100 things your kids may never know about

Christine found this post on Wired.com, and it’s a total flashback on technology, and how fast things have changed. What’s funny is that there is a chance that some people reading this may not know what these things are either.

Here are a few of my favorites from the list:

  1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
  2. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager
  3. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
  4. MiniDisc !!
  5. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations.
  6. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one
  7. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
  8. The scream of a modem connecting.
  9. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
  10. DOS
  11. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
  12. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
  13. Finding out information from an encyclopedia
  14. Doing bank business only when the bank is open
  15. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
  16. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
  17. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
  18. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment
  19. Sending that film away to be processed
  20. Rotary-dial telephones
  21. Answering machines.
  22. Pay phones
  23. Phones with actual bells in them
  24. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart

The whole last section is pretty funny so I just pasted it:

Everything Else

  • Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
  • Remembering someone’s phone number.
  • Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
  • Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
  • Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
  • LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
  • Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
  • Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
  • Neat handwriting.
  • The days before the nanny state.
  • Starbuck being a man.
  • Han shoots first.
  • “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
  • Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
  • Trig tables and log tables.
  • “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
  • Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
  • Swimming pools with diving boards.
  • Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
  • Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger
  • A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
  • Having to manually unlock a car door.
  • Writing a check.
  • Looking out the window during a long drive.
  • Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
  • Cash.
  • Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
  • Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
  • Omni Magazine
  • A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
  • When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.
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    seetee on July 24, 2009 | Filed Under Tech

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