+1 for the person who mentioned going to blockbuster on friday night for a movie. It's a shame that all the movie stores are going extinct. Some good things never last.

I also carry a pocket knife. I've carried one since I was a teenager.

I used to carry a bottle opener in my wallet. It was flat like a credit card and made out of metal. I don't carry it now b/c I don't use a wallet.

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If you didn't have Jordache or Sasson jeans you were laughed at. I had about 3 pairs of each and thought I was King ****. lol

Everyone wore those brown leather shoes made by Levi's that had the thick black soles. I remember begging my mom for them and when she finally gave in and took me to the store they didn't make them in my size. I eventually got them the next year and couldn't wait to show them off at school. Everyone would scuff there foot on the white tile floor at school and leave black marks.

The local TV stations only had 1hr total of news for the day. It was 30 mins at 6pm and 11pm. Now it seems like there's about 5hrs of news for the day.

Marithe Francois Gerbaud was popular. And hellaciously expensive. $70 pair of jeans.

Doc Martens...seriously, how tf did that ever catch on, even ever so briefly?

My dad told me "throw the ball like you were trying to break his nose" when I was pitching and it no one would have batted an eye, no pun intended.

I equipped my Schwinn Predator with a sony device and rocked Appetite for Destruction all summer long. I never was able to acquire 'live like a suicide' or just 'suicide'. I was 6 yrs old.

I called my mom t-jones amongst my friends, at which point I made dated references to murphy brown, and my grandmother watched murder she wrote.

JNCO's or JEANCO's were cool until they got not cool and the ****ing end of your pant would get caught in your sprocket and you'd rack your nuts on your GT-40 headset that was on your S&M dirtbike with Prince Albert 3-pc cranks and your Po-Boy shin guards saved numerous trips to the ER to get your shins stitched up.

I got stoned for the first time and it was ****ing awesome.

You got a trophy if you won. If you lost, you just went on with things.

No one brought a gun to school unless it was to sell it to someone who obviously wasn't going to open fire until ****ing school let out for the weekend.

I had "D" lunch as a sophomore followed by golf and would swing by the 20-20 and grab two bud ice 40's and after teeing off (golf followed lunch) I'd use my Big Bertha head cover as a coozie<sp>, spark a blunt, and piss off the seniors who couldn't break 40 on a muni 9 hole course. Or get beer. Or weed.

I had an '82 Z-28 w/t tops and it was the nucking futs. So was the first gen Z-71 that had two Cerwin Vega 15's where the back seat was supposed to be.

A pound of weed was $400 all day everyday anyday. Cocaine was **** and no one did anything but shrooms and herb. We listened to Sublime and then.....

One day we were in our 30's.....

WTF.

try one day we we were in our 50s!

When I graduated high school, my father gave me the most awesome present ever:



1981 Mazda RX7

God, I loved that car.

that is a classic...until you need to replace the rotors

How very important it was to learn to use the card catalog for 'research'. jfc we wasted so much time on useless ****. should have been getting high.

dad loved coca cola, and had a delivery every couple of weeks. wood crates and 16oz bottles.
bottle opener was stuck to the fridge with a magnet

leaded gasoline. a car built to use leaded could run unleaded, but not the vice-versa.
during the gas crunch we had 2 500 gallon tanks in the garage, one with gas for the cars, one with diesel for tractors, mowers, etc. delivery by gas truck. very, very important not to confuse those 2.

280z > RX7

The government delivered cheese and milk to your front door.

I usually don't lock the door when I leave the house now.

Where are you from?

The milkman didn't generally work for the government.

I had to pick up our govt cheese in the 80s. You had it delivered?

We had a guy who delivered big metal cans full of potato chips to our house once a week.

IIRC, the company was called "Charles Chips."

LOL. The first computers I worked on was at my dad's Computer Services company. IBM 1401 and 360 series.

I wrote programs on punch cards!

The 1401 had about 8k of memory.

Files were on mag tape - 7 track 556 bpi then 9 track 6250 bpi.

I vaguely remember taking a computer course in college. Know we used punch cards. Fortran, maybe?

Can confirm. I was super young so I don't actually remember the deliveries, but I do know we had this container for years:

loved Charles Chips!

Me too! wow there's a brand name I haven't thought of in years. I remember their big tins and eating their chocolate chip cookies by the handful (don't remember the potato chips though). I went to their website and discovered they almost went out of business (I thought they were out of business actually), but apparently are making a comeback selling chips only for now:

http://www.charleschips.com/index.php

Remember when digital watches and calculators first came out. Seems like they cost several hundred dollars. You can pick them up for a couple of bucks now.

I certainly didn't get one until they were cheap, but it was an LED watch where you had to push a button to see the time. Otherwise it was blank.

Which reminds me, I also had one of the newer LCD watches like this:

When I went to college we had to purchase a scientific pocket calculator ($500-$800) and take a class on how to use it. You can buy them now for $10.

And $800 back then was like $6,200 in today's terms.

I was in Target today and they had a table full of some random "guy gifts" for Christmas. Saw a book that said BEER and opened it and it was a large book with photos of all kinds of old beer cans with description of where the brewery was and some other small factoids. Mostly it was just pictures though. It also listed the decade each can was used. I flipped through it and saw some dating back to the 1930s. And the photos were of actual cans so many of the old ones had genuine rust holes in them. Really cool book but I thought $19.99 was a pretty LOL price for such. I definitely saw the "Schlitz Sunshine Vitamin D" beer pictured on the bottom row of the picture above. Those old cans with the sort of conical top part were the oldest ones as far as I could tell.

Anybody here have a paper route when they were young?

Paperboys used to actually be boys, not creepy old dudes in beat up 1985 Honda Civics patrolling the streets at 4 in the morning. Every afternoon after school I used to sling my carrier around my shoulder, pull off the yellow plastic cord, stuff the papers into my sack, and take a walk around the neighborhood. I would fold them in three and put the newspapers in the customers' mailboxes. If it was raining I would use a plastic bag. No shortage of ink on my fingers when I got finished, either. I knew pretty much everybody in the neighborhood's name, who the weirdos were, who was a degenerate, who was cool, who was a snitch, who had a hot daughter, etc.

Do newspapers even print an evening edition anymore?

You also had to go "collecting" to get paid. Some customers lived too far away to be collected from on a regular basis, so once every three months they'd get me knocking on their door asking for some outrageous amount of money. There was one customer who lived about a quarter mile from my next-closet customer and only got the Sunday paper, so I never collected from him.

Sunday mornings were the worst because you had to get up at 3 a.m. and stuff the papers with inserts before getting Dad to drive you around and toss all the papers out the car window. Dad, I'm sure, loved doing this, too.

I had a paper route. Started September. 1, 1984. I remember. The date well because on August 31, 1984 I went to an As Tigers night game that went 14 and ended when Rickey Henderson scored from third on a passed ball. When I got home from the game the papers were already there waiting for me to fold and deliver.

Collecting sucked, but the mandatory subscription drives sucked worse. I hated trying to get "starts" but our manager was super competitive.