If you grew up in the 80's......

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*mad_professor*

SatelliteGuys Family
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Supporting Founder
Aug 9, 2004
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Covina, CA
IF you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!! (anyone who lived
during the 80's)

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with
their tedious diatribes about how hard things were
when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five
miles to school every morning...uphill BOTH ways ...through
year 'round blizzards .. Carrying their younger siblings
on their backs ... to their one-room schoolhouse, where
they maintained a Straight-A average despite their full-time,
after-school job at the local textile mill ... where they
worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving
to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was
no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids ...
about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But.... Now that
I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but
look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy!
I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate
to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've
got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet.....we wanted
to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it
up ourselves! In the card catalog!! There was no email! We
had to actually write somebody a letter....with a pen! Then you
had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox
and it would take like a week to get there! There were no MP3s or
Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damn
record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around
all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over
the beginning and f@#* it all up!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn!
You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler"
at the 7-11! Those were your options!

We didn't have fancy sh*t like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone
and somebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have
fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea
who it was! It could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your
drug dealer, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take
your chances!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Play station videogames with
high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like
"Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy
was a little square! You had to use your imagination!
And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen

forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting
Harder and faster until you died! ... Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium
seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy sat in
front of you and you couldn't see you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like
20 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You
had to use a little book called a TV Guide
to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came
to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk
over to the TV to change the channel and there was
no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on
Saturday Morning... D'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had
to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards!

We didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something
up ... we had to use the stove ... imagine that! If we
Wanted popcorn...we had to use that stupid jiffy pop and
shake it over the stove like an idiot forever.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today
have got it too easy. You're spoiled, you guys wouldn't
have lasted five minutes back in 1980!



 
we had just 6 channels in the 80s on our "cable" :(
ARD (1st western station)
ZDF (2nd western station)
N3 (local station for North-West-Germany and Berlin)
SAT.1 (1st commercial TV for Western Germany)
DDR 1 (1st eastern channel)
DDR 2 (2nd eastern channel)

on antenna I've received also AFN-TV (American Forces Network), BFBS-TV (British Forces), Antenne 2 (2nd french station - today: France 2) and Ostankino (1st russian station - today: 1st channel)

that was all :(

I was born in 1974 in East-Germany (Leipzig) ;)
 
There were no MP3s or
Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damn
record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around
all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over
the beginning and f@#* it all up!
So true so true :D

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn!
You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler"
at the 7-11! Those were your options!
Or look in your parents closet where dad hid al of them : )

you had no idea
who it was! It could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your
drug dealer, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take
your chances!
That’s just damn funny

We didn't have any fancy Sony Play station videogames with
high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like
"Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy
was a little square! You had to use your imagination!
And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen
forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting
Harder and faster until you died! ... Just like LIFE!
So true…I still have my 2600

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like
20 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You
had to use a little book called a TV Guide
to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came
to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk
over to the TV to change the channel and there was
no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on
Saturday Morning... D'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had
to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards!
You had cable as a kid? We had 5 channels. (The big 3+PBS and an IND) We were stoked when Channel 29 started because they had wrestling and then this new channel called Fox. Excitement was when we could get Chanenl 12 (CBS from Mankato..some 60 miles away)
Even though the local CBS was the same it was cool to see the “News 12” graphic.

I laugh at all of this as I have a little brother who is 13 and could NEVER live like we did.
No video games
No cable
No central air
 
We also did not have cable, just plain rabbit ears with VHF/UHF.

Here in L.A we had SelecTV and Z-Channel, which were both adult pay-tv channels that went on after 10pm or 11pm everyday on channel 22 and channel 52.

The best thing was to tune to those channels and get a scrambled signal, but sound was 100% open. Every now and then you will see a full image for a sec or 2, and that made my night when i was in Jr HIgh.
 
I can remember watching the old NWA, WWF, AWA & WCCW wrestling shows actually wondering who won from the big Closed Circuit Shows, like Starrcade and Wrestlemania...

What about being made the personal channel changer for your Dad? You would have to get up and be directed when to change the channel.

I think the best memory of TV for me was waiting til 7 PM for HBO to come on.... Ok maybe not the best, but it was like this secret channel that really had a mystique to it...
 
Chado said:
I can remember watching the old NWA, WWF, AWA & WCCW wrestling shows actually wondering who won from the big Closed Circuit Shows, like Starrcade and Wrestlemania...

AWA every Saturday night and Sunday morning on KMSP 9 (the Indy channel)
WCCW on this new "KITN 29...the kitten that roars" :)
 
Did anyone mention that these kids think cell phones are standard issue now and you are expected to pay for a cell plan for them?
 
Ahh but do you remember "ON" and "IT" cable when it came out? I remember staying up late and surfing through the channels the manual way and coming across this funny distorted channel and vaguely making out the body parts of a woman through the squiggles, and we didnt have any cable to the tv. "ON" and "IT" required a descrambler hooked up to your antenna and tv to view but hey I was a kid and didnt have cash so I would twist and turn and tinfoil the hell out of those damned rabbit ears so I could see that nude woman in a solid picture or it was going to kill me.

Computers, I had one of the first trash 80's in 1976, I learned how to program the computer to do an infinite loop of my name all at the age of 6 and five minutes later I was bored with it.

At 12 my tv was a 9 inch black and white set with twist knobs to change the channels, my radio was a pocker transistor am/fm radio. I had a poster of christy brinkly wearing a blue bathing suit on my wall.

14 I got my first playboy the discount way, the girls of the big 10 august 84, I had a collecovision for a game console, saturday morning cartoons showed on abc, cbs, nbc, and the two independant stations, and we had independant tv stations until fox and upn came around years later.

Saturday was the cool day for tv, you could watch 4 hours of scifi and horror movies on both the independants, at 10pm you could watch kungfu theater until 1am and at other times of the year it would be more horror movies. Sundays I would watch abbot and costelo in the mornings.

Banana seat bikes where being replaced by bmx bikes, bmx bikes were used for racing on dirt tracks because no one had invented the trick rides yet. My dad had one of the first Apple color computers that looked like an actual desktop and my step mom had an amiga that you could play battle chess on. A year later I got a honda elite spree moped to ride around on and thought I was sooo cool.
 
Our cable in college (circa 1983) had "All JApan pro womens wrestling". Still the only wrestling show I've watched, and I'd watch it again!
 
Man I watched so many wrestling PPV's through the squiggle lines that it's not even funny...

I wouldn't say kids today have it easy. When we were kids you got pressured to smoke cigarettes and maybe pot in high school. Now they're getting X and all sorts of OTC "homebrew" crap in middle school. Choking Game Anyone? We just didn't have to deal with this stupidity back then...
 
I saw HBO mentioned above. Did anyone else here ever watch Brain Games on there? It was filler they had between movies. I remember it being cheesy yet I found it entertaining. :)
 
Try getting 1 channel (AFN) for 5 years from '75-'80, then coming back to the States and your fellow 8th graders are all saying "Nanu-Nanu" and you have no clue wtf they were talking about. Prior to that, we had 3 networks OTA via rabbit-ears (sometimes with high-tech tin foil attached) and we watched cartoons for 2 or 3 hours on Saturday morning because that was the only time they were on.
 
I remember a trip to souther Illinois to grandma's house with my son. Now grandma had a party line and a rotary phone. So first we had to train him to not answer until the phone had two short then a long ring. But the funniest was when we told him to call someone one, he picked up the phone and just stared at it, he was looking for the buttons to push, didn't know how to use a rotary.

As for microwave ovens, I remember seeing one in college in 1972, a hugh Amana commercial model and being amazed by it. What will they think of next?
 
rad said:
As for microwave ovens, I remember seeing one in college in 1972, a hugh Amana commercial model and being amazed by it. What will they think of next?

...the cancer that it gives you...

Mr. Wizard anyone? Remember when nickolodeon used to be cool?
 
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