1970s and 1980s in rural Virginia, most people didn’t lock their doors and kids ran around outside until dark. Our phone was a party line, meaning if I picked up the phone I might hear a nearby neighbor already on the line having a conversation, so I would just hang up until the line was free. We were comfortable but not wealthy. By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s we had a microwave and a VCR. Video rental stores were starting to be popular. Going out to eat at Pizza Hut was a big deal.

Mid/late 1980s and onward, technology started making a bigger difference. I got a Commodore 64 computer, we moved to a small town and got cable television and MTV, I got a modem for the Commodore 64 and started logging into BBS systems. Those two things definitely expanded my horizons a lot. In the early 1990s a year or two before the Internet got big I played one-on-one Doom with a guy from Norway via modem, that seemed like magic at the time.

1990s and onward more internet, more television, more corporations, more technology, it just got faster and faster. Once we had our magic pocket computers that did phone calls, email, text messages, navagation, etc everything has just been evolutions of that with more storage and faster processors.