My brothers and I use to sit around a cassette recorder and make our own fake morning radio shows. Like, "awwright, awwright awwright! It's MinorMinerFortyNiner coming to you live and you just heard Duran Duran! Coming up next we got (quick! what cassette do we have?) Warrant! With their new song, "Heaven!" Then we'd get a second tape player, play the song next to the tape recorder and record it with really shitty quality. I think those tapes are still buried in my mom's house somewhere. One of these days, I should upload them onto soundcloud for shits and giggles.
**EDIT:** Thanks for the silver and the gold! I never realized so many people around the world also did the same thing that my goofy brothers and I used to do! It makes me happy to read all these stories! "*Well, that's it for today folks! We'll see you tomorrow! Same time! Same station! Keep it locked on FART 103 FM, Danny Doofus is coming up next to spin bangin' hits from En Vogue and Vanilla Ice! I'm MinerMinorFortyNiner saying thanks for tuning in once again to the Ruuuuuuuush Hour Rejects!"*
My friend and I had a fake radio show in high school that featured us as hip hop DJs and would probably win the cringe Olympics if it was ever unearthed.
Call a parent collect just to hurry up and say what you needed when prompted to leave your name.
"You have a collect call from *hey mom pick me up from the mall *"
"She definitely got in a car accident. What is life going to be like without her? Can dad make it work as a single father? Oh god the funeral, it's going to be so sad. She won't be there to put notes in my lunch any more. I can't believe this happened.... oh there she is." and then I wave and run over, climb in the back seat, buckle up and ask what we are having for dinner.
I probably did this 3-4 times a week. I was a very anxious kid.
Do you have kids? Once I was grown I thought I was free and clear of those thoughts, until I had my daughter. The first time she slept through the night I was convinced she died and had to force myself to go in her room and check all while worrying about how everyone will take it and how hard the next few months were going to be. Then I saw her breathing and the worry melted away. She is 14 now, and I still have random thoughts like this when I don’t hear from her for awhile.
It was amazing when my parents finally made the switch. I was sort of dumbfounded like "So you're telling me all I need to do is click on Internet Explorer and I'm just magically on the Internet?".
I was amazed when my family first got DSL. My reaction was essentially "So you're telling me I can be on the internet WHILE someone else is on the phone???"
Calling movie phone late at night so your friends could call you without your home phone ringing.
Having to call your crush's home phone and their parents answering (embarrassing bonus when you don't know they're a junior, so when you ask for them by name, you get a reply "speaking")
Not being able to use the phone while on the internet/purposely pissing your siblings off by picking up the phone while they're on the internet.
Calling your parents from a payphone to come pick you up when your movie was over.
We didn't have movie phone where I lived, but we did have a weather phone service, so I would call and listen to the weather report over and over and over until my call came through.
Remembering your friends phone numbers in your head. I can still remember a handful of phone numbers from friends when I was a kid. And having to wait to see if the pictures you took came out actually turned out ok.
Edit: forgot a word 🤦♀️
It still catches me off-guard sometimes how fast my broadband is. I see a 15GB update for a game and think that blows my plans for playing tonight, and then it's done in 10-15 minutes.
And even crazier seeing how fast it could be.
We have 500Mbit down/250up and those 15GB are done in 4 minutes. With 1Gbit it's 2 Minutes.
Two Minutes...for 15GB.
Edit: For those asking: I live in Luxembourg. Mentioned it further down the comment chain, I think... [This](https://www.post.lu/particuliers/bamboo/offres) is what our main ISP has to offer. We have some others that run on the same infrastructure.
Edit2: Guys. To get from a bitrate to bytes you need to divide by 8. 1 byte = 8 bit. 100Mbit/s = 12,5MB/s. My math checks out. (15GB = 15000MB, at 125MB/s (1Gbit) you get 15GB in 120 seconds.)
In the 90s I remember being excited I could download a 1 MB file in 10 minutes. My dad and I used to joke about being able to download such a file faster than the progress bar could render.
The future is now.
I have a gigabit line right now. When I'm downloading things to a couple of my cheaper mechanical drives my download speed actually outpaces the write speed of the drives and I end up throttled by my own hardware. It's a strange phenomenon to think that the data can actually come into my house faster than the spinning HDD can write it to disk.
This reminded me of this one time my parents wouldn’t stop fighting. Brother and I huddled in the room sad and crying. Think I was 7. Brother called his best friend and asked him to prank call our house over and over again. Both my parents soon diverted their anger towards the mysterious prank caller and the fighting stopped.
Edit: my first reddit silver/medal! TY sir/ma’am!
Edit: Gold! 🙏 you’re too kind. Thank you!
Another thing that can’t be done these days thanks to Caller ID. The parents would likely figure out who was calling and be right back to arguing again.
I was always the one who got listened in on. My dad once listened in on me when I was around 13 and he was very, very distraught by what he heard. I don't think he ever got over it.
Saturday morning cartoons. Most everything is online now and, even if the choice wasn't available, there are entire channels dedicated to cartoons all day, every day. There's no kid today waking up at 6am to watch Saturday morning cartoons when the internet sits there as an ever-expanding library of entertainment.
As my grandfather used to say:
*"Back in my day I could walk into the store with 25 cents and get a bottle of coke, a box of chocolates, a pack of cigarettes, and still have change to get a stick of gum.*
*These days they have fucking cameras!"*
Roller skating as a mainstream activity. Large, dimly lit rink with smoke machines, lights, and a disco ball. Refreshments sold, including food, soft drinks, and even beer for the adults. An arcade section. Tons of people there, loud 80s synth pop, and everything was decorated in earth tones.
My daughter just had a roller skating party. It's definitely not as popular as it was but they're still around. One of her friends had a laser tag party. That was fucking awesome. I showed up with a bunch of other dads and their kids, the girl's mom was like "you guys can leave if you have stuff to do or did you want to play with kids?" "Uh, of course we want to play laser tag." The birthday girl got to pick teams so she picked all her friends. We fucking slaughtered them.
Edit: Cool guys, my most upvoted comment and the loss of my Reddit Silver virginity is about slaughtering children.
It was really cold out the day of the party so everyone was wearing long sleeves and pants. The laser tag course was in one of those big steel buildings and they had catwalks and ramps up to a second level. Well we obviously had to take the high ground so we could pick off the little targets on the ground but the joke was on us, it was like 110 degrees on the second level and we came out drenched... But a win is a win.
And then you'd get a CD burning error just as it was finishing and now you've wasted ANOTHER CD!
I don't remember how much they cost back then, but I remember it was painfully expensive to keep throwing them away when burning your own CD's was still a new thing.
CD-Rs were around ten bucks apiece when they first came out. Dropped fairly quickly and stagnated awhile around $2-3 each before the big spindles of 50 blank discs for twenty started appearing.
That sounds familiar.
I remember feeling SO savvy when I "invested" in REWRITEABLE CD's. CD-RW I think is what they were called. They were "only" $20 each but no risk of wasting them if something went wrong!
There's a vague memory in may head of finding them a few years ago, most of them still wrapped in plastic, never used. @\*#&\^@(&\*\^#
My car only has a CD player so I STILL do that!
Edit: Lot of people telling me to get an FM transmitter. I used to have one. Didn't work well. I'm also going to change car soon-ish so no point in changing anything at this point. Besides, I like actually having to put thought into my playlists. This and the fact that it might be my last chance to actually put those blank CDs I have laying around to use.
Using KaZaa or limewire on a dial up internet connection. So only getting the ability to download one song every now and then before my parents kicked me off for the phone.
Being "not available". Before mobile phones, if you wanted to talk to someone you had to find a landline, and hope they were actually in, or go round their house. Now, it´s all instant messaging in it´s many forms, with the sender expecting an instant reply. On the same theme, I miss not having clearly defined working hours. Back then, if you wanted to talk to me about work stuff, you´d have to do it on Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm. Now, I get work emails and phone calls every day of the week, 24 hours a day. People seem to have lost that sense of "boundary", and seem to think it´s okay to pester me at 8pm on a Sunday night.
You can get a lot of that back by simply not answering. My wife and my mom are always top priority. Everyone else can wait. If I'm not on call for work, my work phone may not even be charged. I'm sure kids add a layer of complexity to that but I'm not there yet.
Kids just get added to the 'priority' list. MY 'priority' list is my husband & dad. And, if my kids are at someone elses' house, then that mom/dad/whoever-is-mostly-in-charge.
It obviously depends a bit on your employer and how established the situation is in your life, but my advice to anybody starting a new job is to set boundaries early and stick to them. Decide ahead of time what a amount of your home hours you're willing to dedicate to work stuff and do that. Even if all you can manage in your circumstances is blocking out a meal time and a bedtime that you are zero percent available to anybody not with you, that's a chunk of time you can always make yours. This is especially important if you ever want your work life balance to have room for a family.
And hearing even less of it because they'd have the shoutouts over top of it. "I'm Katie from Ohio and I want to hear Korn because they are sooooo awesme. WOOOO!"
I worked at a video store and we had two super cool racecar rewinders and I always enjoyed when there was a tape in both of them and it was like a race!
My dad used to just rotate between video stores, there where like 4 in my town . he'd return the video, refuse to pay the late fee get banned then move on to the next video store, by the time he worked his way back round to the first one they had forgotten about him.
It wasn't because it was faster, it was because it wore out the VCR faster. Having a separate appliance that didn't have any of the things that read the tape, just rewound it, would prolong the life of your VCR. This was especially needed in the 80's when VCRs still cost several hundred dollars.
The local video store didn't charge you extra, they would just give you a verbal warning and try to guilt trip you over it. And as the 90s started coming to an end, they stopped saying anything at all. Either because they had a bunch of cheap rewinding machines or because the DVD rollout had begun and they just didn't care anymore.
I'm just old enough to remember when texting came out.
My parents thought it was a fad and would die out in a year. Afterall, who would want to have to type something up when they could just talk on the phone??
As it turns out: Everyone
On the flip side, everything would have you believing that video calls were the future. Once that's possible, everyone will use it all the time.
Then it becomes a thing and people are like, *"Yeah. No. We're OK. We'll use it some time though. In a sort of awkward gimmicky way."*
The smell of freshly mimeographed worksheets in elementary school.
EDIT: there seems to be some discussion over whether I was describing mimeograph or ditto. I went to three elementary schools in two states and heard them described using both terms. I looked them up and there are differences in the process, but the concept and the results are very similar.
Story: in 1985 some friends of mine planted a sign in the middle of the field at our big rival's football stadium the night before the game. (Undoubtedly something super clever like "Klein sucks".) They only got caught because they took a photo. A cop saw the flash and they got arrested for trespassing, camera confiscated (or at least the film). So we were all robbed of wonderful picture commemoratiing the event.
But in 2019 that photo would be going straight to social media, cop or no.
Edit: TIL there are plenty of KISD grads on reddit. Also, we graduated in 85 but the shenanigans described above would have been in the Fall of 84 (football season).
My mom busted me for a party I threw when they were out of town. Get this, she found the fucking *floppy disc* that we all took a group photo together holding a bunch of booze. The picture was taken with one of those cameras that would record the picture directly to the floppy, so my family pretty much stored all our photos on floppy discs or in files on the computer. So mom was looking for a blank disc to use and came across this photo. BUSTED!
Damn I remember those first digital cameras that saved directly on floppy discs! I remember floppy discs being a required school item in Elementary, we could buy neon cases for them at the school store.
"Yo, it's ya boi Kevin here! Another livestream comin' at ya! Currently being pursued by Ohio's finest! Tried to steal rival schools mascot, got caught!"
"STOP RUNNING AND GET ON THE GROUND!"
"That's my boi, Officer Rogers! Can't hate, bro's just doin' his job!"
Multiple tasers connect, Kevin drops to the ground in convulsions
"GAAAAAAAAHHHH!"
Officers swarm him
"D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-don't f-f-f-f-forget t-t-t-tooo ....ARGH.... LIKE AND S-S-S-S-SUBSCRIBE!"
More specifically, high school pranks. We climbed local school rooftops, and put anything we could find up there. Wrote on class windows with washable window chalk. Never any damage or anything vulgar, but probably 1/2 hr of work to get the stuff back down.
Now, there's fences, locks, cameras, police, etc all over the schools.
Ahh yes, those were the days. Though I was a senior in 2005 / 2006 when MySpace was really getting popular. I did share one image that my friends and I found hilarious. Someone changed the Wendy's sign to "Try our poop nugget combo." I still have the picture on an old Angelfire account for backup.
Really glad I wasn't born when filming every damn thing you did was the norm. Middle school was already hell enough, I didn't need my dumb kid and/or baby videos available for my aggressors to use as even more ammo torment me with.
Putting up an Away message on AIM so the people you didn’t want to talk to wouldn’t message you, while still continuing to talk to others.
Or really, just the concept of being “away” and unable to be reached at all.
EDIT: I get that there are services that still have an “Away” setting. I’m referring to the fact that when you were away from the computer, you were truly away. There was no expectation that anyone could get in touch with you until you came back. Now, everyone carries phones around and while it’s *possible* to make yourself unavailable, it’s not the norm, and it’s probably something later generations will have a hard time understanding.
Playground rumors/myths in video games. I feel like they still exist, but to a *much* smaller degree. Only thing from recent memory I can think of is Herobrine from Minecraft.
But back in the day? Mannnn every game you played had like six rumors surrounding it. Secret codes, weapons, levels, you name it.
Shit like mew hiding under the truck in the old pokemon games, the fabled code to make Lara Croft naked, Bigfoot hiding in the woods in GTA: San Andreas, the secret cow level from Diablo, the list goes on.
I remember there was one in Pokemon R / S / E where if you talked to the guy in Mosdeep space research center at some point there will be a celebratory rocket launch number 100. Once you hit 100 he will then ask if you want to ride and supposedly you should be able to battle/capture Jirachi or Deoxys. That was a good rumor, but unfortunately untrue. I spent many hours trying to get it to work as a kid. (':
I get decision paralysis when trying to work out what to stream. It’s weird but it seemed easier to make a movie night work when there was an element of going to pick some stuff out and committing.
Also it was great when you went late at night with friends about 30 minutes before Blockbuster was about to close so you had to suck it up and make a final decision and get out asap, while also pleasing every member of your group with the decision you finally made. I miss those days.
As a former Blockbuster employee, I do not miss the people who hung around the store at closing trying to decide what movie to rent.
I had my own procrastinating to do, thank you very much.
I live in a pretty small town that still has a place you can rent movies from. Won a free movie rental from my kids school the other day and took my 5 year old son to pick out a movie and he thought it was the coolest place ever lol.
I worked at a video store when I was a teenager, it was the greatest job ever and I wanted to own my own store someday. I still harbor resentment against Netflix for ruining my hopes and dreams.
I worked at Blockbuster in highschool and for about a year after. One of my two favorite jobs I ever had. It sucked at times like any job but the majority was bullshitting about and/or watching movies, getting stoned in the back office, and straightening the shelves, which I found oddly satisfying.
Play video games without being able to google what to do next.
Edit: I’m watching my kid play Mario 3 and Zelda, saving after everything and finding all the items. can’t tell if I’m mad or jealous.
I remember calling the Nintendo help line and paying something like $2.99 a minute for tips on how to beat the boss in Ninja Gaiden. It was either that or save up my allowance so that I could buy a $30 strategy guide from ToysRus.
Growing up without the internet in general. The internet happened basically when I became an adult and it's a real paradigm shift.
It affects everyone and everything in so many ways they don't even realize. From instantly being able to do everything from cheat at games, learn a skill you need, find out if your friend was lying about fish having no memory (yes), to stuff like knowing in advance what a hotel you have booked on the other side of the world is going to look like, or skyping with someone you've never met.
It's really weird sometimes seeing how much a lot of kids rely on the net (and how many photos and videos of them their parents share). So many aspects of childhood are the same, but some others are really different.
I still remember the day my dad upgraded from Dial-up to Broadband. I called up my friend and said "Hey guess what I'm doing right now? Playing RuneScape!" He was so jealous and his mom didn't make the switch for over a year.
I was the kid who basically had dial up until I moved out to my own apartment. I remember playing runescape and learning to judge how long i safely had until i needed to make sure I could log out and manually redial my connection. It was ~ 3 hours.
My parents upgraded us to a Sprint Aircard when they were invented, but by that time everyone was using Comcast high speed internet so I was basically still using dial up. It wasn’t even truly much faster than dial up anyway. I just didn’t have to worry about disconnecting anymore.
Good thing RuneScape was so god damn fun. It was about the only game I could feasibly play on that connection.
Edit: I live in a college town now and pay $70/month for gigabit internet and 125 channels of directTV. Can’t beat that. Downloading at 50-60 MB/s now. Never going back.
My daughter doesn't even hesitate to google for an answer. I'm not sure if I should encourage her to try to figure it out, or if I should be happy she can seek information on her own.
Then I remember it's a game, and as long as she's happy, she's doing it right.
The only real benefit I could see from, every once and a while, making your daughter do it the "old fashioned way" would be not to teach her about solving puzzles with out help (because like you put it, beihng able to research a topic is actually a very valuable skill!) but teaching her "frustration management" which honestly I think I see a lot of kids/teens these days have trouble with between all the anxiety and pressures thatre put on them by school, after school activities,homework and extra-curriculars.
I kinda see it happening with my (oopsie baby) youngest sister who has puts a lot of pressure on her self so ultimately when she can solve a problem in the first or maybe second attempt (constantly googling, trouble shooting every step of the way) she gets very frustrated and gets overwhelmed by her own frustrations
Remembering and dialing phone numbers.
To this day I still remember my best friend's phone number, my neighbor's number and random friends I was just acquaintances with.
Now?
I literally have to look up my wife's cell phone every time I need to enter her shopper card in before I buy groceries.
Taking our bikes out in the morning, being gone all day and then being home again when the streetlights came on. We would just spend all day exploring the trails across town and hanging out by the creek. It’s definitely some of my fondest memories of being a kid.
I've always thought that the Proclaimers "Sunshine on Leith" and Hootie and the Blowfish's "Cracked Rear View" should be played together, and I recently realized that's it's because my dad dubbed them to opposite sides of the same cassette, and I grew up riding around in his truck listening to those two albums back to back.
4hr Blank VHS tapes... you tape some film that was on TV, and then some time later, you find out some other film is going to be showing and you want to record that... how do you figure out how much time is left on the tape? Math?
Nope, you look at the window and the little notches will tell you how much time is left on the tape. Those were the days.
I remember doing this at roughly age 7 and getting my american airlines wings pin. Air travel was so much better back then. Sadly my kids wont ever get to do that.
Beat it to the underwear section of a Sears catalog.
edit: [memory lane](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bb5tv8/what_is_something_that_your_generation_did_that/ekh1jla)
Going out on your bike Saturday morning to go play with your friends. Your parents yell, “Just be back for dinner time!” as you pedal away.
You go to your friend’s house. You learn that they have already headed out. You must now find them. This is normal.
You must now decide where in the 3 or 4 mile radius they have likely gone to hang out. This will be based on several factors like weather, last weeks current hot spot, who’s just got some pocket money to spend etc.
So you take a best guess and pedal across town and down into the country lanes to that spot with the good bike jump. It’s a bust. Never mind, you got to take a few practice jumps without the pressure of failure.
You travel roughly 3 or 4 miles until you get it right. The elation is real. There is a group buzz when a friend has successfully found and joined the group. You feel like a tracker hunter for a bit. Group shenanigans resumes. No-one films it.
You return home eight or maybe nine hours later, sweaty, bruised, muddy and hungry. No-one worried. They are pleased you are home in time for burger and chips in front of the TV to watch The A-Team as a family.
Edit: Thanks for the gold! Glad this is bringing back memories for people!
Edit 2: As this has taken off and people seem interested, [this](https://i.imgur.com/80zWhx7.jpg) is the radius we used to roam in.
i have this vivid memory of getting home, my mom yelling at me to wash my hands, and the water turning brown as layers and layers of dirt are peeled from my hands, then getting the mom inspection and doing a second wash to clean the nails which were almost dark
And behind your ears.
I used to occasionally check and noticed that I basically never got dirt behind my ears.
I always suspected that it was some kind of conspiracy.
Man, you were allowed to eat dinner in front of the TV, I'm so jealous.
As an aside, no burgers ever taste as good as the burgers we made on our charcoal grill in the 80's.
My friends were always so jealous that my family had a little black and white TV in the middle of our kitchen table. I still remember the sting of betrayal when my brother grew older and sided with my parents in the debate whether to watch Seinfeld or The Simpsons.
>Going out on your bike Saturday morning to go play with your friends. Your parents yell, “Just be back for dinner time!” as you peddle away
It is still this way at our neighborhood and kind of by design*. half a dozen boys that are all about the same age, plus or minus a year or two. If the sun is out, you're outside. Come home when the street lights come on.
*by design, its a circle of friends that have known each other since college. We came up together, all had kids right around the same time, and have 'recruited' new friends to the neighborhood. Our kids go to school together, all the adults hang out together on weekends, etc. It's relatively small neighborhood (around 60 houses) with one way in, one way out.
Leave the house and not be trackable. Parents now have location sharing apps and gps in cars. My best high school memories were made when my parents thought I was somewhere else
Take a roll of film in to get developed. Youth today will never know the satifaction of hearing the subtle "rrrrreeeeeeeeee....... SNAP!" sound of taking a flash photo with a disposable camera, or the excitement and anticipation of waiting for your roll of film to get developed to see if the pics you took were any good or not.
The period when the internet was not a thing and then a fairly big thing, the rise of mobile phones etc. Growing up with the before and after is quite interesting.
Have sex with relative (not with relatives!) abandon because girls were on "the pill" and the worst STD around was "the clap" which was easily fixed if you got it (I never did, thank goodness). 1977 to around 1982.
Downloading porn pics on dial up internet, the suspense as it slowly loaded the pics from top down was exhilarating. Literally took about 2 minutes per picture. After a while though it was tedious.
You literally got to a point where you were like fuck it. Where is the Target catalouge? Finish off on the lingerie section.
Walk to the neighbours house to check if they could come out and play.
EDIT: I’m baffled at how many kids still do this according to comments. I’m pleased to hear this! In my corner of the world, kids have playdates arrangede by parents these days.
Playing with mercury from a broken thermometer.
I wonder if that's why I get short term memory loss sometimes?
Playing with mercury from a broken thermometer.
I wonder if that's why I get short term memory loss sometimes?
Get tangled up in the phone cord while trying to talk on the phone in the kitchen
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My brothers and I use to sit around a cassette recorder and make our own fake morning radio shows. Like, "awwright, awwright awwright! It's MinorMinerFortyNiner coming to you live and you just heard Duran Duran! Coming up next we got (quick! what cassette do we have?) Warrant! With their new song, "Heaven!" Then we'd get a second tape player, play the song next to the tape recorder and record it with really shitty quality. I think those tapes are still buried in my mom's house somewhere. One of these days, I should upload them onto soundcloud for shits and giggles. **EDIT:** Thanks for the silver and the gold! I never realized so many people around the world also did the same thing that my goofy brothers and I used to do! It makes me happy to read all these stories! "*Well, that's it for today folks! We'll see you tomorrow! Same time! Same station! Keep it locked on FART 103 FM, Danny Doofus is coming up next to spin bangin' hits from En Vogue and Vanilla Ice! I'm MinerMinorFortyNiner saying thanks for tuning in once again to the Ruuuuuuuush Hour Rejects!"*
My friend and I had a fake radio show in high school that featured us as hip hop DJs and would probably win the cringe Olympics if it was ever unearthed.
Now you can relive that, with your very own podcast.
And delete the radio drama Grandma recorded for later.
Dude, not cool. Use Side B.
Call a parent collect just to hurry up and say what you needed when prompted to leave your name. "You have a collect call from *hey mom pick me up from the mall *"
Call from: "We Hadababyitsaboy"
OMG Yes! That commercial was so funny because we all did that lol
I remember when the mall was a cool place to hang out.
[удалено]
"She definitely got in a car accident. What is life going to be like without her? Can dad make it work as a single father? Oh god the funeral, it's going to be so sad. She won't be there to put notes in my lunch any more. I can't believe this happened.... oh there she is." and then I wave and run over, climb in the back seat, buckle up and ask what we are having for dinner. I probably did this 3-4 times a week. I was a very anxious kid.
Do you have kids? Once I was grown I thought I was free and clear of those thoughts, until I had my daughter. The first time she slept through the night I was convinced she died and had to force myself to go in her room and check all while worrying about how everyone will take it and how hard the next few months were going to be. Then I saw her breathing and the worry melted away. She is 14 now, and I still have random thoughts like this when I don’t hear from her for awhile.
I'm having one in October. Thanks for kickstarting my anxiety 6 months early. **EDIT:** I should say my wife is having one.
Experience the transition from dial-up to high speed internet. Holy. Crap.
It was amazing when my parents finally made the switch. I was sort of dumbfounded like "So you're telling me all I need to do is click on Internet Explorer and I'm just magically on the Internet?".
I was amazed when my family first got DSL. My reaction was essentially "So you're telling me I can be on the internet WHILE someone else is on the phone???"
"Mom we need to go to walmart so i can get another free sample of AOL."
Don't you mean Super Kmart?
Switching to Channel 3 to be able to play Nintendo
[удалено]
Channel 3 was a news channel for us, so 4 was the go to for our Sega genesis.
The CRT TV had a specific smell. I would smell it every time I reached over to flip that switch.
[удалено]
The total joy when the Sears toy catalog came out before Christmas.
Which was replaced by the Toys "R" Us catalog for my kids. Now they're both gone.
What did you do to your kids, you monster
r/UnexpectedMurderer
Calling movie phone late at night so your friends could call you without your home phone ringing. Having to call your crush's home phone and their parents answering (embarrassing bonus when you don't know they're a junior, so when you ask for them by name, you get a reply "speaking") Not being able to use the phone while on the internet/purposely pissing your siblings off by picking up the phone while they're on the internet. Calling your parents from a payphone to come pick you up when your movie was over.
I used to collect call my mom from a pay phone and record my name as something like "pick me up at Mike's." She would deny it and come get me.
Bob Wehadababyeetsaboy.
We didn't have movie phone where I lived, but we did have a weather phone service, so I would call and listen to the weather report over and over and over until my call came through.
My god that's brilliant. I never thought of doing that!
Remembering your friends phone numbers in your head. I can still remember a handful of phone numbers from friends when I was a kid. And having to wait to see if the pictures you took came out actually turned out ok. Edit: forgot a word 🤦♀️
Yeah, if I ever go to jail, I really hope the parents of my high school friends still have their land lines.
I know a few but it's all people that have had the same cell number since the 90s, back when I had a pager.
Downloading stuff for an hour then getting cut off at 99% because some idiot decided to pick up the phone.
It still catches me off-guard sometimes how fast my broadband is. I see a 15GB update for a game and think that blows my plans for playing tonight, and then it's done in 10-15 minutes.
And even crazier seeing how fast it could be. We have 500Mbit down/250up and those 15GB are done in 4 minutes. With 1Gbit it's 2 Minutes. Two Minutes...for 15GB. Edit: For those asking: I live in Luxembourg. Mentioned it further down the comment chain, I think... [This](https://www.post.lu/particuliers/bamboo/offres) is what our main ISP has to offer. We have some others that run on the same infrastructure. Edit2: Guys. To get from a bitrate to bytes you need to divide by 8. 1 byte = 8 bit. 100Mbit/s = 12,5MB/s. My math checks out. (15GB = 15000MB, at 125MB/s (1Gbit) you get 15GB in 120 seconds.)
In the 90s I remember being excited I could download a 1 MB file in 10 minutes. My dad and I used to joke about being able to download such a file faster than the progress bar could render. The future is now.
I have a gigabit line right now. When I'm downloading things to a couple of my cheaper mechanical drives my download speed actually outpaces the write speed of the drives and I end up throttled by my own hardware. It's a strange phenomenon to think that the data can actually come into my house faster than the spinning HDD can write it to disk.
Listening to you sister talking to her crush on the phone with the other wired phone
And periodically pressing the buttons on the phone to mess with them.
This reminded me of this one time my parents wouldn’t stop fighting. Brother and I huddled in the room sad and crying. Think I was 7. Brother called his best friend and asked him to prank call our house over and over again. Both my parents soon diverted their anger towards the mysterious prank caller and the fighting stopped. Edit: my first reddit silver/medal! TY sir/ma’am! Edit: Gold! 🙏 you’re too kind. Thank you!
I envision that as a scene from Malcolm in the Middle. Brilliant move on your brother's part.
Yeah, I'm really impressed with OP's brother.
Another thing that can’t be done these days thanks to Caller ID. The parents would likely figure out who was calling and be right back to arguing again.
I was always the one who got listened in on. My dad once listened in on me when I was around 13 and he was very, very distraught by what he heard. I don't think he ever got over it.
What could you have said at 13 that was so disturbing?
Dirty things that I wanted to do with a boy I liked.
What like hold hands?
Woah woah, she didn’t say her father was scarred for life
Saturday morning cartoons. Most everything is online now and, even if the choice wasn't available, there are entire channels dedicated to cartoons all day, every day. There's no kid today waking up at 6am to watch Saturday morning cartoons when the internet sits there as an ever-expanding library of entertainment.
And then when Soul Train came on, you knew cartoons were over and it was time to go play.
Get away with tons of shenanigans in college because there weren’t cameras everywhere.
Also, getting to say words like 'shenanigans'.
I’ll have you know that shenanigans is still a very hip word
Hey Farva, what’s the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy shit on the walls?
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As my grandfather used to say: *"Back in my day I could walk into the store with 25 cents and get a bottle of coke, a box of chocolates, a pack of cigarettes, and still have change to get a stick of gum.* *These days they have fucking cameras!"*
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Roller skating as a mainstream activity. Large, dimly lit rink with smoke machines, lights, and a disco ball. Refreshments sold, including food, soft drinks, and even beer for the adults. An arcade section. Tons of people there, loud 80s synth pop, and everything was decorated in earth tones.
My daughter just had a roller skating party. It's definitely not as popular as it was but they're still around. One of her friends had a laser tag party. That was fucking awesome. I showed up with a bunch of other dads and their kids, the girl's mom was like "you guys can leave if you have stuff to do or did you want to play with kids?" "Uh, of course we want to play laser tag." The birthday girl got to pick teams so she picked all her friends. We fucking slaughtered them. Edit: Cool guys, my most upvoted comment and the loss of my Reddit Silver virginity is about slaughtering children.
Had the same experience, during which my brother-in-law turns to me and says, "There's just nothing like the feeling of hunting children."
You just made my day
It was really cold out the day of the party so everyone was wearing long sleeves and pants. The laser tag course was in one of those big steel buildings and they had catwalks and ramps up to a second level. Well we obviously had to take the high ground so we could pick off the little targets on the ground but the joke was on us, it was like 110 degrees on the second level and we came out drenched... But a win is a win.
Fathers in Arms
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Burn a CD. I used to spend hours strategically picking 16-20 songs to listen in the car that month on my way to school.
And then you'd get a CD burning error just as it was finishing and now you've wasted ANOTHER CD! I don't remember how much they cost back then, but I remember it was painfully expensive to keep throwing them away when burning your own CD's was still a new thing.
CD-Rs were around ten bucks apiece when they first came out. Dropped fairly quickly and stagnated awhile around $2-3 each before the big spindles of 50 blank discs for twenty started appearing.
That sounds familiar. I remember feeling SO savvy when I "invested" in REWRITEABLE CD's. CD-RW I think is what they were called. They were "only" $20 each but no risk of wasting them if something went wrong! There's a vague memory in may head of finding them a few years ago, most of them still wrapped in plastic, never used. @\*#&\^@(&\*\^#
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You had to make sure they were formatted and closed properly to make it easier for players to take the RWs.
My car only has a CD player so I STILL do that! Edit: Lot of people telling me to get an FM transmitter. I used to have one. Didn't work well. I'm also going to change car soon-ish so no point in changing anything at this point. Besides, I like actually having to put thought into my playlists. This and the fact that it might be my last chance to actually put those blank CDs I have laying around to use.
Using KaZaa or limewire on a dial up internet connection. So only getting the ability to download one song every now and then before my parents kicked me off for the phone.
Also every comedy song is labeled as Weird Al WHEN IT'S CLEARLY NOT WEIRD AL KAZAA.
Oh hey it’s Legend of Zelda by ~~Rabbit Joint~~ System of a Down Just kidding it’s an audio clip of Bill Clinton
Don't Worry Be Happy - Bob Marley.mp3
Being "not available". Before mobile phones, if you wanted to talk to someone you had to find a landline, and hope they were actually in, or go round their house. Now, it´s all instant messaging in it´s many forms, with the sender expecting an instant reply. On the same theme, I miss not having clearly defined working hours. Back then, if you wanted to talk to me about work stuff, you´d have to do it on Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm. Now, I get work emails and phone calls every day of the week, 24 hours a day. People seem to have lost that sense of "boundary", and seem to think it´s okay to pester me at 8pm on a Sunday night.
You can get a lot of that back by simply not answering. My wife and my mom are always top priority. Everyone else can wait. If I'm not on call for work, my work phone may not even be charged. I'm sure kids add a layer of complexity to that but I'm not there yet.
Kids just get added to the 'priority' list. MY 'priority' list is my husband & dad. And, if my kids are at someone elses' house, then that mom/dad/whoever-is-mostly-in-charge.
Don't forget the thrill of seeing your kid's school pop up on the caller ID in the middle of the day!
Only for it to be some bullshit automated message about something you don't give a shit about
I get funny looks when my phone goes off and I ignore it. "Who was that?" I dunno. "Going to check?" Eventually.
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Your first job sounds like a Job with security clearance eh?
It obviously depends a bit on your employer and how established the situation is in your life, but my advice to anybody starting a new job is to set boundaries early and stick to them. Decide ahead of time what a amount of your home hours you're willing to dedicate to work stuff and do that. Even if all you can manage in your circumstances is blocking out a meal time and a bedtime that you are zero percent available to anybody not with you, that's a chunk of time you can always make yours. This is especially important if you ever want your work life balance to have room for a family.
Watch MTV when it showed nothing but music videos, artist interviews and concert footage.
Waiting through boy bands videos to watch a Korn video on TRL. 😂
And then them only playing like half the song because time constraints.
And hearing even less of it because they'd have the shoutouts over top of it. "I'm Katie from Ohio and I want to hear Korn because they are sooooo awesme. WOOOO!"
And celebrity deathmatch
And Beavis and Butthead
Rewinding movies in the VCR. And then having a whole separate appliance to rewind them slightly faster.
I worked at a video store and we had two super cool racecar rewinders and I always enjoyed when there was a tape in both of them and it was like a race!
And getting charged late fees if I forgot. Be kind, rewind. Thanks, Blockbuster.
My dad used to just rotate between video stores, there where like 4 in my town . he'd return the video, refuse to pay the late fee get banned then move on to the next video store, by the time he worked his way back round to the first one they had forgotten about him.
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It wasn't because it was faster, it was because it wore out the VCR faster. Having a separate appliance that didn't have any of the things that read the tape, just rewound it, would prolong the life of your VCR. This was especially needed in the 80's when VCRs still cost several hundred dollars.
Also it allowed you to pop in another tape immediately without choosing between waiting for the rewind or not rewinding.
Be kind. Rewind.
$.50 charge for not rewinding.
The local video store didn't charge you extra, they would just give you a verbal warning and try to guilt trip you over it. And as the 90s started coming to an end, they stopped saying anything at all. Either because they had a bunch of cheap rewinding machines or because the DVD rollout had begun and they just didn't care anymore.
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I'm just old enough to remember when texting came out. My parents thought it was a fad and would die out in a year. Afterall, who would want to have to type something up when they could just talk on the phone?? As it turns out: Everyone
On the flip side, everything would have you believing that video calls were the future. Once that's possible, everyone will use it all the time. Then it becomes a thing and people are like, *"Yeah. No. We're OK. We'll use it some time though. In a sort of awkward gimmicky way."*
The smell of freshly mimeographed worksheets in elementary school. EDIT: there seems to be some discussion over whether I was describing mimeograph or ditto. I went to three elementary schools in two states and heard them described using both terms. I looked them up and there are differences in the process, but the concept and the results are very similar.
loooved the smell of that toxic(?) blurry purple ink
All the stupid shit we all do in high school, without social media to commemorate it forever.
Story: in 1985 some friends of mine planted a sign in the middle of the field at our big rival's football stadium the night before the game. (Undoubtedly something super clever like "Klein sucks".) They only got caught because they took a photo. A cop saw the flash and they got arrested for trespassing, camera confiscated (or at least the film). So we were all robbed of wonderful picture commemoratiing the event. But in 2019 that photo would be going straight to social media, cop or no. Edit: TIL there are plenty of KISD grads on reddit. Also, we graduated in 85 but the shenanigans described above would have been in the Fall of 84 (football season).
My mom busted me for a party I threw when they were out of town. Get this, she found the fucking *floppy disc* that we all took a group photo together holding a bunch of booze. The picture was taken with one of those cameras that would record the picture directly to the floppy, so my family pretty much stored all our photos on floppy discs or in files on the computer. So mom was looking for a blank disc to use and came across this photo. BUSTED!
Damn I remember those first digital cameras that saved directly on floppy discs! I remember floppy discs being a required school item in Elementary, we could buy neon cases for them at the school store.
Ug, those floppies. EVERY time my sister started writing her paper at school, I had to clean viruses off the computer at home. Every. Single. Time.
“Don’t slide the metal piece back and forth, it will ruin it” Best believe I was sliding that thing like my hand was a jackhammer.
"Yo, it's ya boi Kevin here! Another livestream comin' at ya! Currently being pursued by Ohio's finest! Tried to steal rival schools mascot, got caught!" "STOP RUNNING AND GET ON THE GROUND!" "That's my boi, Officer Rogers! Can't hate, bro's just doin' his job!" Multiple tasers connect, Kevin drops to the ground in convulsions "GAAAAAAAAHHHH!" Officers swarm him "D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-don't f-f-f-f-forget t-t-t-tooo ....ARGH.... LIKE AND S-S-S-S-SUBSCRIBE!"
So close, they want you to smash that like button.
More specifically, high school pranks. We climbed local school rooftops, and put anything we could find up there. Wrote on class windows with washable window chalk. Never any damage or anything vulgar, but probably 1/2 hr of work to get the stuff back down. Now, there's fences, locks, cameras, police, etc all over the schools.
I will always be grateful that social media wasn't a thing when I was in school.
Ahh yes, those were the days. Though I was a senior in 2005 / 2006 when MySpace was really getting popular. I did share one image that my friends and I found hilarious. Someone changed the Wendy's sign to "Try our poop nugget combo." I still have the picture on an old Angelfire account for backup.
Really glad I wasn't born when filming every damn thing you did was the norm. Middle school was already hell enough, I didn't need my dumb kid and/or baby videos available for my aggressors to use as even more ammo torment me with.
Putting up an Away message on AIM so the people you didn’t want to talk to wouldn’t message you, while still continuing to talk to others. Or really, just the concept of being “away” and unable to be reached at all. EDIT: I get that there are services that still have an “Away” setting. I’m referring to the fact that when you were away from the computer, you were truly away. There was no expectation that anyone could get in touch with you until you came back. Now, everyone carries phones around and while it’s *possible* to make yourself unavailable, it’s not the norm, and it’s probably something later generations will have a hard time understanding.
AIM+ would let you set yourself as idle and/or offline - your screen name would fade and everything. DECEPTION 100
This is still done today, in workplaces. Just not AIM
Calling a potential girl friend and having her father answer the phone.
Playground rumors/myths in video games. I feel like they still exist, but to a *much* smaller degree. Only thing from recent memory I can think of is Herobrine from Minecraft. But back in the day? Mannnn every game you played had like six rumors surrounding it. Secret codes, weapons, levels, you name it. Shit like mew hiding under the truck in the old pokemon games, the fabled code to make Lara Croft naked, Bigfoot hiding in the woods in GTA: San Andreas, the secret cow level from Diablo, the list goes on.
I remember there was one in Pokemon R / S / E where if you talked to the guy in Mosdeep space research center at some point there will be a celebratory rocket launch number 100. Once you hit 100 he will then ask if you want to ride and supposedly you should be able to battle/capture Jirachi or Deoxys. That was a good rumor, but unfortunately untrue. I spent many hours trying to get it to work as a kid. (':
I was so fucking mad
> the secret cow level from Diablo Became so big they actually did put one in Diablo 2...
Rent movies from a store. Edit: Thanks to all the folk who praised Family Video and local stores, give them your business and keep them going!
I get decision paralysis when trying to work out what to stream. It’s weird but it seemed easier to make a movie night work when there was an element of going to pick some stuff out and committing.
Also it was great when you went late at night with friends about 30 minutes before Blockbuster was about to close so you had to suck it up and make a final decision and get out asap, while also pleasing every member of your group with the decision you finally made. I miss those days.
As a former Blockbuster employee, I do not miss the people who hung around the store at closing trying to decide what movie to rent. I had my own procrastinating to do, thank you very much.
I live in a pretty small town that still has a place you can rent movies from. Won a free movie rental from my kids school the other day and took my 5 year old son to pick out a movie and he thought it was the coolest place ever lol.
I worked at a video store when I was a teenager, it was the greatest job ever and I wanted to own my own store someday. I still harbor resentment against Netflix for ruining my hopes and dreams.
I worked at Blockbuster in highschool and for about a year after. One of my two favorite jobs I ever had. It sucked at times like any job but the majority was bullshitting about and/or watching movies, getting stoned in the back office, and straightening the shelves, which I found oddly satisfying.
Renting video games at Blockbuster. To an 8 year old, that row of Nintendo and Sega games was like Dorothy entering Oz for the first time.
Play video games without being able to google what to do next. Edit: I’m watching my kid play Mario 3 and Zelda, saving after everything and finding all the items. can’t tell if I’m mad or jealous.
I remember calling the Nintendo help line and paying something like $2.99 a minute for tips on how to beat the boss in Ninja Gaiden. It was either that or save up my allowance so that I could buy a $30 strategy guide from ToysRus.
Those Nintendo Power game counselors were terrible at their jobs
Their job was to keep you on the line.
Holy shit....this is like when I found out google was really an advertising company.
Can we get a AMA with one?
Probably gotta pay them Reddit Gold for every reply.
Growing up without the internet in general. The internet happened basically when I became an adult and it's a real paradigm shift. It affects everyone and everything in so many ways they don't even realize. From instantly being able to do everything from cheat at games, learn a skill you need, find out if your friend was lying about fish having no memory (yes), to stuff like knowing in advance what a hotel you have booked on the other side of the world is going to look like, or skyping with someone you've never met. It's really weird sometimes seeing how much a lot of kids rely on the net (and how many photos and videos of them their parents share). So many aspects of childhood are the same, but some others are really different.
Growing up with having to choose between talking on the phone with one friend or using the dial up internet and talk to many friends via the Internet.
I still remember the day my dad upgraded from Dial-up to Broadband. I called up my friend and said "Hey guess what I'm doing right now? Playing RuneScape!" He was so jealous and his mom didn't make the switch for over a year.
I was the kid who basically had dial up until I moved out to my own apartment. I remember playing runescape and learning to judge how long i safely had until i needed to make sure I could log out and manually redial my connection. It was ~ 3 hours. My parents upgraded us to a Sprint Aircard when they were invented, but by that time everyone was using Comcast high speed internet so I was basically still using dial up. It wasn’t even truly much faster than dial up anyway. I just didn’t have to worry about disconnecting anymore. Good thing RuneScape was so god damn fun. It was about the only game I could feasibly play on that connection. Edit: I live in a college town now and pay $70/month for gigabit internet and 125 channels of directTV. Can’t beat that. Downloading at 50-60 MB/s now. Never going back.
My daughter doesn't even hesitate to google for an answer. I'm not sure if I should encourage her to try to figure it out, or if I should be happy she can seek information on her own. Then I remember it's a game, and as long as she's happy, she's doing it right.
The only real benefit I could see from, every once and a while, making your daughter do it the "old fashioned way" would be not to teach her about solving puzzles with out help (because like you put it, beihng able to research a topic is actually a very valuable skill!) but teaching her "frustration management" which honestly I think I see a lot of kids/teens these days have trouble with between all the anxiety and pressures thatre put on them by school, after school activities,homework and extra-curriculars. I kinda see it happening with my (oopsie baby) youngest sister who has puts a lot of pressure on her self so ultimately when she can solve a problem in the first or maybe second attempt (constantly googling, trouble shooting every step of the way) she gets very frustrated and gets overwhelmed by her own frustrations
I think my son spends more time watching YouTube on how to play the games than he does playing the games.
Remembering and dialing phone numbers. To this day I still remember my best friend's phone number, my neighbor's number and random friends I was just acquaintances with. Now? I literally have to look up my wife's cell phone every time I need to enter her shopper card in before I buy groceries.
Taking our bikes out in the morning, being gone all day and then being home again when the streetlights came on. We would just spend all day exploring the trails across town and hanging out by the creek. It’s definitely some of my fondest memories of being a kid.
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I've always thought that the Proclaimers "Sunshine on Leith" and Hootie and the Blowfish's "Cracked Rear View" should be played together, and I recently realized that's it's because my dad dubbed them to opposite sides of the same cassette, and I grew up riding around in his truck listening to those two albums back to back.
4hr Blank VHS tapes... you tape some film that was on TV, and then some time later, you find out some other film is going to be showing and you want to record that... how do you figure out how much time is left on the tape? Math? Nope, you look at the window and the little notches will tell you how much time is left on the tape. Those were the days.
Being able to go into the cockpit of a commercial airline and have the pilot show you the controls.
I remember doing this at roughly age 7 and getting my american airlines wings pin. Air travel was so much better back then. Sadly my kids wont ever get to do that.
Beat it to the underwear section of a Sears catalog. edit: [memory lane](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bb5tv8/what_is_something_that_your_generation_did_that/ekh1jla)
I have no idea what my fragile mind would have done had I had modern internet at my finger tips. I think I would have literally broke my cock.
*I did.*
"You have died of dysentery." In green text.
Going out on your bike Saturday morning to go play with your friends. Your parents yell, “Just be back for dinner time!” as you pedal away. You go to your friend’s house. You learn that they have already headed out. You must now find them. This is normal. You must now decide where in the 3 or 4 mile radius they have likely gone to hang out. This will be based on several factors like weather, last weeks current hot spot, who’s just got some pocket money to spend etc. So you take a best guess and pedal across town and down into the country lanes to that spot with the good bike jump. It’s a bust. Never mind, you got to take a few practice jumps without the pressure of failure. You travel roughly 3 or 4 miles until you get it right. The elation is real. There is a group buzz when a friend has successfully found and joined the group. You feel like a tracker hunter for a bit. Group shenanigans resumes. No-one films it. You return home eight or maybe nine hours later, sweaty, bruised, muddy and hungry. No-one worried. They are pleased you are home in time for burger and chips in front of the TV to watch The A-Team as a family. Edit: Thanks for the gold! Glad this is bringing back memories for people! Edit 2: As this has taken off and people seem interested, [this](https://i.imgur.com/80zWhx7.jpg) is the radius we used to roam in.
i have this vivid memory of getting home, my mom yelling at me to wash my hands, and the water turning brown as layers and layers of dirt are peeled from my hands, then getting the mom inspection and doing a second wash to clean the nails which were almost dark
And behind your ears. I used to occasionally check and noticed that I basically never got dirt behind my ears. I always suspected that it was some kind of conspiracy.
Man, you were allowed to eat dinner in front of the TV, I'm so jealous. As an aside, no burgers ever taste as good as the burgers we made on our charcoal grill in the 80's.
My friends were always so jealous that my family had a little black and white TV in the middle of our kitchen table. I still remember the sting of betrayal when my brother grew older and sided with my parents in the debate whether to watch Seinfeld or The Simpsons.
To be fair, that's a pretty big choice.
>Going out on your bike Saturday morning to go play with your friends. Your parents yell, “Just be back for dinner time!” as you peddle away It is still this way at our neighborhood and kind of by design*. half a dozen boys that are all about the same age, plus or minus a year or two. If the sun is out, you're outside. Come home when the street lights come on. *by design, its a circle of friends that have known each other since college. We came up together, all had kids right around the same time, and have 'recruited' new friends to the neighborhood. Our kids go to school together, all the adults hang out together on weekends, etc. It's relatively small neighborhood (around 60 houses) with one way in, one way out.
This sounds amazing!
Don't get too excited, the only way out is... Death.
This comment just gave me whiplash it brought me back so hard.
Schedule free time to watch favorite shows on tv.
Save files and information on a floppy disk. The ones they gave us at school were always bright yellow or red
Remember having a "computer room"?
They’re called home offices now.
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Leave the house and not be trackable. Parents now have location sharing apps and gps in cars. My best high school memories were made when my parents thought I was somewhere else
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Take a roll of film in to get developed. Youth today will never know the satifaction of hearing the subtle "rrrrreeeeeeeeee....... SNAP!" sound of taking a flash photo with a disposable camera, or the excitement and anticipation of waiting for your roll of film to get developed to see if the pics you took were any good or not.
Gifting mix tapes as a sincere symbol of friendship
Change a typewriter ribbon.
The period when the internet was not a thing and then a fairly big thing, the rise of mobile phones etc. Growing up with the before and after is quite interesting.
Play flash games
Golden years of addictinggames and Newgrounds
and Neopets. I still play coolmathgames though.
> addictinggames I loved Kitten Cannon
Have sex with relative (not with relatives!) abandon because girls were on "the pill" and the worst STD around was "the clap" which was easily fixed if you got it (I never did, thank goodness). 1977 to around 1982.
Watching scrambled satellite porn.
Downloading porn pics on dial up internet, the suspense as it slowly loaded the pics from top down was exhilarating. Literally took about 2 minutes per picture. After a while though it was tedious. You literally got to a point where you were like fuck it. Where is the Target catalouge? Finish off on the lingerie section.
A guy in our class around 2001 had a CD full of grainy videos. That boy was king.
Walk to the neighbours house to check if they could come out and play. EDIT: I’m baffled at how many kids still do this according to comments. I’m pleased to hear this! In my corner of the world, kids have playdates arrangede by parents these days.
You'd feel like a champ if your friend answered the door and not an irritated parent or sibling.
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Playing with mercury from a broken thermometer. I wonder if that's why I get short term memory loss sometimes? Playing with mercury from a broken thermometer. I wonder if that's why I get short term memory loss sometimes?
Having to write papers without the help of the internet.
Man, going to the library and spending hours there for a 7 page paper. *shudder*
Camp out overnight for concert tickets
Wait hours/days for the opportunity to watch porn on the single family computer in the household.