100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

Saw this on Twitter today:
100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

I thought it'd be fun to go through this list and see what I remember or know. Click below to see the list...



Audio-Visual Entertainment

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



Computers and Videogaming

18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long YUP
19. The scream of a modem connecting. YUP
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer YUP
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage. YUP
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs. YUP I never actually had to do this, but I learned about it.
23. DOS. YUP
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe. YUP
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black. YUP
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. Nope
    
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID. Nope
28. Counting in kilobytes. YUP
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade. Nope
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time. YUP
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load. Nope
32. Joysticks. YUP
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive. YUP
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk. YUP
35. Recording a song in a studio. Nope



The Internet

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



Gadgets

57. Typewriters. YUP
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk? YUP I remember having to use the flash bulb strips
    
59. Sending that film away to be processed. YUP
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you. YUP with negatives!
    
61. CB radios. YUP I know what they are, never used one.
    
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away. YUP That can be prevented with the Atlas or road map from #38
    
63. Rotary-dial telephones. YUP
64. Answering machines. YUP still have one.
    
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart YUP
66. Pay phones. YUP
67. Phones with actual bells in them. YUP
68. Fax machines. Why is this included? They still make these, and people use them.
    
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them. YUP they still make these.
    



Everything Else

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