What technologies from your youth do you need to explain to your kids or grandkids?

[bcla]

I’m looking at what my kid is using these days and it’s a far cry from my childhood. When I was a kid, many technologies were decades old with maybe evolutionary changes.

TVs still resemble older TVs. Kind of. Someone from the 50s would understand how a 70s/80s TV worked. But now rxplaining a CRT is one thing. Explaining a vacuum tube set and roof mounted antenna might not be so easy. I remember the screen showing lines where my dad would slap the side until they went away or we made a trip to Radio Shack for a replacement tube.

As a kid in the 70s my prized possession was a portable phonograph player. It wasn’t high quality, but it would play my Six Million Dollar Man records, as well as the multi disc set of Disney music we got with several Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box tops. Later on we had a cheap cassette deck and even a hand me down 8-track player from my uncle. The records were getting harder to find in the 90s as CDs dominated. Cassettes were still doing pretty well for mixtapes before recordable CDs became common. Most cars had tape decks. I guess downloads have taken over, and my kid might see my old collection of CDs and cassettes and wonder what they are. My kid asked if anyone could scream loud enough to break glass, and I was trying to explain old Memorex commercials.

Not sure about explaining what a car “tune up” would be since pretty much carburetors are gone from modern cars.

 

[low-key]

this isn't technology but since this is a Disney board, I feel I would have to expain the vaule of an "E" TICKET.

 

[firefly_ris]

Rotary phone.

 

[fly girl]

Typewriter with no autocorrect or squiggly line to let you know you misspelled a word. Along that line, correction tape!

Cassette tapes. You liked a song, you bought the whole album. Unless you patiently waited to record it off the radio, praying the DJ didn't chime in before the song ended.

Beeper. You could only see a phone number of someone who wanted to talk ... yes TALK to, not text, you. You had to then find a pay phone (that is a whole other device) to call them back.

Pay phone. Before everyone had a phone on them, you had to find a public telephone that you barely wanted to touch because it was never cleaned. That was a pay phone. And you had to stick coins to get time to chat. And when you called someone and they were talking to someone else, you got a busy signal.

 

[firefly_ris]

Cassette tapes. You liked a song, you bought the whole album. Unless you patiently waited to record it off the radio, praying the DJ didn't chime in before the song ended.

Ugh that drove me crazy! I had some great mix tapes I painstakingly made and then the radio DJ loved the sound of their own voice too much.

 

[RedAngie]

Phones-party lines shared with a stranger. Numbers that had a two letter exchange prefix (EM 5-3671).

Cars-you needed to wind a crank to open or close windows. Plus those little triangular vent windows in the front doors.

A record player that ONLY played 45 rpm singles.

Reel to reel tape recorder.

 

[chickapin parterre]

Rotary phone.

my ex-wife still has a rotary phone, the nephews would come over in the 90s at christmas and just marvel at the sound and motion.

 

[DisLiss]

My youngest has never known actual television channels. We've only had streaming services in the 8 years he's been around. When we watch TV elsewhere he's so funny. We were in a hotel a few months back and a movie was HBO on that he liked, but it was about 20 minutes in when he found it, and he couldn't understand why he couldn't start it from the beginning. Then he wanted us to pause it so he could get a snack and we had to tell him that wasn't possible either. He was flabbergasted!

 

[chickapin parterre]

rabbit ears on the TV....though now we just send a stripped coaxel cable up the 5 feet pole.

 

[barkley]

i was just explaining yesterday to my 22 year old about using carbon (and praying it didn't slip or slide) if we needed multiple copies of a typewritten paper back in the day. along the same lines dh and i were wondering if younger people today understand why the students in 'fast times at ridgemont high' are smelling the test papers that are handed out to them (ah.......the smell of freshly mimeographed paper).

not nesc. technology but a friend returned to college recently after decades gone-kept looking for course catalogs so she could figure out what classes to take only to find they no longer exist in 'hard copy'.

it was a dinosaur when i worked on it but a telephone switchboard-back in the 70's/early 80's it was still the way the doctors in the area i lived did after hours calls. i also worked for a company in the 80's that had a 60's era keypunch machine. the thing was a monster and between the size/noise it generated it took up a whole room. my kids think i'm over 100 years old b/c they only see switchboards on stuff like old westerns, and the only thing they've ever seen anything similar to my old keypunch machine in is the 50's movie 'desk set'.

 

[bcla]

this isn't technology but since this is a Disney board, I feel I would have to expain the vaule of an "E" TICKET.

I can ask my parents where the old ticket books are. I think this one was from before I was born:

https://d23.com/e-ticket-memories-five-favorite-facts-about-ticket-books/

 

[firefly_ris]

Oh, how about overhead projectors.

 

[bcla]

it was a dinosaur when i worked on it but a telephone switchboard-back in the 70's/early 80's it was still the way the doctors in the area i lived did after hours calls. i also worked for a company in the 80's that had a 60's era keypunch machine. the thing was a monster and between the size/noise it generated it took up a whole room. my kids think i'm over 100 years old b/c they only see switchboards on stuff like old westerns, and the only thing they've ever seen anything similar to my old keypunch machine in is the 50's movie 'desk set'.

I have memories as a kid playing games on some sort of minicomputer accessed through Teletype terminal at a local science museum. An hour would cost a certain amount, but as a member I had a coupon for two hours every each year. The one thing I liked was printing out banner with a phrase or perhaps an image like Snoopy made of ASCII characters. The sound of that room was pretty loud. I would start my printout and then leave the room to escape the noise.

 

[bcla]

Oh, how about overhead projectors.

We used those in college. I guess in a similar vein, slides and films. In school we used to watch 16mm films and I remember which teachers were better at getting an old Bell & Howell projector to work. It was a lot of education films, but one teacher managed to get a copy of the Star Wars spoof Hardware Wars.

 

[Mrs. Ciz]

Microfiche

I tell my students all about how I had to use it when I teach the research paper.

 

[bcla]

Rotary phone.

I still have one in my house. It's a black Western Electric wall mount with direct wire connections and not an RJ11 jack. The previous owner left it behind. It worked when we got service from AT&T but no longer has any connection since we changed to VoIP. If we pick it up there's still some line noise, so it's strangely enough still connected to the phone line power.

 

[bcla]

Microfiche

I tell my students all about how I had to use it when I teach the research paper.

We had microfiche and/or microfilm rolls in our school and public libraries. I remember the sound those things made. There are new machines to read old archives, and they have cool features like scanners and maybe printers.

 

[whatname]

Dial up Internet and having to have the computer plugged in to the internet.

Cordless phone so you don’t have to stretch the cord as far as possible for some privacy. Not that anyone talks on the phone anymore.

cameras with film and having to wait to get them developed. I remember going to the mall and doing the one hour processing. That was fast! And they scrolled out at a window, so everyone could see them.

 

[bcla]

Cassette tapes. You liked a song, you bought the whole album. Unless you patiently waited to record it off the radio, praying the DJ didn't chime in before the song ended.

I recorded off the air, but that wasn't quite as reliable as making actual mixtapes once my parents bought me a cheap rack system. I made mixtapes off of records, CDs, and sometimes other cassettes.

Anyone remember Personics? It was a custom mixtape that was available at some record stores like Tower Records. One just ordered songs from a catalog where they were stored on a master set of CDs that had already been prepared with Dolby B noise reduction. It would play the source and record the tape at maybe 10x speed, which was similar to commercial duplicators.

They had this weird radio commercial where someone is interviewed about his choices like he's some sort of music producer. The question was about the juxtaposition of Master and Servant and maybe Stand By Me.

 

[MithrilMaiden]

cameras with film and having to wait to get them developed. I remember going to the mall and doing the one hour processing. That was fast! And they scrolled out at a window, so everyone could see them.

Hey, it's still a thing. It just usually takes 24 hours, not one, and us film photographers tend to be picky about who we let develop our stuff. I'll either mail it to a higher end online place, or, more likely, develop it myself.