@MrItty – don’t get me wrong, I loved my Atari 2600. I KNOW I spent more time playing with that than I do with all my other games combined now. Of course, then I was a kid with zero responsibilities. My favorite was Missile Command….I had that game mastered. I wanted to see what would happen if you got to a million points so one night at 10pm I started playing. I hit a million and 60 points at 4:05am (I don’t think we had pause buttons then either, did we?) and the numbers rolled over. Of course my audience (cousins and friends who were staying over) had all fallen asleep by then…I woke them up to show them, but I always wonder if they believed me or if they thought I just reset it and let myself die at 60 points.
@aprilsimnel – we had a microwave by the mid-late 80s ourselves…I was actually more resistant to the idea than my parents…I was sure one of the mean neighbor kids was going to come over and cook my cat (I’d heard the horror stories, and I was kind of a morbid child).
and @cyndyh – your experience doesn’t mirror mine at all. I was actually serious….we didn’t get a microwave until at least the mid 80s. Cable TV, well, my parents lived 4 miles out of town in the township in a northern Minnesota town, which at a population of 5,000 might seem by other geographic standards to be decent sized, but which actually didn’t have a single chain store until McDonald’s came in 5 years ago. My parents STILL can not get cable at their place, nor high speed internet. And at least where I grew up, vinyl records were on a decline by the early to mid 1980s…everyone I knew had cassettes. It may have had something to do with the fact that the nearest proper music store was located about 80 miles away, and most people who bough music did so via BMG or Columbia House. Our only Sears was basically just an appliance shop in our mall 10 miles away which had all of 40 stores. There was one arcade in this mall, and a movie theater with 3 screens that showed pretty much just the blockbusters and nothing else. So yeah, a big city experience was I’m sure significantly different, but I’m willing to bet that my experience was probably mirrored by more of America, simply because at the time there were more people living in rural areas than in populous ones. Just a hunch. Though you’re right, we did have 36 exposure film, but that was generally only 35MM, and we had 110 or 126 cameras. We actually did have an instant camera, but it wasn’t a Polaroid, it was a Kodak, and they had to stop making film for those when Polaroid sued them for copyright infringement. Long story short…growing up was HELL.