Not sure I agree with your disagreement; I'm thinking the biggest practical differences in youth would be non-computing and a generation or two earlier - indoor light, central heating, hot water on demand, electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners and motor cars and so on. I don't know which generation it would be but my mom's upbringing in a house with only fires for heating the house and water, and my grandma spending most of her life on cooking and cleaning and my other grandma being from the "make do and mend" tradition of making their own clothes and adjusting hand-me-down clothes, to a world now where sewing is a hobby and household chores much less effort seems a much more significant change than having a TV or not.
Or the other way, a generation later; your dad - TVs did exist in the 1950s; Richard Feynman was born in 1918 and his memoirs include fixing radios as a young lad around 1930; that your dad had no radio in the 1950s isn't because they didn't exist, and he could have raised you with no TV and no radio too. My grandad, my dad, and to a small extent myself, grew up in a world where electronics and radios were things made of discrete components which you could build and repair, where chemicals (including explosive things) were things you used in everyday life, could buy from the chemist, played with if you wanted. We all grew up with schooling based on books and paper. At least my dad and I used cassette tapes, film cameras, clockwork oven timers, digital and analogue watches, push-button TVs and radios, microscopes, Meccano, and a world where going down the street left you completely uncontactable.
I don't have children, but if I did they would grow up in a world where the only device is a computer, the computer works by magic and is not repairable. By that I mean all the light and sound bleeping toys of the 1980s, audio tape players, CD players, VCRs, film cameras, timers, are all subsumed into computers. Drawing is a thing you do on a cheap tablet, constructing is something you do on Minecraft, research is something you do on Google, and you always have cellphone signal and there's always a world on the other end of it never a ring and no answer. Games are computerised, drones exist mostly to bring a video image back to a smartphone, everything is or has a camera, all storage for audio, video, pictures is digital and copious and portable, all communication is wireless, cellular and ubiquitous. And we grew up in a world where talking to someone else outside the local area was rare - a phonecall was a reasonably expensive luxury, and you would only phone people you knew or companies.
Your son watches star wars, but he doesn't exist in a world where if he misses Star Wars at the movie theatre he has literally no way to watch it until it's out on tape. In the 1980s and 1990s only my cousins had a VCR and they only had a handful of films, many recorded from TV. Now films are everywhere - in second hand shops, on Amazon to be delivered next day for $2, on download sites, on YouTube, on NetFlix and Prime and Hulu; he lives in a world where Star Wars is roughly indistinguishable from any other moving picture available on a screen - that it's a movie isn't anything special. Recipes no longer come in books they come in Google results. Games no longer come on boards and cards they come on screens. They don't have to, but in our youths they almost couldn't. Now they do by default.
I say the biggest impact of computers to date is always on communication, which I understand was earlier in the USA than in the UK, but for me dates to 2000 exactly; that's the time when talking to other people outside the local area on forums and IRC became normal and commonplace, the time when downloading information took over from other forms of obtaining it. It didn't have to be fast, it only had to be unmetred and not disrupt others using the phoneline. After that, smartphones and always-on-data from circa 2012, always on became always on you.
> practical differences in youth would be non-computing and a generation or two earlier
I agree with that one, but that was not part of the discussion.
Maybe TV's existed in the '50, but in the rural areas of Flanders, not a lot of people had one.
For me, the move from no electronics to electronics, seems bigger than the move from electronics to everything is computer. That you play a VCR tape or mp4 isn't that different. That you play a cassette or mp3 is also not that different. It's details compared to not being able to play anything at all.
Or the other way, a generation later; your dad - TVs did exist in the 1950s; Richard Feynman was born in 1918 and his memoirs include fixing radios as a young lad around 1930; that your dad had no radio in the 1950s isn't because they didn't exist, and he could have raised you with no TV and no radio too. My grandad, my dad, and to a small extent myself, grew up in a world where electronics and radios were things made of discrete components which you could build and repair, where chemicals (including explosive things) were things you used in everyday life, could buy from the chemist, played with if you wanted. We all grew up with schooling based on books and paper. At least my dad and I used cassette tapes, film cameras, clockwork oven timers, digital and analogue watches, push-button TVs and radios, microscopes, Meccano, and a world where going down the street left you completely uncontactable.
I don't have children, but if I did they would grow up in a world where the only device is a computer, the computer works by magic and is not repairable. By that I mean all the light and sound bleeping toys of the 1980s, audio tape players, CD players, VCRs, film cameras, timers, are all subsumed into computers. Drawing is a thing you do on a cheap tablet, constructing is something you do on Minecraft, research is something you do on Google, and you always have cellphone signal and there's always a world on the other end of it never a ring and no answer. Games are computerised, drones exist mostly to bring a video image back to a smartphone, everything is or has a camera, all storage for audio, video, pictures is digital and copious and portable, all communication is wireless, cellular and ubiquitous. And we grew up in a world where talking to someone else outside the local area was rare - a phonecall was a reasonably expensive luxury, and you would only phone people you knew or companies.
Your son watches star wars, but he doesn't exist in a world where if he misses Star Wars at the movie theatre he has literally no way to watch it until it's out on tape. In the 1980s and 1990s only my cousins had a VCR and they only had a handful of films, many recorded from TV. Now films are everywhere - in second hand shops, on Amazon to be delivered next day for $2, on download sites, on YouTube, on NetFlix and Prime and Hulu; he lives in a world where Star Wars is roughly indistinguishable from any other moving picture available on a screen - that it's a movie isn't anything special. Recipes no longer come in books they come in Google results. Games no longer come on boards and cards they come on screens. They don't have to, but in our youths they almost couldn't. Now they do by default.
I say the biggest impact of computers to date is always on communication, which I understand was earlier in the USA than in the UK, but for me dates to 2000 exactly; that's the time when talking to other people outside the local area on forums and IRC became normal and commonplace, the time when downloading information took over from other forms of obtaining it. It didn't have to be fast, it only had to be unmetred and not disrupt others using the phoneline. After that, smartphones and always-on-data from circa 2012, always on became always on you.