show your age with a picture of a toy from your childhood

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We had IBM 5150 computers in junior high but then I moved to a rural high school, which didn't have any computers at all (unless you count the word processors). But then I got to college and there were computers EVERYWHERE!
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Most of my time was spent in the library VAX lab (run on a VAX 8800 using VMS). After the lab monitor went home at 10pm, it turned into a gamers lab, with most of us playing various MuDDs. We had a huge advantage over most of the other players because we could coordinate our attacks with voice and were running on a blazing T3 connection!
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I also loved playing Civilization in the Mac lab, but the lab monitors there kept deleting it so I had to carry a copy with my saved game on a floppy.
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Then in 1991 Steve Jobs donated a whole lab of NeXTstations, which was cool because as long as the lab was less than half full, the monitor would look the other way while we ran LAN Doom!
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the way assembly should be written!

edit: remember the demo scene on the BBs's, and how they'd brag about it being written in 100% assembly!
 
just got a short throw XGA DLP projector used for $80...so i can lay in bed and play old arcade games in MAME with a screen the entire size of my bed, and quarters are as easy to pump in as pressing a button...

i remember these when i was a teenager..

 
When you're a kid, you assume EVERYBODY is playing croquet. I haven't seen anyone playing croquet since that time. Me on left, and my awesome little brothers. [edit another pic, years later, same brothers, but Dad there and uncle's red Cutlass that he lent me)

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The slip-n-slide was an essential part of summer days on my block. Sometimes as many as three yards had one going and we would make a circuit. Slide down one, hop on the bike and ride to the next one, go for a slide, hop on another bike, etc. As long as everyone had a bike we could go for hours. Always accompanied by fla-vor-ice for hydration, which would start to cut the corners of my mouth after eating a few, or those little barrel-shaped juice drinks.

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Who else remembers these bad boys? A little water, pump some air, pull the trigger back and they'd go up about 150 feet or so.

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I loved science toys, and that had to be the most fun one. My set had that big one and also a short, chubby one shaped like a bomb. So much fun and all you needed was some water.
 
The slip-n-slide was an essential part of summer days on my block. Sometimes as many as three yards had one going and we would make a circuit. Slide down one, hop on the bike and ride to the next one, go for a slide, hop on another bike, etc. As long as everyone had a bike we could go for hours. Always accompanied by fla-vor-ice for hydration, which would start to cut the corners of my mouth after eating a few, or those little barrel-shaped juice drinks.

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I had a friend with a huge backyard, and we would gather up 4 slip n slides from throughout the neighborhood and play baseball with a base at the end of each slip n slide.

Good times.
 
I love the smell of gunpowder in the morning. Smells like victory.
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Remember that feeling of loading up a roll and sliding that cover closed? Tuck it in my waist band and mount up on my schwinn tornado. I wonder if kids in other countries had cap guns or was it just us 'muricans?
I remember taking whole rolls of them and smacking them with a hammer to get one brief but very satisfyingly loud bang.
 
When I was a yute back in the age of steel cap guns inevitably led to BB guns - which in my neighborhood led to BB gun wars. Not actually wanting to brain anyone we slapped slabs of modeling clay to the gun stocks and would pinch off a BB size bit, roll it up round, blow it down the barrel then cock and fire. Clay pellets left a nice welt, but nobody ever had an eye put out.

We'd have battles that ran for half a day up and down the neighborhood on a New England street lined both sides with stone walls with gaps for the driveways. Tons of flanking maneuvers, countered by ambushes. Good lord those were fun times :D
 
We had this exact bike. My grandpa brought it home one day, I think it fell onto his truck at some terminal he delivered to. Same color except it was battle-scarred, and the rear wheels were wobbly with a few spokes missing which caused a wicked shimmy at top speed. That also gave it a lot of sway in the corners while making a getaway, or I could swerve it a bit one way then the other to tip it up on two wheels and really dazzle 'em on a fly by.

The wire basket was kinda bent up and there was a raggedy scrap of carpeting in it as a cushion, my younger brother Billy would sit in the basket indian-style facing backward as the tail gunner while I piloted. I only had two years on him, but I was tall enough to pedal it and he wasn't. He would shreek when I tipped it up in the turns but I never laid it over on him, though once or twice the basket would fall out with him in it. We rode that into our early teens when he grew too tall for the basket. Other times we used it to transport treasure and/or supplies back and forth to our fort and then later we both used it to deliver the Southtown Economist and the Pennysaver to several surrounding neighborhoods.

I bet we put more than a few thousand miles on that old bike.

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I love the smell of gunpowder in the morning. Smells like victory.
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Remember that feeling of loading up a roll and sliding that cover closed? Tuck it in my waist band and mount up on my schwinn tornado. I wonder if kids in other countries had cap guns or was it just us 'muricans?
Australia had them too!. We had the roll ones and also the round plastic ones that had 6 caps. Fun! Probably annoying for the neighbours haha
 
I remember the toy guns from when I was young, and when the gun broke, you could still make the strips explode by rubbing your nail over them....not US only, we had them in the Netherlands and i guess in most of europe.

for bikes, you aren't really dutch if you don't have an "omafiets" (literaly grandma bike), at some point during your youth/young adulthood.:
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Yes to remembering hitting the whole roll of caps with a hammer!

My BB gun experience was rather short lived. I guess I was maybe 8 or 10 years old when I found what was apparently my father's old BB gun in my grandparents basement. I ran around shooting it at things for a few hours before I eventually shot my sister in the butt. I don't know where that chrome plated machine gun looking BB gun ended up but I never saw it again.
 
Mighty Max anyone?

Had about 10 of these. The tv series was god awful of course lol
 

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Ah, cap guns. Bang, bang, bang! When we got tired of this, we'd ignite the caps with a rock quickly pulled or pushed against the cap.

This is another, apparently only boys understand similar to finding Benny Hill funny (as most woman roll their eyes). Taking the time to build a model car. Getting it all nice. Then loading it with firecrackers, lighting the firecrcakers and rolling the model car down the street. Blowed up real good.
 
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