It was pretty much the same as now, except people spent more time sitting in front of the TV than computers.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I even saw a personal computer. As kids, we all had plastic guns and played Combat. We ran in the woods and swam in the reservoir. We dug tunnels!

I even strung a wire. A single bell wire, from my house, all the way to my cousin’s house up the street. We used the ground as the ground. Literally. The wire was one side of the circuit, the water pipe the other, and we were able to send Morse code to each other.

We had acorn fights in the fall and snowball fights in the winter. We went to school and hid under desks for drills in case there was a nuclear war with the Russians. I learned to type on a mechanical typewriter, a skill I find very useful now inside my Linux box.

I’m 63, soon to be 64. I’m a baby boomer, born in 1953. I grew up on black and white TV. My Uncle Henry had the first color TV on the block. We’d all go to his house to watch the only color TV shows on the air at the time: the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite followed by Bonanza, every Wednesday.

We never locked the car or the house even though we were 35 miles from New York City. Had a dog and a cat. A great childhood and a great life!