Posted on 11/02/2018 3:56:33 PM PDT by MNDude
No worries. Then follows the Butlerian Jihad and we get back to basics again. ;-)
My grandmother was a teenager when the Wright brothers flew the first airplane. She lived to see men walking on the moon only to see us abandon the effort. Saw the Shuttle. She died at 101. Heck of a lifetime.
The WWW changed everything. Everything.
I agree. The 50s to the 80s was about American growth. The Mid 80s to the present is more about America's death. I feel fortunate being born in '54 to live through one of the most exhilarating times in our history.
Ping
50s to the 80s. I qualify to know. The real breakthroughs in computing came in the 80s. The 90s were refinement and the early part of this century was in applications and the whole thing becoming common. I started engineering school with a slide rule and finished graduate school with a TI-50. I threw a lot of hay to buy a TI-50 in 1974 for $170. I bought the very first “portable” computers for a major oil company starting in 1985, a PDP8e and a Grid to do mini-frac calibrations. I also bought one of the first Macs, an SE30 luggable, to build databases and graphics for a project.
The 50s and early 60s up until Vietnam were optimistic times. We were going to the MOON and just about everyone talked about it and studied it. The things we dreamed and the things we built! Interstate highways were all new and under construction. The 1300 square foot house we grew up in was considered pretty darn good and when we got a window air conditioner for the living room we were really cooking! People were visibly busy and not just acting so. Of course there were the race riots, Vietnam, the post Vietnam recession, the first and second arab oil embargo, the wars in the Middle East, the Cold War that had us all ducking and covering and we kids thinking the end of the world had come every time was a test of the air raid sirens and so forth.
There was no nanny state. We could succeed and say in compliance by simply doing what was right.
I remember the summer of ‘72 when we had a big countdown to the time when the population reached 200,000,000. The country seemed much less crowded then because it was much less crowded then.
All the way through the 70s we looked forward to the new Sears catalog and every small town had a catalog sales store. It was wonderful to save your money, order stuff, walk downtown to pick up your order during school lunch and then take your new thing home on the bus after school All my tools came from Sears and I still have them 50 years later. They are prized possessions.
The time when we all walked to school or rode our bicycles with absolutely no fear in our small town of about 15,000 are long gone. So are the days when the Scout Troop met at the Methodist Church downtown on Friday after school and we all, some 40 boys, walked out of town with our backpacks 10 or so miles out to the lake for a campout. Just we boys with our 13 to 14 year-old leaders. I never recall a single problem by us or to us.
I always carried a rifle, shotgun and fishing rod in my pickup while I was in High School. A lot of other boys did as well. Nobody gave it a thought. These were necessary things for before school bird hunting and plinking or fishing after school. I even traded a pistol with one of my teachers while in school and kept it in my locker until ready to go home. My Dad and I hunted just about every single Saturday I can remember from the time I was 5 until I was 15 or 16 and had a steady job.
My much younger brother had only some of the same experiences I enjoyed. My son, in the 80s and 90s certainly did not.
Certainly since 2000 I believe life has been sort of tame except for the War on Terror. Most of what has happened has reduced freedom and choice and replaced it with trinkets, gimmickry and gee whiz stuff that can be remarkable but we can live without.
That is part of what I think.
80’s-2010’s.
The crack of a black diamond water melon under the blade of a big butcher knife after cooling it in the bathtub with a 50# block of ice. It really was an idyllic and closer family time. You knew that other families all across town were doing much the same thing with parents in lawn chairs and kids chasing fire flies out in the yard. It really did happen.
We are retired now and we sit out back and watch the sunsets and sometimes we remember and enjoy a cold water melon from our garden but there are no children playing in the yard.
human technological advance is pretty much on an exponential growth curve, so every new decade exceeds the previous decade by at least an order of magnitude ...
I remember when Connie “visited her aunt”.
I won’t quibble with you and don’t mean to so don’t take offense please but is it shame or being ashamed or disappointing the family? I’ve even called it a loss of humility that allows people to do things now that would have made us crawl under a rock for.
We just respected our parents too much to do anything or very much that would bring shame to them and their disappointment in us.
“People changed MUCH more from the 80s to now. Technology changed more from the 50s to the 80s.”
GREAT answer. And I think the reason people have changed is due to the smart phones and internet.
My grandmother was born in rural Norway on a farm in 1884. No electricity, no vehicles, nothing. Maybe a few steamships on the fjiord I guess. She always said she was so lucky to have lived when she did (and being able to come to America - alone at the age of 17 not knowing anybody here). She died in 1983.
I know one thing the things that were envisioned in the 1950’s and 1960’s are here now
“The neighborhood gang camped in the woods by the railroad tracks where I-5 runs today.”
Hey - I drove by there last week - they are all still there!
A ha!
My dad, an engineer by trade, wouldn’t allow us to get a TV when they came out in the 50s.
His remark , when we begged him was a classic: *I don’t think they will catch on*. We were too naive to understand that probably he was too cheap to buy one. :)
So all those early shows, like Lassie, Beaver, Gunsmoke, Lucy, etc. We lived in a cultural void. Heh.
Born in 1948. Remember Weekly Readers in school predicting “automation” as early as second grade.
Also remember the high rate of family breadwinners dying, and people commenting, “I don’t know what that family will do. They’re too proud for welfare”.
‘(In 1962), Gallup interviewed 1,813 women ages 21-60. “In general, who do you think is happier,” the Gallup interviewer asked, “the girl who is married and has a family to raise, or the unmarried career girl?” Ninety-six percent of the wives said the married girl with a family was happier. Ninety-three percent said they did not, in retrospect, wish they had pursued a career instead of getting married.’
Charles Murray, “Coming Apart”
Daniel Webster comes to speak for the Whig Party in Stratton, Vermont; in the middle of *no-where*. About 20,000 people gathered to hear him speak; they traveled the wilderness of the Boston-to-Albany Turnpike, a primitive dirt road. 20,000 people! Amazes me to this day.
Probably more from the ‘80s to now; though there were some MAJOR changes from the ‘50s to the ‘80s...just not as many detrimental ones.
Yes, I see the major change there (from what I call the "Western Cultural Revolution"). Though there were some major technological changes in recent decades, I see the time from the mid/late sixties to now as basically a continuation and intensification of the same thing.
I don't see it all as being bad. In many ways I myself am living much better than I did in the fifties. (In my old age I'm very appreciative, for instance, of the internet -- without it we wouldn't be having this discussion. :-) When someone on a language forum spoke of "the progress from post-war Britain into the very different culture of the 1960s", though, I couldn't confidently concur with her use of the term "progress". "Progress? Well, depending on one's values better in some respects, worse in others."
I won't quote all I said -- a couple of pages of posts specifying what I thought was good and bad about the changes, but anyone interested can find what I said here -- Dictionary.com Forum thread.
She remembers the first airplane that flew over her house in Alabama. They called it "barnstorming" in those days. It was such a novelty that people ran out of their houses half-dressed to see the plane.
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