before 5 1/4" floppies were the 8 inch floppies used on the commadore superpets, one of the first PC's. a station of 5 units, all tied together to 1 floppy drive and should you decide to save to the drive you had to call out...."on the bus", this stopped anyone else from saving to their floppy. if 2 people tried to save to the shared drive at the same time the entire work centre would crash and the entire system had to be rebooted. Everyone lost everything they were working on. i also had a tape drive.
at one time green screen was all we had to work with and you really had to be creative to design menu systems and cheesey graphic solutions with asterisks.
i remember when i was 5 years old and had the red measels and the doctor made a house call.
my kids get a kick out of the stories i tell them. black and white tv, bunny-ears, 3 tv channels, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, no dvd or vcr, rich people had 8mm video cameras, average joe had to bring their film into a development place to develop their black and white photos. or how about the first polaroid insta print cameras that you had to wipe the guck on as soon as the picture was ejected out - that was pretty real-time. we had a vw beetle, but we also had a bombardier alouette snow mobile that could haul logs out of the forest - years later i got a yamaha 440 that could cruise at 80mph.
the kids think it's cool seeing pictures of me in black and white and the elephant ear collars on my shirts.
but you know, we always had something to do, unlike kids today that constantly complain they are bored. had a group of kids come around, doing a door to door campaign asking me to donate to a worthy cause to keep youths off the street....... they got an earfull and left without money. when my kids get bored, you can see it in their eyes it is attention they are looking for, so i pull out a deck of cards, lay them out face down and we play match-the-card(or whatever the game is called). except for about a month ago, i found 2 ball point pens and pulled the inners out and taught them about spitballs...they went crazy.