I grew up in the era BEFORE video games! We got 3 channels and had cartoons on Saturday morning!

[TorchTheWitch]

73. I really miss Q102 radio's Friday Flashback every week

It was always done live in some nightclub, and they played all the good oldies tunes... Shake a Tail Feather, A Whiter Shade of Pale, Bernadette, Tears of Clown, Shout, Tequila, Secret Agent Man, Can I Get a Witness, Since You've Been Gone, Takin' Care of Business, The Love You Save, and on and on. Once a year they did the 102 best of the oldies tunes and the next week they did the top 102 that didn't make the best of list. I also loved waking up to their "Horrible Scopes" (horoscopes) every morning to get off to work.

Video games didn't come out to play at home until I already graduated high school. Asteroids was the big favorite that kids played hours on end in the pizza shops and delis though most of us were still into pinball. My favorite corner bar in the 90's was the only place I knew of that still had a real juke box with records and pinball machines... most of the younger crowd thought pinball was something new since they'd never seen it before.

I grew up with 3 regular tv channels (well, 4 if you counted PBS which was all children's shows then other than the occasional Masterpiece Theater) and 2 or 3 UHF channels (3 if you were lucky and had good reception). All the channels went off the air around midnight and always used to play the national anthem with a video of a waving flag before going off to the gray fuzz screen. To change the channel you had to get off your ass and go change it on the tv (and fiddle with the aerial again since every station needed adjustment.

Households had one phone line, rotary dial and no call waiting until around the time I got into high school. Phone exchanges were letters with a number (instead of 688 followed by four digits it was MU8 followed by four digits). Most people didn't even know their area code since that was only for long distance calls which were too expensive to make anyway.

Clocks - even the one on the oven - had hands. Same for watches.

Word processing didn't get into businesses until I already graduated high school. Most people that saw job ads for word processors had no idea what that meant. I actually went to the local community college to take a word processing course since it was the wave of the future that some day all secretaries would have to know. And in high school I thought that the electric typewriter with the correct button was all the tech rage.

Cameras used film that had to be sent out for processing and photo taking was an expensive hobby. Having your photos put on slides to view on a home movie screen or one of those little handheld light boxes was so high tech as were polaroid cameras. Videos? Only wealthy people could afford the cameras and the projector to show the tape reels. I was 19 when video cameras became popular and were nearly as big and heavy as real cameramen used.

The Walkman didn't come out till I was out of high school... before that you used a little transistor radio or a boom box. Music was on vinyl. Cassette tapes became all the rage while I was in high school but they were poor quality and most people still bought record albums and used turntables. When I was a kid it was 8-track tapes that were all the rage.

But without all the tech we have now that was unimaginable back then people talked to each other face to face and got out of the house. We did stuff that required getting off one's butt and mingling with the human race, and if you didn't want to do stuff that got you off your butt and wanted to be alone there was always books... made with paper and ink.