The things you did as a kid...

Too much mischief to list. One of the summertime favourtes:

Joey gun/monkey apple wars against anyone brave enough.

Mates and I would build our weapons form old piping, rubber glove fingers and duck tape. We spend a couple of hours collecting ammo from the best local sources. Quite often leaving with shopping bags full. We'd then build forts or use the local schools playground and go to war.

The occasional passer by might take the odd hit as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=impv5AMGzLk
http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/pests/monkey-apple

[gruntygiggles]

Originally Posted by RichT

Too much mischief to list. One of the summertime favourtes:

Joey gun/monkey apple wars against anyone brave enough.

Mates and I would build our weapons form old piping, rubber glove fingers and duck tape. We spend a couple of hours collecting ammo from the best local sources. Quite often leaving with shopping bags full. We'd then build forts or use the local schools playground and go to war.

The occasional passer by might take the odd hit as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=impv5AMGzLk
http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/pests/monkey-apple

You'll have plenty to teach MiniT

also i used to get a inch wide peice of plastic pipe maybe 2 foot long then get a 2 inch nail and make a cone shape end to it so it was like a dart, and then make targets and blow the dart out could easily get it to stick in a door or wall never shot at a living thing though

[Matt-EUC]

Setting things on fire, breaking into condemned buildings, combining the previous two, taking corners far too fast on push bikes, scooters, rollerblades. And obviously the classics, knocking on doors and legging it and another not mentioned, which involved knocking on doors and asking for someone who didn't live there.

Doctors and Nurses!

[Matt-EUC]

Just looking back through the thread, there seems to be a clear trend towards burning things and blowing sh!t up.

Originally Posted by Matt-EUC

Just looking back through the thread, there seems to be a clear trend towards burning things and blowing sh!t up.

Indeed... it's making the other disturbing thread which I believe was GG's inspiration for this one, a lot less worrisome (in that there are fewer people doing said things!)

[Wideboy]

Everyone set stuff on fire and blew **** up, it's compulsory behaviour.

Some of us still do, just more extreme......

[carelesschucca]

I never set anything on fire, Honest...

Childhood memories though...

Blackwidow Catties and marbles.
Stealing golfballs from the golfers on Harrogate GC.
Rolling haybales down hills and being chased by the farmer.
Rolling a ornament cannon down a steep hill and watching in fear as it got a little fast and we couldn't stop it...

But my all time memory/or non memory was racing my bike with my mate and I didn't stop peddling going round a corner and highsided myself. Theres a gap of about 20 mins I have no memory off, but the last thing I do remember was flying through the air, thinking OH FERK!!! Mate was great though he got me the half mile home all covered in blood and then went back for my teeth, found all four of them so he did. Happy Days.

[keith_d]

Originally Posted by timwilky

So how the hell did a kid get access to computers in the 70s?

Around 1975 Fords (the car company) was donating time on their mainframe to schools and we were writing programs in BASIC on punched tape then connecting with a teletype through an acoustic modem. A couple of years later the school bought a couple of Apple II computers which we pretty much monopolised.

One of my friends had a Commodore PET at home, another had an Apple II, and a third assembled a commercial DIY PC with something like 1k of RAM. I didn't get a computer at home until the early eighties.

Around 1980 we were designing a parallel port card for the Apple II because the official Apple ones were like hens teeth and we could buy a 6522 chip for a few pounds. I think the guys finished it just after I went to university in 1981. We were pretty geeky in those days.

Keith.