The 'A time before the internet' thread

EKE_38BPM

JZed wrote:

ZX Spectrum - an hour sat listening to a tape high pitched squealing only for it to feck up at the last 30 seconds. Then sit for another hour - all for Chucky Egg.

Quickly lost interest and spent time exploring on the MTB.

Commodore 64s were much better. No high pitched squealing, more consistent loading and they could make the colour orange (which the rubber keyboard abomination couldn't).

Wallace1492

Hot wheels and Airfix models....

Once the model aircraft were built, painted and admired, they were crashed, burnt and exploded.

Beaking things was popular too, though not in a nasty way, for example, we had a ruined stables up the woods, myself and quite a few others would help the demolition on its way.

I remeber the days before remote control, having to get off your seat to change channels, well, there only was 3 back then....

Does anyone remember wired remote control?

cee

Wallace1492 wrote:

Hot wheels and Airfix models....

Once the model aircraft were built, painted and admired, they were crashed, burnt and exploded.

Beaking things was popular too, though not in a nasty way, for example, we had a ruined stables up the woods, myself and quite a few others would help the demolition on its way.

I remeber the days before remote control, having to get off your seat to change channels, well, there only was 3 back then....

Does anyone remember wired remote control?

yes.
my grandad had one so he didn't need to get up to change the channel....we stuck with the non-remote version, although....my dad diyed a new fangled wireless remote.....literally... a garden cane.

we still call the remote control the 'stick'!

cee

oh...and my first computer was a ZX81 that I got given by my uncle....it had a massive 8K RAM extension pack that was about the size of a house brick.

And whats all this...using tapes and screeching noises to load games.....thats new fangled.

Im talking about typing in code listings from magazines for hours, only to then have to find all the errors in the blasted thing!

essex-commuter

Wallace1492 wrote:

Does anyone remember wired remote control?

I'm sure we had a Ferguson Videostar that had that, it went round the living room by the skirting and popped up through a gap in the settee!

Jay dubbleU

Amstrad 64 - still in the loft somewhere

Pong anyone ?

Wallace1492

cee wrote:

oh...and my first computer was a ZX81 that I got given by my uncle....it had a massive 8K RAM extension pack that was about the size of a house brick.

And whats all this...using tapes and screeching noises to load games.....thats new fangled.

Im talking about typing in code listings from magazines for hours, only to then have to find all the errors in the blasted thing!

Ha! Spend 3 hours sticking in code for a game from a magazine, only for blasted thing to run out of memory! Turned out code was for enhanced ZX81 with extra memory or something.... 3 hours wasted!

mudcow007

JZed wrote:

ZX Spectrum - an hour sat listening to a tape high pitched squealing only for it to feck up at the last 30 seconds. Then sit for another hour - all for Chucky Egg.

Quickly lost interest and spent time exploring on the MTB.

i have found someone else who liked Chuckie Egg!!

ive mentioned that game to loads fo people an all i get is blank stares

mudcow007

my first computer was an Amstrad it with a mono coloured green screen. Harrier Attack was my favourite game in the whole world

then i got a Atari 2600 with centipede

then it was an Amiga 500+ cartoons classic edition. ahh im feeling all nostalgic

rick_chasey

mudcow007 wrote:

JZed wrote:

ZX Spectrum - an hour sat listening to a tape high pitched squealing only for it to feck up at the last 30 seconds. Then sit for another hour - all for Chucky Egg.

Quickly lost interest and spent time exploring on the MTB.

i have found someone else who liked Chuckie Egg!!

ive mentioned that game to loads fo people an all i get is blank stares

http://www.chuckie-egg.co.uk/

Kieran_Burns

Setting fire to things seemed to be a favourite (yes I can see the irony)

My brothers made the local paper back in '76 when they played with some matches in the field next to the old Burton baths.

I'd stayed in the baths for about 15 minutes after they'd left and by the time I got out a good couple of hundred feet of field was up in smoke - apparently the whole lot went up by the time it was finally put out

You should've seen their faces when I got home to tell them

Then there was that time with the bulls on the Ferry Bridge....

Oh yeah and that time when I got stuck in a goods lift, not to mention that time I almost drowned playing in a building site. We used to jump off the top of the eaves onto piles of sand in the same building site later on (we didn't learn)

Then, one time I went to play 'round the house of a new friend I'd made, and didn't tell my Mum. She actually had the Police out looking for me by the time I got home.

Oh... and that time my elder brother impaled himself through the mouth with a metal pole when he had the bright idea of pole-vaulting off a slide.

and our old neighbour who came home to find we'd made AMAZING patterns on her gleaming white bedsheets with ballistic coal.

Walking on pavements was optional when there were trees and hedges nearby, and old people could never catch us, boy could we run fast

Storm drains were always cool - we used to tell stories of monsters and crocodiles hidden down there - you would always see how far down you would crawl until you came pelting out screaming you SEEN the MONSTER!!!!!

andyb78

All this nostalgia reminds me of something a friend of mine once sent me.. sorry for the poor formatting, somethings gone wrong with my interweb...

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1920's, 30's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pickup on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds, KFC, or Subway.
Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy fruit tingles and some crackers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and cubby houses and played in creek beds with matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on Sky, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
Lawsuits from these accidents.
Only girls had pierced ears!

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross buns at Easter time.......no really!
We were given BB guns and sling shots for our 10th birthdays,
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet!

Footy had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

Our teachers used to belt us with big sticks and leather staps and bulliesalwaysruled the playground at school.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.They actually sided with the law!

Our parents got married before they had children and didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade'

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 70 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

And wile you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parentswere.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!
PS -The big type is because your eyes are shot at your
Age 

Anonymous

Before the internet we used Teletext, Ceefax and Oracle.

You used to be able to find out a surprising amount from it, weather, TV listings, lottery result.

Companies even had there own pages and you cold post classified adds and even use it to find out about last minute holiday deals.

My Dad was a big fan of Teletext so brought a Teletext decoder for our computer (A Acorn BBC model , it was huge, about the size of a flatbed scanner and you simply plugged a ariel in the back and then plugged it in to your computer and you could view teletext pages on you computer. You could even download simple programs and games.

Anonymous

im a latter 80s baby and I was up to all of the above, but I am guilty of having mum and dad ensuring I didnt sit around inside.

Funnily enough, no broken bones though. Although I did get the slipper

bails87

andyb78
Probably why infant mortality was about 15 times what it is today, and why you could expect to be dead before you were 60....ah, the good old day

rick_chasey

bails87 wrote:

andyb78
Probably why infant mortality was about 15 times what it is today, and why you could expect to be dead before you were 60....ah, the good old day

That'll be why they're so greedy sh!t at managing global economies too eh?

Just glad they made it.

:P


As someone who was in love with computer games as a kid, and had all the necessary distractions at home, I still played outside.

Surprise surprise - kids like playing outside. And if you played outside, surprise surprise, the kids you came across also played outside.

The kids who didn't you probably never saw and never gave a 2nd thought to, because, wait for it, they were inside!

No way!

CiB

Can we all play this then?

Before the internet? Most of my life has been 'before the internet'. Let's see...

Early TV would have been Pogle's Wood and Trumpton when I was small, and the not so good other things like Andy Pandy, Tales Of The Riverbank and so on, lumped under the Watch With Mother label. Crackerjack, Blue Peter, Jackanory, The Magic Roundabout to close kids progs off for the day before the news at 10 to 6. We also had a lot more wireless; Listen With Mother and schools' radio was prominent, and BBC Radio Leicester was usually on in the kitchen - I do remember hearing Leicester being relegated, probably in 1969 when they also lost the Cup Final to Man City.

Let's see. Weekends. Tiswas was our choice when it first appeared (for ATV only, later Central TV). Only later did it spread to Anglia and then nationally and sort of lost its way a bit. Early ones with Tarrant and the ATV Today sports presenters were superb. There was the weekly toss-up on Saturday lunchtime to watch either On The Ball on World Of Sport, or Football Focus with Sam Leitch on Grandstand. FF usually got it but it depended who'd been on MoTD or Star Soccer the previous week as thay were the goals that they'd show, along with some badly dubbed commentary on a European game occasionally. There were no remotes to flick around both channels (BBC2 was only on the portable that we'd borrowed) so it tended to stay on whatever channel it started on. Then it was a mix of catching the start of The Saturday Rock Show on Radio 1 VHF and scuttling off to the rec to play football until it was time to do the paper round at 4 with a bag full of Leicester Mercurys to deliver.

What else? My first racing bike inherited from my mum's best friend's son who'd got a motorbike; more football, vague girls sort of being around and then not, and more football - that seems to have been most evenings & weekends for a few years. By eck we were good.

Beer. Did a lot of that from about 16 onwards, learning to drink properly in pubs with the older guard keeping an eye on us and pulling us up if we went too far. None of this swigging from bottles stood up in a disco pub. Blimey. What's that all about?

Didn't have a computer until 1991 when I did a course on Programming With COBOL and we were encouraged to buy a compiler to practice the exercises. There's been a stready stream since up to where we are now. Oddly, computer games have never been of any interest - I don't get it, being good at waggling thumbs and working out what the programmer intended players to provide as input. Still don't - the kids with their XBox lose me completely.

Anyway. Life was better then, or would have been if we'd had the internet.

SickAsAParrot

Before the internet? Compuserve? Bulletin boards???... now I'm starting to sweat, sorry...

bails87

Hmmm, how many crap olden days search engines can we remember.

Lycos, anyone?

rick_chasey

bails87 wrote:

Hmmm, how many crap olden days search engines can we remember.

Lycos, anyone?

Ask Jeeves!

I remember the days where google would spew out "microsoft" when you searched "the most evil corporation in the world".

bdave262000

Porn mags in the park

White dog Sh**t

Big Daddy & Giant Haystacks

Massive slides in the playgound

Texan bars

Coke Floats

BMX Bandits

Quatro soft drink

10p mixtures

50 a-side games of football

meanredspider

I think CiB and I are of the same generation for sure.

My brother talks about how he got into the Interweb as a business. He was selling space on MTV Text (Teletext & Ceefax being the "on-line" info of the day) in Cambridge and came across two academics who said he should be on the World Wide Web. He started to get really interested when he asked them for a quote. The first quote was £20k but when he baulked they immediately dropped the price to £10k. He realised there was money to be made. There were no books on the subject back then to he taught himself HTML by reverse-engineering pages - deleting code to see what happened.

We had one of the very first ADSL connections - we simply couldn't believe the quality of the streaming video...

But I'm drifting OT. Sport and loads of it was what we did before the Web. And model kits for the dark evenings. Building go-karts and breaking bikes and trying (and (mostly) failing) to make bombs. Scalextric & air rifles & TV.

medoramas

I'm an early '80s kid. My country, Poland, was under communism that time. Weird stuff I can remember... Like being jealous because a friend had an empty can of Coke in his room, which meant he actually had drunken it! Or spending hours watching German shopping catalogues, where you could see matchbox cars, lego, skateboards... Or having my first pair of proper puma trainers: first night I slept wearing them, then I was only allowed to wear them on Sunday...

Different world, I tell you!

freakybacon

Black and white tellies! We had one with a 26 inch monster screen! Needed to warm up 5 minutes before you could enjoy its cinemascope vision due to the valves inside. Wonder how much power that beast drew from the national grid. Prior to this, we had a black and white telly that you had to tune in with a dial like a transistor radio and once tuned in to one of the three channels available we children were not allowed to touch it!
Rented of course- they were unreliable in those days.

Wired remote controls...ah yes...

The video cassette recorder. How well to do you were if you had one in the 80s! With proper buttons you had to push down half an inch(12.7mm) to operate. And when in operation...it sounded like you had started off a nuclear reactor there was so much going on!! Used to love the ferguson, and how it used to go up and down its gears when fast forwarding a video cassette!

Applespider

Does anyone else remember that programme 'Why don't you.... go and turn off your television and do something less boring instead?'

It was full of annoying kids running around doing things that either required lots of odd bits and pieces or an enormous group of kids who'd also watched the show to be able to do it.

So I did turn off my TV and played outside instead... I did love conkers as a kid and remember going conker hunting in the autumn to find a tree. Now I live in a house that has a conker tree in the front garden with lots of gorgeous conkers... and no-one plays conkers any longer...

Flyingbogey

I used to play the quiz on Ceefax, The self discipline of pressing 'reveal' without cheating and looking at the ones you hadn't done yet.
Fav game on the green Amstrad 464 was Ghosts and Goblins and Fav down the Arcade was Shinobi. Top of the leader board meant your pick of the chicks.
As for t'web, i only started using it regularly when i found this forum, the lads at work couldn't believe I actually started using a computer.

John B

bdave262000 wrote:

Porn mags in the park

White dog Sh**t

There always seemed to be loads of dogs about who took themselves for walks when it suited them. Never mind porn mags, what about "Health & Efficiency" where they used to airbrush out certain parts of nude women? Took me a long time to find out that they didn't really look like that.

Anonymous

Applespider wrote:

Does anyone else remember that programme 'Why don't you.... go and turn off your television and do something less boring instead?'

I do, used to come on about 10am when the holidays were on. There was kind of a unwritten rule in our house, no TV after 10am in the morning.

We just went out on our own on bikes or skateboards. I can't remember the age when I was first allowed out, out of sight of my parents. Probably about 5-6. Couldn't do that now, my oldest daughter is 8 and there is no way I'd let her out on her own. By that age I was out for 4 or five hours and that was completely normal.

Cleat Eastwood

The fella who created 'why dont you' now teaches in JMU.

And on 'porn' did anyone ever go through the ladies undies section in their ma's catalogue....must have been just me then, god bless you John England!!!

medoramas

Cleat Eastwood wrote:

And on 'porn' did anyone ever go through the ladies undies section in their ma's catalogue....must have been just me then, god bless you John England!!!

And ripping your favourite pages off for easier access...