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When I was a kid...

We dialed into BBS instead of opening up Internet Explorer where we played text based RPGs. Edit: All on a 9600 baud modem! (I remember upgrading to 14.4k modems and then 56k modems...we thought we were running some blazing fast internet on 56k LOL!)

9600 baud modem! You kids had it easy. I was using a 300 baud modem. It was perfect for me because I can read about as fast as the data speed and hardly ever have to pause.

I remember the first time I had a phone that wasn't a rotary phone. It had the 12 buttons on it. You know what? It still rotary dialled. When I press a 5, I can hear it click 5 times. We didn't have proximity sensors on our phones back then to turn off the input. The buttons were up against your face when you are on the phone. If you press the phone against your face too hard, it would dial and you would have to wait through the clicks before you can talk again. This phone of mine has a redial button, too. The problem is when you accidentally hit it while already on a call and you have to wait for all 7 numbers to click through before you can continue talking.

We had 7-digit phone numbers back then and we had to remember them. We didn't have this fancy speed dial or smart dial where you can partially enter the number and the phone figures out what you wanted to dial.

In order to find out who was calling you, you actually have to answer and talk to the person. If you didn't want to talk to that person, you had to actually come up with an excuse to hang up. We didn't have this ignore feature on our phones. If we didn't want to answer the phone, we had to listing to the phone ring several times until the caller got tired of waiting and hang up.

We didn't have voice mail back then. We had to get someone else in the house to answer the phone and take the message.
 
DOS(Disk Operating System) was on a single 5.25 disk and windows were things you walked across the room and looked out of. Pong was the S*#t if you had a colored T.V.
 
DOS(Disk Operating System) was on a single 5.25 disk and windows were things you walked across the room and looked out of. Pong was the S*#t if you had a colored T.V.

Yep, you had a bootable disk with your app on it. I can even remember having to flip them over for side B when prompted.
 
Remember Tape Drives? Head to Head Football? The Arcade? Stretch Armstrong? Rubics Cube? Light Bright? Punch Me? Etch O Sketch? Pickup Sticks? Godzilla? Shazam? and many many more great things back then.

Probably be very disappointed if we were to try to use these things again or watch the shows again to much of a remembrance of where are expectations were and how we really ended up. Even though spin the bootle would still prove to be very interesting.
 
"Frito Bandito" erasers
Gumby & Pokey bendable figures & TV show
Creepy Crawlies and Plastigoop (yeah, metal trays and a hot plate!)
Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots
Slot car tracks
Clackers
lawn jarts (all about safety!)
 
Clackers! Now there was death on a string. ;)

How about airplane glue (model cement) and dope, spray paint, solvents model rocket engines (with ignitors) all readily available to any kid within walking distance of the hobby shop.
 
Top 40 music actually was more than bad poetry with most of the lyrics mispronounced. There was only 3 television stations and color TV was very, very rare. Commercials made up less than 50% of network TV and TV news folk tried to suppress personal bias.
 
When I was a kid, you didn't have to worry if your sarcasm was understood.... :p

no instead we were picking our brains up off the floor where DAD just knocked them out of our head and said a few choice words that end with smart ass :D
 
(Much younger generation here) A cell phone was this magical device (just the one) that your parents had that let you talk to people in the car that weren't in the car. And you couldn't talk to daddy too long because they were paying by the minute.
 
I think by the 1970s, kids stop playing marbles...I was the marble king back in da day!
fisch992lg.jpg

http://landofmarbles.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/fisch992lg.jpg
 
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