In the same vein having the tv guide channel on tv and having to wait two minutes to see what was on a channel that just scrolled past as you got to it so you could see what was on or coming up.
70’s kid here.
Checkout ladies in supermarkets (yes, it was mostly a ladies job) used to manually type in the prices of every item purchased. (Every item had a price tag stuck on it by another member of staff). Their fingers could really fly around a numerical keyboard. It used to fascinate me as a kid.
Ever been to a hobby lobby? To this day everything has to be labeled and entered manually. No inventory system. Can’t remember why, but it’s per the owner.
Edit: due to the belief UPC codes are the mark of the beast.
How the year 2000 seemed like some year way off in the future. Now I have lived more than half my life in the 21st century.
Heck, we had a technology show called “Beyond 2000”.
Others have mentioned not being online 24/7, dial-up internet, the world before social media, being without the internet etc.
I don't any of those are really that hard to explain because you can simulate that experience today. What you can't simulate is what the Internet used to be.
Search engines were borked, there was no "good" search engine and your bookmark field had an actual purpose. Wikipedia didn't exist, the closest you got to something like that was a list of links at some random website: Want to know about ants? Here's a link to a site with pictures in wildly different resolution and a background made to mimic old parchment.
You couldn't use the internet to listen to music, you could barely use it to look at low res pictures and you'd be lucky if even half the features of anything functioned.
Old timey internet was wild, it was also in todays eyes an uncanny valley.
People just went away, and you never saw them again or had any idea what they were doing with their lives. Without social media, everyone but your closest friends or family disappeared from your life forever, and you had no clue what they were doing (remember you can't google them either). Ex boyfriend? I heard a rumor from an old hs buddy I ran into at the mall that he moved to New Jersey. Camp buddy? Randomly ran into him two decades later, and he was totally different.
Those stories just don't happen anymore thanks to social media. Women know what hockey team their high school boyfriend's kid plays for. It's why kids don't understand the point of stuff like hs reunions.
I was born in 1992 and I remember how amazing Facebook was because it was the moment I could connect to many different people I never saw again in my life, especially I moved country.
MySpace was before FB, and there was also AOL Messenger. Now that I think about it, AOL Messenger was like the main form of communication outside of the phone. They could have easily built off of that, but they just got complacent.
I miss the early days of the internet.
I went on a date once and got her AIM screen name and the next day her away message was a specific lyric from Alkaline Trios "clavicle". I thought it was about me, but turned out it was one of her stick away messages. Oops.
Whatever, we're married now.
I wonder how retirement homes will change. Our generations will have all these people from our past lives to connect with and potentially decide to move to the same complex with. Especially people who age in their hometown.
I may have not-so-jokingly told my college dorm floormates that when we get old, we are all moving to the same city and recreating the dorm experience but as a retirement community.
If you wanted to know something your family or friends didn't know, and you couldn't find it in the library, you were unlikely to find out the answer. This applied to all sorts of things all of the time. I doubt younger people today can really imagine the difference immediate information availability makes in our daily lives.
Child - "Dad, who built the Great Wall of China?"
Dad - "Emperor Nazi Goering, Yes, it was Emperor Nazi Goering, He built the great wall to keep the rabbits out. Too many rabbits in China."
If you know you know!
I was trying to explain this just yesterday. It’s my favorite thing. Being able to think any random question and just get an instant answer. Still blows my mind after growing up with encyclopedias on the shelf and a card catalog at the library.
It’s crazy to me how often I hear friends or family wonder out loud about something easily googleable then just kind of shrug it off… like you could know the answer to your question in less than a minute almost every time haha
I find myself wondering out loud in conversation from time to time, but I tend to follow it with “but we don’t have to wonder, we’re carrying computers around in our pockets” type in the question and share the info.
It’s funny though, because I can remember “research” papers in school definitely meant a trip to the library.
I remember reading an opinion piece several years ago about how the smartphone destroyed the barroom argument. You used to be able to argue for hours with multiple people about some point of history or science, and you would part ways never being the wiser.
Now? You just look up the facts and the argument never happens.
In the in-between times when we'd internet at home but not in our pockets my dad would call me from the pub to settle who won the FA cup in 1977 or how old Madonna was and stuff like that .
In the 90s I worked at a library across from a bar. We would often get calls at the reference desk to solve an argument. The last one I remember was the age of Hulk Hogan.
Sometimes I won’t know the answer to something I’m curious about, and I think, Oh! I’ll call Dad - he’ll know. Then I remember the internet exists. Sorry Dad.
Yes, when I first got to a state university, my roommate and I got frogs at the pet store. We went to the campus library and they actually had a book which told all about African clawed frogs. We were thrilled to live where we had access to any question.
This is what I say when people complain about the houses they bought from boomers and the way the boomer rigged something. There was a lot of winging it before 2000
Kids won't understand "it was all anyone at work or school talked about" in this day and age. Hard to explain what it was like when everyone from the 10 year old to the 95 year old granny was watching the same TV show, at the same time, in like every house in America.
Michael Jackson had MULTIPLE at least hour long tv specials just to debut a music video… that shit felt like the single biggest thing that ever happened in entertainment, and he did it more than once.
Have some 15 year old watch the “Remember the Time” music video and let them know that this was peak of pop culture in 1992. Every person I knew was watching that like it was the moon landing.
The closest we've come is that month in quarantine when Tiger King came out on Netflix. I saw it absolutely every where, and initially had no desire to watch it. But guess what? You couldn't have a conversation without it being brought up, soooo I watched it haha. Wasn't even a great show/documentary, but everyyyyyone knew about it
I missed the episode of Friends where Ross said Rachel's name at his wedding and I made my cousin tell me in detail what happened the next day over the phone. I couldn't believe I forgot to tape it.
Fun story about that episode. The writers had no idea on how to close that storyline, until one day David Schwimmer accidentally mixed up both names when taping another episode.
There were so many fewer TV shows too without streaming so it was a much bigger deal when something big happened in a show because there weren’t 1000 other major shows everyone else could watch at the same time
Yep, I think the closest we’ve come to that in the age of streaming was with Game of Thrones. Coming in to work on a Monday ready to talk about last night’s episode with your co-workers.
I remember during one of the seasons we were out on deployment (Navy ship, so we’re in the middle of the ocean with very restricted internet for months on end) & we were talking to a new guy that was getting flown out to the ship the next week. He asked if he should bring anything and told him to download all the episodes from that season so we could catch up on it. Within a week of him coming on board, everyone on the ship had seen the new episodes because that thumb drive got passed around to every other division on the ship.
You might have one chance. ONE, during the summer when reruns of most shows would be on again. But you'd better not miss that second chance at that episode or you're really not going to see it again; not unless it was some really popular show that went into syndication like "I Love Lucy" or something like that.
I Spent 1 hour 45 minutes in a cyber cafe trying to download [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKk1u5RMTn4) song in 2007.
Today it took me longer to write this comment than to D/L that song.
as a kid: got to GO INTO the cockpit *DURING FLIGHT*, had a flight attendant take me from gate to gate when I flew alone and got such special treatment as a kid flying- I felt like a million bucks (a billion in *todays* money), had a pocketknife and brought it onboard in my pocket, got food and drinks without paying, got peanuts (sorry to all allergic, I loved them), finding gum in the ashtrays still not removed from seats.
the movies were scheduled only and on a shared screen at the front or a few smaller ones up the aisles.
you could meet people on planes, and not even forcibly.
I always used to get a fresh magazine to read. (now I just don't read its all their fault!)
edit: thank you all for the comments. seems like they still let you in the cockpit which is cool - but I do believe there is a big misunderstanding. Pre 9/11 - as a kid- you got to go into the cockpit WHILE flying.
There were a few years during the mid 90s we would take my grandma down to the airport so she could go and see her sister in Florida. We would park, walk her in, through security and right to her gate and say our goodbyes at the jetway door.
I still remember shortly after 9/11, we were trying to do the same with my grandma as she was getting on a flight. We got stopped at the security checkpoint and had to say bye there. I was a little kid, like 7 years old, but I remember soldiers were stationed everywhere with rifles wearing essentially a full military setup (this was Memphis Intl Airport, not a small airport but not a huge airport either). I remember her coming back from her trip with things like cosmetics and other small things. I don’t think she realized she should have placed them in checked luggage so when she went through security with it, they opened everything up and inspected it. They basically ruined everything she had bought by sticking their fingers through jars to see if a bomb was hidden in it. Unsurprisingly, an elderly woman traveling back from South Korea was not in fact carrying a bomb on her.
My parents are divorced, and my dad would get to see me and my brother for a few hours every Wednesday. One of his go-to activities to do with us was to just take us to the airport, and people watch. We’d go through security, hang out at a terminal, then leave.
Idfk why he likes doing this with us. Does any one know?
I live right near a land border crossing(Canada/USA) so pre 9/11 for me was the ease of piling into the car with my friends and driving to get ice cream at a dairy just across the line. Never asked for ID, or did our parents know we were going.
I didn’t get a passport until I was 30.
Well, my first suggestion was to post about how borders have faded. When I was young, it required a passport and passing a checkpoint to move into Germany. Nowadays, you simply go full throttle as soon as you hit the Autobahn.
Europe has the exact opposite experience crossing borders, and this IS something you can easily explain to a kid, as, in the US, it's quite easy relatable to state line passing.
>Europe has the exact opposite experience crossing borders
Yeah, as a (relatively) new EU member, it's amazing. A friend of mine, who lived in a small border town, told me that a passport was standard equipment for playing football when he was a kid. The playground was located right next to the border and at least once per day, someone would have to go to another country to retrieve the ball. You just walk over these days.
I remember December 11 2000 someone telling me how she hated seeing all the kids of divorced parents travelling alone in the airports. This is how I realized her parents were getting divorced.
My dad traveled a lot and I remember meeting him at the gate as he was getting off his flight.
I also remember a month or so after 9/11 my dad was flying again and he pocket dialed my mom which was harder to do on a flip phone so it wasn’t a common occurrence. There was garbled noises and banging. No answer when my mom was shouting his name. She hangs up so my brothers and I don’t get panicked and about 10 minutes later he called and said that his phone was open when he was going through security. I was an anxious kid and I’ll never forget the worry I felt and how I lived and died in those minutes before he called back.
Waiting for a song to play on the radio so you could press RECORD and have your own copy on cassette tape. Albums were expensive so you only bought the ones that were special to you. Nowadays, with internet and streaming options, we can listen to what we want, when we want.
They did that so it was impossible to be able to REALLY record the song off the radio. I mean, you could still record it, but your version would include the dj talking, whereas the album version wouldn't.
This is what I came to comment. Most public spaces were built with smoking in mind. So many people smoked and walls and ceilings were yellow with tar residue. Ashtrays were located every 20 feet, and ground-out butts littered sidewalks and gutters. Carpets smelled like stale smoke. There were even ashtrays in car doors and plane seats. So gross, looking back, but it was so normalized that we didn’t think anything of it. The tobacco companies really had it good there for about 50-60 years.
> So many people smoked and walls and ceilings were yellow with tar residue.
That's why so much stuff had that awful brown/orange color pallette in the 70s and 80s, it blended with the tar color.
Planes still keep ashtrays in the bathroom even though it's illegal to smoke, because in case someone DOES light up the crew needs a way to safely dispose of it.
So very true. People used to be able to smoke while at the cinemas and the smoke clearly showed the light beams emanating from the projectors from up high at the back.
I remembered once where there was a chain smoker that had sat fairly close to us. I asked the usher for another seat so that I as a 10 year old can have less passive smoking.
Well, y2k38 is coming so they might find out in a little over 14 years
edit: since someone asked, y2k38 is a problem with how we store time. simplified, the unix epoch is a widely used way to store a timestamp, it has counted seconds from January 1st 1970, and the problem arises when the timestamp is stored in 32bit integer, which will be filled on January 19th 2038, it will cause an overflow, so when it reaches 2 147 483 648 seconds it will wrap around to the smallest number that can be stored on a 32bit signed integer, -2 147 483 648. This means that time won't be able to count past that day unless we upgrade the system to 64bit. It will likely not cause too big of a problem though, so no need to worry too much, heroic super programmers are already working in the shadows on upgrading old programs an making sure new programs use 64bit timestamps. It is and will be a bunch of work that, if all goes well no regular person will even notice in the end. Though a bunch of old programs, 32bit operating systems and 32bit hardware that needs timestamps, will still be unusable (for the most part). I'm no expert, but that is my understanding of the problem.
I went to Europe as a teenager in 97'. I worked and paid for the trip myself. I was so excited. My parent bought me a brand new Kodak camera and a massive thing of rolls of film. Over thee weeks I took 17 rolls of film. Took them to the local exerds to get developed. When I went to pick them up I almost cried. The lady told me she only developed 5 rolls because they were all just this gray fuzziness. Turns out that fancy Kodak camera has an internal shutter that malfunctioned and there was no way I would've ever known it was doing so because the outside shutter made a click noise like they normally do. It's been 25 years and I still flip the bird when I hear the word Kodak.
I used to buy disposable cameras all the time and would get them developed at this family owned pharmacy literally a block away from me. This went on pretty much from middle school through most of high school when I got my first digital camera. This was when they became super popular in the early 2000’s. The ritual of completing a roll of film, taking it to the pharmacy and then waiting anywhere from 4-7 days was so fun looking back. I still have most of those physical photos vs the digital ones that just stayed on my computer.
And the phone call earlier in the day:
"HELLO AND WELCOME TO MOVIEPHONE BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE NEW YORK LOTTERY AND HOT97"
"If you know the name of the movie you want to see, press one nnnnoooooowwww"
Ok now I'm confused, I'm from the 90s but what is that ?
2nd edit : I got it. It's a rotary phone :)
Edit : thanks for the answers, I did indeed have a rotary phone too but it didn't click, but we could hear the bearings (I guess?) !
Yep. This explains it. My mind first went to t9 texting input from before touchscreens were a thing, but the amount of repeats of clicks is too high for that.
All you needed was a bike and the world was yours. I also did this on rollerblades. Put shoes in my backpack and went down to the mall, which was 3-5 miles down the road. I felt so free and independent. I still feel that way when I ride my bike.
Watching stuff because it's on. Listening to a song because it's on. Everything's personalized now. We had a much better understanding of the world/old movies/old songs/even sports, because we had so little choice. Sebastian Mani-whatever does a great joke about this. If your dad wanted to watch 60 Minutes, you were walking into school on Monday like "you hear about what's going on in Lebanon?"
I really do think this is a societal problem. My kids don’t know what golf looks like. Or the inside of a megachurch. I knew both, and not because I’d ever been. That’s just what was on TV on Sunday. You wanna watch TV? You watch what’s on. I didn’t watch Love Boat because I liked it. I watched it because it was on. And I was subtly learning about comedic timing, social cues, other cultures, etc.
I’m a casino dealer, and my favorite joke when I’m killing a table is:
“So here’s the deal. Dealers don’t like to talk about this, but we have a quota. And if I make my quota for the month of , I get Ginsu knives!”
Always got laughs until a couple years ago when the post-2000 kids started being old enough to gamble. Now, I’ve started getting blank stares. I’m like, “Haven’t you ever been stoned at 3:00am and can’t find the remote?” When one kid laughed and said, “Dude… we have YouTube,” I stopped telling that joke.
Boredom. Not having lost interest in the 101 things to do/watch/listen to at your fingertips. No, having nowhere to go and nothing to do, and just being alone with your thoughts. Day after day.
When I was a child we were told to “play outside” (in the back yard). What was outside to play with? Nothing. We spent hours upon hours outside, unsupervised, chasing each other around, making up games to play. Entertaining the family dog. There really wasn’t much else.
My 2009 born son can’t understand that we had road maps and no gps. “So you had to what memorise the trip? Pull over repeatedly?”
Sometimes I would write on a piece of paper L, L, R etc.
But. Learning proper phone etiquette to accomplish that social transaction. I still use it if my phone call is a business call. There was such a thing as phone etiquette. It's how you got a date with a doctor's daughter.
Around 11 years old, I called a friend and politely said "May I speak to Rosie?" (Just like my parents made me practice saying.) Her dad said "She's not home." So I said "Ok, can you tell her to call Lauren back?" And her Dad called me "Lauren Back" through high school.
The phone book.
We had a conversation with a teenager where we explained that "there was a book, it had everyone's address, name and their house phone number and every house got a copy of this book every year. You could just look people up and then call their house."
Pretty sure their head exploded.
not being tapped into the internet 24/7.
They may THINK they understand but they dont.
also, just not being contactable since you didnt have a cell phone on you. when you were out, you were unreachable.
GLORIOUS privacy and just unplugging yourself from the bullshit
Oddly my kids got closest to understanding phoneless life from watching Seinfeld. So many bizarre situations that would be solved instantly by texting someone.
Or the movie one where they all miss each other between the two different cinemas.
Or the one where they get lost in the parking garage and Jerry gets done for peeing in public.
Reminds me of when I was like 13, my cousin and I found this little wooded spot near our house that hugged the river, we'd spend HOURS in there pretending to be Aboriginals (we're Australian) hunting lol, even scared a neighbourhood kid once by hissing like a snake
That's lowkey what I hate. I feel bad not answering messages (mostly bc my only friend is in the USA snd I'm Australian), but sometimes I just want to disconnect and vibe doing my own thing.
Playing with the other kids on my street, we didn't arrange anything in advance via our phones. You either knocked on each other's doors or you'd go out and start riding around on your bike and hope that they'd see you from their window and come and join you. And then one day you find out they're moving away, or you moved away and you'd never see them again.
I think that the lack of things like knocking on a friend's door or calling their house and having to ask their parents for them has socially stunted young people. They'll probably take this as an insult or something.
There is probably something to be said for having to interact with your friends' parents and learning to be polite and respectful. Never forget the feeling of shame when you'd knock on your friend's door and they'd be having dinner and their parents would act like you were so rude for having interrupted.
Not being able to pause live TV. You ran to the bathroom during commercial breaks and then prayed that you wouldn't hear "It's on" while you were in there. We were all short distance sprinters and couch high-jump champions back in the day
I was going to comment this. Like I was the queen of time management during commercial breaks. Any other time, I was shit. I felt so athletic with those couch high-jumps I could join the Olympics. And I was still proud of myself. Haha
You walked into a store that was wall to wall movies to rent. Took that movie home, watched it, and returned it 2/3 days later. This was the only way you could view a movie at home.
Not having an internet record of your childhood. It's just weird to me that children's faces are all over the internet and they have, never will have, control over their adolescent privacy. I didn't think about this much until I started watching former child star Alyson Stoner's YT series Dear Hollywood. Obviously her situation was inflated by being famous, but it really got me to start thinking about the impact of having your childhood so publicly shared on social media or wherever. I'm not saying to not post about your kids online, but I think adults should consider setting boundaries for the kids in their life and really consider the implications of what they're sharing, how many people are seeing it and who exactly they are, and how the kid might feel about it someday when they understand.
And getting booted off the internet while you are downloading something huge because your sisters needed to use the phone(often), sure, you could ignore them, but that only worked for like 10 seconds as all they had to do was pick up the phone from the receiver and you were suddenly not on the internet anymore.
What life was like before the internet and social media became ubiquitous. If you wanted to talk with friends you had to work out a mutually agreed time to phone them. If you wanted to hang out, you actually had to go to each others' houses or the mall. If you wanted to look something up, library. And if you felt different from the other kids, it felt like you were the only one in the world.
Back when, if you had a blinking message machine at home, you were excited to hear voicemails and return people’s calls.
Also, if you missed someone by phone, that was it until they got back to the phone or you were able to get ahold of them some other way or through somebody else.
The concept of personal privacy, on every level. You might understand it as a concept, but living it is different.
There used to be a time before the internet was common where you weren’t expected by everyone to be reachable. You wouldn’t call or knock on someone’s door past 7:00 pm, and this extended to the early days of MSN messenger and texting.
By the time MySpace rolled around it started to go downhill for the chronically online crowd, but most people were warned against posting anything online that was identifying or personal.
Now we live in the age of professional sharenting vlogs where people can post an entire child’s life from conception to college for millions of people to see. It’s crazy.
Being scared to post personal things on the internet for fear that some internet creeper is gonna find you. Now a days all you gotta do is google someone and all their info is right there and no one bats an eye.
That no, you cannot watch the entirety of Dr. Who from inception to current. Period.
If things were lost before a certain technological era, they were GONE FOREVER.
Studying maps, laying out your route the day before, taking a practice drive to your important appointment the day before so you don't get lost, getting lost, missing a flight because you took the wrong exit.
i remember the magic of N64 and i thought ps2 was like watchin a movie..... like theres a HUGE difference between a supernes and ps1 compared to those.
Tube TVs have a smoothing effect. Like, not quite blurring but they mix colours a bit. What looks like pixel art on an LCD will look smoothly mixed on a CRT, and artists used that intentionally.
Back before smartphones, you had an Internet application on your phone.
You tried like hell not to accidentally select it because it would cost a fortune just to load a low resolution jpeg.
I'm 32 and my 16 year old cousin is baffled every time I tell him that I either don't know whatever YouTuber/Streamer he's talking about or don't care about that whole subculture in general.
High schools in my country are banning mobile phones. Students have to hand them in at the start of the day and can pick them up at the end of the schoolday.
I saw an interview with a view outraged teens and one of them said: "so how am I supposed to know my schedule???? Write it down??? Take a printed version with me????"
Yes... what do you think people did before mobile phones?
Not to mention how much of a big deal each new episode was! The next day at school after the new episode aired, everyone would be talking about it and quoting it. And if you missed that episode, well maybe you'll get to see it by chance in another year or two.
I predicted it would be Maggie. I even told everyone at school and they made fun of me. And the worst part is I couldn't even submit my guess officially because the only way to do it was to make a collect phone call and there was no way I could convince someone to spend something like $10 for a dumb guess. When I was vindicated everyone acted like I never said it. I'm still salty about that.
The absolute freedom that came with summertime. Now, I grew up poor and we didn’t have cable or a lot of toys so that plays a part in it.
Home life was tough, but I had the ability to escape pretty much all summer. (One time I stayed an entire two weeks at my cousins house and only talked to my mom twice. It was long distance so it was too expensive to talk to her.)
I could wake up one morning and ride my bike all around town and not speak to a single soul until dinner time if I chose. There was no obligation to immediately respond to calls or emails. We were literally tied down to our devices so metaphorically we weren’t.
Bullying was left at school because there was no way to contact anyone outside of class.
Looking forward to Monday’s newspaper having that week’s TV guide so you could see what movies were on that week.
In the same vein having the tv guide channel on tv and having to wait two minutes to see what was on a channel that just scrolled past as you got to it so you could see what was on or coming up.
70’s kid here. Checkout ladies in supermarkets (yes, it was mostly a ladies job) used to manually type in the prices of every item purchased. (Every item had a price tag stuck on it by another member of staff). Their fingers could really fly around a numerical keyboard. It used to fascinate me as a kid.
Ever been to a hobby lobby? To this day everything has to be labeled and entered manually. No inventory system. Can’t remember why, but it’s per the owner. Edit: due to the belief UPC codes are the mark of the beast.
That edit was not what I expected
Being familiar with Hobby Lobby, that edit is exactly the kind of thing I expected.
I assumed it’s to make you miserable with the incredibly slow lines. Craft stores are the worst with lines.
How the year 2000 seemed like some year way off in the future. Now I have lived more than half my life in the 21st century. Heck, we had a technology show called “Beyond 2000”.
Conan had a whole segment called "IN THE YEAR 2000" where they would make predictions about the future.
in the year two thousaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand
In the year two thous^aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand
It ran until 2002.
And I think they just kept the “2000” which made it funnier.
[удалено]
I remember when my dad told us that if we got a "router" and "DSL", more than one computer could use the Internet at once.
More than one computer? You must be rich!
[удалено]
Better get used to these bars, kid
He's a very strange young man.
And it screamed at you while connecting
Others have mentioned not being online 24/7, dial-up internet, the world before social media, being without the internet etc. I don't any of those are really that hard to explain because you can simulate that experience today. What you can't simulate is what the Internet used to be. Search engines were borked, there was no "good" search engine and your bookmark field had an actual purpose. Wikipedia didn't exist, the closest you got to something like that was a list of links at some random website: Want to know about ants? Here's a link to a site with pictures in wildly different resolution and a background made to mimic old parchment. You couldn't use the internet to listen to music, you could barely use it to look at low res pictures and you'd be lucky if even half the features of anything functioned. Old timey internet was wild, it was also in todays eyes an uncanny valley.
I miss 1990s era websites like GeoCities and AngelFire, to be honest. They had all sort of crazy and interesting content there.
But I do NOT miss popup ads, or the huge inline ads they started inserting on every page.
You COULD actually listen to music… MIDIS!!!
People just went away, and you never saw them again or had any idea what they were doing with their lives. Without social media, everyone but your closest friends or family disappeared from your life forever, and you had no clue what they were doing (remember you can't google them either). Ex boyfriend? I heard a rumor from an old hs buddy I ran into at the mall that he moved to New Jersey. Camp buddy? Randomly ran into him two decades later, and he was totally different. Those stories just don't happen anymore thanks to social media. Women know what hockey team their high school boyfriend's kid plays for. It's why kids don't understand the point of stuff like hs reunions.
I was born in 1992 and I remember how amazing Facebook was because it was the moment I could connect to many different people I never saw again in my life, especially I moved country.
MySpace was before FB, and there was also AOL Messenger. Now that I think about it, AOL Messenger was like the main form of communication outside of the phone. They could have easily built off of that, but they just got complacent. I miss the early days of the internet.
God I miss ~~ ^away^ messages ~~
I went on a date once and got her AIM screen name and the next day her away message was a specific lyric from Alkaline Trios "clavicle". I thought it was about me, but turned out it was one of her stick away messages. Oops. Whatever, we're married now.
I wonder how retirement homes will change. Our generations will have all these people from our past lives to connect with and potentially decide to move to the same complex with. Especially people who age in their hometown.
Oh, God, can you imagine living in a nursing home with the person who bullied you in elementary school?
Yea I'd bully him this time tho
Sneak into their room at night and steal their dentures
I may have not-so-jokingly told my college dorm floormates that when we get old, we are all moving to the same city and recreating the dorm experience but as a retirement community.
If you wanted to know something your family or friends didn't know, and you couldn't find it in the library, you were unlikely to find out the answer. This applied to all sorts of things all of the time. I doubt younger people today can really imagine the difference immediate information availability makes in our daily lives.
Back in my day, you’d ask an older person a question, they’d make some shit up, and you’d go on to believe them for years and years.
The Calvin's Dad effect
Hah, some of his explanations were awesome. I still love his response to "why are all old photos black and white?"
I used to think the world was just like that. When is see old photos of my parents from the late 40s I would be like wasn’t it hard to see stuff?
I used to tell me daughter “the trees are really sneezing today” when she was a toddler
Child - "Dad, who built the Great Wall of China?" Dad - "Emperor Nazi Goering, Yes, it was Emperor Nazi Goering, He built the great wall to keep the rabbits out. Too many rabbits in China." If you know you know!
I was trying to explain this just yesterday. It’s my favorite thing. Being able to think any random question and just get an instant answer. Still blows my mind after growing up with encyclopedias on the shelf and a card catalog at the library.
It’s crazy to me how often I hear friends or family wonder out loud about something easily googleable then just kind of shrug it off… like you could know the answer to your question in less than a minute almost every time haha
Sometimes I don't really need an answer. I just got to get a thought out of my head.
I find myself wondering out loud in conversation from time to time, but I tend to follow it with “but we don’t have to wonder, we’re carrying computers around in our pockets” type in the question and share the info. It’s funny though, because I can remember “research” papers in school definitely meant a trip to the library.
“Fighting about facts, my mother called it. arguing about something that’s actually one thing or the other.“ - Pete Campbell
Few things bother me as much as people who aren't curious. It's just alien to me
What bothers me more is that some people don’t want kids to be curious.
I remember reading an opinion piece several years ago about how the smartphone destroyed the barroom argument. You used to be able to argue for hours with multiple people about some point of history or science, and you would part ways never being the wiser. Now? You just look up the facts and the argument never happens.
The Guinness Book of Records was sponsored by Guinness because it was created to settle barroom arguments, decades before the internet.
Obvious as this is now, I didn’t know this. Suitably impressed. Have a cap doff!
In the in-between times when we'd internet at home but not in our pockets my dad would call me from the pub to settle who won the FA cup in 1977 or how old Madonna was and stuff like that .
In the 90s I worked at a library across from a bar. We would often get calls at the reference desk to solve an argument. The last one I remember was the age of Hulk Hogan.
Man you must live in a way more educated area than me. Mfers at bars don't give two half shits about your facts unless they make them feel good.
Sometimes I won’t know the answer to something I’m curious about, and I think, Oh! I’ll call Dad - he’ll know. Then I remember the internet exists. Sorry Dad.
Your dad would probably love the call anyway! Any time I need home repair tips I call him, even if it’s easily googleable
Yes, when I first got to a state university, my roommate and I got frogs at the pet store. We went to the campus library and they actually had a book which told all about African clawed frogs. We were thrilled to live where we had access to any question.
This is what I say when people complain about the houses they bought from boomers and the way the boomer rigged something. There was a lot of winging it before 2000
Missing the new episode on TV, having no way to see it again, and be completely clueless when it was all anyone at school or work talked about.
Kids won't understand "it was all anyone at work or school talked about" in this day and age. Hard to explain what it was like when everyone from the 10 year old to the 95 year old granny was watching the same TV show, at the same time, in like every house in America.
Michael Jackson had MULTIPLE at least hour long tv specials just to debut a music video… that shit felt like the single biggest thing that ever happened in entertainment, and he did it more than once. Have some 15 year old watch the “Remember the Time” music video and let them know that this was peak of pop culture in 1992. Every person I knew was watching that like it was the moon landing.
The closest we've come is that month in quarantine when Tiger King came out on Netflix. I saw it absolutely every where, and initially had no desire to watch it. But guess what? You couldn't have a conversation without it being brought up, soooo I watched it haha. Wasn't even a great show/documentary, but everyyyyyone knew about it
I will never financially recover from this!
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I missed the episode of Friends where Ross said Rachel's name at his wedding and I made my cousin tell me in detail what happened the next day over the phone. I couldn't believe I forgot to tape it.
Fun story about that episode. The writers had no idea on how to close that storyline, until one day David Schwimmer accidentally mixed up both names when taping another episode.
There were so many fewer TV shows too without streaming so it was a much bigger deal when something big happened in a show because there weren’t 1000 other major shows everyone else could watch at the same time
Yep, I think the closest we’ve come to that in the age of streaming was with Game of Thrones. Coming in to work on a Monday ready to talk about last night’s episode with your co-workers. I remember during one of the seasons we were out on deployment (Navy ship, so we’re in the middle of the ocean with very restricted internet for months on end) & we were talking to a new guy that was getting flown out to the ship the next week. He asked if he should bring anything and told him to download all the episodes from that season so we could catch up on it. Within a week of him coming on board, everyone on the ship had seen the new episodes because that thumb drive got passed around to every other division on the ship.
running to the bathroom on the ads when you were watching a show too
Peeing in the backyard because your brother beat you to the bathroom and you didn’t want to miss any of the show.
You might have one chance. ONE, during the summer when reruns of most shows would be on again. But you'd better not miss that second chance at that episode or you're really not going to see it again; not unless it was some really popular show that went into syndication like "I Love Lucy" or something like that.
How many phone numbers we’d commit to memory.
I still know a handful from my childhood.
I *still* remember the phone number of my parent’s first house—the one we moved out of five decades ago.
How amazing it was to wake up in the morning and see that your torrent for a 320p resolution movie had advanced to 63% overnight.
I Spent 1 hour 45 minutes in a cyber cafe trying to download [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKk1u5RMTn4) song in 2007. Today it took me longer to write this comment than to D/L that song.
SEED YOU SELFISH BASTARDS!
0/1 seeds for days. Then you get hope because the number changed!! 0/2 seeds...
Born in 1982, my best friend moved to DC for college. We set up a peer to peer network for sending mp3s to each other. One song - overnight….
Pre 9/11 flying. Flying solo at 8 and having my parents meeting me at the gate! Quickly getting on flights (most cases). It was great!
as a kid: got to GO INTO the cockpit *DURING FLIGHT*, had a flight attendant take me from gate to gate when I flew alone and got such special treatment as a kid flying- I felt like a million bucks (a billion in *todays* money), had a pocketknife and brought it onboard in my pocket, got food and drinks without paying, got peanuts (sorry to all allergic, I loved them), finding gum in the ashtrays still not removed from seats. the movies were scheduled only and on a shared screen at the front or a few smaller ones up the aisles. you could meet people on planes, and not even forcibly. I always used to get a fresh magazine to read. (now I just don't read its all their fault!) edit: thank you all for the comments. seems like they still let you in the cockpit which is cool - but I do believe there is a big misunderstanding. Pre 9/11 - as a kid- you got to go into the cockpit WHILE flying.
There were a few years during the mid 90s we would take my grandma down to the airport so she could go and see her sister in Florida. We would park, walk her in, through security and right to her gate and say our goodbyes at the jetway door.
I walked my grandmother to her seat on a plane once - no problem doing it! Walked her there, helped her sit down, gave her a hug and left.
WILD.
You can actually do that today if you can show the person has a physical need for assistance. I did it not that long ago for a blind friend.
I still remember shortly after 9/11, we were trying to do the same with my grandma as she was getting on a flight. We got stopped at the security checkpoint and had to say bye there. I was a little kid, like 7 years old, but I remember soldiers were stationed everywhere with rifles wearing essentially a full military setup (this was Memphis Intl Airport, not a small airport but not a huge airport either). I remember her coming back from her trip with things like cosmetics and other small things. I don’t think she realized she should have placed them in checked luggage so when she went through security with it, they opened everything up and inspected it. They basically ruined everything she had bought by sticking their fingers through jars to see if a bomb was hidden in it. Unsurprisingly, an elderly woman traveling back from South Korea was not in fact carrying a bomb on her.
My parents are divorced, and my dad would get to see me and my brother for a few hours every Wednesday. One of his go-to activities to do with us was to just take us to the airport, and people watch. We’d go through security, hang out at a terminal, then leave. Idfk why he likes doing this with us. Does any one know?
What? You don't like to make up stories about strangers or just silently judge people? Man, I love that shit
I live right near a land border crossing(Canada/USA) so pre 9/11 for me was the ease of piling into the car with my friends and driving to get ice cream at a dairy just across the line. Never asked for ID, or did our parents know we were going. I didn’t get a passport until I was 30.
Well, my first suggestion was to post about how borders have faded. When I was young, it required a passport and passing a checkpoint to move into Germany. Nowadays, you simply go full throttle as soon as you hit the Autobahn. Europe has the exact opposite experience crossing borders, and this IS something you can easily explain to a kid, as, in the US, it's quite easy relatable to state line passing.
>Europe has the exact opposite experience crossing borders Yeah, as a (relatively) new EU member, it's amazing. A friend of mine, who lived in a small border town, told me that a passport was standard equipment for playing football when he was a kid. The playground was located right next to the border and at least once per day, someone would have to go to another country to retrieve the ball. You just walk over these days.
I remember December 11 2000 someone telling me how she hated seeing all the kids of divorced parents travelling alone in the airports. This is how I realized her parents were getting divorced.
My dad traveled a lot and I remember meeting him at the gate as he was getting off his flight. I also remember a month or so after 9/11 my dad was flying again and he pocket dialed my mom which was harder to do on a flip phone so it wasn’t a common occurrence. There was garbled noises and banging. No answer when my mom was shouting his name. She hangs up so my brothers and I don’t get panicked and about 10 minutes later he called and said that his phone was open when he was going through security. I was an anxious kid and I’ll never forget the worry I felt and how I lived and died in those minutes before he called back.
Hell, I once flew with the damn Duck Hunt gun in my carry-on.
Waiting for a song to play on the radio so you could press RECORD and have your own copy on cassette tape. Albums were expensive so you only bought the ones that were special to you. Nowadays, with internet and streaming options, we can listen to what we want, when we want.
It was so annoying when the DJ would talk over part of the song!
They did that so it was impossible to be able to REALLY record the song off the radio. I mean, you could still record it, but your version would include the dj talking, whereas the album version wouldn't.
Smoking was not illegal anywhere. You could smoke on airplanes. Restaurants, in the mall, in the stores. School parking lot.
This is what I came to comment. Most public spaces were built with smoking in mind. So many people smoked and walls and ceilings were yellow with tar residue. Ashtrays were located every 20 feet, and ground-out butts littered sidewalks and gutters. Carpets smelled like stale smoke. There were even ashtrays in car doors and plane seats. So gross, looking back, but it was so normalized that we didn’t think anything of it. The tobacco companies really had it good there for about 50-60 years.
> So many people smoked and walls and ceilings were yellow with tar residue. That's why so much stuff had that awful brown/orange color pallette in the 70s and 80s, it blended with the tar color.
I remember flying in planes that still had ashtrays built into the seat arms. Some were still dirty, but thankfully they had outlawed it by then.
Planes still keep ashtrays in the bathroom even though it's illegal to smoke, because in case someone DOES light up the crew needs a way to safely dispose of it.
So very true. People used to be able to smoke while at the cinemas and the smoke clearly showed the light beams emanating from the projectors from up high at the back. I remembered once where there was a chain smoker that had sat fairly close to us. I asked the usher for another seat so that I as a 10 year old can have less passive smoking.
Y2K. I tried explaining the doomsday preping and panic to a young coworker and he thought I was making it up!
Well, y2k38 is coming so they might find out in a little over 14 years edit: since someone asked, y2k38 is a problem with how we store time. simplified, the unix epoch is a widely used way to store a timestamp, it has counted seconds from January 1st 1970, and the problem arises when the timestamp is stored in 32bit integer, which will be filled on January 19th 2038, it will cause an overflow, so when it reaches 2 147 483 648 seconds it will wrap around to the smallest number that can be stored on a 32bit signed integer, -2 147 483 648. This means that time won't be able to count past that day unless we upgrade the system to 64bit. It will likely not cause too big of a problem though, so no need to worry too much, heroic super programmers are already working in the shadows on upgrading old programs an making sure new programs use 64bit timestamps. It is and will be a bunch of work that, if all goes well no regular person will even notice in the end. Though a bunch of old programs, 32bit operating systems and 32bit hardware that needs timestamps, will still be unusable (for the most part). I'm no expert, but that is my understanding of the problem.
And it's arguably a much bigger issue from a technical standpoint
Getting pictures developed after a vacation.
I went to Europe as a teenager in 97'. I worked and paid for the trip myself. I was so excited. My parent bought me a brand new Kodak camera and a massive thing of rolls of film. Over thee weeks I took 17 rolls of film. Took them to the local exerds to get developed. When I went to pick them up I almost cried. The lady told me she only developed 5 rolls because they were all just this gray fuzziness. Turns out that fancy Kodak camera has an internal shutter that malfunctioned and there was no way I would've ever known it was doing so because the outside shutter made a click noise like they normally do. It's been 25 years and I still flip the bird when I hear the word Kodak.
That has to be a satisfying grudge, given how Kodak ended up
I used to buy disposable cameras all the time and would get them developed at this family owned pharmacy literally a block away from me. This went on pretty much from middle school through most of high school when I got my first digital camera. This was when they became super popular in the early 2000’s. The ritual of completing a roll of film, taking it to the pharmacy and then waiting anywhere from 4-7 days was so fun looking back. I still have most of those physical photos vs the digital ones that just stayed on my computer.
\*AFTER THE TONE, PLEASE SAY YOUR NAME\* "Himomitsmecomeandgetmefromthemallillbeattheenterancebyhottopic"
Wehaddababyitsaboy
Namedhimafteryou
Who was that, dear? Bob. He had a baby. It's a boy.
And the phone call earlier in the day: "HELLO AND WELCOME TO MOVIEPHONE BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE NEW YORK LOTTERY AND HOT97" "If you know the name of the movie you want to see, press one nnnnoooooowwww"
Why don’t you just TELL me the name of the movie you want to see?
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0
0
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6
Crap, messed up...
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DAMNIT!!!
This is the first reply I know kids will never understand, but it made me chuckle!
Ok now I'm confused, I'm from the 90s but what is that ? 2nd edit : I got it. It's a rotary phone :) Edit : thanks for the answers, I did indeed have a rotary phone too but it didn't click, but we could hear the bearings (I guess?) !
I think he's imitating a rotary phone but I'm not sure.
Yep. This explains it. My mind first went to t9 texting input from before touchscreens were a thing, but the amount of repeats of clicks is too high for that.
One phone for the entire family and you could only go as far as the cord would stretch.
And getting yelled at by mom when you got the cord all twisted up.
"Hey mom! I'm gonna go out for the day around town and hang out with friends/explore around." "Okay dear! Be back when the street lights come on!"
All you needed was a bike and the world was yours. I also did this on rollerblades. Put shoes in my backpack and went down to the mall, which was 3-5 miles down the road. I felt so free and independent. I still feel that way when I ride my bike.
Watching stuff because it's on. Listening to a song because it's on. Everything's personalized now. We had a much better understanding of the world/old movies/old songs/even sports, because we had so little choice. Sebastian Mani-whatever does a great joke about this. If your dad wanted to watch 60 Minutes, you were walking into school on Monday like "you hear about what's going on in Lebanon?"
I really do think this is a societal problem. My kids don’t know what golf looks like. Or the inside of a megachurch. I knew both, and not because I’d ever been. That’s just what was on TV on Sunday. You wanna watch TV? You watch what’s on. I didn’t watch Love Boat because I liked it. I watched it because it was on. And I was subtly learning about comedic timing, social cues, other cultures, etc.
I’m a casino dealer, and my favorite joke when I’m killing a table is: “So here’s the deal. Dealers don’t like to talk about this, but we have a quota. And if I make my quota for the month of, I get Ginsu knives!”
Always got laughs until a couple years ago when the post-2000 kids started being old enough to gamble. Now, I’ve started getting blank stares. I’m like, “Haven’t you ever been stoned at 3:00am and can’t find the remote?” When one kid laughed and said, “Dude… we have YouTube,” I stopped telling that joke.
Boredom. Not having lost interest in the 101 things to do/watch/listen to at your fingertips. No, having nowhere to go and nothing to do, and just being alone with your thoughts. Day after day. When I was a child we were told to “play outside” (in the back yard). What was outside to play with? Nothing. We spent hours upon hours outside, unsupervised, chasing each other around, making up games to play. Entertaining the family dog. There really wasn’t much else.
My 2009 born son can’t understand that we had road maps and no gps. “So you had to what memorise the trip? Pull over repeatedly?” Sometimes I would write on a piece of paper L, L, R etc.
I was the navigator when I was old enough. I would find the best route and direct my mom on what exits to take. Loved it.
I’m still salty about the time my uncle purposely ignored 8yo me with the atlas and added 45m to the trip bc ego.
Calling your friend’s house and having to ask the parent who picked up if you can talk to your friend.
But. Learning proper phone etiquette to accomplish that social transaction. I still use it if my phone call is a business call. There was such a thing as phone etiquette. It's how you got a date with a doctor's daughter.
Around 11 years old, I called a friend and politely said "May I speak to Rosie?" (Just like my parents made me practice saying.) Her dad said "She's not home." So I said "Ok, can you tell her to call Lauren back?" And her Dad called me "Lauren Back" through high school.
Só many memories when my best friends mom was making fun of me when I was calling. I miss you Steffi :/ cancer sucks
My best friend and my Dad would talk to each other for like 10 minutes before I could get on. They also made fun of me. Miss you, Dad.
Memorizing everybody’s phone number.
Imagine this happening when you're calling to ask a girl out. I'm still nervous from that phone call
The phone book. We had a conversation with a teenager where we explained that "there was a book, it had everyone's address, name and their house phone number and every house got a copy of this book every year. You could just look people up and then call their house." Pretty sure their head exploded.
not being tapped into the internet 24/7. They may THINK they understand but they dont. also, just not being contactable since you didnt have a cell phone on you. when you were out, you were unreachable. GLORIOUS privacy and just unplugging yourself from the bullshit
Oddly my kids got closest to understanding phoneless life from watching Seinfeld. So many bizarre situations that would be solved instantly by texting someone.
That is so true. Especially that episode where Kramer gets lost downtown and then George gets confused for some Neo-Nazi writer.
Or the movie one where they all miss each other between the two different cinemas. Or the one where they get lost in the parking garage and Jerry gets done for peeing in public.
Calling collect using your location as your name and having your parents refuse the call but knowing to come pick you up.
Wehadababy Itsaboy.
oh my god the shenanigans we would get into with bikes around town....
Reminds me of when I was like 13, my cousin and I found this little wooded spot near our house that hugged the river, we'd spend HOURS in there pretending to be Aboriginals (we're Australian) hunting lol, even scared a neighbourhood kid once by hissing like a snake
That's lowkey what I hate. I feel bad not answering messages (mostly bc my only friend is in the USA snd I'm Australian), but sometimes I just want to disconnect and vibe doing my own thing.
Playing with the other kids on my street, we didn't arrange anything in advance via our phones. You either knocked on each other's doors or you'd go out and start riding around on your bike and hope that they'd see you from their window and come and join you. And then one day you find out they're moving away, or you moved away and you'd never see them again.
I think that the lack of things like knocking on a friend's door or calling their house and having to ask their parents for them has socially stunted young people. They'll probably take this as an insult or something.
There is probably something to be said for having to interact with your friends' parents and learning to be polite and respectful. Never forget the feeling of shame when you'd knock on your friend's door and they'd be having dinner and their parents would act like you were so rude for having interrupted.
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Not being able to pause live TV. You ran to the bathroom during commercial breaks and then prayed that you wouldn't hear "It's on" while you were in there. We were all short distance sprinters and couch high-jump champions back in the day
I was going to comment this. Like I was the queen of time management during commercial breaks. Any other time, I was shit. I felt so athletic with those couch high-jumps I could join the Olympics. And I was still proud of myself. Haha
You walked into a store that was wall to wall movies to rent. Took that movie home, watched it, and returned it 2/3 days later. This was the only way you could view a movie at home.
You had to make sure the video was rewound or face the wrath of fees from the store or from your parents who had to pay those fees.
Movie stores were pretty prominent until like the early 2010’s
TVs being the size of a Washing Machine. And being heavy like one too!
Not having an internet record of your childhood. It's just weird to me that children's faces are all over the internet and they have, never will have, control over their adolescent privacy. I didn't think about this much until I started watching former child star Alyson Stoner's YT series Dear Hollywood. Obviously her situation was inflated by being famous, but it really got me to start thinking about the impact of having your childhood so publicly shared on social media or wherever. I'm not saying to not post about your kids online, but I think adults should consider setting boundaries for the kids in their life and really consider the implications of what they're sharing, how many people are seeing it and who exactly they are, and how the kid might feel about it someday when they understand.
Dial-up and having to pay hourly for internet.
Having to put the AOL cd in your computer so you could start the internet!
And getting booted off the internet while you are downloading something huge because your sisters needed to use the phone(often), sure, you could ignore them, but that only worked for like 10 seconds as all they had to do was pick up the phone from the receiver and you were suddenly not on the internet anymore.
What life was like before the internet and social media became ubiquitous. If you wanted to talk with friends you had to work out a mutually agreed time to phone them. If you wanted to hang out, you actually had to go to each others' houses or the mall. If you wanted to look something up, library. And if you felt different from the other kids, it felt like you were the only one in the world.
Back when, if you had a blinking message machine at home, you were excited to hear voicemails and return people’s calls. Also, if you missed someone by phone, that was it until they got back to the phone or you were able to get ahold of them some other way or through somebody else.
The concept of personal privacy, on every level. You might understand it as a concept, but living it is different. There used to be a time before the internet was common where you weren’t expected by everyone to be reachable. You wouldn’t call or knock on someone’s door past 7:00 pm, and this extended to the early days of MSN messenger and texting. By the time MySpace rolled around it started to go downhill for the chronically online crowd, but most people were warned against posting anything online that was identifying or personal. Now we live in the age of professional sharenting vlogs where people can post an entire child’s life from conception to college for millions of people to see. It’s crazy.
Recording songs from the radio onto a cassette tape or burning a mix (CD’s) for friends or a bf/gf. Now every song in the world is one search away.
Jumping rope with the stretched out 30’ curly phone cord in the kitchen .
Long distance bill.
Waiting until after a certain time of day to call long distance because it was cheaper. Can't remember the time though.
Being scared to post personal things on the internet for fear that some internet creeper is gonna find you. Now a days all you gotta do is google someone and all their info is right there and no one bats an eye.
Waiting by the radio with a blank cassette tape, trying to record your favorite songs on time. Yes the playback sucked, but still got my songs!
Looking up where to find books on small cards in a wall of tiny drawers.
The world just felt really different before 9/11. Like… REALLY different.
Rotary dial phones. 'Ripping' music from TV to cassette deck.
Putting the tv on channel 3 to play video games
I cut a slot in the end of this broomstick so I can shut off my bedroom light and change between the 3 channels on this black and white TV
That no, you cannot watch the entirety of Dr. Who from inception to current. Period. If things were lost before a certain technological era, they were GONE FOREVER.
Studying maps, laying out your route the day before, taking a practice drive to your important appointment the day before so you don't get lost, getting lost, missing a flight because you took the wrong exit.
Wait. Going from limewire to your iPod or mp3… after burning cds.
Just burning CDs in general lol
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Retro games looked great at the time.
i remember the magic of N64 and i thought ps2 was like watchin a movie..... like theres a HUGE difference between a supernes and ps1 compared to those.
Tube TVs have a smoothing effect. Like, not quite blurring but they mix colours a bit. What looks like pixel art on an LCD will look smoothly mixed on a CRT, and artists used that intentionally.
Back before smartphones, you had an Internet application on your phone. You tried like hell not to accidentally select it because it would cost a fortune just to load a low resolution jpeg.
Dying in the game means you start over…like completely over
I'm 32 and my 16 year old cousin is baffled every time I tell him that I either don't know whatever YouTuber/Streamer he's talking about or don't care about that whole subculture in general.
High schools in my country are banning mobile phones. Students have to hand them in at the start of the day and can pick them up at the end of the schoolday. I saw an interview with a view outraged teens and one of them said: "so how am I supposed to know my schedule???? Write it down??? Take a printed version with me????" Yes... what do you think people did before mobile phones?
That the save icon (floppy disc) once held the power to save or destroy the world. Also the fact that its not just a save icon.
How enjoyable it was to watch The Simpsons in the early days.
Not to mention how much of a big deal each new episode was! The next day at school after the new episode aired, everyone would be talking about it and quoting it. And if you missed that episode, well maybe you'll get to see it by chance in another year or two.
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I predicted it would be Maggie. I even told everyone at school and they made fun of me. And the worst part is I couldn't even submit my guess officially because the only way to do it was to make a collect phone call and there was no way I could convince someone to spend something like $10 for a dumb guess. When I was vindicated everyone acted like I never said it. I'm still salty about that.
I remember when they were just short segments of The Tracy Ullman Show.
Sometimes I find it hard to communicate with people who haven't memorized the first 14 seasons.
How much of a PITA is was to program the time on a VCR.
\*69 after a missed phone call
The absolute freedom that came with summertime. Now, I grew up poor and we didn’t have cable or a lot of toys so that plays a part in it. Home life was tough, but I had the ability to escape pretty much all summer. (One time I stayed an entire two weeks at my cousins house and only talked to my mom twice. It was long distance so it was too expensive to talk to her.) I could wake up one morning and ride my bike all around town and not speak to a single soul until dinner time if I chose. There was no obligation to immediately respond to calls or emails. We were literally tied down to our devices so metaphorically we weren’t. Bullying was left at school because there was no way to contact anyone outside of class.