I was born, for starters ...

August 22, 2010 12:59 AM

What Happened in My Birth Year? If you have the patience for the slow onscreen text printout, you might find some interesting tidbits.

In 1966... The first Acid Test is conducted at the Fillmore, San Francisco. About 8,000 U.S. soldiers land in South Vietnam; U.S. troops now total 190,000. Harold Holt becomes Prime Minister of Australia when Robert Menzies retires. The United Kingdom ceases all trade with Rhodesia. The Belgian government resigns. Soviet space probe Venera 3 crashes on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface.

posted by bwg (43 comments total)

yup...don't have the patience...
posted by aloiv2 at 1:02 AM on August 22, 2010

Wikipedia is pretty good too. 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:15 AM on August 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

If you try to close the tab while the text is loading (after it eventually gets to your year), it will freak out and dump all the text to get you to stay.
posted by Throw away your common sense and get an afro! at 1:19 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

In 1973, the world was a different place.

There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. Or Metafilter, for that matter.

In 1973, the year of your birth, the top selling movie was The Exorcist. People buying the popcorn in the cinema lobby had glazing eyes when looking at the poster.

Remember, that was before there were DVDs. People were indeed watching movies in the cinema, and not downloading them online. Imagine the packed seats, the laughter, the excitement, the novelty. And mostly all of that without 3D computer effects.

Good god. I'm 37 now, as if I wasn't aware Google didn't exist yet. Why is it telling me stuff I can remember not happening? I remember three channels on the telly and the vhs/betamax debate.

In 1973... [...] Tottenham Hotspur wins the Football League Cup final at Wembley, beating Norwich City 1-0.

No way! even the stuff I didn't know is boring! amazing.

On preview, wikipedia is interesting for June at least. And it doesn't have the grandpa-on-mogadon vibe.
posted by shinybaum at 1:20 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

TS;DR
posted by hanoixan at 1:20 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

it will freak out and dump all the text to get you to stay.

That really is the grandpa on mogadon vibe. Maybe it's intentional.
posted by shinybaum at 1:21 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wait, why the stumbledupon URL when the regular address works fine?
posted by klangklangston at 1:28 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

Also: For "Kramer v. Kramer", they claim it was mostly without computer effects.

I knew Hoffman's nose was enhanced.
posted by klangklangston at 1:32 AM on August 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

not to be too overly snarky, but shouldn't the link be to whathappenedinmybirthyear.com rather than a stumbleupon link?

otherwise, this is condescending, sorry. there's some good stuff in there, when it's not editorializing - in 1983, Lech Wałęsa won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Physics Prize, but it doesn't really say much about that. (it was one of the very few actual things I learned from the site.) but the OH GOD NO 3D OR DOWNLOADING MOVIES?!? yeah, I remember that, and there were 3D movies dating back to the 50s - by the time the 80s rolled around, the 3D glasses were a bit of a cliché (remember 3-D in Back to the Future?) and yeah, I remember Men At Work - not only are they still around, Land Down Under isn't exactly an underground hit. (maybe it should have referenced Freur, and their minor hit, Doot Doot.) Beauty and the Beast was meh, Addams Family was pretty decent. I expected more out of PDAs until the iPhone and Android came out. I know there wasn't a Google or a Yahoo! - back in the day, we used gopher and Veronica, and then eventually AltaVista. and I don't think I was that special of a snowflake.
posted by mrg at 1:49 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

You have to be fucking joking. 1968, and you want to tell me about "Funny Girl" and "Oliver, and how there wasn't Google?

How about the hippies and the riots and the revolutions all over the place, how the Vietnam war was ramping up and the happy optimistic future world that promised flying cars for all was coming crashing down in bitterness and tears, how we just started to realize that maybe the Good Guys wouldn't win after all?

Maybe they get to that later, but their typing WPM is too fucking slow for me to sit and watch.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:03 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm one day older than Matt Groening. Nyah Nyah!
posted by pjern at 2:33 AM on August 22, 2010

klangklangston: "Wait, why the stumbledupon URL when the regular address works fine?"

Yeah yeah, I fucked up, give me a break already.
posted by bwg at 3:31 AM on August 22, 2010

I was born in 1954. I'll be dead by the time that thing finishes.
posted by imjustsaying at 3:32 AM on August 22, 2010 [10 favorites]

In 19xx, the world was a different place. There was no Google, or Yahoo, or any number of other things, for that matter. There were, however, still paper almanacs. I'd still get way more information about my year of birth from a paper almanac than from this clever website.
posted by blucevalo at 4:49 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

You're probably going to want to have the earthbound coffee break song looped in the background for greatest effect.
posted by grizzly at 5:14 AM on August 22, 2010

If you have the patience for the slow onscreen text printout, you might find some interesting tidbits.

I went and made a cup of coffee and the "teletype" was only 9 lines in. I feel like it really is 1980 back when dot matrix printers were the standard.
posted by Fizz at 5:26 AM on August 22, 2010

Good god. I'm 37 now, as if I wasn't aware Google didn't exist yet. Why is it telling me stuff I can remember not happening?

This is pretty much my response. Much of what it told me boiled down to "OMG THERE WAS NO INTERNET CAN YOU POSSIBLY IMAGINE?

To which I have to say, yeah I can fucking imagine. Cause it was a good part of my childhood.
posted by Ouisch at 5:37 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

That copy is terrible.
posted by clvrmnky at 5:41 AM on August 22, 2010

OMG, you mean in 1985 people read books? On paper? And not on their digital devices? Man, I had no idea I was so retro-trendy.

And what kind of filler bullshit is this crap: But it didn't stop the planets from spinning, on and on, year by year. Years in which you would grow bigger, older, smarter, and, if you were lucky, sometimes wiser. Years in which you also lost some things. Possessions got misplaced. Memories faded. Friends parted ways. The best friends, you tried to hold on. This is what counts in life, isn't it?

That aside, 1985 was apparently the first year they used DNA evidence in a criminal case, so that's pretty cool.
posted by phunniemee at 6:03 AM on August 22, 2010

Only goes back to 1900. BTW, apparently in 1900 there was no Google yet. Or Yahoo.
posted by rottytooth at 6:08 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

In the year of your birth, your 110 baud modem spit out text faster than that page.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:11 AM on August 22, 2010 [6 favorites]

Oh hey, if you click the little asterisk in the corner it says to check out Bomomo, which was posted to Projects a while back.

This was created by philipp.
posted by phunniemee at 6:12 AM on August 22, 2010

"Remember, this was before there were DVD's. People were indeed watching films in cinemas..."

For fuck's sake, it knows I'm not 6 from me telling it what year I was born in.
posted by opsin at 6:32 AM on August 22, 2010

All the snarky comments so far...correct. Amazing that they know that I have lost possessions!

I was, however, launched into nostalgia when I read that the most popular movie in 1952 was This is Cinerama. Don't believe I've seen that one, but we had one Cinerama theater in St. Louis. I took a date there to see Krakatoa: East of Java in the 60's. (Cinerama was filmed with three cameras, producing a 146 degree arc. I liked it better than Imax, really, because it was odd and enveloping, not just BIG.)
posted by kozad at 6:49 AM on August 22, 2010

[Unstumbled the link.]
posted by cortex at 7:18 AM on August 22, 2010

...This is an odd site. It's currently giving me all the lyrics to My Sharona, one line at a time.
posted by frobozz at 7:44 AM on August 22, 2010

People buying the popcorn in the cinema lobby had glazing eyes when looking at the poster.
That happened during my birth year as well. I wonder when people's eyes stopped glazing over in movie theaters.
posted by sanko at 8:21 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

what an awful design.
posted by modernnomad at 8:39 AM on August 22, 2010

I feel like they were trying, perhaps too hard, to be poignant. They weren't.
posted by tommasz at 8:42 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

What in the world does 'glazing eyes' mean???
posted by circa68 at 8:44 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of something I saw at Silver Dollar City (i think?) when I was a kid. For like five dollars, you'd type your birthday into a text terminal, and it would print out a dot-matrix fake newspaper sheet with the headlines of the day. I thought this was Greek Oracle levels of amazing.
posted by maus at 8:49 AM on August 22, 2010

Why do I need to know the lyrics to "One Bad Seed" by The Osmonds?
posted by killy willy at 8:56 AM on August 22, 2010

What in the world does 'glazing eyes' mean???

There was no Google, Yahoo, or Krispy Kreme yet. It would be 20 more years before movie-lobby-eye-glaze would begin to be harvested and out on donuts.
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:57 AM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

"In 1981 your father worked at a sewage treatment plant. Your sister fell off her bicycle & busted her head on the curb, requiring stitches. Your family lived at 1929 Shel*"

Hey, now wait a second.
posted by broken wheelchair at 9:24 AM on August 22, 2010 [6 favorites]

Awful. I'm surprised there aren't more comments along the lines of the first one in this thread, except, I guess, that there's so much to hate about the content when it... finally... arrives.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 9:48 AM on August 22, 2010

Why.... is....it...so.......slow? Why........?

And yeah, why are they telling me, a 37 yr old, that there was no internet or 3D computer graphics, or DVDs? And that books were printed on paper? I was born in 1973 not 2003.
posted by Liquidwolf at 10:44 AM on August 22, 2010

This is fucking terrible design and slightly-interesting-at-best content. It reminds me of those novelty nostalgia decade pamphlets that are available in tourist traps, except without examples of the ads of the era.
posted by kdar at 1:04 PM on August 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Um, how different was the world in 2009? How have people born in 2009 since changed things?
posted by Bromius at 9:47 PM on August 22, 2010

Even though the way this site is down is annoying it does remind me of how I make my niece and nephews freak out by telling them all the things that didn't exist when I was born, or their age. The fact that I was married before I had internet access boogles their mind. Hell, my younger brother doesn't remember a lot of the things that mean childhood for me and he is only eight years younger.

My little brother never owned a record. It was all cassette by the time he owned music. He had no clue what an 8-track was at all. On the other hand I owned many records, and still have some. It really is amazing how eight years makes our world view different.
posted by SuzySmith at 2:29 AM on August 23, 2010

But it didn't stop the planets from spinning, on and on, year by year. Years in which you would grow bigger, older, smarter, and, if you were lucky, sometimes wiser. Years in which you also lost some things. Possessions got misplaced. Memories faded. Friends parted ways. The best friends, you tried to hold on. This is what counts in life, isn't it?

Wow. This site is... wow. It's like an AI gained both sentience and an annoying sense of nostalgia. This must be what grandfatherly robots say when sitting on the porch reminding the youngsters of those days back when they had to be programmed by hand and would you please pass the WD40?

There's a kid outside, shouting, playing. It doesn't care about time. It doesn't know about time. It shouts and it plays and thinks time is forever. You were once that kid.

I'm scared. Hold me.
posted by sonika at 7:08 AM on August 23, 2010 [2 favorites]

My little brother never owned a record. It was all cassette by the time he owned music. He had no clue what an 8-track was at all. On the other hand I owned many records, and still have some. It really is amazing how eight years makes our world view different.

Eh, not saying your world views are not different, and that 8 years can't be the cause of that, but surely "different media" /= "different world view". As I noted in a couple of threads discussing, pejoratively, mixed-age dating, a movie not seen here, a minor tech change there -- it's really no big deal.

Now a few changes I think are profound. For example, I cannot imagine growing up with the internet at my fingertips, to follow up any question I have. On anything. That is incredible, and I don't know if people who have never been without understand what it could take just to find shit out.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 7:52 AM on August 23, 2010

In the year 2010, this website did not work for crap on my iPad.
posted by tamitang at 4:42 PM on August 23, 2010

Of course, there's lots of websites that don't work for crap on my iPad.
posted by tamitang at 4:43 PM on August 23, 2010