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100 Things your kids may never know about.
This is a great list.
Audio-Visual Entertainment
# Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
# Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
# Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
# The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
# Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
# Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
# High-speed dubbing.
# 8-track cartridges.
# Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
# Betamax tapes.
# MiniDisc.
# Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
# Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
# Shortwave radio.
# 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
# Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
# That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
Computers and Videogaming
# Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
# The scream of a modem connecting.
# The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
# 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
# Using jumpers to set IRQs.
# DOS.
# Terminals accessing the mainframe.
# Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
# Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
# Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
# Counting in kilobytes.
# Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
# Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
# Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
# Joysticks.
# Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
# Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
# Recording a song in a studio.
The Internet
# NCSA Mosaic.
# Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
# Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
# Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
# Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
# Phone books and Yellow Pages.
# Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
# Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
# Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
# Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
# Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
# Archie searches.
# Gopher searches.
# Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
# Privacy.
# The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
# Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
# Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
# The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
# The time before PC networks.
# When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.
Gadgets
# Typewriters.
# Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
# Sending that film away to be processed.
# Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
# CB radios.
# Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
# Rotary-dial telephones.
# Answering machines.
# Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
# Pay phones.
# Phones with actual bells in them.
# Fax machines.
# Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
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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