Feeling old yet?

[Rowan MacD]

Another Christmas in the can, and 2013 right around the corner..
The good news is that the Apocalypse was a dud.
The bad news was that we were forced to acknowledge that there are still people out there gullible enough to give away all their possessions, and go sit on a hill somewhere waiting for the end of the world.

Some things to ponder...

~The people who are starting college this fall across the nation were born in 1993.

~They are too young to remember the Challenger blowing up.

~Their lifetime has always included AIDS.

~Bottle caps have always been childproof and plastic.

~The CD was introduced 3 years before they were born.

~They have always had an answering machine..

~They have always had cable.

~They cannot fathom life without a remote control.

~Jay Leno has always been on the Tonight Show.

~Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.

~They never took a swim and thought about Jaws.

~They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are.

~They don't know who Mork was or where he was from.

They never heard:
"Where's the Beef?"
"I'd walk a mile for a Camel", or
"De plane, Boss, de plane.."

They do not care who shot J.R. (Nor do they have any idea who he is).

~McDonald's never came in Styrofoam containers.

~They don't have a clue how to use a typewriter (or how to spell).  
Heck, cursive writing is becoming an obsolete art form.

*Sigh*

[Ms Trish]

Good list! I was talking to a friend from high school today and we realized that our children are older than when we met (as sophomores). That dated us a bit.

[Merlin the Elder]

Do you remember "Out of the clear blue of the western sky comes Sky King!"?

I had heard somewhere that they are not even going to teach cursive in schools anymore. I had stopped using cursive back around `71, not because of technology, but because I was a draftsman, and I just got into the habit.

My grandparents (save one) all were around to see the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers, and the landing on the moon.

[Hoowil]

It was a strange experience when I realized the new staff at work I was training weren't born yet when I first started working for the company.

[Rowan MacD]

My grandparents (save one) all were around to see the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers, and the landing on the moon.

1969-I remember the moon landing-that was single coolest thing ever!  I was vaguely aware that Woodstock was going on that year also, mostly because my older sister was going bat-poop over the bands.  The Manson murders happened then too, that scared the piss outta me.
   I sorta remember when JFK was assassinated, mostly because the TV stations were showing sketches of the presidents' head with diagrams of entry and exit wounds.  Within a few days we were all watching the loooongest funeral in history (according to my friends and I). 
  As a kid, I seem to have missed most of the highlights-like seeing Jr. saluting the casket, and I never even noticed the boots placed backwards in the stirrups of the 'riderless horse' being led in the funeral procession. 
   

[Baron Frederick]

I remember the Shadow,Lone Ranger and Little Orphan Annie and it was called radio and not TV.But then came SKY King and Capt Video and that was TV.I remember our first TV with a remote and if you dropped your keys on the floor the TV changed channels

[Rowan MacD]

  The first TV show I saw in color was Star Trek.  Dad had a remote that looked like a pack of cigarettes (which were still being advertised on TV).
   Remember when TV's were actually a piece of furniture, frequently the centerpiece of the living room?  You had to have the TV repairman come to your house to fix it....with vacuum tubes.
  Stereos (or HiFi units) used to come in fancy maple and oak cabinets, the speakers were camouflaged behind colored material and sometimes velvet.
   Now they are just another plastic, throw away gadget...

[VIII]

I recall when seat belts weren't even in cars... our old Bel Aire didn't have them, as I recall.

... and gas was a quarter-a-gallon...

[DonaCatalina]

we watched Die Hard as our official last movie of Christmas. Premium was $0.74 gallon.

[iain robb]

We realized at Christmas that we've had a computer in our house for the entire life of our 18-year-old son.

And I still can't bring myself to throw away about two dozen of those Zip disks I thought were massive because they held 100 MB.

I suppose that a few centuries ago there were guys telling their grandsons what it was like before gunpowder, and that if they thought cannons were something, they should've seen trebuchets.

[Merlin the Elder]

...I sorta remember when JFK was assassinated, mostly because the TV stations were showing sketches of the presidents' head with diagrams of entry and exit wounds.  Within a few days we were all watching the loooongest funeral in history (according to my friends and I). 
  As a kid, I seem to have missed most of the highlights-like seeing Jr. saluting the casket, and I never even noticed the boots placed backwards in the stirrups of the 'riderless horse' being led in the funeral procession. 

I remember exactly where I was when we heard about the assassination. It was lunchtime at the school. I also remember as we left church on Sunday morning, hearing on the news that Lee Harvey Oswald had been killed. I was perhaps a little too aware of what was going on in the world for my age, but my dad, being in the service, was always on the verge of having to deploy because things were so unstable internationally—not that things are any better now.

Cars I remember coming out—then going away—were the Edsel and the Aqua Car.

[Lady Mac]

I remember cutting my finger on the tail lights of dads' ford, they were actually glass. Most of brothers'
toys were mostly made of metal. TV dinners, the peas and carrots? Yuck! McDonalds had served what,
150,000? My mom wrote copy for a radio station, live and on "reel to reel." Pot pies had bottoms! Great
grandmother heated and cooked with wood and coal, no indoor plumbing with an outhouse. Can you
imagine that now? Yes, it's called Camping.

[iain robb]

Just some random thoughts about the past ...

From the time of my first newspaper job in 1980, I always worked on computers. All the stories I ever wrote or edited were written, edited and typeset on computers.

I remember when the first color wire service photos began to move out to newspapers. They came as a series of four black-and-white images, one each for the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black plates.

Remember the telephone companies' local monopolies? Heaven help you if, like us, you had General Telephone. I think they spawned the slogan, "We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to." Thank you, cell phone companies, for keeping that old-time phone company customer service alive.

My dad's company bought him a Ford LTD in the mid-70s, with all the new smog-control add-ons that were required in Southern California. He got 8 miles per gallon.

Running shoes were in their infancy. I was a high-school distance runner from 1974 to 1977, and the first year, our cross-country coach gave us a mimeographed handout that his predecessor had put together telling us where to get shoes and what shoes to get, because it was hard to find the one or two running shoes out there. I remember running races my senior year in my brand-new Nike "waffle-soles," inspired by, of all things, waffle irons. Long-distance was two miles; cross-country went to three miles (roughly, very roughly, 5K) the year after I graduated.

Gosh, I may not really feel old, but I sound old, don't I?

[Merlin the Elder]

You sound young, Iain!  When I started with computers, we did our programming using punched cards!

The first McDonald's in Little Rock was about the size of a 2-car garage, covered entirely with white and red glazed tile on the outside, walk-up counters only...outside. It wasn't long that they enclosed the counters so that you could actually go into a Micky D's. I think burger were 12 cents and cheeseburgers were 15...not 100% of those prices, but they're within a couple pennies.

Recycling paid in those days! All sodas were in glass returnable bottles, and we used to get our spending money by finding bottles and turning them in. When my dad used to get his Camels out of the cigarette vending machine at the neighborhood tavern we used to go to, his change for the two dimes he put in the machine would be inside the cellophane of the cigarette pack—2 or 3 bright shiny pennies. Vending machines for a 6.5 ounce Coke went from a nickle to six cents, just about then.

We never completely locked the house. Always left the backdoor unlocked so someone could get in if they needed to. We were still told to be wary of strangers, but didn't live in constant fear of that. We had the Cold War to keep us warm. They issued dog tags to us at school, telling us that they would be used to identify our bodies after the bomb hit. Duck and Cover exercises—as futile as they would be in a real attack—were practiced to make us feel less vulnerable, I suppose.

We could go outside and keep ourselves busy for hours at a time, without computers. Mom didn't have constant contact with us—we just had to be home at a certain hour. "Who will you be with?" was the only question so that she would have a rough idea where to start should she need you home.

With all the romantic memories I have of simpler days, I know that my parents had some struggles to rear the four of us. I do miss talking about things like this with my folks...

[Lady Mac]

Speaking of the 69 moon-landing; we had a party that evening, celebrating it live. Anyone remember
watching Dark Shadows daily on the television? Dad smoked a pipe in the living room with a jacket and
an ascot. Church was church, denomination excluded, you went for 1/2 day or more, always something
going on after. Sunday evenings were reserved by the older folks for the hottest ticket on the telly,
Lawrence Welk. Remember the Frito Bandito? It's the first thing I remember as later being classified
politically incorrect. I just remember the erasers looked awesome on a pencil, sombrero or not.