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Family tries to party like it's 1986

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im not sure you have to go back to 1986 so whater like the dude in the article, my sister has 3 kids and they play outside with the dog and all that and none of them are addicted to tech. its called parenting. the have computers and cellphones but none of her kids are addicted to them im not even sure the kids can operate them on their own. or at least ive never seen them do it
 
What happens after the year is up? they all go back to the previous lifestyle and what does that accomplish?

I agree that there should be limits on how much the kids play video games and such, get them outside to play, be active and social, but I don't think this experiment is really going to help.
 
pontifex said:
What happens after the year is up? they all go back to the previous lifestyle and what does that accomplish?

I agree that there should be limits on how much the kids play video games and such, get them outside to play, be active and social, but I don't think this experiment is really going to help.
Click to expand...

To your point, my buddy next door growing up had a Nintendo and we'd play for hours on it. And that was just your basic 8-bit system. So really, you can get lost in anything. I guess it's no different than getting stuck on Farmville, Words with Friends, Plants vs. Zombies, or Candy Crush, I guess.
 
BUTCH1 said:
Good points, when I was a kid, (yea, I'm old) we all gathered to play street-hockey or stickball in the streets, not only was it good physical activity but it also provided social interaction the way it was meant to be, person to person. Weirdest part of it was my Dad owned a TV sales/repair shop so there was a TV in every room but with 3 channels (and a few UHF one's) there was nothing to watch in the afternoon but soap operas so we played outside. The future is kinda dim as in all this lack of exercise will eventually lead to a lot of people with crappy health later in life.
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We're not too far off from this:

http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/18530_Wall_E_Fat_People_Wide.png

I had a WALL-E moment a year or so ago...I finished a bike ride, came home and turned on my Roomba, threw a protein shake in the blender, and sat down in the Lazy Boy with my iPad. Suddenly I realized I was in a non-hoverchair version of that horrible, horrible future envisioned in the picture above :biggrin:
 
IronWing said:
This I don't get. Standing in line at the convenience store and watching customer after customer put $2-3 purchases on their debit cards. Reward credit cards I would understand but the totally cashless approach to life seems more trouble than it's worth.

That said, the nation-wide ATM network is an incredible advance that didn't exist in 1986. ATMs existed well before then but they weren't all linked up.
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There's no accumulation of change to be concerned with, and the need to always ensure that you remember to bring cash, and repeatedly replenish it, versus a single card that buys anything you need.


</first world problems>


What is the cost of having cash delivered to your business via armored truck?
 
Jeff7 said:
There's no accumulation of change to be concerned with, and the need to always ensure that you remember to bring cash, and repeatedly replenish it, versus a single card that buys anything you need.
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With everything you buy carefully analyzed and tracked, and your path through the world marked by purchases with a little GoogleMaps flag.
 
I was born in 1979 and remember the following things

- Having a rotary phone. We had one until I was 9 or 10.
- One TV with hardly any channels. It was an ancient TV, from the early 70s I think.
- No microwave. We didn't get one until I was about 9 or 10.
- Not even a VCR. We probably got one when I was about 10, simply because the old TV couldn't take the VCR
- We got our first computer circa 1990 (a 80286)

My father actually got a cellphone really early. Probably around 1990 for work as he was an engineer and needed to be contact. However it was those huge brick phones. I didn't get a phone until 2000.

Life has changed a lot in the last 15 years imo. And not always for the better. When I was a kid I loved playing sport with my friends etc. Now lots of kids would rather just sit on ipads. My son loves playing on my iphone, although I do my best to limit it to no more than 90 minutes a day.
 
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lxskllr said:
With everything you buy carefully analyzed and tracked, and your path through the world marked by purchases with a little GoogleMaps flag.
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Which is unfortunately the biggest downside of that.
You'd probably have to go completely off-grid to avoid that sort of thing anymore. :\

You'd think they could use some of that advertising revenue to dump a decent interest rate into the bank accounts of their data-mine crops. But when you can get huge loans from the government for next to nothing, having to deal with customers is just an annoying and trivial matter.
 
Sonikku said:
Those kids don't need interwebs and iphones to survive. Give them a NES for a year with Zelda, super mario brothers and ninja gaiden and they'll be just fine.
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:thumbsup: /signed

After a few years of NES, move them onto some SNES RPGs to instill a good sense of moral values.
 
StinkyPinky said:
I was born in 1979 and remember the following things

- Having a rotary phone. We had one until I was 9 or 10.
- One TV with hardly any channels. It was an ancient TV, from the early 70s I think.
- No microwave. We didn't get one until I was about 9 or 10.
- Not even a VCR. We probably got one when I was about 10, simply because the old TV couldn't take the VCR
- We got our first computer circa 1990 (a 80286)

My father actually got a cellphone really early. Probably around 1990 for work as he was an engineer and needed to be contact. However it was those huge brick phones. I didn't get a phone until 2000.

Life has changed a lot in the last 15 years imo. And not always for the better. When I was a kid I loved playing sport with my friends etc. Now lots of kids would rather just sit on ipads. My son loves playing on my iphone, although I do my best to limit it to no more than 90 minutes a day.
Click to expand...

The old VCR's all had RF output, selectable to channel 3 or 4, since no TV's from the 60's-70's had an RCA video input RF was the only option, I worked in a local TV shop that sold the original Betamax, $1,400 and blank tapes were $25/ea..
 
Bah! Just hipsters looking for an excuse.

foghorn67 said:
Rotary phones were dead in 86. Not extinct, but not even my grandparents had those anymore.
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You forget that lots of people got their phones from the phone company back then and NOT off the shelf. The phone company kept them around as the cheapest one and lots of people weren't willing to pay more for touch-tone, my mother included. Even when we finally started using our own phones she refused to pay for touch-tone service through much of the '90s. I took three times as long to connect and find an opponent with my SNES X-Band video game modem in 1995. I remember how frustrated I was when id Stuff on the Quake 1 shareware CD didn't have a way to enable pulse dialing, so that was around 1996/1997.
 
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kinda useless to own a rotary phone w/o the skill of remembering people's numbers - not something today's kids would have (or adults, for the matter)
 
Hope it helps. They are right, kids live a different life than in '86.

I turned 6 in '86, I lived outside as well.

I'm lucky so far, my kids love to play outside. But we only have one smartphone in the house (my wife needs it), and the kids don't touch it. They get to use the xbox 360 or the wii when we allow it....and with time limits.

I do agree with their sentiments, but I wouldn't force my kids to live like it's '86....they will be the object of ridicule from their peers 😛
 
ch33zw1z said:
Hope it helps. They are right, kids live a different life than in '86.

I turned 6 in '86, I lived outside as well.

I'm lucky so far, my kids love to play outside. But we only have one smartphone in the house (my wife needs it), and the kids don't touch it. They get to use the xbox 360 or the wii when we allow it....and with time limits.

I do agree with their sentiments, but I wouldn't force my kids to live like it's '86....they will be the object of ridicule from their peers 😛
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Me too but I became a videogame fiend when I got my NES in 1988. I still balaned outdoors with games until my teens but that's mostly because there was nothing left to accomplish in Super Mario Bros. 3. 🙂

I wouldn't be the techie I am today if my mother imposed time limits.
 
CZroe said:
Me too but I became a videogame fiend when I got my NES in 1988. I still balaned outdoors with games until my teens but that's mostly because there was nothing left to accomplish in Super Mario Bros. 3. 🙂

I wouldn't be the techie I am today if my mother imposed time limits.
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I'm a techie still.

My mother didn't just impose time limits, poor behaviour would remove the system altogether. we got a NES in '90, but we weren't allowed unrestricted access to it. It wasn't until I was a teen and my parents were to busy to monitor us that I was able to control my own time on it. I'm not very good at it either, I became a fiend during the summers lol...

I'm more lenient than my parents, but I won't let them just do whatever either. Like I said, I'm lucky my kids are active and love to be outside anyways.
 
Wonder if another family might go back to the year 1956,hell that would mean unplugging virtually everything but the lamps,your stove and your fridge lol.
 
useless extermism imho, and after a year it's back to addictions. They should promote responsible use.
 
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