'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

Re:Atari 2600 Expert Here

[cayenne8]

I remember walking up to the gate at the airport to see folks off, or to wait for them to arrive.

I remember when there was no TSA, I remember when there wasn't even a metal detector.

I remember in high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in the racks behind their seats of their pickup trucks IN the school parking lot, because they had been hunting before classes started.....

I remember kids (myself) playing freely in the neighborhood and beyond 100% unsupervised ...which was the norm for all kids.

I remember being able to feel quite safe going for day trips across the MX border in Nogales and such places, and not fearing a drug killing might get you, at worst, you might drink too much tequila and come home with a black velvet Elvis picture.

I remember when you used to say "Thank You" to someone, they would replay with "You're Welcome"...instead of "no problem".

I remember when you used to buy something in the US, and it didn't take you 15 fucking minutes to find the "English" version of the instructions.

I remember growing up, and in games, there were winners and losers....and ONLY the winners got the trophy.