100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

This is funny :-)

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’


Computers and Videogaming

18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.


The Internet
36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.


Gadgets
57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.


Everything Else
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. 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
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

Link

41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.

I wish this was a thing of the past. Seems like about every other month someone drops one of these dinasaurs on my front porch. Then I have to go and put it in the recycling bin.

5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.

You all won't believe this but I still have a 17 inch CRT monitor. It works perfectly. The monitor just won't die.

19. The scream of a modem connecting.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

They forgot to put dial-up, so I guess these two will do.

98. Omni Magazine

I miss this magazine.

Great list! Brought back many memories.... Here are a few:

Winding your watch
Roller skate keys
Jiffy Pop Popcorn made on the stove
TV Dinners where you heated the oven to 350° and peeled back the foil over the dessert
25 cent McDonald's hamburgers
23 cents for a gallon of gas
Drinking water out of the garden hose (I can't believe we gladly pay $1.25 for a bottle of water!!!!)
Penny candy and 5 cent candy bars
Pay phones or old fashioned phone booths
Rotary dial phones
Party lines
Not having to dial area codes to phone numbers
Phone numbers based on your address (Forest Hills 3529)
Not having any such thing as a Zip Code
Listening to the "clunk-clunk" of an 8-track tape changing tracks in the middle of a song.
Not having Fluoride in your toothpaste
Not having such a thing as "Dental Floss"
Not having seat belts in cars (or air bags, for that matter)
Chrome bumpers on cars - that were real bumpers
Disappearing from the house all day in the summer, just as long as you were home by suppertime
Not having to come in the house in the evening until the streetlights came on
Kids having their own paper route
Kids selling things from door-to-door for school or scouts
Having to go to the bank to cash a check or to make deposits
Not having to wear a helmet to roller skate or to ride a bike
One speed bikes. If you were really cool, you had a 3-speed
Making your own skateboard from roller skate trucks and a board

Any others?

Thought of some more:

Having only 3 channels on the TV
TV shows that advertised that they were "In Color"
AM radio
Transistor Radios
"Pong"
Pinball Machines
Cartoons only on Saturday Morning
Bringing your records to a school dance or a friends party
Having to wear rubber overshoes in the rain
Keds and PF Flyers (You could run faster and jump higher!)
Not having air conditioning in the summer
Airlines using rotary-piston propeller planes
Transoceanic passenger ships
Walking to school (2.5 miles) uphill both ways in the snow

Kind of gives you an idea of how old I really am!!

drive-in theater

tphuey wrote:Cartoons only on Saturday Morning

Does anybody remember those short musical cartoons that would come out on Saturday about the constitution, the bill of rights, verbs and nouns, stuff like that?

libri wrote:Does anybody remember those short musical cartoons that would come out on Saturday about the constitution, the bill of rights, verbs and nouns, stuff like that?

Schoolhouse Rock! Have the whole collection on VHS. Another technology that has come and gone.

Interplanet Janet was a favorite!

^ Yeah, that's the one.

Using a slide rule for calculations
typewriters
dramas and comedies on the radio

Dripping Spurs Fan wrote:typewriters

What are those?

libri wrote:

Dripping Spurs Fan wrote:typewriters

What are those?

I still have my old portable.

libri wrote:

tphuey wrote:Cartoons only on Saturday Morning

Does anybody remember those short musical cartoons that would come out on Saturday about the constitution, the bill of rights, verbs and nouns, stuff like that?

I loved school house rock and still remember most of them

I used an old workbook for some word problems yesterday and had to spend 10 minutes explaining to 8th graders what floppy disks and cassette tapes are...............

^ Now that's funny! What grade do you teach again?