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

Posted by msmash on from the man's-search-for-meaning dept.

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",

5 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pagers: doctors and first responders still use them. Some work via satellite, meaning there are no network dead spots.

    Pretty sure I've been in a car with manual windows (and manual transmission, even!) in the last year.

    Busy signals? Pretty common when calling a business -- once there's a call on call waiting and one on the line, 3rd caller gets a busy.

    Paper maps -- maybe road maps aren't as common, but any hiker typically gets a paper maps of a park, and maps of buildings like museums are often given out.

    1. Re:Really? by vux984 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Its not that a PBX would be too costly... its "why bother"? Its not even on their radar as a 'problem' that needs 'fixing'.

  2. My parents' remote control by Snotnose · · Score: 5, Informative

    Whichever of us kids was closest to the TV.

  3. Re:Rotary dial on a party line... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've used a manual phone as recently as the late 1990s. It didn't have a crank -- you picked it up and waited for the operator to go on the line. It looked like a normal 1970s desk phone with no dial.

    Granted, this was in a rural part of Eastern Europe, not North America.

  4. Re:first by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 2, Informative

    VLC Player. Does video as well and has a plugin for most formats.