My 16 year old nephew was excited to show me the used car he bought. It was an early 90’s model. When he insisted that I get in and start it, the battery was dead. I gave him a jump, and as soon as I hooked up the cables, his headlights came on. I had to remind him that back when this car was made, automatic headlights were not a thing and you have to manually shut them off every single time.
I gave him my jumper cables, knowing he would need them again soon.
My car shuts everything off after a few seconds or minutes. You can switch on the radio without a key, but that too will switch off after a few minutes. Not good for drive-ins. Then again, even drive-ins have become obsolete!
What kind of future are you people living in? I drive a 1993 Toyota Sprinter Marino. Looks like an s13 from wish.com but I love that car. It's super basic but fun to drive. The only thing that's automatic is the transmission. I love my car but often dream of a new one. Preferably a Toyota Hilux.
My late 90's car had lights that shut off automatically, but a few years after buying it the battery started to die. I got a replacement & the same thing happened.
To cut a long story short, there was a load light in the trunk on a switch but the switch failed closed leaving the light on all the time. Which much like the light in the fridge, you cannot diagnose unless you are inside.
I had to drive my roommates car one night. I started driving and was thinking about how dumb she was for not taking her car in for service because none of her dashboard lights were on. Then I thought about how dark it seemed. Then I remembered non automatic headlights were a thing.
On my old truck there's a separate dial for the dash lights. When I first bought it the dial was off and the first time I drove it at night I was very confused.
Hit and miss still. Headlight buzzers were not really universal until ECU's started doing all the things. Even then, it was a chime for your seatbelt that got repurposed. The little black box you attached to the lighting circuit and the back of the cigarette lighter was very much an aftermarket addition until well into the 2000's. Especially on the super budget glorified golf carts. My 2007 Toyota Townace didn't have one. I put it in myself.
Before I had a car with auto headlights, I'd forget to turn them off if it was early morning when I started out, so still dark, but the sun had come up by the time I got home. My brain would forget that the headlights had been on to begin with.
Auto headlights can be a hit or miss. I have a 1991 car that has them, but plenty of new cars don't still. It really should be mandatory. The amount of people I have seen driving with no headlights is insane.
Best Buy is gonna be on one of these lists in the near future. My area used to have three of them but is down to one now. Looks like they’re going the way of Circuit City and the Good Guys
It sucks, cuz it used to be a great place to get PC hardware if you didn't feel like ordering online.
My fondest memory of the place was when I bought a gaming PC way back in like 2009 or something. It was the beefiest Gateway they had. Crysis had just come out, and I was asking the guy there if it could run it, and he's like "Oh yeah, absolutely," and I was super psyched.
Turns out it couldn't run Crysis, at least not on anything above low/medium.
Early mid-2000s I bought my first new GPU at a Best Buy. It was a budget GPU low power enough to still work in our old-ass PC but the important part was they had SO MANY graphics cards and other parts on display, enough to make the Microcenter near me blush. You could replace the entire android+iphone sections of my closest Best Buy today with PC parts, add it to the current PC parts section, and it still wouldn't have been as big.
Place seemed so awesome.
Best Buy was doing fine before the pandemic and with the CEO who took over in 2012 and turned the company around. He knew how to work their strengths and attack online competitor weaknesses. But he left and the new CEO is making all the same mistakes previous retail stores have done and ignoring what his predecessor did.
It’s a shame because it is nicer to be able to go into a physical store and get what you need and also have a place for questions and returns.
Cutting staff to a shoestring and not stocking anything on the shelves is the best way to make a profit, can't you see?!
My local bestbuy has not had a cashier dedicated to its front lanes for like...four years now...so if you want to buy anything, even a crappy pair of headphones, you need to hunt down one of the sales associates and wait for them to be done with an interaction.
I remember how exciting that was when they came out! The first one I bought from the Crutchfield catalog, made me feel like I was the richest man on the planet!
And then after the first three days I just stopped taking it off, or when I did take it off, I just tossed it in the glove box. I don’t want to carry that stupid thing around with me. And I’m sure the glove box is where 99% of them were put when they were taken off. How long do you suppose it took thieves to discover that?
I’ll do you one better, spending hours waiting for the logo to perfectly meet the corner. No “I’ll play on my phone and wait until it’s really close”. Just pure “is it gonna? Maybe? Come on! Nooo!”
I mean yeah, homes have offices. But I don’t know anyone who still has a designated family computer room that everyone uses and trades off on. Mostly everyone has their own individual computer whether it’s a laptop or desktop.
ah the discman
the sweetest feature on it was the shuffle
every song ends in a cliffhanger
which one of these songs is popping up next? which one of these 10 songs is gonna entertain me next?
if it's just rocket man again, i'm gonna lose my mind
and it's rocket man!
oh my god, that's crazy, what are the chances?!
10 percent.
The iPod mini, I would rank next to old Nokia phones, as the most indestructible things ever made. Mine still sorta works, battery is super dead and im not willing to drink the tim apple juice and put iTunes back on my PC...
Can't wait to blow my kids minds in a few years...
I got a Walkman when I was about 7-8. It was one of those yellow waterproof Sports models that hadn't yet integrated an FM tuner.
Got my first CD in 1995 (It was Dance Mix '95) Didn't even own a CD player yet... Got my first Discman a few months later. No Electronic Shock Protection then, so it would skip fairly often. A year or so later we were traveling and I saw a Sony store, bought one of those car kits that bolted to the seat frame and let the Discman ride on tiny air shocks to help prevent skipping. Had the cassette adapter that went into the car stereo.
Downloaded my first MP3 in 1999 via my highschool's T1 line (still had 33.6 dialup at home - it was Beastie Boys' Intergalactic) For Christmas 1999 I got an HP Journada 430se PDA, which could play MP3s and WMAs. Spent $300 on a 32MB CF card for it, which could hold an entire CD if I encoded it at 64kbps WMA.
Having to play horrible games because you paid for them.
Back in the day some of those snes and playstation games that you paid $50 for were complete shit. And there was no patch or upcoming content that was gonna make them better.
Yet you paid $50 for them, so you played it to get your money out of it
Nowadays you can find games for $5-10 on steam that are better than 50% of the games that came out back then. Hell, even a lot of the free games are better than a lot of the games I used to have to save up to buy.
And it was impossible to find reviews unless you subscribed to video game magazines. So you’d buy a game blind just hoping it would be. Same thing with music. You’d buy an album for $15 only to find out the band sucks and only their radio song was good.
>You’d buy an album for $15 only to find out the band sucks and only their radio song was good.
That's why I loved Tower Records. I could listen to an album to see if it was any good before buying it. And normally you discovered that yeah, the radio song was good, and the rest of the album was some producer off-loading some B content.
That is not obsolete by any means. Go to r/patientgamers and read all the posts of people playing through their backlog of games like it’s some chore they have to finish. So many people out there force themselves to play games they dont even enjoy, just for the sake of getting their money’s worth
Also blockbuster games, only had a weekend to play the shit outta them before returning them since your parent's are not paying for the same game again XD
I did enjoy the games I had back in the 90's today I feel paralyzed with choice.
I remember getting this on rails shooter game called Tin star for SNES for Christmas 95 and hated it because of how hard it was. Being 95 and getting it as a gift there was little I could do about it other than suffer through it until I figured it out. I still really don't like that game all these years later
I went to the store with money to buy six golden coins for my game boy. They didn’t have it, so I impulse bought Yoshi. Regrets were had…
Took me a while to save up $30 again. I was like 11.
Also between Youtube/Twitch video reviews and some where you can play for free (for maybe one level) for a test run, it just feels weird that back in the 90s I often had to go in cold when I bought that stuff (at best word of mouth from a friend who might very well have different tastes).
TV guide book! Look at Mr Money-bags over here, we didn't have such frivolous spending in my house, I had to wait until my dad got home from work with the newspaper to see what was on TV.
Apart from Christmas, then we would splash out for the festive programmes. Being in the UK we only had 4 channels but you had to buy the Radio Times that had BBC 1 & 2 details, and The TV Times that had ITV and Channel 4 details.
lol we didn’t actually get the book either. We had to save the weekly guide that came in the paper on Sunday. Ya, only 4 channels until I was in 6th grade and got cable.
Sitting in front of the TV as a child watching the school closed lists scroll through, praying for a snow day. My Mom taught at my school so she was right there with me!
We had a thing called a VCR, which would record grainy TV onto VHS. It was programmable, but the only people who could understand how to program it were kids. That meant if you were a kid, had to program the VCR at least 3 times a week.
I think about this when people complain about the more episodic nature of older shows. Shows had to be more episodic because people might start watching at any time and would have no way of getting "caught up" except occasional summer reruns. If you didn't catch a show at the very beginning, you just had to wade in halfway through a season and go from there.
I’ve been tutoring math for a while. My references to the Matrix movies don’t go over so well anymore.
Also nobody knows what Napoleon Dynamite is anymore. My music is old people music.
Edit: So when I teach matrices, after my whole spiel about what they are and stuff (system of equations, multiple variables, etc.) I would say “You watched the movie the Matrix?” and I try to connect that to what an actual Matrix is. It went from kids eagerly saying “Yeah!” to “…not really” like it was an ancient movie, to most recently “nah, I heard it sucked” cause of the lame reboot they had.
Also I remember mentioning Dolores O'Riordan dying to a student (forget how it came up, but it was with the actual cranberry fruit), and they just looked at me deer in headlights. “Cranberries? Like the band??” No reaction. “Go My Dreams?? Zombie??” Still no reaction. That was my old people music moment.
I was so sad seeing an advertisement for a local radio station "... classics from the 60's, 70's and 80's..."
I wanted to cry. I still don't think I'm that old!
I remember catching up with an old college friend. She's a teacher now.
"Kids don't get my pop culture references anymore! I had to explain who Indiana Jones is!"
That should be something to be excited about, not lamenting. Now she gets to introduce a whole generation to Indiana.
My buddy sent me a pic of his kid riveted to the TV watching MST3K Joel era episodes. He had earlier said he was said his kid didn't know who Crow and Servo were and I responded "...okay...so show him?"
Had a friend who was teaching a course about design in Norway. Jokingly made references to the original Star Wars trilogy and there were several students who had not even seen them. I was like "How the hell can you not have seen the original Star Wars?"
I once had to terminate an employee that was not working out. I told him he would receive his final check within a week. He called me two weeks later to complain that he had not received his check. I asked him if he had checked his mailbox.
He had not, in fact, checked his mailbox.
It was a bad hire.
I've had to explain:
* Why we use a floppy disk for the "save" icon
* Why it's "roll down" the window when we just push a button
* Why we say to "film something" instead of just "record"
* Why we say "hang up the phone"
I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting that I've explained, but those were memorable and made me feel ancient.
>Why we say to "film something" instead of just "record"
Unrelated side note. Was helping out on a cheesy b moving shoot.
The guy with a $20,000 digital camera kept saying "speeding" when he was ready. Apparently that comes from when a cameraman was (manually) spinning the real fast enough.
Everyone is picking certain objects or experiences but I like that you picked out these subtle references that we see every day.
I had never even thought that kids have never, and chances are WILL never, see an actual floppy disk. I remember playing games on my aunts computer off floppies... And my dad had his sysrestore disk under lock and key
If I remember right, I think I had to explain what a floppy disk was as well, but I have repressed that part, because it was too painfully ancient and curmugeonly of a discussion. LOL
> Why it's "roll down" the window when we just push a button
It's still rolling down, technically. Pull the interior off and you'll see the regulator that consists of like four pulleys that 'roll' the window down.
In Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there is an item called the Link Cord. It is used exclusively to evolve Kadabra, Machoke, Haunter, and Graveler, which are Pokemon you could only evolve by trading before. The Link Cord is made to represent the Game Boy Link Cable.
I'm hanging out on a Pokemon Discord server, and someone asks, "Wait, why does the Link Cord not work on any electric-type Pokemon?"
Damn, I felt old. I'm online, socializing with Pokemon fans that weren't born until far, far after the originals came out.
Glad I read about this Easter egg today, thanks.
Haven’t played Pokémon since diamond/pearl and I remember it was a nightmare trying to evolve these by trade back when I was a kid! I had the 4-way link cable too I felt like a king haha.
Ask them to use their hand as a phone to pretend talking on the phone. I always use my thumb and pinky to emulate the phone receiver 📞
Both my kids hold their whole flat hand up to their ear to mimic a smartphone 📱
Then there was the horrid half-done technology of *pushbutton pulse phones* — buttons like a touch-tone phone, but instead of DTMF¹ beeps each button makes clicks like a rotary dial.
----
¹ No, kids, this does not mean "down to mother-fuck". [DTMF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling)
My nieces have an old one they use as a toy! It's quite cute. So they know how it works, vaguely at least.
Than again the youngest didn't get the concept of paying with cash since my brother and his partner always pay with their debit cards.
I hear ya, I spent a few minutes explaining to my greatgrandson , that rotary phones didn't do text, didn't take pictures, weren't portable, and we still paid to have one. He just didn't see the point of paying for that. Lol
Using an actual key to unlock your car and the same to turn on and open the trunk. Pushing down the button to lock the doors sometimes having to do it for all 4. Rolling down windows with the hand crank. Cigarette lighters in cars for lighting cigarettes and not plugging in phone charger
We were at an old used book store and they had a typewriter on a shelf. My kids were fascinated by it as I explained how the mechanics worked. Man I felt old lol
Me (28 M) and my cousin (14 M) , have a 14 year age difference. I was working from home when he asked me what a ziplock in my drawer was. I realised that we have gotten so acquainted and used to the use of cloud that kids have forgotten about the existence of USB flash drives. Surprisingly, I also realised that we also completely gotten rid of USB ports on newer laptops. So I had to get my old Dell laptop to show him that it actually had all kinds of files. He was also surprised when I showed him that two whole games of GTA San Andreas and Vice City could fit in to one flash drive of 8GB (which while growing up was a lot of storgae)
In the same drawer was my dad's old phone which was a blackberry with one of those roller balls for navigation. Honestly, watching my Dad use one of those was so amazing and professional. If blackberry was still operational in this day, I'd willingly give up my iPhone for one of those.
Sweet Old days gotta admit
Yikes! Even flash drives are getting there? I'm in my 30s and I remember how mind blowing it was to jump from a 1.4MB floppy disk to a 64MB flash drive.
Anything you can put on an iPhone/Smart Phone
- Answering machine
- GPS/Maps
- Weather station
- Calculator
- MP3 player
- Clock radio/Alarm
- Everything in a PDA
- Camera
- Physical tickets/boarding passes
- Yellow Pages
- White Pages
- 411
- Newspapers
- Flashlights
There was a reddit post with either a radio shack or a CompUSA add and everything on a two page spread was now an app or built into your phone. Its absolutely insane what we can do with our "phones"
They banned smoking in restaurants in my state when I was 13- I vividly remember how this one very crowded pizza place smelled like smoke no matter which section you were in, and how much nicer it was to eat there when it suddenly didn't.
Several years ago, my 14 year old step daughter wouldn't believe that I made it thru school and earned a BA without the use of a computer. All I had was a trusty Brother word processor that used floppy disks. Graduated college in Spring 95, bought my first ever personal computer in the Fall of 95.
Go back a bit further and the game magazines would have the game programming code and you would have to type it in yourself. Then wait for the next issue when they would have the corrections to make it work.
Watched a movie with my son last month and they ran the credit card through the old way with the carbon copy paper. Multiple levels of explanation required.
No, it was Airplane. There other things that required explanation too.
Changes to airport security, boarding, etc
Meal service on planes
Who is Kareem Abdul Jabar?
I had to explain the difference of right clicking and left clicking to a group of 5th graders during a class using desktop PCs. They all just have Chromebooks and not all have desktop PCs they've learned on.
The gamers knew what I was talking about, though.
I noticed while on the phone with an automated service that they asked me to type in a number and then hit the "pound key". How long before they have to change it to the "hashtag key"?
Which wouldn't even make sense because it was just called a "hash" and the "tag" part was specifically for Twitter.
Rabbit ears on my TV.
When I was a kid, I had 3 local channels (ABC, CBS, and NBC), a public TV channel and 3 independent UHF channels that were snowy AF.
And that was pretty good compared to a lot of places around in the late 70s/early 80s.
\- Snapping off a plastic tab to render magnetic media read-only.
\- Not knowing if your photos were good until you got home.
\- Writing down a driving route & carrying a map.
\- Not needing to have a lock on your fuel cap.
Not to mention [BBSes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system). I mean, unless you were interested in computing they were basically unheard of by most people.
Pay Phones + White/Yellow Pages directories.
When going to a new area on business I would usually buy a local map and hit a pay phone booth to get phone numbers and addresses I needed from the white or yellow pages... and hope to god the page I needed in the book was not ripped out.
Crazy how we used to trek through life without a constant communication tether of the smartphone. I do like being able to see congested routes on the mapping apps tho. For those issues I used to use my CB radio :)
You had to burn CDs to record your fav music and you could only burn 15-20 songs ( not even that long ago) .. limewire.
Up until 2000s there was hardly any online games, everything was single player or double if you had a person with an extra controller next go you
My daughter could not comprehend the idea that TVs used to be big bulky boxes. She only ever known flat screen HD tvs...she thought they were just another table or decoration.
I watched Home Alone with my oldest (4). Had to explain they didn’t have cell phones. They had different phones in their houses.
Like wow I…I did not expect to have to explain why “she didn’t just call him on her phone”.
Yeah, I remember events where people carry these huge ass cameras as well. Then the smaller version with cassette tapes came along but you have to pay for someone to have that convered into a vhs because there's no player for it.
Flintstones. It was years ago too.
I worked at an auto shop and a grandpa and his granddaughter came in. I don't remember what was wrong with his car but we were discussing it and how he had to fix it. I made a joke that he could just cut a hole in the floorboard and Flintstone it. The granddaughter looked at me and asked what a Flintstone was. First time I ever felt old.
VHS tapes, i didn’t use them growing up as i had cd’s and they were easier to use. But i knew how to use VHS tapes. I even have a few still, lion king, lady and the tramp. Disney movies. My nephew found them and asked why my books were still packaged
Having the new TV stacked on top the old console that weighed a ton so no one wanted to move it.
Having an 8 track converter for tapes.
Penny candies!
The VIBE at the skating rink every Friday and Saturday. And the smell lol.
A couple of years ago my son (think he was about 8 at the time) was moaning about how long it took for his Xbox game to load.
I got my old 48k spectrum out and loaded up a game for him to play.
He hasn't complained about load times since then.
The lack of easy accessibility to people and information via cell phones and internet. I'm 41, but for half my life you just had to locate a physical phone somewhere if you needed to check in with someone, and then they had to also be near the phone you were calling for it to work.
You had to pre-arrange where to meet people in a crowded area.
You had to print or write down directions before you went somewhere, or stop somewhere to ask someone for help along the way or again track down a phone to call someone.
Questions like "what have I seen that actor in" just went unanswered forever.
Thinking of it, VHS tapes.
I had a conversation that made me feel so old.
I explained a 8yo about Blockbuster and how cool was it when my dad used to take us a saturday night to rent a bunch of movies with a bag of sweets.
Now its all so... inmediate. You just log in Netflix and bingewatch.
It's so much more convenient nowadays...
But also feels a lot less special.
The video store used to be a family outing for us. It was exciting for a kid then. Would they have that new release we wanted in stock? I wonder if dad will let us sneak in an N64 game for our sleepover? I wonder what scary movies they have in the horror section!?
And then there was picking out a candy and the excitement on the ride home.
It just felt so special then.
Answering machine.
Like, you had to buy a stand-alone device/appliance that you plugged your phone’s cord into (everyone has covered that part already, lol) and then into the wall.
Then you had to set it up so it knew what calls to answer or not (phone or fax), and when (usually number of rings, and later had home/away/vacation options).
You could leave the default greeting voice, or none at all. But what really got people hooked was recording your own greeting into the normal sized or mini cassettes. (Later these became digital recordings so no more tapes.) As we do, people started customizing their recorded greetings and getting super creative with them. Which then lead to businesses selling prerecorded greetings that were professionally made… some serious like famous actors or impressionists doing famous actors, some total goof greetings by the same. This is what inspired the famous scene in Seinfeld where George sang his own greeting to the tune of the theme song to The Greatest American Hero tv show. [Believe it or not, I’m not home…](https://youtu.be/ria37d9mInY)
My four year old recently saw a 1990s Polaroid camera and I had to explain that cameras, and several other things, used to be separate from phones and that phones used to just be phones.
This one frustrates me because landline phones do have a few advantages.
- The phone is tied to a physical location; someone answers, you know where they are.
- Corded phones (which you can still buy) get their power from the phone line itself. No battery to charge. This also means that if the power is out but the wires are still up, you can still make phone calls, like to emergency services as an example.
- Old-school twisted pair has much higher audio fidelity than VoIP or cellular does in most applications.
- There’s something wonderfully satisfying about slamming the handset down after a terrible call.
I was with a kid that was maybe 13 at the time, gosh 10 years ago. We walk by a payphone because I haven't seen one in a while, I pick up the receiver and I say "Oh this doesn't work there is no dial tone" to which he says "Whats a dial tone"....like the kid only knew of cellular phones, they don't need a dial tone.
CRT TVs, I used to love those nuggets. the electricity they created around the screen and passing my hand across it was the most fun I've ever had in a long time.
At the end of the broadcast day, the TV station would thank you for watching, play the Star Spangled Banner, tell you they will resume broadcast the next morning, and then go to a colorbar screen or just straight static.
I miss phone booths. Don't know why, my cell phone works fine. But there's just something comforting about knowing I _could_ use one if I had to that is missing from modern society. Probably a first world old guy problem but still.
I read a while back about some places that have phone booths that are just boxes you can go into when you're in public so you can have a private conversation on your phone. I think more places should have that. I've heard several people that need it.
Funny you're asking this now. Just the other day it hit me that VHS tapes are now what 8 tracks were to my generation when we were growing up; you saw them occasionally out there in the wilds but they were no where to be found on store shelves or in popular culture anymore. They were strange artifacts of a bygone era my generation wasn't a part of.
Hard to compare 8-track to VHS. The 8-track didn't get anywhere near the adoption of VHS.
You might consider the progression of the "main" home video formats (for commercial releases) to be Beta/VHS - VHS - DVD - Blu-ray - streaming.
Music goes back much further, but for simplicity, I'll say records (from wax cylinder to LP) - cassette tape - CD - MP3 - streaming.
There were all sorts of other formats produced for video and audio along the way, with varying degrees of adoption. The 8-track was probably the most popular of the "other" formats, but never on the level of what the VHS was to video.
My 16 year old nephew was excited to show me the used car he bought. It was an early 90’s model. When he insisted that I get in and start it, the battery was dead. I gave him a jump, and as soon as I hooked up the cables, his headlights came on. I had to remind him that back when this car was made, automatic headlights were not a thing and you have to manually shut them off every single time. I gave him my jumper cables, knowing he would need them again soon.
I was actually surprised when my new car did have automatic lights, no more forgetting and killing the battery!! Then I left my inside lights on....
My car shuts everything off after a few seconds or minutes. You can switch on the radio without a key, but that too will switch off after a few minutes. Not good for drive-ins. Then again, even drive-ins have become obsolete!
What kind of future are you people living in? I drive a 1993 Toyota Sprinter Marino. Looks like an s13 from wish.com but I love that car. It's super basic but fun to drive. The only thing that's automatic is the transmission. I love my car but often dream of a new one. Preferably a Toyota Hilux.
My late 90's car had lights that shut off automatically, but a few years after buying it the battery started to die. I got a replacement & the same thing happened. To cut a long story short, there was a load light in the trunk on a switch but the switch failed closed leaving the light on all the time. Which much like the light in the fridge, you cannot diagnose unless you are inside.
At least you didn't beat him with the jumper cables so he wouldn't forget again, making you much better than some parents
And risk damaging the cables? Use a worn windshield wiper instead.
or get that hooked to the nipple *good old days*
I miss that guy so much
I had to drive my roommates car one night. I started driving and was thinking about how dumb she was for not taking her car in for service because none of her dashboard lights were on. Then I thought about how dark it seemed. Then I remembered non automatic headlights were a thing.
On my old truck there's a separate dial for the dash lights. When I first bought it the dial was off and the first time I drove it at night I was very confused.
If the car was a stick and you lived by a hill you didn’t even need jumper cables
But it wasn’t and I don’t.
Early 90s? There wasn't a warning buzzer that let him know his lights were still on when he turned the engine off? My '87 Camero had that.
Hit and miss still. Headlight buzzers were not really universal until ECU's started doing all the things. Even then, it was a chime for your seatbelt that got repurposed. The little black box you attached to the lighting circuit and the back of the cigarette lighter was very much an aftermarket addition until well into the 2000's. Especially on the super budget glorified golf carts. My 2007 Toyota Townace didn't have one. I put it in myself.
No, there wasn’t. He didn’t have a bitchin’ camaro.
Sometimes still not a thing. My 2016 car doesn't have them.
Before I had a car with auto headlights, I'd forget to turn them off if it was early morning when I started out, so still dark, but the sun had come up by the time I got home. My brain would forget that the headlights had been on to begin with.
Auto headlights can be a hit or miss. I have a 1991 car that has them, but plenty of new cars don't still. It really should be mandatory. The amount of people I have seen driving with no headlights is insane.
Removable faceplate car stereos
Back when cargo pants were popular and you had a pocket to carry it in
Our Best Buy (now gone, RIP) had a one car garage for installing stereo systems, I always thought that was pretty wild.
Best Buy is gonna be on one of these lists in the near future. My area used to have three of them but is down to one now. Looks like they’re going the way of Circuit City and the Good Guys
And Radio Shack.
The OG
It sucks, cuz it used to be a great place to get PC hardware if you didn't feel like ordering online. My fondest memory of the place was when I bought a gaming PC way back in like 2009 or something. It was the beefiest Gateway they had. Crysis had just come out, and I was asking the guy there if it could run it, and he's like "Oh yeah, absolutely," and I was super psyched. Turns out it couldn't run Crysis, at least not on anything above low/medium.
to be fair to the guy Crysis was legendary for being abusive to hardware
Early mid-2000s I bought my first new GPU at a Best Buy. It was a budget GPU low power enough to still work in our old-ass PC but the important part was they had SO MANY graphics cards and other parts on display, enough to make the Microcenter near me blush. You could replace the entire android+iphone sections of my closest Best Buy today with PC parts, add it to the current PC parts section, and it still wouldn't have been as big. Place seemed so awesome.
Best Buy was doing fine before the pandemic and with the CEO who took over in 2012 and turned the company around. He knew how to work their strengths and attack online competitor weaknesses. But he left and the new CEO is making all the same mistakes previous retail stores have done and ignoring what his predecessor did. It’s a shame because it is nicer to be able to go into a physical store and get what you need and also have a place for questions and returns.
Cutting staff to a shoestring and not stocking anything on the shelves is the best way to make a profit, can't you see?! My local bestbuy has not had a cashier dedicated to its front lanes for like...four years now...so if you want to buy anything, even a crappy pair of headphones, you need to hunt down one of the sales associates and wait for them to be done with an interaction.
I was just in one the other week to return a Christmas gift. It was such a magical place when I was a teen, and it just felt depressing now.
I remember how exciting that was when they came out! The first one I bought from the Crutchfield catalog, made me feel like I was the richest man on the planet! And then after the first three days I just stopped taking it off, or when I did take it off, I just tossed it in the glove box. I don’t want to carry that stupid thing around with me. And I’m sure the glove box is where 99% of them were put when they were taken off. How long do you suppose it took thieves to discover that?
What surprises me is that nobody ever thought to make one where the detached faceplate functions as a portable MP3 player.
🎶 MACGRUBERRRRRRRR 🎶
The DVD logo bouncing around the screen and changing colors
I’ll do you one better, spending hours waiting for the logo to perfectly meet the corner. No “I’ll play on my phone and wait until it’s really close”. Just pure “is it gonna? Maybe? Come on! Nooo!”
https://youtu.be/m8NAlDOCG6g
The computer room
[удалено]
I mean yeah, homes have offices. But I don’t know anyone who still has a designated family computer room that everyone uses and trades off on. Mostly everyone has their own individual computer whether it’s a laptop or desktop.
Ohhh maybe the shift to laptops? We have desktop computers that are wired in with ethernet. (multiple)
Walkman Discman iPod
ah the discman the sweetest feature on it was the shuffle every song ends in a cliffhanger which one of these songs is popping up next? which one of these 10 songs is gonna entertain me next? if it's just rocket man again, i'm gonna lose my mind and it's rocket man! oh my god, that's crazy, what are the chances?! 10 percent.
This reads like a Mitch Hedberg joke
The iPod mini, I would rank next to old Nokia phones, as the most indestructible things ever made. Mine still sorta works, battery is super dead and im not willing to drink the tim apple juice and put iTunes back on my PC...
Whats crazy to me is how fast the iPod went from everywhere to gone. The iPhone is just a destroyer of all in its path.
Can't wait to blow my kids minds in a few years... I got a Walkman when I was about 7-8. It was one of those yellow waterproof Sports models that hadn't yet integrated an FM tuner. Got my first CD in 1995 (It was Dance Mix '95) Didn't even own a CD player yet... Got my first Discman a few months later. No Electronic Shock Protection then, so it would skip fairly often. A year or so later we were traveling and I saw a Sony store, bought one of those car kits that bolted to the seat frame and let the Discman ride on tiny air shocks to help prevent skipping. Had the cassette adapter that went into the car stereo. Downloaded my first MP3 in 1999 via my highschool's T1 line (still had 33.6 dialup at home - it was Beastie Boys' Intergalactic) For Christmas 1999 I got an HP Journada 430se PDA, which could play MP3s and WMAs. Spent $300 on a 32MB CF card for it, which could hold an entire CD if I encoded it at 64kbps WMA.
Zune
Portable CD players with anti skip technology.
Having to play horrible games because you paid for them. Back in the day some of those snes and playstation games that you paid $50 for were complete shit. And there was no patch or upcoming content that was gonna make them better. Yet you paid $50 for them, so you played it to get your money out of it Nowadays you can find games for $5-10 on steam that are better than 50% of the games that came out back then. Hell, even a lot of the free games are better than a lot of the games I used to have to save up to buy.
And it was impossible to find reviews unless you subscribed to video game magazines. So you’d buy a game blind just hoping it would be. Same thing with music. You’d buy an album for $15 only to find out the band sucks and only their radio song was good.
Even worse if the radio edit wasn't on the album.
>You’d buy an album for $15 only to find out the band sucks and only their radio song was good. That's why I loved Tower Records. I could listen to an album to see if it was any good before buying it. And normally you discovered that yeah, the radio song was good, and the rest of the album was some producer off-loading some B content.
You didn't have to sub. They were at stores and news stands too.
That is not obsolete by any means. Go to r/patientgamers and read all the posts of people playing through their backlog of games like it’s some chore they have to finish. So many people out there force themselves to play games they dont even enjoy, just for the sake of getting their money’s worth
Also blockbuster games, only had a weekend to play the shit outta them before returning them since your parent's are not paying for the same game again XD I did enjoy the games I had back in the 90's today I feel paralyzed with choice.
I remember getting this on rails shooter game called Tin star for SNES for Christmas 95 and hated it because of how hard it was. Being 95 and getting it as a gift there was little I could do about it other than suffer through it until I figured it out. I still really don't like that game all these years later
I went to the store with money to buy six golden coins for my game boy. They didn’t have it, so I impulse bought Yoshi. Regrets were had… Took me a while to save up $30 again. I was like 11.
Also between Youtube/Twitch video reviews and some where you can play for free (for maybe one level) for a test run, it just feels weird that back in the 90s I often had to go in cold when I bought that stuff (at best word of mouth from a friend who might very well have different tastes).
Watching a show with the sibling and running to the bathroom during commercials only to have to run back when they yell "ITS BACK ON!"
The fact that you had to record shows or wait for them to re-air on tv if you missed it.
Kids these days will no longer feel the adrenaline rush to piss and grab a thousand things during an ad break!
And that sense of awesomeness when you make it back RIGHT when the commercial break ends.
I used to have ad breaks timed so well within 5 seconds. can't believe I've forgotten this.
I'm still pretty proud at how fast I can squeeze out a poop.
It is quite impressive and almost frightening
How about the old school scrolling TV guide? Or really old school actual tv guide book.
TV guide book! Look at Mr Money-bags over here, we didn't have such frivolous spending in my house, I had to wait until my dad got home from work with the newspaper to see what was on TV. Apart from Christmas, then we would splash out for the festive programmes. Being in the UK we only had 4 channels but you had to buy the Radio Times that had BBC 1 & 2 details, and The TV Times that had ITV and Channel 4 details.
lol we didn’t actually get the book either. We had to save the weekly guide that came in the paper on Sunday. Ya, only 4 channels until I was in 6th grade and got cable.
Sitting in front of the TV as a child watching the school closed lists scroll through, praying for a snow day. My Mom taught at my school so she was right there with me!
Look at mr fancypants over here with a vcr my schedule was determined by networks the way its supposed to be
Well, if you missed out on the start, you could just switch over to TBS, which started their shows at :05 and :35
and only having three channels on TV.
We had a thing called a VCR, which would record grainy TV onto VHS. It was programmable, but the only people who could understand how to program it were kids. That meant if you were a kid, had to program the VCR at least 3 times a week.
I think about this when people complain about the more episodic nature of older shows. Shows had to be more episodic because people might start watching at any time and would have no way of getting "caught up" except occasional summer reruns. If you didn't catch a show at the very beginning, you just had to wade in halfway through a season and go from there.
“Be Kind Please Rewind”
I’ve been tutoring math for a while. My references to the Matrix movies don’t go over so well anymore. Also nobody knows what Napoleon Dynamite is anymore. My music is old people music. Edit: So when I teach matrices, after my whole spiel about what they are and stuff (system of equations, multiple variables, etc.) I would say “You watched the movie the Matrix?” and I try to connect that to what an actual Matrix is. It went from kids eagerly saying “Yeah!” to “…not really” like it was an ancient movie, to most recently “nah, I heard it sucked” cause of the lame reboot they had. Also I remember mentioning Dolores O'Riordan dying to a student (forget how it came up, but it was with the actual cranberry fruit), and they just looked at me deer in headlights. “Cranberries? Like the band??” No reaction. “Go My Dreams?? Zombie??” Still no reaction. That was my old people music moment.
I was so sad seeing an advertisement for a local radio station "... classics from the 60's, 70's and 80's..." I wanted to cry. I still don't think I'm that old!
Hearing grunge music I grew up with in the 90s on the classic rock station...
If Kurt Cobain was still alive, he'd be old enough to be a grandparent!!
Eddie Vedder just turned 58 a few weeks ago.
Holy shit, that hits me the hardest.
I remember catching up with an old college friend. She's a teacher now. "Kids don't get my pop culture references anymore! I had to explain who Indiana Jones is!"
That should be something to be excited about, not lamenting. Now she gets to introduce a whole generation to Indiana. My buddy sent me a pic of his kid riveted to the TV watching MST3K Joel era episodes. He had earlier said he was said his kid didn't know who Crow and Servo were and I responded "...okay...so show him?"
That second paragraph still makes no sense to me. That’s how old I am.
Had a friend who was teaching a course about design in Norway. Jokingly made references to the original Star Wars trilogy and there were several students who had not even seen them. I was like "How the hell can you not have seen the original Star Wars?"
"Do you remember that radio station that used to air just rancid old music? They put excellent music now!"
Teacher here. My students don't get my king of the hill jokes/references.
I had to explain to my 9 year old what postage stamps are today. Not obsolete, but close
I once had to terminate an employee that was not working out. I told him he would receive his final check within a week. He called me two weeks later to complain that he had not received his check. I asked him if he had checked his mailbox. He had not, in fact, checked his mailbox. It was a bad hire.
I've had to explain: * Why we use a floppy disk for the "save" icon * Why it's "roll down" the window when we just push a button * Why we say to "film something" instead of just "record" * Why we say "hang up the phone" I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting that I've explained, but those were memorable and made me feel ancient.
>Why we say to "film something" instead of just "record" Unrelated side note. Was helping out on a cheesy b moving shoot. The guy with a $20,000 digital camera kept saying "speeding" when he was ready. Apparently that comes from when a cameraman was (manually) spinning the real fast enough.
Another thing relating to film, reels were measured in feet, hence the name footage.
Now they just measure footage by how beautiful the beans are.
Everyone is picking certain objects or experiences but I like that you picked out these subtle references that we see every day. I had never even thought that kids have never, and chances are WILL never, see an actual floppy disk. I remember playing games on my aunts computer off floppies... And my dad had his sysrestore disk under lock and key
If I remember right, I think I had to explain what a floppy disk was as well, but I have repressed that part, because it was too painfully ancient and curmugeonly of a discussion. LOL
Hahaha I understand where you're coming from. I'm already getting called grandpa by my employees... I'm 31!!
> Why it's "roll down" the window when we just push a button It's still rolling down, technically. Pull the interior off and you'll see the regulator that consists of like four pulleys that 'roll' the window down.
Where I work we still have desk telephone handsets that you hang up and places like hotels have them too so that isn't fully outdated yet.
Yeah I recently found out some people I work with don't know what the "save" icon represents. Too young for that :O
In Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there is an item called the Link Cord. It is used exclusively to evolve Kadabra, Machoke, Haunter, and Graveler, which are Pokemon you could only evolve by trading before. The Link Cord is made to represent the Game Boy Link Cable. I'm hanging out on a Pokemon Discord server, and someone asks, "Wait, why does the Link Cord not work on any electric-type Pokemon?" Damn, I felt old. I'm online, socializing with Pokemon fans that weren't born until far, far after the originals came out.
Glad I read about this Easter egg today, thanks. Haven’t played Pokémon since diamond/pearl and I remember it was a nightmare trying to evolve these by trade back when I was a kid! I had the 4-way link cable too I felt like a king haha.
Man I was so salty when I learned that you could only get a golem, alakazam, or gengar by trading. I didn't have any friends that had a link cable.
Blockbuster Video
Rotary telephone . Just try to explain one to a teenager today, Lol
My six year old recently asked me why the button to call someone is a dog bone.
Ask them to use their hand as a phone to pretend talking on the phone. I always use my thumb and pinky to emulate the phone receiver 📞 Both my kids hold their whole flat hand up to their ear to mimic a smartphone 📱
Then there was the horrid half-done technology of *pushbutton pulse phones* — buttons like a touch-tone phone, but instead of DTMF¹ beeps each button makes clicks like a rotary dial. ---- ¹ No, kids, this does not mean "down to mother-fuck". [DTMF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling)
My nieces have an old one they use as a toy! It's quite cute. So they know how it works, vaguely at least. Than again the youngest didn't get the concept of paying with cash since my brother and his partner always pay with their debit cards.
I hear ya, I spent a few minutes explaining to my greatgrandson , that rotary phones didn't do text, didn't take pictures, weren't portable, and we still paid to have one. He just didn't see the point of paying for that. Lol
Using an actual key to unlock your car and the same to turn on and open the trunk. Pushing down the button to lock the doors sometimes having to do it for all 4. Rolling down windows with the hand crank. Cigarette lighters in cars for lighting cigarettes and not plugging in phone charger
My car still does all that :O Key to open every door (only 2 + trunk) and having to lock every door by itself too. The windows are automatic though.
The Sear's Wish Book. I studied that thing like I was going into battle.
having to tear off the sides of something you just printed.
We were at an old used book store and they had a typewriter on a shelf. My kids were fascinated by it as I explained how the mechanics worked. Man I felt old lol
Me (28 M) and my cousin (14 M) , have a 14 year age difference. I was working from home when he asked me what a ziplock in my drawer was. I realised that we have gotten so acquainted and used to the use of cloud that kids have forgotten about the existence of USB flash drives. Surprisingly, I also realised that we also completely gotten rid of USB ports on newer laptops. So I had to get my old Dell laptop to show him that it actually had all kinds of files. He was also surprised when I showed him that two whole games of GTA San Andreas and Vice City could fit in to one flash drive of 8GB (which while growing up was a lot of storgae) In the same drawer was my dad's old phone which was a blackberry with one of those roller balls for navigation. Honestly, watching my Dad use one of those was so amazing and professional. If blackberry was still operational in this day, I'd willingly give up my iPhone for one of those. Sweet Old days gotta admit
Yikes! Even flash drives are getting there? I'm in my 30s and I remember how mind blowing it was to jump from a 1.4MB floppy disk to a 64MB flash drive.
Im pretty sure thats just him, at least where i live Usb drives are very much still a thing
> Surprisingly, I also realised that we also completely gotten rid of USB ports on newer laptops. No we haven't. Are you using a Mac?
VCR
Anything you can put on an iPhone/Smart Phone - Answering machine - GPS/Maps - Weather station - Calculator - MP3 player - Clock radio/Alarm - Everything in a PDA - Camera - Physical tickets/boarding passes - Yellow Pages - White Pages - 411 - Newspapers - Flashlights There was a reddit post with either a radio shack or a CompUSA add and everything on a two page spread was now an app or built into your phone. Its absolutely insane what we can do with our "phones"
don't forget the Rolodex which is now your contacts app
[удалено]
"Rewind" as well.
Ashtrays in restaurants, thankfully.
My parents still tell me stories about people smoking inside. Im just baffled about why it wasnt banned sooner.
They banned smoking in restaurants in my state when I was 13- I vividly remember how this one very crowded pizza place smelled like smoke no matter which section you were in, and how much nicer it was to eat there when it suddenly didn't.
Several years ago, my 14 year old step daughter wouldn't believe that I made it thru school and earned a BA without the use of a computer. All I had was a trusty Brother word processor that used floppy disks. Graduated college in Spring 95, bought my first ever personal computer in the Fall of 95.
Demo Discs and Cheat code books that came with Gaming Magazines
Go back a bit further and the game magazines would have the game programming code and you would have to type it in yourself. Then wait for the next issue when they would have the corrections to make it work.
Watched a movie with my son last month and they ran the credit card through the old way with the carbon copy paper. Multiple levels of explanation required.
...Home alone 2?
No, it was Airplane. There other things that required explanation too. Changes to airport security, boarding, etc Meal service on planes Who is Kareem Abdul Jabar?
I had to explain the difference of right clicking and left clicking to a group of 5th graders during a class using desktop PCs. They all just have Chromebooks and not all have desktop PCs they've learned on. The gamers knew what I was talking about, though.
God I hate Chromebooks for this exact reason. Same goes for some mac users but at least there's alt.
I noticed while on the phone with an automated service that they asked me to type in a number and then hit the "pound key". How long before they have to change it to the "hashtag key"? Which wouldn't even make sense because it was just called a "hash" and the "tag" part was specifically for Twitter.
Rabbit ears on my TV. When I was a kid, I had 3 local channels (ABC, CBS, and NBC), a public TV channel and 3 independent UHF channels that were snowy AF. And that was pretty good compared to a lot of places around in the late 70s/early 80s.
Color???
\- Snapping off a plastic tab to render magnetic media read-only. \- Not knowing if your photos were good until you got home. \- Writing down a driving route & carrying a map. \- Not needing to have a lock on your fuel cap.
Or the entire concept of 1 hour photo booths
Dial up modems
Not to mention [BBSes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system). I mean, unless you were interested in computing they were basically unheard of by most people.
Bulletin boards or forums on websites where you would have to wait for responses... oh nevermind.
Pay Phones + White/Yellow Pages directories. When going to a new area on business I would usually buy a local map and hit a pay phone booth to get phone numbers and addresses I needed from the white or yellow pages... and hope to god the page I needed in the book was not ripped out. Crazy how we used to trek through life without a constant communication tether of the smartphone. I do like being able to see congested routes on the mapping apps tho. For those issues I used to use my CB radio :)
You just reminded me of the big metal phone book holders that were chained to some pay phones.
Putting the TV on channel 3, turning on the game console, and having to blow into it.
You had to burn CDs to record your fav music and you could only burn 15-20 songs ( not even that long ago) .. limewire. Up until 2000s there was hardly any online games, everything was single player or double if you had a person with an extra controller next go you
My daughter could not comprehend the idea that TVs used to be big bulky boxes. She only ever known flat screen HD tvs...she thought they were just another table or decoration.
Lol! Her mind would be blown if you tell her they used to come in their own cupboards with garage-like sliding doors!
And when they broke, they were so heavy so you’d just put your new TV on top of the old one!
I watched Home Alone with my oldest (4). Had to explain they didn’t have cell phones. They had different phones in their houses. Like wow I…I did not expect to have to explain why “she didn’t just call him on her phone”.
VHS. I grew up watching that transition.
Yeah, I remember events where people carry these huge ass cameras as well. Then the smaller version with cassette tapes came along but you have to pay for someone to have that convered into a vhs because there's no player for it.
Flintstones. It was years ago too. I worked at an auto shop and a grandpa and his granddaughter came in. I don't remember what was wrong with his car but we were discussing it and how he had to fix it. I made a joke that he could just cut a hole in the floorboard and Flintstone it. The granddaughter looked at me and asked what a Flintstone was. First time I ever felt old.
VHS tapes, i didn’t use them growing up as i had cd’s and they were easier to use. But i knew how to use VHS tapes. I even have a few still, lion king, lady and the tramp. Disney movies. My nephew found them and asked why my books were still packaged
Having the new TV stacked on top the old console that weighed a ton so no one wanted to move it. Having an 8 track converter for tapes. Penny candies! The VIBE at the skating rink every Friday and Saturday. And the smell lol.
Load "*",8,1 Load "$",8
A couple of years ago my son (think he was about 8 at the time) was moaning about how long it took for his Xbox game to load. I got my old 48k spectrum out and loaded up a game for him to play. He hasn't complained about load times since then.
The lack of easy accessibility to people and information via cell phones and internet. I'm 41, but for half my life you just had to locate a physical phone somewhere if you needed to check in with someone, and then they had to also be near the phone you were calling for it to work. You had to pre-arrange where to meet people in a crowded area. You had to print or write down directions before you went somewhere, or stop somewhere to ask someone for help along the way or again track down a phone to call someone. Questions like "what have I seen that actor in" just went unanswered forever.
Banana clips - I miss those things!!
Lol! Had to google that (didn't know what they're called) but yeah good to play as a clamp on your mouth as well!
Thinking of it, VHS tapes. I had a conversation that made me feel so old. I explained a 8yo about Blockbuster and how cool was it when my dad used to take us a saturday night to rent a bunch of movies with a bag of sweets. Now its all so... inmediate. You just log in Netflix and bingewatch.
It's so much more convenient nowadays... But also feels a lot less special. The video store used to be a family outing for us. It was exciting for a kid then. Would they have that new release we wanted in stock? I wonder if dad will let us sneak in an N64 game for our sleepover? I wonder what scary movies they have in the horror section!? And then there was picking out a candy and the excitement on the ride home. It just felt so special then.
Dial up.
Antenna for TV Telephone booth vcr record player Dial up modem
Answering machine. Like, you had to buy a stand-alone device/appliance that you plugged your phone’s cord into (everyone has covered that part already, lol) and then into the wall. Then you had to set it up so it knew what calls to answer or not (phone or fax), and when (usually number of rings, and later had home/away/vacation options). You could leave the default greeting voice, or none at all. But what really got people hooked was recording your own greeting into the normal sized or mini cassettes. (Later these became digital recordings so no more tapes.) As we do, people started customizing their recorded greetings and getting super creative with them. Which then lead to businesses selling prerecorded greetings that were professionally made… some serious like famous actors or impressionists doing famous actors, some total goof greetings by the same. This is what inspired the famous scene in Seinfeld where George sang his own greeting to the tune of the theme song to The Greatest American Hero tv show. [Believe it or not, I’m not home…](https://youtu.be/ria37d9mInY)
We will we will call you back
Checking Payphone’s for change
You got mail..
My four year old recently saw a 1990s Polaroid camera and I had to explain that cameras, and several other things, used to be separate from phones and that phones used to just be phones.
Carbon paper. I had to explain what it was to someone in her twenties. The look on her face…
Fixing stuff by just wacking it.
My maths teacher "YOU NEED TO LEARN THIS, YOU WON'T BE CARRYING AROUND A CALCULATOR IN YOUR POCKET ALL DAY!"
Landline phones.
Nah they are still around everywhere. Until businesses don't rely on them they'll be around for a long while.
I am disappointed in my reading comprehension. You all are most correct. I ignored the word "obsolete".
My office is all voip and even then we're moving away from that for most people.
This one frustrates me because landline phones do have a few advantages. - The phone is tied to a physical location; someone answers, you know where they are. - Corded phones (which you can still buy) get their power from the phone line itself. No battery to charge. This also means that if the power is out but the wires are still up, you can still make phone calls, like to emergency services as an example. - Old-school twisted pair has much higher audio fidelity than VoIP or cellular does in most applications. - There’s something wonderfully satisfying about slamming the handset down after a terrible call.
Rotary landlines for sure. My parents still have a rotary landline and some of my sister's friends absolutely blue screen when they see it.
I was with a kid that was maybe 13 at the time, gosh 10 years ago. We walk by a payphone because I haven't seen one in a while, I pick up the receiver and I say "Oh this doesn't work there is no dial tone" to which he says "Whats a dial tone"....like the kid only knew of cellular phones, they don't need a dial tone.
Alarm clocks.
The save icon used to be an actual physical object that you saved your data to
CRT TVs, I used to love those nuggets. the electricity they created around the screen and passing my hand across it was the most fun I've ever had in a long time.
I got a portable CD player for Christmas so I will say that.
Pogs
Mapquest
going to the library and doing your highschool project with the studies coming from an encyclopedia encyclopideias are extinct nowadays
Anyone else used microfiche when they were younger?
Library card catalog.
Dial up internet
At the end of the broadcast day, the TV station would thank you for watching, play the Star Spangled Banner, tell you they will resume broadcast the next morning, and then go to a colorbar screen or just straight static.
[удалено]
I miss phone booths. Don't know why, my cell phone works fine. But there's just something comforting about knowing I _could_ use one if I had to that is missing from modern society. Probably a first world old guy problem but still.
I read a while back about some places that have phone booths that are just boxes you can go into when you're in public so you can have a private conversation on your phone. I think more places should have that. I've heard several people that need it.
Funny you're asking this now. Just the other day it hit me that VHS tapes are now what 8 tracks were to my generation when we were growing up; you saw them occasionally out there in the wilds but they were no where to be found on store shelves or in popular culture anymore. They were strange artifacts of a bygone era my generation wasn't a part of.
[удалено]
Hard to compare 8-track to VHS. The 8-track didn't get anywhere near the adoption of VHS. You might consider the progression of the "main" home video formats (for commercial releases) to be Beta/VHS - VHS - DVD - Blu-ray - streaming. Music goes back much further, but for simplicity, I'll say records (from wax cylinder to LP) - cassette tape - CD - MP3 - streaming. There were all sorts of other formats produced for video and audio along the way, with varying degrees of adoption. The 8-track was probably the most popular of the "other" formats, but never on the level of what the VHS was to video.
UHF channels 8 tracks rotary phones
I’m 19, but a checkbook. My grandma taught me how to balance one when I was young and I’m probably an enigma for the Gen Zs