Gen X having been born in the 1970's

Thu Jun 27, 2019 6:11 pm

I was born in the early 1970's, and my earliest childhood was spent in the 1970's which i have very hazy memories at this point, which take on a dreamlike quality

i think that the decade resembles earlier decades of the 40s 50s 60s though i did not exist at the time,

I heard that Charlie Brown to the Flinstone were of the 50s.

consider Charlie Brown,



since i was born in the 70s, what i had in common with the 40s 50s 60s

was this was before the personal computer revolution. AFAIK there weren't any useful PC's in the 1970s, no one i knew owned one.

so we had telephones the kind you can dial, and tv's with dials on them. and tape recorders to record audio and play music, and my family even had a record player (!)

the cars were huge and gas guzzlers and you could be leaded gasoline. i wonder what my IQ would have been if current safety standards were in place.

childhood for me included saturday morning cartoons and action figures and board games like monopoly and stratego.

that 70s era childhood i think had in common was this was what i like to call the dark times, before personal computers and now smart phones and social media.

as a kid especially girls liked to write messages on notebook paper and pass them to one another, which is of course like text messages today.

to this day i wonder how things got done without computers, in the 70s.

i know typewriters were used.

i went to school, in the 70s, preschool to elementary, and i know they had folders and files on us. we got report cards, i know teachers recorded grades using pen and paper books.

we used either cash or check for school books and supplies. but obviously nothing was done via computer. when i went to the catholic school, they kept track of my tuition payments as this was a private school, and had my report card and what not, but all without any computers in the school, if you can even imagine such a time.

all our academic information was books, like birds and countries of the world.

of course i was still in early elementary when the 80s started, and the first pc i ever saw was in the school library they had an apple 2c. they introduced it as a computer and asked us if we knew what a computer was and none of us knew.

they told us about monitor keyboard and floppy disk.

we learned cursive writing and i practice cursive.

i visited my local radio shack and i remember being torned between the tandy color computer and the tandy 1000.

i did get to see the rise of Michael Jordan from the beginning, up to his first then last championship with the Chicago Bulls.

but yeah my early childhood in the 70s, my pediatrician office had pictures of children from the 30's, and i tried to imagine a time before i was even born.

the 70s, as i remember it, looked a lot like Charlie Brown. except where i happened to live had a lot of black kids who uh hmm.

fun included activities like snow ball fights and swimming in brain eating waters. it did not include anything relating to computers and video games.

my parents actually did not want me to call and use the phone.

back in those days we had land lines, and only 1 phone line. if someone calls you can hear a busy signal.

so my parents wanted the lines cleared in case they got important work related or even their own friends calling. there was just 1 phone and if you call someone and they were on the phone it gave a busy signal. dial in modems i used in the 90s and 00's had same problem.

and church and religion was pretty important. being a priest or pastor was highly respected, at least in some quarters.

one thing i miss about this more innocent age is that if you ask the typical girls what they thought of 2 boys together or girls kissing girls, they think that was just gross.

i remember the adults saying we were the future. the prior generation i think were either baby boomers or even the ww2 generation. several of my teachers actually fought in ww2, but they were old.

but yeah the 1970s was the last decade that like previous decades was before the computer revolution, so i think my childhood like previous generations involved activities without computers, social media smartphones.

a more innocent era from a more civilized age.