Little things that have changed dramatically.

[WOM]

Every time I strap my kids into their car seats, I think about what it was like when I was a kid. 35 or 40 years ago, nobody wore seat belts. Kids rode up front or in back, often standing, sometimes with a glass Coke bottle in their mouth as dad smoked like a chimney with the windows rolled up. And if it was after 9 pm, you can bet a fair few people were weaving around drunk.

As well, every other kid on the street is talking or texting on a phone the size of a deck of cards. As a kid, we had one phone, on the kitchen wall, and we shared a party-line with a neighbour.

What little things have changed dramatically since you were a kid and makes you sound like an old fart when you mention it?

[boris]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

Everything.

[matt j]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

Talking about computers before mice.

Mosaic, Fetch, Eudora, etc.

Ditto machines

[hobbes]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

We had a black and white telly until I was 9.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

I can tell my son about the b&w TV, the three channels, etc and he doesn't bat an eyelid. What makes him crack up is when I tell him about computers that didn't have hard drives.

"how did they work?" he asks

"well, you had two 5.25 inch disk drives. And you put the OS floppy in one drive and the program you wanted to run in the other. And then, once those loaded, you'd take the OS disk out and replace it with the disk that had the filed you wanted to work on, and then you could work with an actual text or data file".

By this point his jaw has hit the floor several times over.

[erwin]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

.

Ha ha ha! Party lines! How primitive was that!? What was the justification? We had one with the Turners across the road. You'd be able to just pick up the phone and listen in to their most intimate conversations. Unfortunately for us boys, the Turners never got very intimate with anyone. At least not on the phone.

.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

WOM - Scarborough had party lines in the 70s?

[Reed John]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

That's what a party line was? That was a central plot device in Pillow Talk.

I don't recall having to load the OS off the disk although maybe I'm forgetting that. What sort of computer was that? I think we might have had to do that with Todd Moore's Dad's Apple II+ before playing Castle Wolfenstein.

My dad had one of these bad boys. It was "portable" so he could take it to and fro from the office - in the trunk of the car, mind. It wasn't a "lap top" by any stretch. It had a very small screen, but at home he hooked it up to a regular monitor which was, of course, only 12 or 14 inches and green on black.

For my birthday when I was 10 or 11, we got a Commodore 64 which hardly ever did anything but play pirated games that I got from kids at school who had older brothers who knew guys on campus who hacked them. At first, we just had a tape drive which was only slightly faster then getting a degree in computer science and designing and building a better computer.

Then we got the disk drive, which cost as much as the computer (around $200) and was absurdly slow compared to the disk drive of other personal computers of the day, but way faster than the tape drive. When we visited Europe when I was 12, I saw there were lots of games for sale for really good prices (it was about 3 marks to a dollar back then and a pound sterling was about $1.25). But I didn't buy any because they were all on cassette tape. Did you people really boot awesome games like Beach Head or Yi Ar Kung-Fu off of a tape? That must have taken 8 hours.

My dad had a series of pre-Windows IBM clone PCs from Swan Computers (they were local). We weren't allowed to play games on that after we broke the keyboard playing Track & Field which required you to hit the keys really fast in succession to make the guy run.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

I fucking loved Track and Field, which I could only play on my friend Alex Stephens' Apple II. Come to think of it, we played a lot of Wolfenstein, too.

Pretty much all PCs (or "IBM clones" as we called them back then) had to do this. Apples may not have, I don't remember. Certainly, the Brother portable I bought in 1988 and used until 1992 had this feature. As did the earlier Tandy computer I had from about 1985 onwards (on which I played an early computer game by Douglas Adams, and one of EA sports earliest hockey games.

[WOM]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

WOM - Scarborough had party lines in the 70s?

Indeed. It was my father's stated intention to keep it "until the come and beg me to give it back". I swear he must have had one of the last in the city.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

It's quite funny to see this side by side with the "The Snip" thread.

Which it won't be anymore after I post this, sadly...

[Reed John]

Little things that have changed dramatically.

Come to think of it, I think my dad's IBM clone had two disk drives, so we put the OS in one and whatever else in the other. I think.