Jellies from my generation (grad HS 76): How different do you think our lives would be today if we'd had computers when we were kids?

I’m almost a generation before you. I graduated high school in 1962. If I’d had a computer then with today’s software and a time machine connection to the Internet, I would have done some awesome term papers. I might just have set myself up as the world’s greatest psychic, too. I could have predicted all sorts of things.

I am about 7 years after you. I can tell you I’d have about 2000 people in my Facebook, from elementary thru high school and then college and all the various jobs I’ve had since, plus friends I’ve made along the way. I found a bunch through FB, but not all, obviously.

I’m just really glad we didn’t have cell phones. All those times I told my mom I was somewhere I wasn’t…

@chyna: Exactly! The last untethered generation.

Untethered. :) The things we did, untethered! My kids were pretty untethered. I raised them in the 80’s an 90’s, but I refused to have internet or cable in my house. I refused to have video games in the house too. They spent a LOT of time outside.

(I just posted this on FB…This is what happens to kids when they are untethered!)

When I was raising my kids in the 80’s and 90’s, I refused to have cable, internet, or video games in the house. They spent a LOT of time outside. They’d get on my nerves and I’d holler at them to go run around Farmer’s Field, across the street, 10 times! And they would. :)

When my daughter was about 13 or so, she could feel her childhood slipping away. One day she asked me to take a walk with her….and we spent the whole afternoon walking through the pages of her childhood.

She took me down an alley, then stopped at a privacy fence and said, “Look through that knot hole. The guy has a Japanese garden in his back yard! We watched him build it! He adds new stuff every so often. Isn’t it cool?!” It was VERY cool.

South Western College campus was their play ground. She showed me a funky tree on campus that had limbs that grew almost horizontally to the ground. She said kids would collect there and sit on the limbs and make plans for when they grew up.

It wasn’t just the campus…they knew the buildings inside and out too. She took me to the new science building they had put up a couple of years before. She showed me where Alvin the Alligator’s living place was. She described where he lived in the old building and how much nicer his new digs were and how much happier he was….until one day he wasn’t there any more. He had died. She took me on a tour of the whole building. Really NEAT stuff in there! Then we snuck out a back door before we got chased away! :)

She took me to so many, many secret places around town and told me the stories and memories that were tied to each one. I could sense that she didn’t want it all to end, didn’t want to close that book, but she couldn’t stop it. It was a tide relentlessly sneaking up to claim her childhood, and she could sense it coming. It brings tears to my eyes to this day. It was one of the most precious moments I’ve ever spent with one of my kids.

And then my baby started slipping away after that, stolen by the tide and boys and bad attitudes. I turned around twice, and she was having children of her own. But I’ll never, ever forget that walk that day.

Thank you Corrie, my love. ♥

@Dutchess_III Here you have this old, crotchety man all teared up. Precious moment, that.

Thanks ET.

In ‘76, I was on my second or third computer. You had to put them together yourself and learn Basic or Fortran.

Actual computers have been around since the 40’s but they were just too expensive. I bought a Heathkit Z80 computer somewhere around that time. Floppy disks were really floopy either 8” or 5”, and second drives were really expensive.

I remember Fortran. And JCL. And Mass Storage. And floppy floppy disks! And cool stuff like that. But the question actually is for the masses. The computers you cobbled together may have changed your life to a certain extent, but didn’t change those around you—as kid, they didn’t affect your friends en masse, thereby affecting you.
I worked for Boeing Computer Services 79–81. The speed at which everything changed in just those 3 years just takes my breath away.