Back in my day...
 

This thread is all about completing that statement. Tell the truth, an exaggeration, or whatever you like. It can be FIRST related, but doesn't necessarily have to be. I'll start.

Back in my day, Inventor used a numbering system rather then years. I learned on Inventor 10.

Note: This thread was inspired by an elderly gentlemen at a Mcdonald's. Apparently they used to have 5 items on the menu when he first went to one.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day Cartoon Network used to be entertaining....

Back in my day...we had Toonami:rolleyes:

Back in the day we used to have Saturday morning cartoons!!!

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, we didn't have bumpers, we traveled uphill both ways in the snow to the event, and if your robot broke, it was your own fault! None of these here thick rulebooks, we had a thick Q&A printout! And we LIKED it!

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day... oh wait. everything is modern. ah well this thread isn't for me ...

Re: Back in my day...
 

Goodness, where do I start?

Gas was 32.9 cents a gallon. Cars routinely got less than 10 MPG. You could fit 6 people in the trunk - 8 if they were cut up :rolleyes:

Computers... well, nobody had one at home. My first home PC had 1 kB RAM (A Timex-Sinclair 1000, cost $99), my next one has 1024 kB (a whole Meg! But to address it required QEMM) and a 20 MB HDD (Double-height). Once I bought 4 MB of RAM for my 486 and I paid $525...and that was a bargain. Of course, DOS wasn't a memory hog either. I used Norton Commander for file structure navigation, what a godsend over the >DIR/W command! Oh, and I can use Windows 3.1 without a mouse...

Cars didn't have seat belts. No such thing as a child car seat either.

A mobile phone was actually a serious HF radio setup, 50 pounds in a suitcase.

Cartoon network? Didn't exist, nor did Cable. But here in the NYC area, with a dozen over-the-air channels, 3 or 4 stations had cartoons Saturday morning. Sunday all we got was Davey & Goliath...

I'd leave the house after school to play in the neighborhood, and wouldn't return until after dark. And nobody worried about it.

Vacuum Tubes were still quite common, the TV guy came to the house to fix it at least once a year, or we'd take all the tubes to Lafayette radio Electronics and use their tube tester. We had an RCA Model 4. In color!

No e-mail, no fax. Teletype was used in business, otherwise mail was as good as it got. No FedEx either.

The Boeing 727 was a new aircraft, quite remarkable for its day. I flew "Wings Wonderful" out of Newark (that was Eastern Airlines). I also flew on a Yellowbird (That was on Northeast Airlines - Google it).

Large-Scale-Integration (LSI) ICs hadn't come out yet; the biggest you could get retail was a Hex Inverter in the 7400 series. [EDIT]OK, we had a Signetics SE567 PLL chip too...

OK, enough...

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day....

We could only dream of buying a Tektronix scope, so we built our own (all tube) oscilloscope from surplus parts. It worked.

We wanted Color Television, so Dad bought a Heathkit, and we built it.

When anything at home broke, we took it apart and figured out how it worked. About half the time we could get it working again.

About half the cars I drove had a three speed manual shift transmission...with the shifter on the steering column.

Our friends had air conditioning in their car.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day the M in MTV stood for MUSIC (I don't know what it stands for nowadays. Mental I suppose).

Re: Back in my day...
 

Recently I took some team members to my homeown and explained to them how my version of 'google' worked back in the day,, here goes:

So when I was young I'm sitting around and something comes to mind and I'd say - what is the answer to 'X'. So I'd jump on the bike, ride down pine street 1/2 mile, turn left, go 2 blocks to laurel street, turn right, ride about 8 blocks, turn left into the library. Run up the steps, through the door, then left to the card catalog. The catalog was the way we would do a 'search'. I'd look up the topic in a card catalog, which was a bunch of drawers of index cards, find the ISBN number, run upstairs to the stacks, and hopefully no one had the book removed from the shelf. Next query - repeat. Did this daily.

Every time we drove by this place the team would say "there's google" !!

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Back in my day, Walt Disney was magical.

And I was blonde...

Re: Back in my day...
 

Math was done without calculators and papers were written without spell check.

Principles had paddles, playgrounds were asphalt and the teachers lounge was always filled with smoke.

You had three choices at McDonals, hamburgers, cheeseburgers and fillet O' fish, you needed a bottle opener to have a coke, and everyone knew what a church key was,

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day ...

There were only 2 TV channels, until we got a 3rd one. And a lot of the shows were B&W - which didn't matter because a lot of the sets were B&W. My mom's cousin had a color set - it was a big deal to go over there and see football players in red uniforms.

We got an Instamatic camera - it had flash cubes.

We learned to use a slide rule in 9th grade algebra.

In 11th grade physics, we actually had a programmable computer - it could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and input and store about 4 numbers. It was about 16" square, and 5 or 6 inches thick.

Re: Back in my day...
 

-It was big deal for my family when my mom got a cell phone. I was probably 7 or 8 years old.
-Very few people had cell phones until high school
-iPod shuffles were more than an inch long
-AOL CDs everywhere. Enough said.
-Playgrounds had merry-go-rounds
-There were only 151 Pokemon, and they weren't obnoxious, bright colors.
-My family's first computer was an IBM machine, and we used Juno for email.
-Little kids wore clothing that their mom's bought from a catalog.

Re: Back in my day...
 

To get music you had to go to the record store and the storekeeper would play it for you if you wanted to hear what was on it.

They came in two sizes:

• big records with little holes in the middle
• little records with big holes in the middle.

To get ice cream you went to the drug store. ( Now you go to the drugstore to get motor oil and to the grocery store to get drugs. )

A 7-11 opened at 7am and closed at 11pm because no one was out at any other time.

When a new independent gas station came to town the other gas stations tried to run it out of business. It started a "GAS WAR" and prices dropped to about 17 cents a gallon for a while. When is the last time you bought gas in a price war ??

Re: Back in my day...
 

Yes indeed, and in fact that absolutely was the key to "our" little church...:rolleyes:

AM Radio was huge (NYC market again), FM wasn't big yet because no cars had FM radios yet. Cousin Brucie was alive (um...he still is!).

A 4 function calculator with LED digits was about $150, and sure beat that slip-stick.

We still do that.

Re: Back in my day...
 

You guys have better stories than mine but I'll post anyhow. Back in my day kids rode bikes after school and on weekends. Cell phones were mainly just expensive options in cars, then we got motorola flip phones.

We had Apple IIe computers at school with 5 1/4" floppy drives on which we played Oregon Trail and fun math games. I had a IIc+ at home. After a short while, as mentioned above, AOL CDs were everywhere. I remember at school when we got PowerPC Macs they were the most remarkable thing. I remember when my 6th grade classroom got one that we would take turns using. Alta Vista was the best search engine on the web. Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice. There was no such thing as Google. I remember reading in the newspaper about how telephone lines would "soon be able to transmit data at much faster speeds of 56 kbps." I remember at that time we had a 14.4 modem at home, that made all sorts of silly noises. Web pages loaded about a 1/2 inch at a time, down the screen. The internet was not full of ads and spam and hobbyists and individuals put great effort into making web pages with quality information that was often quite interesting. Animated GIFs were the hot ticket for making a web page fancy.

I miss the early days of the internet.

The other day I found a receipt for a Pentium MMX 233MHz computer we bought from CompUSA in 1997. It came in just under $2000.

When eBay came to be, it was individuals, in the United States, selling their unique used stuff. You would pay for it with a money order in the mail. People paid insane amounts of money for Pogs and beanie babies. Radio Shack had the best RC cars around, and actually sold radio equipment...

Middle school had classes like Wood Shop and Drafting. Students knew how to respect their teachers, and could pay attention and read books, without having to constantly be entertained.

In high school, I got one of the first color cell phones for about $400.

FIRST Robots were programmed in PBASIC, were powered by drill motors, and you could only buy parts from the Small Parts catalog or a small list of approved materials.

That's about all I remember. Sometimes I want those days back.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day
- We had large rotating police lights on our robots
- Bumpers were an obscure rule that no one dreamed of implementing
- We programmed in PBASIC (The emulator was a lot better back than, thanks to rbayer)
- Autonomous mode was brand new, and very unexpected
- Only 4 robots were on the field at a time
- The van door motor was awesome
- The battery counted as part of your weight

This thread made me way to nostalgic. I want to play stack attack again.

Also looking back it's nice to see most of the issues Dr. Joe outlined here have been solved

Re: Back in my day...
 

Radio Shack never had the best RC cars :)

Re: Back in my day...
 

Ok, best toy-grade RC cars. And there were brick-and-morter small-town hobby shops with the best RC cars.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day:
Computer programs were written using key punch cards.
Bumpers on cars could take a 10 mph hit and not total the car.
Full service gas stations had actual people come out to check the fluids and tires on your car.
We actually went outside to play.
The motto was "Spare the rod, spoil the child"
Halloweening was all night.
We had to walk to the bus stop for school. Not get picked up at our door.
Draftingwas done a board using a 'T' Square and a pencil.

Re: Back in my day...
 

There was a commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld (an up-and-coming comic with a brand new TV show on Thursdays on NBC) at a gas station. He filled his tank for $20.00 - "the perfect pump." Then he did the unthinkable: He pumped more gas, raising the cost by a single penny.
See, there was this great new technology in which if a person has a VISA card, such as Mr. Seinfeld, you could pay for your gasoline without having to go in to the station. Truly a watershed moment in American culture.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day...

The first professional computer I worked on filled a room that was an entire NYC block long, Required Water Cooling, Room Temperature Controlled to 68 degrees, had a whooping 16K of RAM, and took 12 hours to compile.

We used the punch outs from punch cards as a confetti at football games.

The Transistor was the new HOT technology.

You WALKED to/from School if you lived 3 miles or less away.

A TI Scientific Calculator was over $100. So most of us used a Slide Rule instead.

Muscle Cars, actually HAD muscle. 10-12 second quarter miles were common.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Gotta call you on that. At least one team did, and the next year the standard design came out. IIRC, there was some sort of weight-transfer system inside.

Most other teams used a wedge instead.

Oh, right:

Back in my day, robots were built to flop down onto their drivetrain from vertical!
Back in my day, there was no limit to a robot's expansion!
Back in my day, drill motors were the drivetrain motor of choice!
You kiddies don't even know how good you have it. Back in my day, the Kitbot was about 3 aluminum beams, some drill motors, and pray you had the smarts to put it together! (The kickoff video one year included "look-ins" at a group of about 3 "average joes" putting it together. Only problem? That's 3 average joes with PhDs.)
Back in my day, there was a large obstacle in the middle of the field.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, the Unofficial Caption Contest was actually scored over the weekend

Re: Back in my day...
 

...robots were something we saw on Star Trek and Lost in Space

Re: Back in my day...
 

Engineers used slide rules to design airplanes that could do Mach 3+.

Computers were the imagination of science fiction authors.

Re: Back in my day...
 

They had the little devices that they flipped open called communicators.

Today we call them "flip phones with speakerphone".

Back in the day the 'communicator' was sheer fantasy. Today they are ubiquitous.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day every high school student was on a FIRST Robotics team.....ps I'm from the future:)

Re: Back in my day...
 

Sounds like someone is going to score -infinity.

On topic though...

Back in my day:
Cartoons had a moral to the story.
The violence was outlandish and plentiful.
The video games were 2-D.
School vending machines had candy in them and no raisins.
Rosie O'Donnell did a talk show.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Burn FTW!

Back in my day, if you were out and had to make a phone call, you got a dime and went to a public pay phone. If you were lucky, there was a dime already in the coin return.

Re: Back in my day...
 

When I was a kid I had to call my aunt in a town 54 miles away. I had to pick up the phone and "rotary dial' a zero, an OPERATOR answered and I'd say "I like 'such and so' and the OPERATOR would say 'Please Hold' - and she would get an operator in the next town to finish the other end of the connection.

Another day I was digging around in an old drawer and found an old ticket, to ride the steam train to the next town, 17 miles away, for 15 cents. The ticket had been redeemed so it wasn't like they lost the fare.

A few years ago I was rummaging around an antique shop in Minnesota and bought myself a B-Battery Voltage Meter. They had no clue what it was and why it was on the plains of Minnesota.

Back in the day - if you wanted to listen to the radio in the evening you needed an A battery, a B battery, a C battery to run the radio. If you want to learn more about the technology go research an early edition of "Elements of Radio" by Marcus and Marcus. To learn more about the culture listen to the references from Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion.

Re: Back in my day...
 

I can't believe this hasn't been said yet, or I missed it, but back in my day....

Pluto was a planet.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, Rosie O'Donnell was a backwards-hat wearing comedienne on the Improv. She later hosted it.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Touché, good sir. You outdid me on this one.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, floppy disks were at least as common as CDs.
Back in my day, the same went for cassette tapes.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, car stereo was the house stereo, powered by an inverter, and playing 7" reel to reel tapes

Re: Back in my day...
 

Man, I feel way too young for this thread.

Back in my day, Beanie Babies were normal animals and colors. And the names of the cats rhymed.
Back in my day, TV shows for kids AND pre-teens/teens were animated
Back in my day, Ms. Frizzle was the coolest teacher ever
Back in my day, my gaming consisted of blowing on cartridges to try and get them to work. On my dad's Intellivision.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day floppy disks were 8" and expensive and the first computer I owned used cassette tapes for memory.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, data was stored on mag tapes. And I had to hand carry it from the data center in one building to the data center in another building to transfer the data (aka "sneakernet").

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, a floor sort was a great way to ruin your day.

Re: Back in my day...
 

In my earliest days
I arrived here from WEST Germany taking an intercontinental flight that was propeller driven... stopping 6 times between Frankfurt and Chicago

Gasoline was cheap enough that $2.00 worth could last the weekend...

On Sundays most stores were closed... (in Germany stores were closed from Noon on Saturday until Monday morning...)

Televisions were black and white...

We ate most of our meals at home and I walked home for lunch every day from Elementary school.

We had one car.

Telephones were dialed on a dial and we had a party line.
Telephone numbers started with letters not numbers...

At school we did atomic bomb drills

Television stations "signed off" at night... usually around midnight.

Interstates were new and exciting.... and often not completed...



yes I know... people ask me whether it was really sad when all the dinosaurs died...

Re: Back in my day...
 

So...was it? Or perhaps some of your peers could weigh in on that question.

Re: Back in my day...
 

doesn't make sense, we all thought you wore armored suits as a knight, hung out with King Arthur, etc

That is what your picture indicated, graduation from knight school !!

Re: Back in my day...
 

We listened to the World Series games over the school intercom.

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We watched the astronauts on a big (it seemed big at the time) TV in the cafeteria.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys were the most popular bands, I used the AOL software for everything on the internet, and it would be common for my parents to find parts from flashlights, CD players, click pens, and R/C cars scattered all over my room.

Side note on that last one:
Being a robotics nerd started early for me. I could take almost anything mechanical/electrical apart. Problem was, I didn't know how to put most of them back together. Ahhhh, good times.

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in MY day...

• Gas was 99cents/gallon!
• I programmed robots in PBasic
• Holy cripes drivetrains were hard (there was no kitbot!)
• Drill motors rocked! (or smoked!)
• The Placebo was our favorite Robot
• Tigerbolt was the best robot in town
• Chief Delphi was the biggest cheese
• Matches were 3 robots - no alliances!
• I wrote papers in Wordperfect with no Spellcheck!
• Pen up Pen down Forward 3 Right 5 Pen up was how we learned to program!
• The Championship Tournament bracket fit on one 11x17 sheet of paper
• Slap bracelets rocked
• Hexagons and Torroids and Ladders were FIRST Games!
• Pinning was legal!
• Parts falling off robots didn't cause a penalty!
• Kids with a Sony Playstation or Nintendo GameBoy were the BOMB!
• No one I knew owned a cell phone
• Walkmen were the best source of portable music!
• Epcot was all ours!!

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day...
People ate dinner in the dining room.
People would have to talk face to face instead of texting, and or calling.
You could watch cartoons and see some moral value.
You could go down the street to play with other kids.
People weren't glued to their computer all the time.

Re: Back in my day...
 

computer ? what's a computer ? nobody had computers ! most people didn't even know what a computer was !

Re: Back in my day...
 

Back in my day... the tubes said FIRST on them. yeah, thats all I got.