was born. It was one of the first home computers with a SIXTEEN bit processor. We also got an NES somewhere in there. Best console ever.

When I was six we got a PC: 386SX-16Mhz, 2MB RAM, 40MB Hard drive. We got a disk compression program called stacker that doubled the available space, but the computer ran probably at least half as fast. Obviously in those days hard drives weren't near as inexpensive as today. We usually Ran DOS 5, and GeoWorks because Windows took up too much space. Word perfect 5.1 for DOS with the blue screen also ruled. We also had a wiz-bang Adlib sound card. So we could have FM synthesis audio and not just PC Speaker Square wave audio.

We also got a blazing fast 2400 baud modem. That's right, 2400 bits per second. No downloading of 32GB torrents went one, and we used BBS's. Completely text driven. In 93 or 94 we got a Shell account to the internet, again completely text driven. Z-Modem was defenatly the best protocol for modem file transfers. It supported resumes which was good because someone picking up a phone would end the connection. Though the modem lines at the BBS and for the Shell internet were always busy. Not uncommon waiting 30 minutes for a free line.

Our next computer (A Pentium 100) had a 28.8kbps modem. Wow!! Fortunently we eventually got PPP which made using the internet much more bearable.

I'm also guilty of successfully being able to imitate a 2400 baud modem handshake tone.

All this happened before CD burners, or USB drives, so to transfer files between computers required this ridiculous process known as floppies. These terrible inventions were slow and unreliable (abort, retry, ignore). And I saw many people make the fatal mistake of thinking they were more reliable than a hard drive, and stored their only copy of a work on a floppy.

I had a cassette walkman until 7 years ago. I used to make MP3 tapes. I'd make a playlist in Winamp and connect the audio out to a tape deck. I then bought a CD-MP3 player because for $200 it let me carry 700MB of songs around (plus more if I wanted to carry more discs). Compared to $300 flash MP3 players of the time holding 32MB and $800 4GB Hard drive players.

Another thing you forgot. Back then (60s, 70's, early 80's) cars didn't have this fancy thing called "electronic fuel injection" that lets you stick the key in the ignition, turn and have the engine running. Instead you had to fool with priming, chokes, fast idles, and smelly exhausts.

It did take us a very long time to get into the computer scene, but when we did, we made sure to pick up something top of the line that would last us forever... a pentium 800-something with a whopping 4 gigs of harddrive space (my brother's tech-savvy friend had a 1.6 gig)! That sonofabitch cost us $2000.00, heh!I can beat you there: our first computer THAT ACTUALLY HAD a hard drive had a 40 MB one. Note: megabytes. Not gigabytes. Megabytes!

Of course my mum worked for IBM in the late 60s and fed their computers code on punch cards, so everything is relative. :lol:

8 years ago I bought an inexpensive used Toshiba laptop circa 1990:
Intel 8088 - 9Mhz
640kB RAM (That's kilobytes)
720kB floppy drive
20MB Hard Drive
1200 Baud modem
Weight about 20 pounds.

No built in mouse pointing device. No trackball, touchpad or trackpoint. I could plug a mouse in the serial port if I wanted to. But the only app I use on it is WP5.1 and I have the keyboard template with all the shortcuts.

The screen close switch makes the same warning tone of Toshibas of only a few years ago.

[Jim1454]

Another thing you forgot. Back then (60s, 70's, early 80's) cars didn't have this fancy thing called "electronic fuel injection" that lets you stick the key in the ignition, turn and have the engine running. Instead you had to fool with priming, chokes, fast idles, and smelly exhausts.


That's where I was going to go (to absolutelly no one's surprise) - cars!

I remember in 1981 my parents bought a 1980 Oldsmobile Omega (man was it a lemon, but another story...) and it was their first car with air conditioning, a cassette player (with 4 speakers!!!), cloth seats (rather than sticky vinyl), and it was FRONT WHEEL DRIVE!!!

And no, it didn't have fuel injection, so you had to choke / prime it before starting it.

It didn't have antilock brakes. It didn't have air bags. It didn't have a high mounted rear stop light. It didn't have traction control or any kind of anti-skid system. Your 'GPS Navigation System' was the person in the passenger seat with a map, if you remembered to bring one. Your 'OnStar' or car phone was the nearest phone booth. Unlocking the door required actually putting the key in and turning it (assuming the lock wasn't frozen). At the time, GM at least was still using two keys! One for the doors and one for the ignition.

Those were the days... (NOT!)

[joeyconnick]

It didn't have antilock brakes. It didn't have air bags. It didn't have a high mounted rear stop light. It didn't have traction control or any kind of anti-skid system. Your 'GPS Navigation System' was the person in the passenger seat with a map, if you remembered to bring one. Your 'OnStar' or car phone was the nearest phone booth. Unlocking the door required actually putting the key in and turning it (assuming the lock wasn't frozen). At the time, GM at least was still using two keys! One for the doors and one for the ignition.Actually, although it may seem like air bags are totally newfangled, Ralph Nader, he of the US Green party presidential bid fame, had been trying to get car companies to include them standard in cars since if not the late 60s then definitely the early 70s. The fact that they didn't start coming standard until the 90s is a result of the car industry dragging its feet because it was cheaper for them to settle lawsuits for wrongful death or dismemberment or injury than to install air bags.

So what I'm saying is that your parents' 1980 car could easily have had life-saving air bags if it weren't for corporate greed.

Nice, huh? Thanks car industry!