Millennials Share 30 Things Generation Z Doesn’t Know About, And It Will Make You Feel Old
Technology advances and improves faster than we can adapt to the changes. Progress has always left some people in the dust, but the tempo has increased with the dawn of the Digital Age. That means that different generations are finding less and less in common with each other than before.
If you thought that the differences between millennials (aka Generation Y) and members of Gen Z were minor, think again. Nowhere are those generation differences more obvious than when members of the older generation show kids the tech that they used when they were small, only to be met with utter disbelief.
Bored Panda has collected some of the best examples when kids today couldn’t understand the technology the millennial generation grew up with. And, boy, do we feel old looking at these childhood memories! If you’d like to feel ancient and get a burst of nostalgia for the good old days, scroll down. Remember to upvote your faves or the ones that gave you the most 90s nostalgia and share this list with your friends (especially those whose birthdays are soon approaching).
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This is a diskette, aka a floppy disc.
It stores information.
If you ever installed Windows 95 from floppies (many, many of them), you will not forget.
MS Office in the mid-90s with Winword 6 and Excel 5 (if I remember correctly) came on more than 20 floppies. This was pure torture.
Load More Replies...That's not a real floppy. Floppies were much bigger and... floppy.
A real "Floppy" disk is 5.1/8 of an inch and really floppy. it stores 720KB. this one id a diskette and stores a whapping 1.4 MB
A real floppy was an 8", and stored far far less. Before that we had punched paper tape.
Load More Replies...I had one computer prof tell me that back in the day, when PC's had 5 1/4 floppy's and Mac's were just coming out with the mini disc drives, students would come into the computer labs with a 5 1/4 disc, look at the Macs, fold the disk in half and try to insert it into a Mac. Needless to say..they didn't quite work right after that.
You wanna talk old? This didn't even existed when I started in computers.
I used to hate these things because eventually, I would end up losing my saved file on it--something had corrupted the disk or something.
I just hated the fact that some games took like 4 discs... and you had to constantly swap them.
Load More Replies...I would think that this would be more of a Gen X thing than a Gen Y. I believe that the 3.5s came out in the mid 90s therefore Gen Y'ers would have been around the age of 1 years old.
Just tell the Gen Zs and the Gen Alphas that they're getting older with every passing minute and that they too will die.
Yesss. That happened a LOT ! Does anyone remember the time those files were broadcasted over the radio and you had to be at your desk at the right time to tape it ALL. I don't really feel old because of this, just amazed at how fast all this computer stuff evolved and keeps evolving at an incredible high rate.
I'm assuming this tweet is pretty old by now 15 years ago would be 2005 cause I remember having USB plug portable wifi at that point. dial-up was in the 90s no? haha
Uh-oh. Please forgive Mom because she knew not what she did - doeth - done - oh, heck, it's your mom, dude!
This is a cassette tape.
You can store music on it.
It was first developed in 1963, not the American Civil War which was fought between 1861 and 1865.
My dearest Emily, Gettysburgs was hell. I would never have survived without your kind and generous mixtape.
I bet you felt you were from the Civil War era when that was said to you. I felt that old just reading your post.
honestly! i am gen z and though we may be extremely chaotic, we're not all that ignorant
Load More Replies...Just to make sure that everyone’s more or less on the same page, Gen Y (millennials) refers to people born in the early 1980s and mid-1990s. In short, it’s safe to say that millennials were born sometime between 1981 and 1996, though different researchers use different definitions.
Meanwhile, members of Gen Z are considered to be those born from 1997 until the early 2010s and who grew up with digital technology and are comfortable using both the internet and social media.
This is a fascinating device from a bygone era that lets you manually roll down the car window.
It takes some getting used to.
You have to put your hand on the handle.
And then turn the handle to open the window.
The best part is, if you turn it the other way, the window closes.
Much wow. Such mystery.
I can hear my parents yelling at me to hurry up and close the window cause we are entering a long tunnel. Forget lifting weights, this was the arm workout.
Why do you have to close windows in a long tunnel?
Load More Replies...I remember fondly the days of hurrying to roll up the windows as it began to rain.
I'd much rather have manual controlled windows - you can open them to *just* the right amount.
Funny how some people will still use the "hand signal" for "grind down the window" - when there isn't a handle.
I guess the hand signal for pressing a button wouldn't be so clear. But then, if a kid doesn't know what a window-winder looks like, I guess they won't be using the winding gesture. What do they do?
Load More Replies...20 years and still don't like buttons, manual is easier to get window to exact level i want...
Young people will never experience why it's called 'rolling down a window'.
Worst thing of all: You had to pay in order to find out how good or bad they were.
This is a disposable camera, so at least you would have got pictures of some sort. What was even worse was getting to 24 shots and the camera kept winding on for more shots. Then you realise it never wound on properly in the first place and all those photos you thought you took, you never did. :-(
Load More Replies...Ah yes, the 'Cinderella Cameras' (someday my prints will come) -and you paid, now matter what they looked like.
We couldn't take a ton of pictures. We had to ration them carefully!
Worse now... if you want to use film, to get it developed takes a long time. No more 1 hour photo for film based pics.
I still often use film, but because of the cost and time it takes to get it developed I do my own developing.
Load More Replies...Worse yet, the nerd that worked at the photomat got to see all the nudes of your girlfriend.
For some reason those prints always came back glossy, and sometimes stuck together.
Load More Replies...They'll never know what it's like to send off film and NOT GET IT BACK, because your brother took a photo of his junk and the store destroyed the roll.
Hahaha. My son recently discovered an old polaroid camera we still have. He asked me what it was. I had to buy film just so he can see how it worked. He thought it was the coolest thing ever, except that the pictures "kinda suck". LOL
They have Instax cameras now that are pretty much the same thing. Cheap camera, expensive film.
Load More Replies...I was at a wedding a few months ago and they passed them out for everyone to take candid pictures. There was a big basket to collect them on your way out after the reception.
Young people also do not know that calling someone and asking 'where are you' is as young as mobile phones.
i suppose we don't automatically connect it in our heads, but it does make sense.
Load More Replies...Remember the time unplugging the house land line was how we Blocked someone?
We had a dial phone till 94, even then I knew that was kinda old, but thought it was so much fun. I enjoyed playing with my grandparent's dial phone (after we changed to a new model)
Load More Replies...Yes! LOL I was asked why we say "dialling" when using the phone. That was my son, he said there was nothing like a dial on the phone............. right.
So what do the young folk (lol, I sound so old) say instead of 'dialling' and 'hanging up'? I guess most of them don't do either because they just text.
Load More Replies...Once upon a time, it was stupid to ask "WHERE ARE YOU?" while on the phone.
Try answering your wooden wall phone, not recognizing your personal ring, and cutting in on a neighbor's private conversation. Oops.
Aside from tech and upbringing, what are the ways that the two generations differ? According to Amber Feitsma on Compan Young, Generation Z is far more pragmatic than Gen Y because of higher economic instability. Gen Z prioritizes security and stability (but, ironically, prefers experiences over material possessions which sounds counterintuitive).
And while the new generation has grown up surrounded by digital technology, it still values face-to-face interaction and tech that makes communication easy, simple, and convenient.
My best friend and I had a notebook full of notes that we would pass back and forth. There ended up being 2 volumes. We STILL have them (graduated in 95) and trade them back and forth every few years:-)
Me and my little sister did this! She passed away 2yrs ago and I would give anything to have those binders full of notes we would send to eachother.
Load More Replies...Which may be why Sister Immaculata NEVER turned her back on the class...
My teacher intercepted one we passed where I'd drawn a middle finger under her name. Got a D that semester!
Many historians have wondered what will remain from this modern age of digital images, emails and texts. If someone finds an ancient computer in the attic, will they boot it up to see what's on it? Will they even be able to start it?
Also handy to safe dried flower seeds, spices, medicine, etc.
Calls, text messages, and mobile internet all used to cost more money than today because cellphones were considered a luxury item, while service providers incurred greater costs than nowadays.
In Hungary 3 seconds talk were free. People looked like idiots calling for three seconds then calling back... that's how awkward mobile phone conversations was between teenagers and poor university students.
Also happened in Indonesia :D such a struggle for high school couples
Load More Replies...ah yes. also because of the limit of characters per text, we had to lern 2 typ lyk dis
10 cents is nothing, got my first phone when it was nearly 1 euro for calls and about 30 cents for sms; 20 years later i live in Czechia where prices are nearly the same :D
...when using text language wasn't because U wer 2 lazy 2 type, it was just 'cos U wanted to avoid the cost of having to send your message across two texts. (LOL...)
I use pay as you go so I still pay something like this per text.
When I was a teenager, we had to walk to the gym door in the high school and put 10 cents in this thing called a pay phone...
Do you except this Collect Call from "Momthemovieisovercomepickmeup!!!"
Gen Z also blurs the lines between different devices, work, and leisure: editing documents on laptops at work, only to change a few things on the bus home (or add a flourish or two using their smart fridge while getting a midnight snack). To sum up, it’s a generation that tries to synthesize contradicting and contrasting ideas into a logical whole.
Do you know what I’m looking forward to? Seeing how Generation Z will compare to Generation Alpha—those born from the early 2010s (and those who’ll join us on Planet Earth from the mid-2020s). Imagine the articles showing Gen A’s reactions to Gen Z’s tech. I can’t wait.
A 5 year-old would stuff a toy car into a VCR.
Load More Replies...You call this "struggle"? Pfffff..... try Windows 3.1. Or even better... DOS!
c:\ c:\ cd\games c:\ list /l c:\ commanderkeen.exe
Load More Replies...ever heard of desktop shortcuts? one thingnever changes over time... noobs
At least computers made sense back then, I don't understand modern computers, they've changed so much.
...and we were happy for having these three devices. Not everyone had them.
i prefer to carry my camera for pictures, quality is so much better
Any person who considers photography as a hobby for themselves, usually has a decent camera they take with them. I have yet to meet someone who considers themselves a photographer or photographer enthusiast, and only uses a phone for taking pictures.
Load More Replies...I remember getting a Polaroid camera for my birthday as a kid...it was so giant that the neck strap left a mark on my tiny neck but it was sooo cool to be able to see the photo right after you took it...I imagined that in the future Polaroid cameras would just become higher quality and that the photos would be 3 dimensional.
And a TV and VCR for watching porn. And an encyclopedia. And a dictionary. And envelopes and stamps. And a flashlight. And a clock, timer and stopwatch each separate. And a directory and yellow pages. And a flashlight. And a camera. And a movie camera. And a Gameboy. And an iPod or Nano or MP3 player or Walkman or Discman or a boombox or a stereo.
16 years ago my husband said he wasn't getting a cel phone until it would also play music and take photos. At the time it seemed that it was impossible but here we are.
I still use an mp3 player. Much more storage space and better battery life.
You have an MP3 player with more storage than a modern smartphone? The thing is you can stream most media, you don't need storage. Carrying multiple devices for that reason seems odd. Now the battery life. Yeah. Get that. But then. Still charging my phone for other uses anyway.
Load More Replies...When I over out my parents made sure I got a phone plan with Verizon so all our calls and text would be free. That ended when I got a girlfriend and switched to T-Mobile so all our calls and text would be free lol.
Different service providers for a relationship was basically Romeo and Juliet.
This wasn't that long ago, what's next? Reminiscing about all the old things from the previous year?
Well, that kind of happens every new year, when everyone does the reviews of the year articles and TV shows and social media posts. Also, the increased rate of nostalgia due to the speed of technological advancement is the entire point of this article.
Load More Replies...That's what my parents did; one was the driver, the other navigated by map. A great starter of heated arguments.
Load More Replies...They've been around for decades. I always have a Thomas Guide handy for whatever big city I've lived in - just in case. Still very handy! You never have to worry about a connection or power.
Load More Replies...Lol, I just bought a 2020 Thomas guide road atlas, no electricity required!
What about asking the way? You know, pulling over, forced interaction with strangers, and getting lost repeatedly.
And then panic when the directions told you to take a turn on a road that goes over railroad tracks when that road doesn't actually exist and a 1000 gallon propane tank is in the way instead.
I had that happen once because there was a house in the middle of where the road was supposed to go, apparently they didn't parcel out the lots correctly and the road just wasn't there for about a block and then resumed on the other side of that house.
Load More Replies...Cellphones could store very limited amounts of data.
While it seems funny that your phone couldn't make any more space for extra messages, consider how quickly photos and videos fill up your brand new smartphone.
You have to keep in mind that this phone only could store tiny text messages.
But at least the batteries on these phones lasted more than a few hours. I had a Nokia 6310 that I used to charge once a week.
I still grief the death of my old Nokia ... didn't survive the washing machine :-(
Load More Replies...Smart phones STILL only store limited amounts of data. Relatively speaking.
This is like the phone I have now. I refuse to carry around a "smart" tracking device that can recognize my face and enable drones to target me.
It was such a chore going through the letters to type messages, too. I got to the point with a friend where planning a night out went from "Shall we meet at Negritos at 11?" to "Neg 11?"
that phone memory size can't even hold a single picture from a smartphone
how about when you had only an old rotary phone, and you were on a party line and no one could leave messages. But your neighbours could listen in...
My first mobile phone was Nokia 1611. I was so much cooler than owners of 1610, because mine could receive AND send SMS.
In my day it was the film strip projector. Or, worse, the slide projectors
Im mean im 12 and I remember my 4th Grade had these!! (smart boards were made then though..)
in our day it was a deadly made movie of polar bears and snow.....nap time!
Exactly, the only time you had to pause was when the next letter was under the same number.
Load More Replies...Oh yeah, I didn't even have to look at the keys most of the time lol
Load More Replies...Remember trying to use T9 and being completely confused until someone showed you and then thinking, "It can't get any better than this!"
In Germany there's a place called SOSSENHEIM. If you type that in with T9 on such a cellphone in German, which is 7-6-6-3-6-6-4-3-4-6, it will say POPPENGEHN, which is inappropriate. It means "to go have se*".
Or just press 4-3-9 and if it doesn't say HEY, press * until it does (I think it was *, because # was used to make letters big or small). Sure, some cellphones might not have had this T9 word suggestion, but most of them did. Apparently it existed from 1999.
This is a VHS tape.
You can store movies and video recordings on it.
That moment when you're excited to watch a movie and find out the bugger who watched it before you didn't rewind it....
Load More Replies...We had so many of them. I remember when you 'taped' something to watch later !
Or called home for someone to tape it when you forgot to set the timer, and them mom forgot and you had to wait years to see the rerun.
Load More Replies...When I was a kid, I was always wondering, if audio cassettes have an A and B side, why don't video tapes do too?
The answer is long and technical and searchable if you really want details, but it is essentially to do with videos being larger than audio data so needing more bandwidth on the tape. This means the tapes have to be read at different speeds and using different mechanisms, so although they both use magnetic tape, VHS and audio cassettes work quite differently.
Load More Replies...Recording Disney movies and trying to not to jump to avoid the VHS skipping 😂
I still have mines, I just need a vhs-player. I had hoped something would come out since its retro :C
No VHS player as well. So I had to dump them all at the move to a smaller flat last year :(
Load More Replies...I still have a bunch of these featuring aerobic exercises from the 90s.
Recorded a bunch of REO Speedwagon on these - and now what? YouTube - guess you're the one now.
Twitter needs an update when people who shout (all caps) get a posting ban for 12 hours.
MySpace was a rather short phenomon of less than 10 years. Most people of my generation didn't even realize what MySpace was and - poof - it was almost gone. Interestingly, it still exists but isn't very popular.
I remember it only being popular for 1 or 2 years. It was the first really big social network movement. Then we had facebook and no need of myspace.
Load More Replies...I do. It just didn't last a terribly long time. It isn't that relevant anymore. I have one, actually.
I’d spend all my time changing the song then though. Or picking my top friends and putting that they aren’t in any order in my profile.
I remember Myspace and it was intensely annoying when you go to a page and some s**t song started blaring.
This is an overhead projector.
It projects things over your head.
Here's hoping the teacher had legible handwriting 😂😂 Do not miss this thing
It's a holographic projector for communicating to people on the other side of the world
This was the thing you use before dry erase boards. It was used with clear plastic films your teacher used to write on with permanent ink, then use Windex for hours trying to clean them off. If a dry erase board and a slide projector had a baby, this would be it.
Loved when the teacher wrote all over the transparency.....wiggling the projection all over the place. Headache.
This is a public payphone.
You used it to call people.
Although payphones are out it's not been that long since they were everywhere
I remember leaving my cell at home and thinking "Oh I'll just use a payphone...only to look around for one and finally come to the conclusion that I'm a dinosaur. "
Been there. It is impossible to find one when you need one!
Load More Replies...I found one of these when I parked on the far side of my regular gas station the other day! I had to bring my 8yo to see it and school her in the struggle!
This is the device where you made collect calls to your house that said "Mom, come pick me up from the mall" instead of your name so that mom would get the message and you didn't have to pay for anything.
We had a few on our property but had the phone company take them out a few years ago - only drug dealers were using them.
Yeah, try finding one when you get a flat and left your cell at home!
That's your best friend when you're caught in a mega-mall with no ride home - 80 miles away.
Unfortunately it's not the same on smart phones, it's missing something without those tiny rubber keys
Load More Replies...This is the phone that my mother currently uses. She's a boomer and I'm Gen X
Same although the one using it is my father (gen X) and I'm gen Z.
Load More Replies...ahhhh I had a silver version of this exact one as a teenager....memories....
You took that thing to church? I'm not religious, but it still seems something's not right here.
This is an iPod.
It plays music.
The very first iPod came out in 2001, not 1955.
The iPod pictured appears to be an iPod Nano, the first of which were released in 2006.
In 1955 the only portable sort of music you had was a phonograph and plastic records. And the phonograph/record player had to be plugged into a wall socket
Load More Replies...Wait... Are these considered "old" now? Because I still have my pink one, loaded with all the good music (from the 2000s of course) and I still use it...often.
That one is not a 2006 model. I have one of those. That one came out a couple of years later.
Allow me to contradict you there, this is indeed a 2006 second generation 2Gb iPod Nano, I'm looking at mine as I type this. Mine in better shape, still works and it even has charge even though I haven't used in years...
Load More Replies...It is kinda crazy though... it's only been 14 years and technology has already advanced so much.
Compared to technology in the here-and-now, it may as well have come from 1955...
I still don't know how to burn CDs and I'm not a member of Gen Z.
On a theoretical level, it's clear that you copy information that's on your PC onto a disc. On a practical level, I end up messing up the disc and accidentally deleting the data I meant to copy over from the computer.
Read history about ancient Rome. Especially about Nero who lived in the ancient times and was the Emperor of Rome. He even burnt Rome beside CDs.
I used Nero Burning ROM for burning my CD's.
Load More Replies...I just used a magnifying glass and the sun to burn my discs - it was easier to check your work as you went that way as well. There was nothing worse than spending 8 solid years etching out your perfect playlist by hand only to find you accidentally got a few bits backwards and are now stuck with Nickelback on tracks 3-6!
Load More Replies...I never understood how my parents burnt CDs. I thought it was some sort of tech magic that my dad could just pull off because he was the Dad(TM) of the house.
Some CD's you could re-record to over and over. You had to be House of Ravenclaw in order to get it to work though.
Load More Replies...I've still got a couple of spindles of blank CDs for burning "mix" CDs, depending on your MP3 compression rate you could fit a couple of hundred songs on one. This was because an MP3 compatible Discman or whatever was about $30-$50 in the early 2000s, but an iPod was several hundred dollars and I was a poor student.
My mom laughed so hard the first time I burned a CD because I didn't know you could only put data on it once, unlike a floppy disc. We all carried little cases of floppies for school assignments in high school, I thought I was cutting down to 1 disc to carry. It took 1 CD to teach me the error of my ways lol, now I've got 3 diff thumb drives for various things.
Careful, I recently leaned the hard way that thumb drive data degrades and eventually vanishes!
Load More Replies...Burning CD's was a dark art-form. Few mastered it flawlessly. I often forgot to 'close' the volume and the CD would not work on regular CD players. Or my dog would bump the computer while it was burning and the whole project when to hell. But when it worked, Hallelujah! You had a MASSIVE 720 MB worth of music!!!!
Easy. Put the original CD on your nose, and the blank one on your second toe. Chant a Buddhist mantra for no more than fifteen seconds - and there you have it. (If that fails, choose another religion.)
Nero software was nice for burning CD's (the plastic thing, not cross dressers)
This is a stereo, aka a boombox.
You use it to play music and be popular.
My siblings and I still call them Ghetto Blasters as if we were stuck in the late 70's.
i like the term ghetto blaster more.. so eyah.. yor're not alone
Load More Replies...At the pediatrician a few years back for my daughters eye test. She was 6. The computer thing they use to test her eyes basically said she was blind, so they gave her an old school test with picture cards. She was doing well and starting to relax a bit. Then, the nurse flipped a card of an old, rotary phone. My daughter looked at me with a panicked face. (She already thought she was going blind because of the machine reading). She just stood there, eye covered. Suddenly, a tear rolled down her cheek. She could clearly see the photo, but had no idea what it was. I felt awful. But she passed.
Looks like a more modern one too - with a phone docked in the front.
Save those flashcards. You discovered a new version of Trivial Pursuit.
Stereo became Ghetto Blaster, which became boom box, which became...
OMG I love Beethoven's Symphony Hashtag 9!! (read in a valley girl voice)
Load More Replies...It's called a pound sign and all phones with buttons have always had them. The pound sign is still frequently used in phone menus. As in "enter your number followed by the pound sign". Calling it a hashtag is a new thing that Twitter did.
Where are you from? Never heard it called a pound sign (£=pound sign in the uk), only the 'hash key'
Load More Replies...I teach 18y and over. I had a particularly young group a while back. I had a note on the whiteboard noting out important facts. Each number was preceded by the # symbol. They just looked at that board bewildered and confused. Finally one of them said, "Do you want us to research these hashtags?" I'm only 37, but I felt like a dinosaur!
Oh, seriously, even cell phones have that symbol -- you know "Enter your password, then press the pound sign". I'm not buying this one.
Hi why does everyone think it's a pound sign? That would be £. It has always been called a hashtag.
Load More Replies...That symbol is still on the keyboard on all modern phone apps, I don't understand why this confuses people.
me, wakes up at 5 am to download some songs, because the internet provider is suck at normal times, and only got moderate speed at 2 to 6 am
I still do that since my provider still sucks......but I don't have to wait 2 hours for a single song anymore
Load More Replies...And sometimes you'd get a file of the song you wanted... Ruined because someone decided to add his own "version" at the end. -___-
Or you got the version with the loud, obnoxious horn blaring in the beginning, or some voice coming in at random times saying c**p like "Hot Mixes"
Load More Replies...got a dam virus using limewire, had money taken out of my bank, got the money back, but felt aweful knowing someone had access to my PC.
Never used it, but it was known among savvy friends as SLIMEwire, because of the hazards.
I loved Limewire...even if it took a long time for some songs to be downloaded.
or when you waited forever to download a file just to find out it was a god damn picture
This is a beeper, also known as a pager.
It can be used to transmit short messages or, in some cases, voice recordings.
You know what's crazy? Hospitals still using these because they are so easy to use. They notify you clearly, give you a quick overview of the urgency and let you decide to call back immediately or attend to what you're doing at that point first. Leaving the decision making with the actual person while not having to set a gazilion options only to forget to turn the sound on when you were needed to save someone's life.
Not just for the ease, but it is less likely to interfere with the medical equipment in some areas of the hospitals.
Load More Replies...The hospital gave these to expectant fathers so they would know to come to the hospital if their wife went into labor while she was at work... My husband had one when our 1st was born 26 years ago.
Ahh those were the days! Owning one of these used to make me feel so cool back in my teens (Oops, did I just revealed my real age?) And being able to send those 'number' messages felt so cool too.
This is what doctors ignored until they'd get a phone call or a PA announcement telling them to check their pager.....
I carried one for years. They were still in use at my work when I retired in 2017. Once they just showed a number for a call-back, but 'round about 1998 we were issued ones that also gave short text messages. I put mine through the washing machine once, and it worked for years after I baked it dry. Try that with a smartphone.
This is a cellphone.
You use it to call people.
This one is odd. Even two years old normally recognize those, but consider them toys instead of things an adult would use.
probably because all of his family only used smartphones, *note that these days even phone toys are looked like smartphones
Load More Replies...This is not a cell phone. It is a cordless phone, which was connected to an outlet in a home.
I was going to say the same thing. This looks more like a cordless phone than a cellphone. We still have one of these.
Load More Replies...Ugh. This is NOT a cell phone. This is a cordless handset for a landline phone.
who screaming.. no no no no NO!!!! until you where back to the home screen, hoping that it wouldn't be active in the back somewhere
I miss that sometimes. Yesterday morning I didn't want to talk to anyone, so when my MIL rang I didn't pick up. In the afternoon she called my husband and I had to make up excuses why I didn't answer my phone. Apparently she got worried we didn't call back.
Remember when the phone would ring upwards of 20 times? That ring could be heard all through the house. Heck, I remember how quickly my excitement over getting a 2nd phone turned into defeat when my grandma started listening in on my phone calls and telling me to hang up the phone!
It also meant that you could pretend you were not at home by letting the phone ring, which sometimes was convinient.
Before called id you had to gamble picking up the phone. It could have been anyone.
It is crazy. Cable tv is crazy expensive and you still have to watch commercials.
This drives me crazy too. Why am I paying to watch ads? It also irks me that the cable providers in my country don't give you the option of removing porn channels from the package you're buying. And there isn't a single package that doesn't include that s**t. Ugh.
Well, to be honest, a lot of people from older generations who have never used one would not know about the rotary thing.
That's ok. I accidentally recorded over the birth of my daughter. My family still teases me to this day. She's almost 24 now.
NOOOOO! Don't ever do this! I used to cringe when I worked at Nintendo of America and kids would call in saying the game didn't work even after blowing on the connector. Your game isn't working BECAUSE you've been blowing on the connector. It makes the contacts erode. Best thing to use is a cleaning kit or an old t-shirt or tea towel and rubbing alcohol. Never use a cloth or q-tips that have the chance of getting stuck or fraying/leaving strands behind.
We blew on the cartridge NOT because it was dusty or whatever but because the system would get hot.
This has perplexed me ever since I found out other people did it as well.
Load More Replies...These are/were awesome! They still make them, but they aren't as good!
I had one when I was 5... I'm 15 now. I think it was a Peter Pan one? Something Disney-related.
We couldn't even search, just had to wait through the whole damn 'hit parade' to hear that certain one.
That's true, but you knew it was a show and could remember the numbers without trying.
Load More Replies...Okay, but wait. The code for the bathroom??? Is this a NY thing? I noticed the location on the tweet. You have to have a code to get into bathrooms there? Is this to keep non customers and/or homeless people out? I have so many questions.
I had to unlearn the 0=O working in medical revenue. Too many things are alpha numeric.
You might have grown up in a place with mild weather and no snow/cold closures.
Load More Replies...Or watching the channel guide and missing way was coming in next on tv.
We listened to the radio to see if our school was closed due to snow - it's very rare in the UK.
We would listen for our school closures on the local radio station 🤣🤣 when the weather was bad, they'd read them off in between each song. Was faster than waiting for the TV news
Pfft, I remember when my dad used to have one of the earliest cellphones, it was as large as a brick. And he had a pager for texting. It feels surreal how fast things have changed.
Sarah, there was texting when you were 8? Wow, you ain't seen nothin' yet. We had dial phones, party lines and manual typewriters. We got one TV station, maybe one and a half sometimes.
I remember when texting first became a thing. I thought, "That's silly, why would you do that when you can just call the person?" And now I send several thousand texts a month and probably spend less than an hour total on the phone lol.
Some phones weren't even compatible with texting at first.
Load More Replies...Both my parents originally had cellphones because of their jobs. I remember my stepdad having a bag phone for years, then "upgrading" to a Motorola brick lol. I didn't have my first cellphone until 2004. My dad called it a silly toy, but after our car broke down twice that summer and we used it to call for help he told me that I would always have one, even if he had to pay for it. I still have one, but I've been paying for it all along :D.
When I was 8 there was no such thing texting (or calling unless you happened to be INSIDE someone's house). If dad wanted you home, he stood outside and literally yelled for you and expected you to come running.
I got a cellphone the year after I graduated high school in '97. I had my own apartment and didn't tell mom for at least two years that I had a cell phone because she said 'only drug dealers use them'. I had to keep my land line because I didn't want to tell her I had one. Then around 2000 she got one.
This is a pencil sharpener.
It sharpens pencils.
Are pencils no longer used? Either this shouldn't be in this list or I'm even more out of touch with modern reality than I thought.
How many 4 year olds are sharpening pencils in classrooms?
Load More Replies...maybe she was looking at that white dispenser-thingy in the back there..
I loved those growing up, they sharpened your pencil nice and evenly and you could get a super sharp point
I still have one at home. I also have the small, personal sharpeners for colored pencils and other art pencils.
Load More Replies...They were loud too. If a kid got up to sharpen their pencil the teacher would have to stop for about ten seconds or more because of the grinding sound. And everyone would watch you sharpen.
Or you would go to the sharper to walk near your crush. XD
Load More Replies...They still have those at my school but then again my school district started like seventy years ago
I haven't been in a classroom in YEARS that had one of these! Apparently, they just throw dull pencils away...
This is also a cassette tape.
You can store music on it.
My favorite band ever!! 😀😀😀😀 Can NOT wait to see them at Fenway in August!! *Edit- Crazy good album too!
I had a kick-butt Sony Walkman that was just a little bigger than a cassette case. To put a tape in, you had to expand it by pulling the player head outward. This one: il_fullxfu...460900.jpg
...or hitting a key more than three times because you needed a special letter like an Umlaut.
and then you hit one to many and hat to start over
Load More Replies...Oh yes! Until you realized they played the same movie back to back for an entire month.
I'm 32. I dicovered HBO by watching Game of Thrones. Never heard of them before
Imagine someone like at Walmart calling the police or the Secret Service because you paid with one of those.
The police come right away. Then the Secret Service gets involved and watches for a long time. I know someone that was paid cash for a job, almost half the notes were counterfeit with only 2 different serial numbers. It was a big thing.
Load More Replies...Not as bad as the teen that thought a customer was trying to pass counterfeit bills because he didn't realize that $2 bills actually do exist.
yessssssss i had the purple one, which was like the only color option available
We had one in our basement whey we bought our house 5 years ago. I love it
Candy cigarettes are still available here in Austria! Believe it or not.... I never understand that. And you can still order this at Amazon! :-(
The last time I've seen such cigarettes made of chocolate or bubble gum in Austria was in the 1980s. I don't know a single store where I could buy them (except for Amazon, of course).
Load More Replies...OMG! These were super tasty! I look for them all the time in specialty candy stores. I only find the ones that don't puff the "smoke" out. They don't taste the same.
Oh, you poor things! I saw a movie on Saturday in a theater if I was lucky.
It's not a complaint. There was nothing more exciting than that red envelope in the mailbox.
Load More Replies...They still offer that service, but no one really uses it because it costs just as much as streaming and even if you watch things the day you get them you can only watch 4-5 DVDs a month. If you MUST watch something new, try Redbox, they're all over in the US, even in the tiny town I'm in. If it's something older, well, you can try the DVD thing I guess lol.
Someone here where I work STILL gets discs in the mail. I see them pop up on the mail cart every now and then. They aren't called Netflix anymore (I forget what the envelope says) but they are in a red envelope that looks pretty much just like the one above.
I never noticed that but you're right. the envelope says DVD.com and in small letters 'A Netflix Company' w/ the return address, 'Nearest Netflix Shipping Facility'. Even the website has DVD.com.
Load More Replies...Whatttt???? I seriously thought Netflix was a new invention. I mean I knew they had companies you could order movies through, but I thought Netflix was just invented to view movies on the interNET. Hence NETflix.
That's a sign of a very fast development because Facebook is only 16 years old.
Please don't write this down so explicitly. To me Facebook started yesterday. I know it's been 16 years. But really it was yesterday and I'm still 24.
Load More Replies...Actually it was more like AOL mail when I had dialup but I get the point.
Broadband came out at least 5 years before facebook. Well done for trying, but do your research.
I think they're talking about how they couldn't check facebook on a smartphone.
Load More Replies...Get this.. here in Norway renting videogames was never a big thing. and I am sad to this day.
I'm really old. We used to use a clothespin and a playing card in our spokes. Of course, we had more that three spokes too, so...
Hum.. Never heard of or seen that stuff. We used playing card and clothespin
Born in the 80s here. I always say how glad I am to be able to experience and witness the evolution of technology. I got to grow and learn along the way. It's been exciting and rewarding!
I love how my kids feel having an iPad to enjoy and learn about things is a normal part of their lives. I love new tech and what it enables us to do in communication and collaboration :) And it's a privilege to see this happen in your own lifetime!
Load More Replies...I am a Gen Z and I knew 99% of these but there's honestly no reason for us to know some of these things because we were too young to use them
These things were popular not that long ago. It just shows how quickly things change.
Load More Replies...Don't get me wrong but I don't like those "Kids these days don't know" or "Only millenials will know" like seriously I get that these throwbacks to past give you nostalgic feelings and everything but just because I'm part of gen Z doesn't mean I have no idea what these things are. I saw and used more than half of these things on my own.
The "benifits" of living in a backward country, I guess.
Load More Replies...I think this is more of a Gen X items list as most of the things listed were popular when the Gen Y was too young to appreciate them.
Sitting in a cave without fire because it was not invented yet,only kids from the 90s will remember
I CANNOT wait until we get a generation that asks, "What the hell is 'Facebook'?"
I love the fact that there are explanations under the pictures to tell what it is. Like a history book. Look kids, this is a dinosaur!
Please not another one of these... I'm tired of making fun of young people who have no way of knowing some random, unimportant stuff.
It's not making fun of younger people. It's just a fun way of looking at how fast things change.
Load More Replies...My grandparents had a black bakelite dial phone sitting at a small telephone table next to the entrance door used for visitors. The house they were living in was where my grandfather had grown up and my great grandfather was such a modern man that he had a telephone line installed. The very first time my grandmother visited her parents in law-to be, the phone rang when she was standing just next to it and to her great horror, her future father in law asked her to answer. That was the very first time she spoke on a telephone. This must have been close to a hundred years ago.
Born in the 80s here. I always say how glad I am to be able to experience and witness the evolution of technology. I got to grow and learn along the way. It's been exciting and rewarding!
I love how my kids feel having an iPad to enjoy and learn about things is a normal part of their lives. I love new tech and what it enables us to do in communication and collaboration :) And it's a privilege to see this happen in your own lifetime!
Load More Replies...I am a Gen Z and I knew 99% of these but there's honestly no reason for us to know some of these things because we were too young to use them
These things were popular not that long ago. It just shows how quickly things change.
Load More Replies...Don't get me wrong but I don't like those "Kids these days don't know" or "Only millenials will know" like seriously I get that these throwbacks to past give you nostalgic feelings and everything but just because I'm part of gen Z doesn't mean I have no idea what these things are. I saw and used more than half of these things on my own.
The "benifits" of living in a backward country, I guess.
Load More Replies...I think this is more of a Gen X items list as most of the things listed were popular when the Gen Y was too young to appreciate them.
Sitting in a cave without fire because it was not invented yet,only kids from the 90s will remember
I CANNOT wait until we get a generation that asks, "What the hell is 'Facebook'?"
I love the fact that there are explanations under the pictures to tell what it is. Like a history book. Look kids, this is a dinosaur!
Please not another one of these... I'm tired of making fun of young people who have no way of knowing some random, unimportant stuff.
It's not making fun of younger people. It's just a fun way of looking at how fast things change.
Load More Replies...My grandparents had a black bakelite dial phone sitting at a small telephone table next to the entrance door used for visitors. The house they were living in was where my grandfather had grown up and my great grandfather was such a modern man that he had a telephone line installed. The very first time my grandmother visited her parents in law-to be, the phone rang when she was standing just next to it and to her great horror, her future father in law asked her to answer. That was the very first time she spoke on a telephone. This must have been close to a hundred years ago.
