Yes, times have changed.
I was part of the first TV generation, growing up in the 1950's. My father was so proud of our first TV that he sawed a hole in the living room wall and put the TV behind it so it looked like a view screen out of science fiction. It was black and white and probably an 18 incher. There were just three channels to choose from. I was fascinated with The Mickey Mouse Club.
Our phone had a rotary dialer. I first learned my phone number as YE-2-8282828282... eights and twos until I heard a phone ringing on the far end. And if you didn't make it to the phone in time whoever called would remain a mystery, there was no answering machine or caller ID. Making a long distance call meant dialing the operator and asking her to make the connection.
My brother and I were rovers. There was a creek in a wild forested gully a couple blocks from our house and we were over there constantly. We learned so much about bugs and plants, rocks and water, and about ourselves -- what we could do and what we couldn't. My mother fretted because the creek was nicknamed Polio Creek. I pointed out to her that we had been vaccinated for polio at school -- our generation was the first. She still fretted -- worried about bums instead -- but she didn't stop us. And this is an example of technology changing attitudes. Today a mom letting kids rove like we did would incur the wrath of busybody neighbors and Protective Services. This is an example of a surprise consequence of prosperity -- as our society has gotten more prosperous we can afford sillier and sillier worries.
For Christmas vacations we flew in propeller powered planes to far away places like Florida and the Bahamas. At night the engines would look like they were on fire because the carbon monoxide in the exhaust would produce an eerie faint flame. And getting on the plane was as simple as showing you had a ticket and climbing up the passenger stairs they rolled up to the plane.
In high school in the 1960's I was one of the advanced students who got to program an IBM 360 with punch cards. And on a plant tour I got to hold a glass jar filled with powdered Plutonium! Another student's father was manufacturing ultra high vacuum chambers and somehow the plutonium was useful for that.
In the 1970's while I was at MIT I got one of the first water beds. The girls I dated loved it almost as much as I did. The state-of-the-art computers were now minicomputers and had table-sized hard disk drives attached. Some MIT hackers (a word with good connotations in the MIT community) invented Space War, one of the first computer games to use real-time video and game controllers.
Times have changed.