Back in my day...

[DonRotolo]

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

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...