Things today's kids missed out on

[Big_Ed]

Ok, so here are a few things that I think kids today don't really know much about or have never experienced. (for the most part)

L.P. records
Rotary dial phones
Cars with carburetors
Floppy disks
TV's with rabbit ear antennas
TV's with manual tuning knobs and no remote control
Wind-up clocks and watches
A time when there was no internet
Gas for under $1 a gallon

What else can you think of?

[The_LED_Museum]

The Commodore 64 computer - when it was "the bomb" that is
Cigerettes for less than 50¢ per package
The original style LED wristwatch
Fleming valves (vacuum tubes)

[Oddjob]

Making a mixed tape for a girl you had a crush on (so much more difficult than burning a CD) or actually going to the Library to do research for a school paper.

[gorn]

Air raid drills during grade school.

I will never forget the sound of the sirens announcing an atomic attack by the soviets. Even then I wondered what being under my desk would do to save me from an H-bomb.

[DieselTech]

The Commodore 64 Executive Laptop that was 2 feet long, a foot and a half wide, weighed 80 pounds (or so it seemed at the time), and had a screen that was about 4"x4".

Hand cranking the tractor. Not pushing the start button, but putting her in neutral, sliding the crank in through the front grill and learning to watch where you put your thumbs. You only got it wrong once.

Oh, and reel style lawnmowers. Don't see those much anymore.

[InTheDark]

Funny because i was just thinking about this last weekend while trying to expalin Rocky and Rambo to someone who'd never heard of them.

Mixed tape - definitely a good one. Even better if it was a metal oxide with dolby. And using those dual tape deck stereos to record them.

Using a public pay phones
dewey decimal system and card catalogs
microfiche
VHS rewinders
writing letters to pen pals
walkmans
any type of fun contact games during recess
realistic looking toy guns
pac man
flash cubes and film cameras
carrying pocketknives to school
drive in theaters

Here's a funny e-mail that pretty much sums up my thoughts

When I was a kid adults used to bore me..........

Link contains some language undesirable to some. -Empath

[NA8]

Slide rules for chem & physics.

That whole don't eat meat on fridays thing if you were catholic.

Nuns in funny clothes.

Reading in your history book that the second amendment was what you'd think it'd be, being in the Bill of Rights.

Tube radios in cars.

[shakeylegs]

The whole family watching the same tv show on the one tv (remote-less) in the house
Decoder Rings
Green and Blue Chip Stamps
"Really Big Shews" with Topo Gigio
Sneaking into the Drive-In in the trunk
Mr Peanut and the Wiener Mobile
Party Lines
The absence of fast food and drive through dining
Bench seats without seat-belts
Black & White
The Draft
Board Games
An ageless Dick Clark
Life without paper towels and waxed paper wrapped sandwiches
The Space Race
GTO's, and twenty-five cents a gallon gasoline
The Communist Menace
Kookie and his comb
Doodieville
3D Movies
Duck Tails and Flat-tops
Spud Guns
Saddle Shoes and Poodle Skirts
Panty Raids
Stuffing telephone booths
Silly Putty
Record Booths
Yo-Yo's
Tiki's

[Dances with Flashlight]

Adobe walls without sheetrock.
Outhouses.
Cars with 8 tracks & reverb units.
Houses without air conditioning.
Carbon paper.
Clamp-on roller skates that sliced off ankles.
Roller skating without sidewalks.
Walking through puddles with tin cans attached to shoes.
Newsreels at theaters.
Smothers Brothers on the radio.
No FM stations.
Paperboy Special bicycles.
Roy Rogers Jeep.
The day the Lone Ranger met Tonto.
.22 rifles for 6 year old boys.
Water bags on cars.
Sergeant Preston and Yukon King.
The first fins on cars.

[LumenHound]

Lawn darts.
3 games for a quarter pinball machines.
Groovy 3 color light organs.
Plaid pants and/or leisure suits.
10 feet tall buckets of chicken slowly spinning on top of a white 30 foot pole.
Candy cigarettes and bubblegum cigars.

[Probedude]

Rotary dial phones

I once did a project for a kid's museum (COSI), an interface board to go from a rotary phone to an MP3 player. It was setup to allow a kid to 'call' someone from a list of phone numbers that would then playback audio through the earpiece.

I did the project many years ago and recently googled around to see whatever became of it. The only thing I could find was someone saying it was a neat exhibit but wasn't used much because kids didn't know how to use a rotary phone!

my list
- laserdiscs
- daisywheel printers
- ibm selectrics
- comptometer
- watching an astronaut walk on the moon.
- Woolworth
- $0.35 coffee / the lack of Starbucks.

- TV test patterns back when stations actually went off the air at night!

[Manzerick]

ohhh the memories!!!!


Makes me want to put on a "Slap bracelet"!!!

[woodrow]

Lawn darts.

We used to play catch with those! I miss toys that could kill you!

My list.
Atari

Buying a Apple II+ and then spending another $100 so you could by the 16K card so it could be 64K and you could play the really cool games.

Being your Dad's remote control.

Playing outside.

Innocence

[V8TOYTRUCK]

Im 26...and wow times have changed..lets see

POGs and the look on the other persons face when you take their prized slammer
Napster
Pager Code
Wolfenstein 3D running superfast on your AST 66mhz PC with CD-ROM! and 4mb ram!
1st Gen KL1's
Really bad luxeon lottery odds.

I could go on forever.....

[paulr]

incandescent flashlights. Well, not yet, but soon.

[65535]

I remember telling another high school student that not all cars had fuel injections, apparently he probably doesn't know what a carb is either (mind you I'm still only 17 but I know stories, and I am no slouch to old time tech.)

8 tracks and Hi8 video cassettes, computers that took 2 hours to boot, but were still the best thing ever. Actually playing outside and not online, when video games were fun, it was nice to be good at them, but just because you were the best at some video game, you weren't some video game god.

Somehow I would love to take a few slow days in another decade.

[LightInTheWallet]

Peanut butter in glass jars, Tooth powder, Leaded gasoline ... LOL just HI PO Zinc batteries.

[jtr1962]

1) manual typewriters (lots of fun when you had to retype a whole page for one mistake)

2) carbon paper

3) mimeograph machines

4) wind-up watches

5) the subway system at its worst (having lived through this, it makes you appreciate what we have now all the more)

6) phones in the days before telemarketing, when only people who knew you actually called

7) network TV with more than 6 minutes between commercial breaks

8) network TV actually worth watching (I barely remember this-network TV started going to hell by the early 1970s at the latest)

9) capitalism which actually sold people goods they needed, rather than creating needs to sell (mostly) useless or pointless consumer garbage (I think that trend may have started with the Pet Rock in the 1970s)

10) living where you could actually walk to school or the store or other places of interest (still true for some kids these days, but sadly they're a shrinking minority)

11) neighborhood mom and pop stores instead of big, faceless chains

12) saturation advertising

13) when spelling and grammar actually counted for something (nobody seems to notice or care about either these days, so long as you get your message across)

14) not having overprotective parents (kids just aren't allowed to do anything where they might get hurt nowadays)

15) cycling without a helmet (at least until they're teenagers)

I'll admit that while I miss some of the things mentioned in this thread, for the majority my thoughts are good riddance. I'll take MS Word and a decent laser printer over a manual typewriter any day of the week. I couldn't imagine living without AC even though I was 27 before my bedroom finally had it. Every time I get a tinge of nostalgia I remember long and hard how burdensome of lot of simple tasks used to be. Like my grandfather used to say, the good old days weren't.

[tradderran]

The whole family watching the same tv show on the one tv (remote-less) in the house
Decoder Rings
Green and Blue Chip Stamps
"Really Big Shews" with Topo Gigio
Sneaking into the Drive-In in the trunk
Mr Peanut and the Wiener Mobile
Party Lines
The absence of fast food and drive through dining
Bench seats without seat-belts
Black & White
The Draft
Board Games
An ageless Dick Clark
Life without paper towels and waxed paper wrapped sandwiches
The Space Race
GTO's, and twenty-five cents a gallon gasoline
The Communist Menace
Kookie and his comb
Doodieville
3D Movies
Duck Tails and Flat-tops
Spud Guns
Saddle Shoes and Poodle Skirts
Panty Raids
Stuffing telephone booths
Silly Putty
Record Booths
Yo-Yo's
Tiki's

Those were the day's my friend Also 57 vet's

[LumenHound]

The Milk Man.
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color.
Funky black light wall posters.
Artistic wood burning sets.
Jiffy Pop popcorn.
White wall tires.
Fake Christmas trees that were all gold, silver, white, blue, or pink in color.
Newspapers with morning and evening editions.
Keep On Truckin' bumper stickers.
Crushed black velvet paint by number art kits.
Glass bottle soda vending machines.
Avacado green/harvest gold/burnt orange colored kitchen appliances.
Beanbag chairs.
45 RPM singles records.
Single bladed safety razors.

[this_is_nascar]

Yes, it's true. The kids of today are missing out on many things that folks from my generation had. I'll add my list, however I took a different spin with my answers. Here's what they're missing in no particular order.

-- (2) parents.
-- rules.
-- discipline.
-- respect for others and for personal property.
-- the worth of a dollar.

I'm sure I'll come up with more as this thread continues.

[Illum]

having 50 cents gets you the title of the richest kid on the block
Mercury in jugs
A river clean enough to take a bath in
toys made from plants
ferrite core radios, yeah the ones that you have to send in bubble gum wrappers or bottle caps to get
depends where you are: kerosene lanterns
pinball slot machines [the old old kinds that doesn't plug in]
wind up toys
the days where you can leave your front door wide open all day and all night without anybody looting or having your neighbors cat coming in and eating your dogs food
winchester rifles for kids
I kinds wish I had a childhood like that

[DonShock]

Lawn darts......

We used to play catch with those! I miss toys that could kill you!......

That was my first thought, all the dangerous stuff. Lawn darts like LH already mentioned, but how about Knockers. Nothing better than two large glass balls on the end of a string that you see how hard and fast you can get them hitting each other.

And there's also BB guns, pocket knives (even at school), firecrackers and real fireworks (sparklers were saved for the toddlers), hitting bike ramps with no helmet, forts in the neighborhood tree built from scavanged scrap wood and bent nails hammered straight.

Try any of this stuff today and you'll give somebody a heart attack.

[depusm12]

Grandparents that you spent time with and enjoyed it.
TV shows that had a moral lesson (The Lone Ranger, Leave it to Beaver, Little House on the Prairie ext.)
Wonderful World of Disney
Playing Cowboys and Indians with realistic toy guns.
Spending more time outside than inside.
Being able to leave doors unlocked without worrying about a burglar.
Drive-In movies
Growing up learning to shoot real guns.
Owing my first gun before I got a driver's license.

[Arkayne]

[shakeylegs]

Anyone remember this one? I grew up on this stuff. Explains everything!~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu21TiPWtDA&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcOBPtWZ7sY

[fnmag]

Kukla, Fran, and Ollie
I remember Momma
Sky King
Topper
Hopalong Cassidy
Tom Mix
Captain Midnight
The Gayle Storm Show
Dobie Gillis

[FRANKVZ]

How about how your parents would call you to come home for something in the time before cell phones by opening the front door and yelling or whistling for you. And Clackers!! http://www.bigredtoybox.com/articles...ersindex.shtml

[chmsam]

Sort of a relate -- one of the founders of Wham-O died recently. Hula hoops, Frisbees, Slip-n-slide, Silly String, etc. Must have been pretty cool knowing you put that many smiles on that many faces and made money while doing it.

OK, back on topic...

marbles
Corgi Toy cars
Capt. Kangaroo, Mr. Greenjeans, & The Banana Man
crystal radio sets and listening to the radio under the bed covers so no one could tell
5 and then 10 cent comic books
being 11 or 12 years old and getting a warm and not-so-fuzzy feeling the first time you saw Dusty Springfield on TV
"Honey West"
a James Bond attaché case
coaster brakes and a really long and steep hill
the smell of mimeographed handouts in school
cameras that used film and flashbulbs


Dave Alvin has a song that's really not on this topic (it's a love gone wrong song) but has a few lyrics that fit --

"I used to play in the orange groves 'til they bulldozed all the trees.
I used to play in the orange groves 'til they bulldozed all the trees.
Still I'd stand amongst those dead stumps and smell the blossoms on the leaves."

You know, I think that you get to be a certain age and go through certain things in life, and find yourself wishing you could be 10 years old again.

Sorry to be a bit maudlin. Must be the Winter Blues.

[Dances with Flashlight]

Telephone party lines.
Lightning bugs in glass jars.
Dry ice from railroad cars.
Visible stars in the sky at night.
Water balloon fights.
Mail delivery twice a day.
Green Stamp Books.
Peanuts in bottles of Coke.
Flavor straws.