I met a man recently who began talking about technology when he was little. He showed a picture of himself and talked about some of the new technologies that were around when he was young. Can you imagine a world with only two TV stations, neither of them broadcast all day? Can you imagine a world where music was played on vinyl and you could only hold about 12 songs in your hand? There are currently 9500 songs on my iPod? (I may have rounded that to the nearest 100).
For your homework I would like you to ask someone from an older generation to tell you what it was like being a child when they were young. You could ask them about school, playing, safety, travel, holidays or ask them to describe what it was like where they lived. Once you have your information I would like you to add a comment below with it. You can then comment on other peoples posts where you notice something that you have in common with them.
Technology
people just about had home computers but they are not as good as ours. All games took about 5 minutes to load.
Music
WHAM
AHA
Madonna
School
How the school years were grouped have changed. Teachers were allowed to give you lines.
Playing
They had more freedom and made dens.
Games
kiss chase
1,2,3 in
Sardines
When my mum was little they introduced a new invention called the Minitel, which was basically a mini computer to replace a phone book but you had to pay to use it.
My mum also remembers travelling all the way to the south of France in an Audi 80 on beds at the back of the car that her dad had made.
She also remembers the disk player in the lounge and her first vinyl was Pink Floyd the Wall. She got her first cassette player in her bedroom for her 12th birthday and it even had a microphone. Her best friends brother had a computer called the mo5 but not many people had a computer. mostly my mum played a game outside like manhunt, she also played marbles and “elastique” which was basically jumping over a giant elastic band. She said childhood was really fun.
When my mum was at school, for the Harvest Festival she had to go to the local Greengrocer who would make up a basket of fresh fruit to take to the church service. All the children at school did this and so it had to be distributed quickly before it went off. School dinners consisted of semolina or chocolate cake with mint ,green custard for pudding. They played a game called Elastics which involved jumping in and out of a large piece of elastic.
When my mum was a teenager her parents lived in Pakistan so she went to boarding school. She slept in a dormitory which was mostly made up of bunk beads. She used to play netball and lacrosse. Her favourite gadgets were a Sony Walkman and a cassette player for music. They toys she had were rubix cubes, Sindy dolls, Blue Peter annuals and Knitting mushrooms. She had a computer called a zx spectrum and the games she played on it were space invaders and ping pong tennis. She visited Pakistan on her holidays.
My Mum had a cassette too
I really only watch 2 TV channels because the rest aren’t that good. I don’t really listen to that much music either!
Games my mum played at school were, British Bulldog and 1,2,3 in. At home there was no x box she had a Sega Megadrive which played only platform games such as Alex The Kid, and Sonic the Hedgehog. There were also small hand held computers called Game-boys, a bit like a DS, where she played Tetris and Super Mario Bros.
There were no mobile phones or ipods. Music was listened to on a tape cassette or CD you couldn’t download music you had to go to the shop and buy it.
At school the years were 1,2,3,4 not 3,4,5,6 and again at secondary school it was 1,2,3,4,5 not 7,8,9,10,11. At secondary school you were allowed out of school at lunchtime.
Fleet was a lot quieter with less houses and traffic. Calthorpe was much smaller. There were more shops open in the town because people didn’t really do internet shopping.
My dad didn’t have a TV until he was 8 years old. He played out a lot with his friends. They played football and cricket and lots of war games using potato guns, bows and arrows and sticks. He would be out most of the day making camps in the woods and fields. His favourite toys were his Raleigh Chopper bike and his Action Man.
Technology: He had a BBC computer at school that took a floppy disk and took ages to load. He had a black and white game boy and when he was 10 they had their first family PC that could play games and the first game was a driving game. To listen to music he had a walkman that used to play cassettes
The Music he listened to was McHammer, Michael Jackson and Vanilla Ice
He went to school in Germany and had table tennis tables, a cookery room and also learnt to sew and knit as they wanted to teach them all to look after themselves. School also closed for a week in the summer where my Dad got to do activities such as sailing, canoeing and tennis
My dad was very lucky and lived near the woods in Berlin. They would make dens, play on bikes and in the winter go to a big hill and sledge a lot
The games my dad played were army, and also used to play a lot with toy soldiers and his friend would come over and they would set up massive battles and knock them down with marbles to see who was the winner. The favourite game he played was marbles and this was at home and at school.
My Mum remembers when one of her friends got a BBC computer and she thought it was amazing. She realises now that it was huge. She had a ZX Spectrum computer and said the games were on cassettes which took ages to load and made funny noises as they did. One of her friends’ dads was the first she knew to have a mobile phone – she said that was huge as well and the battery pack was so big it had its own handle and he had to carry it around separately.
She watched 3 TV channels and remembered it being very exciting when Channel 4 was launched.
They had a record player and then a cassette player and my Mum used to try and record the top 40 on a Sunday onto a cassette which you had to keep rewinding to try and find the beginning of the song you wanted – you couldn’t just skip to the right song.
They had cars that had no seat belts dad had an Avenger . He listened to two people called Madness and Adam Ant . He lived in Tavistock, Devon with his brother and mum and dad he did the same subjects as us and played football and cricket.His mum was a nurse and his dad was a policeman. He had to walk 2 miles up hill to his school.
When my mum was a child she walked to her primary school with her mum because they only had 1 car which her dad used for work.
My mum used to play outside with her friends on their bikes and they played french skipping.
they used to go on holiday to France and Spain. They always went on the ferry then drove because air travel was very expensive.
They used to watch the tv and were very excited when the video recorder came along because they could record their favourite shows.
My Nan started school when she was five then moved through the different stages of school. The games that she liked playing were Netball, swimming, rounders and hop scotch.
My Nan lived in a place in Cardiff called Mynachty which was on top of a hill. It took five minutes to walk to school but took longer to walk back, because her and her friends went to a little shop to buy sweets. Those were some of the happy memories of her childhood.