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'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",
Remember when calling 'first' was cool?
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.
Technology my tail! What about things changed by our caring, loving, and omniscient government? When traveling — by air or train — without registering with authorities was possible? When being mistreated at the airport would cause the mistreater to be disciplined, rather than the victim — arrested?
When one could buy health insurance for about $140/month (just over $200 in today's money)? Remember?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Whichever of us kids was closest to the TV.
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.
Oh crap, it just hit me, are we all about to die?
On a geological time scale, we're all about to die momentarily.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It sounds stupid, but sometimes I honestly miss being bored. When you got bored you got creative to keep yourself entertained. That sort of creativity by necessity has died with the rise of the Internet and 24x7 continual entertainment. Kids growing up today will never know that sort of creativity.
I also miss being able to go completely off the grid. If you wanted to get away from everything (and everyone) you actually could. Now days there's really no easy way to do that. You're always under surveillance and you're always tethered to 'the system' somehow (your phone, your credit cards, etc.).
The last thing I really miss is having conversations with random people. Yeah that seems strange to say, but 'Back in the day' when you were waiting in a line or at a bus stop or something, you'd generally make friendly conversation with the person next to you, if just to pass the time. Today no one actually talks to each other anymore, everyone has their face down in a phone (I'm guilty of it myself) or have their headphones on. We're losing the art of human interaction. Hell, I've been with a group of friends who were actually texting each other rather than talking even though we were all right there. It was both eye opening and sad. Those days are gone I suppose.
It could be worse. We could be all about to die permanently.
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.
Slashdot has become Facebook.
I can't count the number of times I've seen this question/meme on my FB newsfeed.
And yes, I can count, I was a math major waaaay back when before I became a CS major.
It's not Facebook or anything in particular.
South Park sort of nailed it on the head with their Memberberries episodes.
There's been a huge wave of nostalgia going on in the last few years. Remakes, reboots, alternate universe settings, etc.
We got remakes, reboots or sequels for Star Wars, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, Jumanji, etc.
We got classic videogame consoles from Nintendo and others.
I think Agent Smith was sort of telling the truth in The Matrix when he said the peak of human evolution was around the mid 1990's.
After that, we had businesses, marketing and governments take over everything, so everything is depressing and sucks, thus the urge to recall the "simpler modern times" is very strong... and businesses are marketing the hell out of it while the government is making notes of who's eating memberberries.
#DeleteFacebook
When I was a child I WAS the remote, you insensitive clod!!
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"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"
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
EPROMs you had to erase under ultraviolet light
Keying in the bootloader on your minicomputer using front panel switches
Taking your card deck to the "computer center", then waiting a few hours to go get your printout
Turning off the TV and seeing the picture collapse to a little bright dot that slowly fades away
Mylar punch tape for those programs you either couldn't afford to lose or that you loaded over and over and over again
Wall-mounted punch tape rewinders
Computers with a vast array of front-panel light/buttons representing registers, which you could alter by pressing them
Calculators that had stations wired to a base unit via half-inch-thick cables, and that cost more than your car
Guys who'd come to your house with dairy products and leave them on your doorstep
Drive-in movie theaters