Material Things of Which the Younger Generation Has No Idea

Post Reply New Topic

Here's one for less than $20: http://amzn.to/2iy4qjq

70's kids and older, it looks like.

Let's see...

TVs with only 50-ish channels, which is next to nothing now. And TV remotes that pretty much only had the number buttons on them and nothing else (remotes these days are baffling).

Dot-matrix printers, with the paper that had the holes on the side. I rather miss these.

Computers that ran under DOS. No Windows, just DOS. And to turn them off, you didnt tell it to "shut down". You hit the power switch, which was often this big thing that made a THUNK noise when you switched it.

Actual physical disks for said computers. You had to be really careful with them. The computer made all sorts of loud whirring and honking sounds while loading or saving via the disks and it wasnt a fast process. And files over 1.4 megabytes were A: too huge to fit on the disks, and B: non-existent, back then (because they couldnt possibly fit anywhere). A megabyte was freaking enormous.

Car windows where you actually had to ROLL them up with a handle. This was annoying.

VHS or Beta tapes.

Rewinder machines for those tapes.

56k modems. Even louder and with more random honking and beeping than a disk drive.

CRT screens. They were huge.

our family had those for the longest time. for me, it was less time fiddling through channels and more time actually watching what i liked.

choice can be paralyzing, and i wasn't picky.

it's funny when my dad comments on my "arcane" video game controller, and swiftly goes to using this monstrosity:

discwashers.

^^ Misery, yes! (Though I remember having only 5 channels.) Oh, this is a strange experience. How quickly we can forget things that we once saw, and even cared about, every day.

How about TVs that had no remote controls whatsoever? You had to actually stand up, walk across the room, and turn a dial! Black and white TVs....we only had one in color because they were more expensive. When I was little, a lot of classic re-runs that were on had been taped in black and white. It could be so frustrating trying to tune in to a local channel sometimes. Working the antennas made one look as if they were on a Nordic Track before Nordic Tracks even existed.

I remember we had one TV that was portable, proportioned like a boom box--a very heavy one--with an actual handle on top and something like a 5" screen.

Last edited by KimD on 27 Dec 2016, 9:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

The younger generation has no idea about having to get up to change channels on a TV.

Or having to trudge a record player all over the place in order to play records.

Or having to wait the whole weekend before being able to withdraw money from a bank.

Or having to carry around "passbooks" to withdraw money; if you lost your "passbook," you were out of luck for a while.

manual transmissions!!

did this all the time.

granted...our TVs did have remotes, they just refused to work to the point where just getting up was easier.

i got frustrated when i went to my aunt's house and saw their TVs had no buttons.

78 rpm records
dictabelts
recording horns

On one of my temp jobs in the 1980s, I used a Dictaphone. They don't exist anymore.

Have any of you under the age of 25 ever used a typewriter?

Or a dial (rotary) phone?

Or had a phone number with letters in it?

ear horns

Fred Flintstone had one of those----as an old man who slept 20 years like Rip Van Winkle.

^^^on that subject, animation cells [everything is digital nowadays].

also, mastoidectomy scars.

I remember nearly ALL of the items people posted here!

Long ago, tennis balls were white. I don't remember that, as I didn't watch tennis seriously until about ten years ago.

large console radios and stereos

yes. and yes.

granted, i haven't needed to use them, because there were alternatives, but i have written passages with a typewriter (my HS junior year english teacher had one in his class) and i know how to use a rotary phone as well.