100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

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 a audio tape using a personal stereo - see what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit - I remember it being a massive event when the UK got its 4th 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 todays 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 bork this concept)
14. Shortwave radio
15. 3D movies meaning red/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 Video Gaming

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. Only shopping 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 old wheel, window or door
76. Waiting for the television network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theatre
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 of 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 of break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in the UK)
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

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Notes

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