'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter (theatlantic.com)

Alexis C. Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic: There's a question going around on Twitter, courtesy of the writer Matt Whitlock: "Without revealing your actual age, what's something you remember that if you told a younger person they wouldn't understand?" This simple query has received, at this date, 18,000 responses. Here is just a tiny selection: A/S/L, pagers, manual car windows, "be kind, please rewind", "Waiting by the radio for my song to come on so I could record it on a cassette tape", floppy disks, the smell of purple mimeograph ink, WordPerfect, busy signals, paper maps, Winamp, smoking in the hospital, the card catalogue. Our favorite response, "The remote to change the channel on the TV was attached to a box that was attached to the TV", which elicited a response, "What about the remote that was really a clicker... In that it clicked like a frog toy",

Comments

first

[bigger]

Remember when calling 'first' was cool?

remote

[Anonymous Coward]

I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!

Re:What's going on here?

[pjt33]

It could be worse. We could be all about to die permanently.

Re:What's going on here?

[clovis]

What is this, the yearbook?

Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?

You are dead. All humans at dead. You think you're remembering this crap because we're doing brain dumps from the parts we found.
We're trying to figure out what went wrong with the design.

Clicker?

[Shotgun]

When I was a child I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!!

Try explaining BBSes to kids

[grasshoppa]

"It's like the internet, only local"

"Why? Couldn't you connect to a BBS across the country?"

"Well, you could, but you'd be hit with long distance charges like you wouldn't believe"

"Long distance charges?"

"Damn it, get off my lawn"