Boomer Generation

I'm sure there have been other generations that have felt this way, but I can't help thinking about the explosion of consumer goods in my lifetime. I was thinking about this because I just spent $2.29 to buy a package of gum. My daughter says this is her favorite gum and I'm thinking, sure it is, 'cause I'm paying for it. I then remarked that $2.29 for gum was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. So I was thinking about candy and the like, and I remember when Sweetarts appeared. They were the first "intense" candy, though they seem pretty tame now.

So it got me thinking about other stuff that's arrived within the bounds of my memory. In music playback, for instance, I've seen the introduction of the cassette tape (I had a portable reel-to-reel deck when I was a kid- fun, but messy if you dropped the tape), the portable cassette player, the compact disk and its portable player, and now MP3 and the related digital technologies. I got my first computer in 1986 and I was the first person I knew who had one (same for the pocket calculator in 1972).