Thetownend.com

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 60's, 70's and early 80's probably shouldn't have survived, because
 
1. Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint which was promptly chewed and licked.
 
2. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.
 
3. When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip-flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokey's' on our wheels. 4. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags - riding in the passenger seat was a treat.
 
5. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same.
 
6. We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
 
7. We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no-one actually died from this.
 
 
 
8. We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.
 
9. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
 
10. We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.
 
11. We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all.
 
12. We did not have 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVDs, no Internet chat rooms. We had friends - we went outside and found them.
 
13. We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt!
 
14. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones but there were no law suits.
 
15. We had full on fist fights but no prosecution followed from other parents.
 
16. We played chap-the-door-run-away and were actually afraid of the owners catching us.
 
17. We walked to friends' homes.
 
18. We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn't rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.
 
19. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls.
 
20. We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood.
 
21. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of...They actually sided with the law.
 
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
 
And you're one of them. Congratulations!
 
 
 
Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good. For those of you who aren't old enough, I thought you might like to read about us.
 
This, my friends, is surprisingly frightening......and it might put a smile on your face:
 
The majority of students in universities today were born in 1986........They are called youth.
 
They have never heard of We are the World, We are the children, and the Uptown Girl they know is by Westlife not Billy Joel. They have never heard of Rick Astley, Bananarama, Nena Cherry or Belinda Carlisle.
 
For them, there has always been only one Germany and one Vietnam.
 
AIDS has existed since they were born.
 
CD's have existed since they were born.
 
Michael Jackson has always been white.
 
To them John Travolta has always been round in shape and they can't imagine how this fat guy could be a god of dance.
 
They believe that Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible are films >from last year.
 
They can never imagine life before computers.
 
They'll never have pretended to be the A Team, RedHand Gang or the Famous Five.
 
They'll never have applied to be on Jim'll Fix It or Why Don't You.
 
They can't believe a black and white television ever existed.
 
And they Will never understand how we could leave the house without a mobile phone.
 
 
 
Now let's check if we're getting old...
 
1. You understand what was written above and you smile.
 
2. You need to sleep more, usually until the afternoon, after a night out.
 
3. Your friends are getting married/already married.
 
4. You are always surprised to see small children playing comfortably with computers.
 
5. When you see teenagers with mobile phones, you shake your head.
 
6. You remember watching Dirty Den in EastEnders the first time around.
 
7. You meet your friends from time to time, talking about the good Old days, repeating again all the funny things you have experienced together.
 
8. Having read this mail, you are thinking of forwarding it to some other friends because you think they will like it too...
 
Yes, you're getting old ......................
 
Oh, they were the days!

Had that on email recently possibly the funniest thing ever.  Its all so true!

seen that before, but its still good and in my case almost entirley true

Them were the days! :mrgreen:

Born in '84, get in!!!

those were the best days ever! brings back so many memories!  :D

Quality - Feel well old now!

Did anyone have (usually in your bedroom) one of those black and white tv's that had a dial on the front, and the shittest reception ever, you could hardly see a thing, but you still watched it.  I watched the Liverpool v Juve European Cup final on one of those.

The 80's were great, when wham bars were huge!!!!  And a great way of pulling your teeth out.

i shaved off my hair for a wham bar once.....

i used to work with a load of teenagers and they also haven't heard of sgt bilko, night rider, airwolf, laurel and hardy and they didn't believe me when i said that games used to be loaded onto computers by tape (spectrum 48k)   :old:

tape used to be the worst, remember the noise?  And when after about 10 minutes it would just crash for no reason.

Also the old fashion ring pulls, that would also sometimes break.

I'm just about old enough to remember the  comador (think that's it's name). Loved the game with the little egg blokey. Anyone else remember him?

That was Dizzy Dan

Games loading by tape sucked, like jan says they'd load for ages, then randomly crash. Anyone remember the multi coloured lines you'd get when it was loading and making all the noises?

:cry:  i still miss those days...they were brill, every was so tacky that it was ace

Gary Wilmott
Rubbish looking electric guitars
Dogtanian and the three muskahounds
Rainbow
"Pull off" ring pulls on cans of coke
Spam
Street Hawk
Lucky dip (sweet bags)

"10 You are a dick
20 Go to 10
run"

Commentating on football when you used to play up the park
White dog poo
Pubs were boring (remember thinking why does dad come here?)
Warming up milk in a pan
tank tops
Rotary dialling phones
No seat belts
XR3i's
skateboarding
coloured shoe laces
Hubba Bubba
Karate Kid
bulldog
Football stickers (got/need etc)
Five Star
Care Bears
Those black jeans with coloured ass panels
New Kids on the Block
One pound notes
1/2 penny sweets
Knightrider
Chips (not the food)
Grange Hill
Tuckers Luck
Seperate shampoo and conditioner
Nike air
Sky toothpaste
Jim'll fix it
Vauxhall Cavalier
Recording charts
Frogger
The A Team
Tapes
Small footyball shorts
PE daps
Noel edmonds house part (I think)
Sarah Green was sexy.
Highland toffee
Dunlop footy boots
Kissing girls was strange
German porn
Bros
Big hair (on women)
A black Michael Jackson
The Cosby Show
Coal delivering lorries
Soda Streams
That "plug into your tv" video game system, you could play squash & tennis,
(it was just a block moving across the screen)
Sunday Night at the London Palledium (Tommy Cooper dying on TV)
Transformers
flurescent socks
ZX Spectrum 48k
Live Aid
Tory years
BMX's
Rally Griffters
Ewoks
Sweat Bands
Rat's tails (long bit of hair at the back, but not a mullet)
Free Milk at School at 11am
1/2 penny sweets
tight tight jeans
body warmers
illuminous socks
big wham barstyping 55378008 in a calculator
Ruud Gullitt/Michel Platini/MichaelLaudrup/Arthur Scargill
Those benches that you'd sit on in assembly, then turn over during PE
Chas n Dave (appearing at the Casbah, next week!)
Les Dawson
Blockbusters
The Krypton Factor
Kylie & Jason
FA Cup Finals being exciting
More from the calculator files "0.553"     "77345" "710 77345"

other things from the 80's

i remember the old shitty spectrum tapes. used to play soccer boss all the time! amigas were ace too. james pond robocod was quality

dizzy was wicked too!
http://www.nesplayer.com/dizzy/egg.gif

ha, i've still got that on tape in me shed!!!!
hangin' tough and all that shite!!!

Amigas were the nuts, I must have had 200 games (mostly copies)

Sensible Soccer - now we're talking! 8)  8)  8)
and the original Champ Manager 8)  8)  8)

The original champ man that took hours and hours to play, every result would come through the vidiprinter, then confirmed on the classifieds just like Grandstand, for some reason it kinda worked.

The game "Kick Off" was great too, remember that?   Especially when the pitch was wet and the ball would slid everywhere!

my ex-girlfriend used to love new kids on the block! fucking rubbish! i can still remember all their names she used to go on about them so much! wierdo!

sensible soccer manager was the best game ever, still got all my amiga stuff in the loft somewhere but no working joystick  :(  might have to pay a visit to ebay & get playing again! so many good games

Why did we get rid of 500ml coke cans?
http://www.colawp.com/seasonal/200107/500ml/CokeGe02.jpg

Why is cherry 7up so hard to get hold of these days?
http://www.energy.pulse.de/dosen/dpics/7up_cherry.jpg



I thought Chomp bars were the daddy of tooth removal, and only 10p!
http://www.sweetiebag.com/product_images/details/chomp.jpg

Ahhh... the Commodore 64.
http://www.silicium.org/images/catalog/cbm/c64/c64c.jpg

Remember we all got dead envious of the flash bloke at school who had a floppy disk drive for his Commodore 64 which could hold (I think) a staggering 360k of data (and these were really floppy floppy disks - huge great 8.5" things in a cardboard cover that wobbled like Rolf Harris' wobbleboard not your fancy 3.5" in their plastic cases). And these things could load programs in less than a minute (sometimes)!

And while we're in nerd nostalgia mode, anyone remember those god-awful thermal printers for the Spectrum that printed out on a what looked like a silver till-roll but you had to store the printout in a lead-lined vacuum sealed container cos it scratched off if you looked at it too hard?

And you didn't get games on cover disks in computer mags - you got the program listing and had to type the fucker in yourself. And when you did it would never run because of a printing error they'd finally own up to three issues later when you'd lost all interest.

Ah, them was the days - when computers were complete toss. I had a VIC 20, which is why I'm bitter about it. Although I wasn't as badly off as the Welsh lad at school who bought a Dragon32 rather than a Spectrum for "patriotic reasons". Yes, kids, there was once a Welsh computer. And it was every bit as bad as the idea sounds.

does anyone remember the name of the sweets that were white , minty, and had three green stripes on them, i cant remember what they were called and its been bugging me for ages  :(

"And you didn't get games on cover disks in computer mags - you got the program listing and had to type the fucker in yourself. And when you did it would never run because of a printing error they'd finally own up to three issues later when you'd lost all interest.

Ah, them was the days - when computers were complete toss. I had a VIC 20, which is why I'm bitter about it. Although I wasn't as badly off as the Welsh lad at school who bought a Dragon32 rather than a Spectrum for "patriotic reasons". Yes, kids, there was once a Welsh computer. And it was every bit as bad as the idea sounds."

 :Ride On Fatbury's Lovestick:   Quality - especially the patriotic computer buying!!

I remember the first tim eI saw screen shots of Platoon on the Amiga, I was amazed, jaw dropping moment, it was almost like real life (at the time)

there used to be a small arcade in covingham video shop with the original street fighter, quite possibly the greatest video game ever... and i've never seen it since  :(

I was born in 1986 and with the exception of Commodore's and the such like, I remember nearly everything on this thread 8)

I feel old :cry:

Chasing the Any Old Iron truck on your bike was great 8)

What about helping the dustmen when they came round, that was ace, chucking some stuff in the back of the lorry.  Oh how I miss my Calne upbringing.

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does anyone remember the name of the sweets that were white , minty, and had three green stripes on them, i cant remember what they were called and its been bugging me for ages
_________________
 
Think they were callled Pacers or something like that.

Match Day (think it was called) on the Spectrum was ace, apart from the bug where you could score direct from a throw in at a certain angle.  

Those mags with the programme listing always used to kick up the 'syntax error' message.  Drove me mad.

Ah nostalgia - it's not what it used to be !

You want MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) - http://www.mame.net/. It does what it says on the tin. Course you need to source the ROMs for the actual games separately, but there's loads floating round the net and I'm pretty sure you can get all the StreetFighter Roms pretty easy on ROM sites for free (can't check cos work firewall includes a content filter that throws a hissy fit if you try to get to gaming sites)

Ahh tapes. I sometimes miss my Amstrad CPC. A mate had an old Acorn with some boxing game on it, now that was shit...

I had a Dragon32.  It was ace and skill  :nod:

( ace = "A Crappy Effort"  and skil =  a disease cows get on their arses, for those that don't know.  Both perfectly accurate descriptions of aforementioned "computer" )


Anyone else remember when it used to snow, and you'd get a day off school because the heating packed in ?

Hey, they still have pull off ring-pulls in the middle east! I go to Bahrain every year with work and they are ace and still use em'! Presumably because the punishment for littering is having your hand chopped off.

Anyone remember

"Yeeeeesss!!!! because it's been sunny we're allowed on the grass" during the summer at primary school, or was that just St Edmunds, Calne, that did that?

I was just thinking back to the times where kids would break bones and injure themselves but that was all part of the fun. I used to love the summer where you could play out forever because it wasn't dark til after ten  8)

We used to go up Wessie Park in Calne, every night and just play hours and hours of footie, usually had to pop home for tea at 6 ish, then out again, brilliant days.

Now it seems that kids want it to be dark so they can hang around outside shops and get ASBOs. If only I could turn back the sands of time  :|

I remember everything being ace & skill 8)

Although there was a later a shock revelation that skill actually meant african bum disease :shock:  :?

A personal favourite of mine………. Corn fights :D

Suppose you have to live neatr cornfields like me to do this

white dog poo?

i laughed out loud when i read that!

how did that happen then?

I had one of those computers that when you loaded the game tapes they screeched like a right cunt, you had to wake everybody up just to play a game. :-))(

written by grayx

   

   Damn right my nostalgia is for the 50's .....it was great we had rationing, an empire still, heavy industry and every thing was in black and white.

 Christmas was ace we got an orange and had chicken.....a once a year luxury preceded by a tin of tomato  soup......possessions weren't really something you cared about too much.

 Welsh coal was delivered by horse and cart in massive lumps which needed smashing up with a large hammer, after being deposited in the coal house, a job for the lad (me) to climb in and do.......central heating hadn't existed in most of English houses since the Roman times.

 In the coal house hung the gas masks, which the old man kept, just in case......next door we used to play in their bomb shelter.

 Kids at school had ring worm and other conditions caused by poor nutrition.....the mistress would deliver a whack of the cane for messy handwriting.

 STFC were probably at their historical worst...save a decent season in 58, when Divs north and south became 3 and 4, and you needed a top half finish to get in thre which was achieved.

I had a Spectrum, finally got it out of my loft recently, gave it to a local charity for a boot sale, I want to know if anyone brought it.

I set it all up beforehand to see if it still worked, and tried Football Manager. I remember that game, could get promoted dead easily on that.

Didn't have coal, but I remember the egg man coming round, and the local corner shop delivering the food.

I love nostalgia. 8)

Nah we had that at my primary school, there was a big field behind the school and if the weather was nice we were allowed on it. It had a full length footy field with proper goalposts so it was skill 8)

"hey, dave says we're allowed on the big field today!!!"

We never had grass at my primary - just a concrete playground. Posh gits.

I'm from the cunt-ree-soide though.

...and when it was really hot and sunny the teacher would take us all outside and we would have the lessons (read a book) on the grass.

how about when it was snowing aswell & everyone could go out & have a massive snowball fight on the field!  :D

the nerdy kids always ended up crying after a mouthful of snow, or a handfull down the back of the jumper!  :twisted:

someone from the council had to spray the dog poo white so you could see it better at night.

some theories about the dissappearance of white dog turd

http://livepublishing.infopop.cc/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/915107294/m/2421015801/r/3011022901

its to do with eating bones apparently  :?

and you thought this board was pretty random!   :shock:

that board has some pretty interesting threads TBH. There's even one about the mighty joey deacon!  :D

check it out http://livepublishing.infopop.cc/eve/ubb.x/a/frm/f/915107294