Back in my day...

[JaneYoung]

Back in my day, Walt Disney was magical.

And I was blonde...

[IndySam]

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,

[GaryVoshol]

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.

[Karibou]

-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.

[ebarker]

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 ??

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by IndySam

and everyone knew what a church key was,

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

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.

Originally Posted by squirrel

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.

We still do that.

[sanddrag]

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.

[AllenGregoryIV]

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

[EricH]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

- Bumpers were an obscure rule that no one dreamed of implementing

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.

[Taylor]

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

[MrForbes]

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

[Warren Boudreau]

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

Computers were the imagination of science fiction authors.

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by squirrel

...something we saw on Star Trek

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.

[Peyton Yeung]

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

[Molten]

Originally Posted by Taylor

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

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.