Material Things of Which the Younger Generation Has No Idea

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There are still vans around where you have to close the sliding door.

Phonograph record players, unless you're a rap deejay.

Same with vinyl "records."

Having to wait for the Ma Bell technician to install your phone.

Renting phones from Ma Bell.

Rabbit Ears.

Difficulty in getting UHF channels.

black-and-white TV's

movie rental stores like blockbuster.

tvs made of fake wood.

tvs made to look like a piece of furniture.

whale oil lamps

donning your helmet and having your sword sharpened, kissing your wife and children goodbye as you set off to retake the holy lands, as ordered to by the pope....man, those were the days.

our local blockbusters a few blocks down held onto life longer than most, so i was pretty distraught when i saw they were finally going under in 2012. (2013??)

i'd wanted to snag a cheap copy of emperor before they closed their doors for good, but someone else already beat me to it. that was the last movie i ever rented there.

at least there's still the public library!

wood-paneled walls in people's houses.

swing axle suspensions.

side-draft carburetors

Erm ... wind-up gramophones?

A big black smiling cat wall-clock, ticking off the minutes loudly with its swinging tail.

My brother has those in his house-on-stilts in Kill Devil Hills! I love it.



I had one as a kid, though it was the '70s, so it certainly was retro by then.

How about football (American) broadcasts without the scrimmage, first down, and field goal target lines superimposed on the screen? I admit that I prefer having them there, though when I reflect on the past, I feel like I'm cheating somehow.

Dedicated digital cameras (not as old hat as film cameras, but camera phones have vastly overshadowed them)
VHS camcorders
Three wheel ATVs (I think they quit making them for safety reasons )
Video game magazines
Null modem cables
RF modulators
Bag phones
Portable CD players
FRS radios

I've used all of these things at least once, with the exception of VHS camcorders.

40 hours a week and a car with a wife and kids.

We normally get 10 hours a week, a spinning piece of crap with four wheels if we are lucky and an ex and child support.

Those Polaroid cameras where the picture would come out as soon as you took it, but you had to wait several minutes for it to develop. Cameras were so BIG in those days. I recently saw an ad for one on Youtube that someone said looked like a Playstation 3, or something.

And then there was the video cameras. My parents once had one where you just put a standard VCR tape in it and then start filming away. My brother and I played around with it quite a bit but our parents never did and ended up selling it.

tires with white sidewalls being standard.

unless you go to hotrod shows. but those, combined with the smooth or spoked rims, to me they have a lot more personality than the flat and wide rims of today.

hearing "you've got mail" when receiving an email.

"Keyboard" wired cable remote


Forgot what it was called but we had one VCR in the living with a wire connected to the basement TV

Kids react to 80's computers