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.’
- 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.
Computers and Videogaming
- 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.
The Internet
- 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.
- 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.
Gadgets
Everything Else
