LOL, Did that all the time!

You had to use a map or stop and ask for directions when driving to an unfamiliar location.

WLS had Dick Biondi, the mad Italiano, 9-midnight until he quit. Then it was Art Roberts.

My high school had a shooting club, and we shot guns on campus on a regular basis, and this was considered perfectly normal and acceptable. We would tell hunting stories too.

There's not a year that goes by that someone doesn't ask me if Im related to him! As I'm not from the Chicago area, I've never heard him.

Dick Biondi is still on the air in Chicago on one of the oldies stations. I gotta figure he was real young back in the 60's or is about 100 now

Not sure if a level, so I'll take a chance at being embarrassed. The value of Dick Biondi/WLS was that WLS was a "clear channel" station (IIRC) and at night could be heard over much of the US, so he was quite well-known far from Chicago.

I think WLS was originally owned by Sears and the call-letters stood for "World's Largest Store".

One of my favorite pastimes at the aforementioned grandfather's hunting cabin was to stay up at night and see the most distant AM station I could receive. I could pick up WLS and WGN most nights. Occasionally I could pick up something from the East Coast. The cabin is 120 miles north of Reno, almost exactly halfway between LA and Seattle as the crow flies.

lol...still never heard him!

pay phones were everywhere

and dial-up internet was so fast you could click a page, get up play video games for two hours and come back to see it still loading ahh...the good ol' days.

Internet? What the heck is that.

Lol at the Internet being in this thread

I remember telnet. I was in college when I first used that. Internet? lol no

Believe I had the first video game. Think it was called Pong. Hooked it up to your TV and it had a white ball that banked back and forth across the screen and you hit it with a little white dash that represented a paddle.

You old farts ITT make me feel young!!!!

In 4th grade, our class had an Apple Computer and we used to run a program that was some sort of stock market game where we had to invest and monitor our money for the entire school year.

Internet was around by the time I hit college, but I still used a word processor for all my typing needs and a library to look things up. I took a computer science class as one of my periphery courses and probably got my worst grade in college. Information is sooo much easier to come by these days.

Phone companies charged for long distance, also.

Often without rhyme or reason. I would call my cousins from my grandmothers house, let it ring twice, then hang up. If they were home, they would immediately call back. It was long distanc if we initiated the call but not if they did.

I once had a $300+ call to a girl. So I guess you could say that when I was younger I was dumber.

Yeah our first computer came with CD software called Encyclopedia Encarta or something, it wasn't even online so you just loaded it onto your computer and accessed it if you wanted. I remember messing around with it a few times but recall it not being very effective for anything resembling research.

Early AOL was the worst. Getting on the internet was the most painful hassle you could imagine. It was hooked up to your house's phone line so if anyone picked up the phone while you were online you got booted. And it took about 5 minutes to get back on IFFFFFFFFFF you could get back on. Sometimes your computer would dial it up over and over for like 45 minutes or more and you'd just give up. So if you were waiting to get an email you were ****ed. Luckily, back then only like 2 people would email you not 500,000 spammers. Peak hours (evening) you just had no shot at getting online. And if you did, you might get booted out of nowhere. Your best chance was like 2am. There were no thumbnail images of porn. Everything was link. It might say "Victoria Silvstedt naked" and you'd click the blue link and an image would begin downloading from top to bottom, very low quality and it would take maybe a few minutes. Awful. It's crazy to think about how fast the internet is evolving... I mean thumbnails haven't even been around long at all but it's hard to imagine life before them. And every stupid web page was the ugliest thing you've ever seen with the worst font, and they all had a stupid page hit counter at the bottom. "Whoa this page has 776,000 hits! Tons of people go here!" lol @ that.

Believe this was the start of atari.

I can't say that I have ever lived a year where this was the case, but from what I have heard, this is one of the biggest changes to occur over the years.

I still have a bottle opener on my car keys

What fraternity are you in?

I know a lot of guys that carry bottle openers on key chains. I carry a pocket knife. I've actually been asked to leave a poker room to put my knife in my car