Moderator: Peak Moderation
Pip Tiddlepip wrote:Having been born right at the end of the Swinging Sixties (literally...in December 1969)
Ha! -- I was conceived in the 'Summer of Love' (even though my parents weren't hippies).Andy Hunt wrote:I was born in March 1970 so a very similar vintage to yourself!
Pip Tiddlepip wrote:
Not only do i remember TVs with wooden casings, I remember when we actually had to get up off our arses when we wanted to change the channel! Not that you had to do it all that often, with only three channels to choose from. No videos, no DVDs.
[/i]
Bakelite was sawdust bonded by a phenolic (coal origin?) resin.bakerlite (what was that?)
I was raised by hippies, and from memory remember a childhood where winters were spent in lots of jumpers, even in bed. We had some cracking snowfalls back then.... sigh....Bakelite - the first synthetic plastic!SunnyJim wrote:Do you remember when all TV's had wooden casings? Car dashboards were wood. In fact plastic hadn't yet found its way into our lives! Everything was china, glass, tin, wood, rubber or bakerlite (what was that?)
Yeah those were the days! Any kids who lived anywhere slightly rural generally did all those things. We had very few toys and no gadgets - but we were never bored it seems.Silas wrote:...as kids (youngest of 3) we were always off out in the countryside climbing trees bike rideing, go carts made from pram wheels and pallets, jumpers for goal post's etc.
I think the slippery slope began when Tomy began to sell the electronic game called Blip:Silas wrote:What always strikes me is how quickly things have changed and how soon many have forgotten the way we were. I think change was fairly gradual up til about 1985 ish then the 1st pc's began to appear and giant mobile phones oh and electric windows in cars (what was so difficult about winding a handle?) followed by CD players and retail park's...oh the list go's on.
Just a bit too young to remember some of the exceptionally cold, snowy winters we had during the early sixties, when you could build a snowman in the back garden and it would still be there three months later...Silas wrote:I arrived in the summer of 1963, good thread, nice to get away from the doom. I arrived in the summer of 1963 so I can remember all the stuff mentioned,
Oh come on, that's media-propagated bullshit!Erik wrote: ...space age electronic tennis game that many kids had back in the very late 70's (or was it early 80s?) in which the "ball" was a little red light bulb which moved about mechanically behind a darkened screen. From then on I guess, home computer gaming (as opposed to arcade games) took off and kids stopped doing anything else, stopped interacting with each other in fact!
Phew, that's a relief, all is OK with the UK youth then!Andy_K wrote:Oh come on, that's media-propagated bullshit!Erik wrote: ...space age electronic tennis game that many kids had back in the very late 70's (or was it early 80s?) in which the "ball" was a little red light bulb which moved about mechanically behind a darkened screen. From then on I guess, home computer gaming (as opposed to arcade games) took off and kids stopped doing anything else, stopped interacting with each other in fact!
I was born in 83, so I was a kid in the late 80's and early 90's - well into the 'gaming' age. Sure, I had a zx spectrum, and later on a sega Megadrive. I also has a series of BMX's and mountain bikes I'd spend half the summer out on with my mates (with no cycle helmets). I played in fields, went exploring all day (only to return for meals, usually caked in mud) and stayed out after dark without fear of paedophilic rape. I had 'dens', invented games, and spent many an evening playing football in the local park with jumpers for goalposts.
If most of you 30-40+ year olds think all of that was gone by the time I was growing up, and kids spent all their time inside staring at a screen, then that's a false perception you've picked up.
And if you've been well enough mislead to think that those following you by a decade or so were brought up as social recluses (save for school), then there's every reason to believe the majority of kids STILL do most of these things, and now we're ALL being mislead by a scaremongering media.
) - but I do think that 30 years ago kids had to get by with a lot less and were as a rule more creative about how they kept themselves entertained. This cultural change didn't happen overnight, but it has happened. Go to a child's birthday party nowadays and you'll see a huge pile of junky plastic presents (most of which will be broken before the end of the day) that they've received from all the other kids via their competitive parents. But when I was a kid we were lucky to receive a bag of sweets and a book and a slap on the back to say "well done for growing another year". Mind you, I did live in a shoe box... 
