Here is something for all you to read , My mom sent me this i could not help and lol how some of this is so true to todays kids out there, my only concern and i can not be leave would have to be the 25 mile walk to school which i think has to be a error by the person who type this, i mean come on back in the 80's there where buses and most parents with kids had some sort of transportation.



If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning ... uphill BOTH ways .. yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now...

I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, and I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy!

I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

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!!

There was no email! ! We had to actually write somebody a letter ... with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!

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!

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!

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "asteroids" and the graphics were horrible! Your 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!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! 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 ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and 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 bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a fire ... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled.

You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

Damn straight.


Lucky whippersnappers!

Feels like I'm walking down memory lane...
Great Post!

A couple more:

Videos only came on Friday Night (broadcast)

If you were watching a movie on your high-tech VCR/Beta, you actually had to fast forward through the whole thing to get to the spot you wanted to see and tried to visualize where you were through black horizontal bars and static. And remotes for the VCR had WIRES.

Don't even get me started about floppys... watch 16 Candles if you don't know.

'Couse back in the good old days, candy bars only cost a quarter.

I'm not quite 30... but I hear ya (mind you in NZ, we didn't have cable TV until the 90's!!... regular TV was 2 channels only as well )

We Feared for our lives back then too... It wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, suicide bombers or anything lke that... Parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! (Some of us are still afraid of them too!) So was being sent to the principal's office!

Decisions were made by going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo" or dib dib's, scissors, paper, rock.

"Race issue" meant arguing about who ran the fastest.

The state of the economy was handled by whoever was the banker in Monopoly.

Terrorism was when the older kids were at the end of your street with slingshots and pea-shooters waiting to ambush you, or the neighbourhood bully chased you up a tree

The worst thing you could catch from the opposite sex was boy/girl germs, and the worst thing in your day was having to sit next to one.

Commodore Vic 20 with Tape drive... Talk about loading time for games....


No cell phones, well if you did have one, it was probably a Brick from Motorola...

Ahhh the 80's. The cable tv box didn't have a remote. You had 20 push buttons across the top and you had to select your channel from there. Staying up late to watch Airwolf or Bevis and Butthead. Yep, the vcr had a corded remote, four buttons even. My parents where one of the first in the neighborhood to get a tv with an IR remote, not that it helped beings the cable box was still pushbutton. No calculators where allowed in school, we had to learn math in our heads and on paper. We had typing class, on a typewriter without word processing. Our delete button came equipped with a brush and was made by white-out. My first experience with a computer came at the hands of an apple IIc, programing colored bars and bouncing dots in Basic. Heck I remember when you could borrow LP's from the library. I was into rap at the time and my parents would cringe when I brought back the Fat Boys, Run DMC or the Beasties on vinyl. My dad got me to stop by convincing me the needle on his record player wasn't the right kind for that brand album and I wasn't allowed to borrow them any more. I had a portable reel-to-reel tape deck, mono mind you, and I would record from my transistor radio onto tape so I could listen to it over and over.


Wait a minute, tell me why I liked the 80's again?

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!!

AHH!!! Yes the, "Dewey Decimal System." I remember it well... nooo I don't.

Well I can tell I'm alot older than the person that typed that up :-(
When I was in HS cable wasn't even an idea. We had 4 stations and
they weren't on all day. I did and still do live way out in the sticks.
And he also failed to mention that the screen on those old computers
were small 12-14" (if your lucky) and they were green :-)

ye gads, what do you think it was like in the 40's. I won't even start with those times though having blocks of ice for the ice box (fridge) delivered on huge horse drawn wagons was pretty cool (pun intended). Black outs with the sirens during the war were great too!

Quote: Originally Posted by chapper ye gads, what do you think it was like in the 40's. I won't even start with those times though having blocks of ice for the ice box (fridge) delivered on huge horse drawn wagons was pretty cool (pun intended). Black outs with the sirens during the war were great too!

Were those blocks of ice, or blocks of Dry Ice :-)

Quote: Originally Posted by Slaymate Were those blocks of ice, or blocks of Dry Ice :-)

I would have to say they where blocks of ice, i remember my grandfathers my mom and dad parents having 2 of those ice boxes in there house meaning both my grandparents, they told me they had to go to the lake i live by to cut blocks of ice that would be at least 2 to 3 feet thick in sections of 4 feet wide, what they did next to get them out of the ice after they where cut they would hook heavy ropes and hooks to them along with the horse that pulled the wagon that carried them back to the house.
Man i miss my grandparents they always told me some great story's back when they where younger that would make todays kids look spoiled rotten today.

I am not 30 but its inching closer and closer and I can relate to most of this. I had it worse then the Atari 2600 I had the Intellivision!! I remember things being so family oriented back then. I remember as a family looking forward to sitting down and watching a movie on ABC (only had 3 channels) like the Disney movie every week popping some popcorn. Now days.....wheres the time to do that?

Quote: Originally Posted by PhLaKz'R I am not 30 but its inching closer and closer and I can relate to most of this. I had it worse then the Atari 2600 I had the Intellivision!! I remember things being so family oriented back then. I remember as a family looking forward to sitting down and watching a movie on ABC (only had 3 channels) like the Disney movie every week popping some popcorn. Now days.....wheres the time to do that?

I think some of that "family-time" has to come back - to keep kids off the streets etc.
There needs to be that kinda time, where parents and kids spend time together, play board games, watch a movie,craft or whatever, cause thats where you get close to the youngens, where you earn their respect, where they will open up and talk etc...

I couldn't agree more BeetleMan. We need to meet one day, I live just
outside of Jax-Hoe-ville in Macclenny :-)

Hell...when I was a kid there were no 'torrents'. If you wanted to steal a video game you had to log on to a BBS (usually incurring the wrath of your parents when they got the phone bill) and download the bloody thing over a 300-baud modem. What's a 300-baud modem?

300-baud: well, a 56k dial-up modem is 56,000-baud. Catch my drift? It takes slow to a whole other level. I fondly remember the day I got my first 1200-baud modem for my Commodore...

Remember coming home from Blockbuster with a suitcase containing your rented VCR? But once you had it, that VCR let you fast-forward whenever the heck you wanted. When the DVD player says "Operation not currently allowed by disc" during the FBI Warning, I marvel at the irony -- it's because I bought/rented a legal copy of the movie that I have to wait through the stupid message telling me how illegal it would've been if I'd pirated it.

I like Jiffy pop more than any other popcorn right now

Quote: Originally Posted by BeetleMan Commodore Vic 20 with Tape drive... Talk about loading time for games....

I've never seen a tape drive like that... the Commodore Datasettes I've seen tend to be rectangular with circular edges.

Quote: Originally Posted by Hak Foo I've never seen a tape drive like that... the Commodore Datasettes I've seen tend to be rectangular with circular edges.

These had regular c60 or c90 cassettes if i remember right(the 80's is all a blur )