Dear Jackrabbit,
We’re growing up in different worlds. That is to say, your childhood and my childhood are vastly different experiences. Some of those differences are superficial, others are more subtle. For instance…
Oh, and if you wanted to change a channel, adjust volume, or just turn it on and off? You had to get off the couch and go fiddle with those knobs and buttons. It’s a wonder we survived as a species.
Television. When I was a kid, we had five TV channels to choose from–six if the weather was good. TVs were generally pretty bulky. Black and white TVs were still pretty common. My childhood saw the transition where color TV became the standard in homes, the first cable services (40 or so channels), and bulky, pricey videotape players. Now, of course, there are hundreds, almost a thousand, channels to choose from, TVs are not only flat, but high definition with more color than the eye can actually perceive, and everything is digital. This is pretty darn cool until you find out that there’s still not much worth watching.
(Side note: Radios. I remember we had a radio that still used vacuum tubes. It stood four feet high and a couple of feet wide. Nowadays, a radio can be the size of a spec of dust and have more range and power.)
Going outside. We were pretty much free-range kids. In summer, we were out of the house first thing in the morning with a bagged lunch and not expected home until maybe 4 or 5 in the afternoon. No supervision. No plans discussed in advance. We were kept in line because we lived in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other so if some adult saw you doing something you shouldn’t, they’d snitch on you without hesitation. If we got bruised or cut or broken while playing in the woods, you either walked it off or went home to clean up and then get sent out again. This wasn’t bad parenting, mind you. It was pretty much how it had been for generations. Nowadays, it seems that that sort of free-range childhood doesn’t happen much anymore. If you’re seen gamboling down the street without an adult, a copy might pick you up and then fine parent. Yeesh.
But it’s about protecting the children, so I can’t really fault that. It gets a little extreme at times, though, it seems to me. Crime incidence is down since I was a kid, but awareness is up thanks to modern media. Given that smartphones are a thing now, it seems like you’d be safer now than when I was a kid. Still, what parent wants to take the risk?
I like to think that by the time you’re of a certain age, we will be able to come up with responsible rules and boundaries that both protect you, but also allow you some of that very necessary freedom to grow. We’ll check in again on that in a number of years.
This is what passed for a computer when I was a kid. Sort of the electronic equivalent to writing on clay tablets. $399 in today’s money would be…what?…$3,000?
Computers. This may seem like one of those superficial differences, but it’s not. Computers and networks surround your life like water does to fish. You’re probably not even aware of it. This is an age when I could be talking about some random product in conversation, and minutes later find ads for that same product showing up on my smartphone or computer. And glitches happen. Computer glitches delayed getting you insurance when you were an infant. We eventually got it all sorted out, but that also involved computers. I work with a computer all day long–have been for over half my life now. I interact with clients across the world through the computer. Where computing will go in years to come is anyone’s guess, but I can tell you now that when I was your age, we seriously underestimated what the future would bring.
When I was a kid, computers were huge machines that required their own air conditioning systems. They were pretty much only owned by large corporations, big banks, and universities. Over time they became smaller and more affordable. You could fit one on a desk. Then you could get them to talk to one another across phone lines. They eventually became portable enough to just carry around. Eventually the networks went wireless. But, son, if I were to show you the kind of computer I started out on–a TRS-80 that hooked up to the TV–you’d just look at me with sad pity… then probably just plug yourself back into whatever the future version of the Internet is.
My computers had no memory to speak of, but you’d be amazed what one can do with so little.
By extension, video games have changed a lot. I remember when Pong came out (look it up). Now video games seem more real than reality.
Weird, but good for you, kid.
I actually once talked to a friend across a room via two tin cans and a taut piece of string. Now I can video chat with anyone anywhere in the world. Beat that with a stick.
I could go on and on about the differences, and will likely do so in future entries. I’m not one of those guys who clings to the past and says how much better things were in the “old days.” While I can appreciate some nostalgia, I don’t feel beholden to it. Some stuff was cool and it’s a shame you missed out on them, but there’s a lot more happening in your world that I wish I had grown up with. The only other observation I have to make right now is…
Music. The music you kids listen to these days sucks. It hasn’t even been made yet, and I know it sucks. If you want good music, come see me. I’ll set you right.
All my love,
–Dad
This is what I yell st my kids when they complain about their iPhones or computer. My house had Pong, and an Apple 2c and an Apple 2e, then a Macintosh. You spent gobs of hours typing in code for it to do anything at all besides show you a black screen with a blinking yellow cursor, then you saved your precious program (“Balance Your Checkbook” or some other such fun) on tape cassette with a common tape recorder with your fingers crossed that it would actually work correctly and not wipe out the 14 hours of work that was put into painstakingly typing in all that code. All the TRS-80’s were at the school, where the baffled teachers would fetch for me out of class with their, “How do you work this thing?” Since I was the only child in the school with a computer at home. Not that I knew either, I tried, but TRS-80’s were no Apples. We only had 5 tv channels until I was 21, because even though cable arrived in RI when I was in 2nd grade, the cable didn’t reach all the way to the rural parts. “WHEN I WAS GROWING UP WE ONLY HAD 5 CHANNELS TO WATCH AND 2 OF THEM WERE FULL OF SNOW AND I LIVED!” Is another thing I yell at my kids when they are whining that they can’t watch tv because they are grounded. So much fun being a parent. The other day when one of them was whining about actual snow I got to tell her that I wore bread bags over my sneakers in the winter. And I wasn’t alone! Half the class did too! She was horrified. I should have told her we used quills dipped in ink to write.
We didn’t use quills dipped in ink, but I remember that many of the desks in my elementary school had the circular well near the top of the desk for where an inkwell would go.
If I ever really need to get across to the boy the sort of caveman-esque computers we had to deal with, I’ll fire up one of those emulators and let him relish the experience of loading a program into BASIC or editing an autoexec.bat file.