100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
July 29th, 2009
There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …
Audio-Visual Entertainment
- Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
- Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
- Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
- The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
- Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
- Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
- High-speed dubbing.
- 8-track cartridges.
- Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
- Betamax tapes.
- MiniDisc.
- Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
- Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
- Shortwave radio.
- 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
- Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
- That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
A few years ago, I was cleaning out an old TV cabinet with my nephew, when I came across a VHS tape. He was immediately captivated by the “ancient” technology, asking what it did, how it worked, etc. It was as if I’d discovered a relic from an archaeological dig or something.
I’m old enough to remember many of the items on this list, but not old enough to recall an age of, say, just four channels. It makes me wonder — and this is purely quack speculation here — if our television viewing time has decreased as the number of channels has increased. That’s counter-intuitive, of course, and there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, but my sense is that TV viewing was more a family activity in past generations, even when the channel options were so limited.
With the advent of the Internet, this argument would carry more weight, as our viewing habits have shifted screens. How many Twitter posts, for example, are about television programming? Among my followers, not a whole lot.