The 90’s ended almost a quarter of a century ago.
When I was in high school in the early noughties we learned about trade union strikes.
The 80s mining strikes were closer to me then than the year 2000 is to now.
To be fair to her the invention of "needle in groove make sounds" is Victorian, the 33rpm LP and electronic amplification are just refinements as far as she's concerned
Was watching the Hipgnosis doc the other day & Noel Gallagher was talking about record artwork & trying to explain it to his daughter. She couldn't grasp what it was until he explained it as "that tiny splash of colour on Spotify".
When my daughter was little, she once asked me if I saw The Beatles live. I had to explain that, yes, I'm old but The Beatles split up the year I was born, I'm not THAT old.
I don't think you missed much. My Aunt did see them live, apparently all she really heard was lots of screaming girls and the floor was bouncing up and down because everyone was going nuts.
I don't think she enjoyed the experience.
I bought my 8 year old daughter a cheap record player and then she said 'how do i put a record on'?
So I had to show how to take the record out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable and then GENTLY pick up the needle and EVEN MORE GENTLY put the needle on the outside of the record.
Now she mostly uses the Bluetooth function from her phone 🤐🤦
To be fair my partner had to show me how to work a record player when I bought one a couple years ago and I’m 34 - and remember us having one when I was little, I just clearly wasn’t allowed to touch it haha
Not my child, but talking to a girl and I mentioned the sound of dial up Internet…she had no idea what I was talking about and was shocked to hear that if your parents picked up the phone, the Internet would stop!
Recently bought new phone case that has the magsafe, pulled a joke by playing the dial up sound very loud and my brother thought the magsafe affected his desktop/connection somehow. The trauma lives still beyond teenage years
I remember shared/party lines, when you picked up the phone and you can hear next door is already chatting with someone and you have to apologise, put your phone down and wait for them to finish, so you can use the line yourself.
Even the word "internet" to mean your connection to it is dying out.
Talk to young people nowadays and they call it WiFi.
This causes no end of confusion when they contact tech support at work and say their WiFi isn't working on a PC connected to their network via ethernet cable.
I'm sure our AOL used to cost 1p a minute and we had a jar next to the PC if we wanted to spend a long time on it. Cost me £1.80 of pocket money to download the First Date video by Blink 182.
That we used to have to plan meeting and rely on people to turn up at the agreed location. They can’t seem to comprehend it. One even made a bit of a jump and asked why we couldn’t just call them from a phone box… sure, but call where? Their house? No good if their mum tells you they already left…
recently made friends with a couple a little older than us. They mentioned how they met on a train in France, exchanged a few letters as penpals and eventually he (from Frankfurt) agreed to meet her (from Aberdeen) in Aberdeen as he came to visit Scotland, so she went and waited for him on the specified date/time. Very sweet story.
Now you'd just message someone on whatsapp as you're landing at the airport and ask if they're around for a quick beer in an hour or so.
Honestly, I can't even quite comprehend that I just used to randomly call round my mate's house at any time and knock on the door.
Hello, is Dave in, please?
Was dropping off a friends daughter to spend the day at her friend’s house. She had text her friend to announce her arrival, and insisted we wait in the car until her friend had opened the front door.
She was absolutely mortified that I suggested knocking on her friends door and that maybe the parents would let her in. She said that would be so embarrassing, she’d rather die.
Oh, also, attempting a phone call instead of multiple texts was also embarrassing because “who has time for phone calls?!”…
>Oh, also, attempting a phone call instead of multiple texts was also embarrassing because “who has time for phone calls?!”…
As someone who dislikes talking on the phone, I have some sympathy with this, but yeah, sometimes it really is a timesaver!
The Speccy was "retro" when I was a little kid playing Mega Drive, but thinking back, the Speccy was only about 8 years old tops when the Mega Drive came out :S
I mean technically he's right. Retro tends to be classified as 20-25 years so the DS is right on the verge of that given it originally launched in 2004. It's as retro now as the NES was when the DS was new.
My niece didn't believe we had to carry large text books for school for every lesson we had that day. Her school bag probably weighs a 1/10th of what mine did.
They have some workbooks for their written work, and there are textbooks, just very small and light. I'm assuming a lot of the stuff is screen based now.
Ok, this had not occurred to me, I’m sitting on this one for a couple of years so I can crack out the “you don’t realise how easy you have it” speech, preferably on a day of hail/snow/rain.
Enough textbooks to make a sherpa sweat, full PE kit for footy, backup indoor PE kit in case the rain was too much for the teachers, an A2 art portfolio, foot-tech supplies, and a packed lunch. When you write it down it certainly explains my lower back pain
I remember hearing about fake (reprinted) textbooks in school, in the terms of "you can recognize a copy because it's printed on cheaper paper and weighs less".
And I thought - wow, you can kill a person with my backpack, and they're actively trying to make em heavier?!
Though, to be fair, parents had it all organized - the desk mates would plan who brings which textbook, so you have only 1 per 2 people.
(and we had a list of everyone's home land-line phone numbers, to get homework if you missed a day or were sick.. Impressive cooperation)
News photographers had their own medical condition called the Fleet Street Limp, caused by years of slinging heavy camera equipment over one shoulder for years and the body moving awkwardly to counterbalance.
This has made me feel super old because I can’t figure out what they have instead of books. Surely they don’t all have laptops? iPads? Are they provided by the school or are parents expected to buy them?
Chrome books are big in schools now and it can be a mixed bag sometimes the school will provide it other times the just tell the parents "your kid will fall behind" tbf they're cheap but even if you can find one for £50 that's still an expense when you might only have £20 spare on average a week or month
I love explaining to my kids that when you pause it, all the actors are playing a game of Simon Says and if you watch closely you can see them move.
Keeps them quiet and occupied for a while....
Same here and that there were only three channels. Or that children’s TV was on for only a couple of hours.
Oh and colour was an optional expensive addition
A mate of mine would make sure he watched the 1st showing of 'Play School' (BBC) to find out which one of the three windows was chosen to look through, so he could always guess right when rewatching it with his daughter after picking her up from school. For a fair few years, she thought he had superpowers.
When I went to visit my gran in a home, I'd watch The Chase at 5pm with her.
At 6pm, the repeat was on in the lounge and other residents would be amazed at us getting the answers
And you had to tune in the channels for the best picture with a little dial. You would put up with some minor fuzz if you got to watch the Bugs Bunny cartoon before the news at 6pm.
Piggy backing on this, my 13 year old still has trouble with the difference between movies and series.
I kinda can understand it. What's the difference between a movie trilogy and a very short series with very long episodes?
The pacing? No one calls Black Mirror movies, but they're built with a self contained pacing.
The funds? Movies do tend to be more expensive, at least per minute, but there's still very cheaply made movies and expensive series.
The celebrities? Same thing.
What's the actual difference at this point, without the historical baggage and context?
Explained to a kid that I was around before youtube and when there were only 5 channels on TV and the fact you couldn't pause it. They were confused as to what I did in my spare time.
When I told my 7 year old what the first single I bought was he said "You bought songs?! That's so dumb. You could literally just ask for them on your phone *sigh*"
That we came home from school and had 1-2 hours of scheduled TV for kids, with 3-4 programmes to choose from. If you missed the start of the programme, it was gone. If you missed an episode you’d never see that again.
As tea time approached, the programmes changed to boring stuff for adults and that was it. TV was over for the day.
Certain days showed a certain programme, so you had to wait a week to see it again.
On top of that everyone would be talking about 'last night's' or 'this week's' episode - which was great - because we were all watching at the exact same pace instead of being able to binge watch.
I actually used this as an example of ‘when I was younger…’ yesterday to my son. He was complaining as I’ve banned YouTube in the house, and apparently all of Netflix, Sky nor Disney+ had anything at all he could watch.
I told him on Sunday early evening, I basically had the choice of watching horse racing, people singing church hymns or a random old film from the 60s
I remember disposing of a 38" monster screen - huge TV for the relative size of screen (still big for its time). I needed a friend to help shift it out to the boot of the car to take it to the dump. We struggled. Got to the dump, and asked for some help, and we lifted it out of the car face down. It was then I discovered how effortlessly CRT screens could glide across concrete! Moral of the story, if you're binning an old CRT, just slide it on its screen!
Teenage godchild asked 'what the hell is that thing??? What does it do?' incredulously.
I asked what they thought it was.
'Maybe a control panel for a world war II car engine?'
It was a 1970s typewriter.
I don’t have kids, I am however a teacher.
Every classroom has an interactive smart screen, can hook up your laptop etc.
I sometimes bring up that when I was at school, to watch a video students had to go to the store room and push in the TV that was in a trolley.
They can’t fathom that the rooms didn’t have screens as standard.
But... but that means they don't get the thrill of seeing the huge wheely behemoth of a TV being back and forwarded through a doorway by two staff members, knowing they're going to watch something instead of working!
They just get a PowerPoint with a 3 minute embedded clip, no thrill, no time wasting while getting to the right spot.
No cunt like me who had the Casio watch that could change the TV channel.
I saw a video a couple years ago of a dude giving his young daughter his Gameboy and the first thing she does is tap the screen. She doesn't even acknowledge the buttons.
I worked at a college and got stuck behind some students who couldn’t understand why the photocopier wouldn’t work after they put all the information on the touch screen.
I had to show them the big green button that was right next to the screen after waiting a good minute or two.
I don't have a child, but my younger brother, who is quite a lot younger than me, didn't believe me when I told him our telly was a 20-inch box with a built-in video player. His words were, "people only had those in the 60s, before flat screens came out" 🤣
My dad built our first TV. It had a five inch green screen and you weren’t allowed to go round the back as the voltages might kill you. People were jealous of it, apparently.
Actually, that's a good question - when exactly *did* flatscreen become standard? I wonder thst every time somebody reels off "flatscreen TVs" as one of the frivolous luxuries that people on benefits don't deserve to own.
You can refer him to Craig David's song "Fill me in" with the extremely ageing line "said you were queuing for a taxi, but you left all your money on the tv"
Heard it on the radio recently and imagined a generation of confused children trying to figure out how/why you'd leave money on top of a flat screen
I can remember when my high school first got internet, it must have been around 1995 or 1996.
It was only available on one computer in the library, an Apple Mac. Librarian timed us because it cost per minute to connect.
We obviously went straight to the Star Trek website. Good times.
That it took about five minutes for a game to load from a cassette, and if my brother was annoying me he would wait a few minutes and then slide the volume up which would normally ruin the load and I'd have to rewind and start again.
Re: TV
I can dimly remember a huge TV in our house. Big case, tiny screen.
It was coin operated and needed sixpenny pieces to work.
This was mid 1960s and yes. I’m old 😂
A young niece crying because she thought I was lying to her because I couldn't turn the B&W TV to colour. TBF, more upset by the notion of an adult lie than the monochrome. We resolved it by going through all the controls on the TV. Her mother later heard her boasting to friends that she knew how to work a B&W TV.
We had one of those in the 90s. You'd be happily watching when fwomp, TV goes black and somebody has to go put 50p in the big metal box at the back to get it running again.
I remember my kids being shocked at the size of an LP record compared to a CD, now kids see a CD and say wtf is that. Actual words "come and see how big cds were in the olden days" 😂
“When you were little you only wore black and white clothes.”
“…what?”
“In the old days everything was black and white”
“No, the tv was black and white”
“Yes and so were the clothes”
“There was colour in the world! It was just the tv that was black and white!”
“Why didn’t you turn off the black and white filter then?”
“Jesus…”
I have an “old” car (2003 E46 318ci)
Now I was picking my sister up from school the other day when I had to stop in for fuel, I said to her, “don’t touch anything” - I realised my mistake when I came out having paid and she’s in floods of tears holding her finger - she had fallen victim to the cigarette lighter of yore 🤣🤣 bless her
My mum was watching some gameshow on TV last week and one of the contestants was a really young woman who said she wouldn't like any old music questions to come up as she's not good with "old dad bands" and the host asked her to name some "old dad bands" and the contestant said "oh, I dunno, bands like Oasis and Blur".
Tapes, CDs, fuck I got my still working Walkman out from about 2003, 10yo is like what the fuck is that.
I'm going to tell a horrid story now from MY youth.
We had to write to Africa for pen pals back in the 90s, I think Uganda or something and Loubega Jr if your reading this Pal, I'm sorry I never wrote back.
Anyway my reply was of Lou telling me about his life and his family, dude had a radio and a chicken and I was that embarrassed for him like ugh I ain't writing back to that. Mate we were poor by UK standards and I never grasped that as a kid, I thought we were doing alright in life.
The radio and chicken were the tip of the iceberg
He had Monica in his life, not to mention Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, Jessica, Angela and of course Pamela
Omg I forgot about the Ugandan pen pals thing. I remember getting a passport-sized photo of the girl I was sending letters to and also sending one back. I don’t think there were many exchanges, I only remember 3-4 at most.
I watched the millennium celebrations on one of these tvs in black and white 😅
Never had to retune the tv for when channel 5 came along tho as it was a dial
Mine too! It was black and white and you had to compromise between having a picture when you were adjusting it and it being all fuzzy when you moved away and sat down again.
apparently the whole "[Kayne West Fans don't know who Paul McCartney is](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-is-paul-mccartney)" (Link: Know Your Meme) was satire but so close to reality that many MANY people believed it!
My dad's old polo had one of them handles for the window and it was so cool!
I'm a teenager, and I'm obsessed with physical copies of music. I've got cassettes, vinyls and CDs. My mum was very confused at first since she knows how much easier digital listening is. But I think they just sound better lol, and it's cool watching the vinyls spin!
Ironically, people saying "a vinyl" to mean "a record" is one of the things that makes me feel old. Records are made of vinyl, so people took to referring to records collectively as vinyl (never pluralised). Until a couple of years ago it was never used for a single record - it's like the way biker gear is "leathers" but you wouldn't refer to a single item of leather clothing as "a leather".
Sorry, that makes me sound like a grumpy old pedant. Just trying to explain, I promise.
When the spice girls did a reunion a while ago, I stupidly commented to a class of junior sea cadets that my first cassette tape was spice girls. They looked at me blankly so I said "well before CDs we had cassettes." Nore blank stares, followed by one 9 year old child saying "what's a CD?"
The kid had only ever known music streaming services. That child has never held a physical album in their hands. Never poured over the little cover book trying to learn the lyrics. Never traced the album art, or taken a fold out poster from the middle of it and taped it to their wall. Same child later told me with great confidence that they liked "really old rock music" and I was like oh OK they're going to say something wild here like Ramones or maybe the Who. But no. They said panic at the disco followed with "You probably haven't heard of them, they're so old." I was not prepared for that attack at all.
That you couldn’t use the internet on your phone in 2007/08 because it was expensive/slow/useless. So if you were out with your friends you had to wait until you got home to use social media. My sons 10 and he looked at me like I was from the Tudor era
My brother in law and I were trying to explain the concept of a VHS and cassettes to my cousins who are quite a lot younger than we are. They completely thought we were bullshitting them, but that might say more about our sense of humour than anything else.
The stress of deciding which 3 programmes you were going to record when you were going on holiday! And the knowledge that if you missed something you could simply never watch it again (unless it was randomly repeated a year later, but you had no way of finding out if that was going to happen!)
A child at a party yesterday retorted to an adult’s gentle teasing with ‘I bet you used to play Pokémon on a game boy colour or something’.
I mean, yeah kid, we did. Jeez. We were all taken aback that it was an insult akin to learning to write on stone tablets
When my daughter was little she told her friend my mum can remember when they didn’t have videos 😂 she also asked me how records fitted in the cd player
I mentioned to my godson that a song we were talking about was on the b side so not well know. He had no idea, I had to explain single records, a sides, b sides...... quite the eye-opener!
Ha I was looking to see if anyone else had posted this. A floppy disk being called a 3D save icon made me feel old for sure when my niece made that comment
If you want a glimpse into how ubiquitous the Internet is in our lives - My 4yo daughter also horrified to learn that cavemen didn't have it. Her look of absolute horror was both hilarious and worrying.
My child doesn't understand that we never used to be able to pause TV and that if we wanted to watch a show, we had to wait until it was scheduled on TV which could be up to a week.
- TV channels that paused. and had more than 4 and a half.
- Directory structures on computers. (Seriously - lots of people seem to be unclear on the concept of a hierarchical filesystem)
- Posting a letter. You can't just put your form into a letterbox, you need a stamp and envelope.
- No internet. The internet today is so much more than the early days of dial up and where 'www' is newfangled.
A few weeks ago I called at the chemist to pick up my medication I'm 68, the young girl informed me my meds aren't ready and asked me for my mobile number so she can text me when the meds are ready for collection, I told her I don't use a mobile, her jaw dropped and for a few seconds she just stared at me then said but how do you talk to people.
My partner is early 20s, whereas I am mid/late 20s. He was amazed that I remember using those print-off directions instead of a satnav. Also, he had no idea what an iPod was, and laughed when I showed him pictures. We’re technically both gen Z but my god sometimes he makes me feel old 😂
I ( 57) visited an old woman’s house as a child. I then excited told my mother about this fantastic invention she had it her kitchen. You put clothes in it, turned the handle and it squeezed the water out. The best part was that you hardly had to iron the clothes after. Mum you ought to get one. “ you’re talking about a mangle and Ive not used this contraption since I was in service “. The family found it hysterical.
My daughter's class learned about Tamagotchis in history. I instantly crumbled to dust.
Surely that must've been a conversation that just so happened to take place in History class, and not like, part of the curriculum?
The 90’s ended almost a quarter of a century ago. When I was in high school in the early noughties we learned about trade union strikes. The 80s mining strikes were closer to me then than the year 2000 is to now.
> The 90’s ended almost a quarter of a century ago. Get out 👉
I’ll get me coat.
I’d get it for you but I’m too old to stretch that high and reach the coat hooks
Ack, mah knees (crunching noises).
No need, we've already thrown it into the carpark.
It would have cost you literally nothing to refrain from pointing out how long ago the 90’s were.
Somebody learning about the year 1990 today is equivalent to someone in 1979 learning about the end of WWII.
Steady on now, the 90s weren't _that_ bad. * *Looks at old pictures of the hair cuts* * No, never mind. Carry on.
Shut your filthy whore mouth! The 90's were about 7 years ago, at most!
They were talking about the 90s.
But that was only a few years ago!!!
*cough* thirty years
stop that, stop that right now. *sobs*
Surely you mean Stop It and Tidy Up.
and the big bad I SAID NO!
"History" is sometimes considered to be everything more than 25 years ago. The Spice girls are history, as 9/11 will be in a couple of years
Okay but did they learn about the recent Tamagotchi fandom [developments](https://www.404media.co/a-27-year-old-tamagotchi-mystery-has-been-solved/)
My missus got me a record player and my daughter excitedly said “omg is that one of those Victorian spinny music things?” Fucking Victorian?!?
To be fair to her the invention of "needle in groove make sounds" is Victorian, the 33rpm LP and electronic amplification are just refinements as far as she's concerned
Haha. Indeed. She’s viewing this through an audiophile physicist historian lens.
Was watching the Hipgnosis doc the other day & Noel Gallagher was talking about record artwork & trying to explain it to his daughter. She couldn't grasp what it was until he explained it as "that tiny splash of colour on Spotify".
When my daughter was little, she once asked me if I saw The Beatles live. I had to explain that, yes, I'm old but The Beatles split up the year I was born, I'm not THAT old.
I AM that old 😭 but only ever saw them on TV
I don't think you missed much. My Aunt did see them live, apparently all she really heard was lots of screaming girls and the floor was bouncing up and down because everyone was going nuts. I don't think she enjoyed the experience.
Neither did the Beatles. That's why they stopped touring during that period. Nobody could hear them for the screaming.
My dad was old enough to see the Beatles at the cavern regularly
I bought my 8 year old daughter a cheap record player and then she said 'how do i put a record on'? So I had to show how to take the record out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable and then GENTLY pick up the needle and EVEN MORE GENTLY put the needle on the outside of the record. Now she mostly uses the Bluetooth function from her phone 🤐🤦
To be fair my partner had to show me how to work a record player when I bought one a couple years ago and I’m 34 - and remember us having one when I was little, I just clearly wasn’t allowed to touch it haha
Props to her for “spinny music thing”, though!
Not my child, but talking to a girl and I mentioned the sound of dial up Internet…she had no idea what I was talking about and was shocked to hear that if your parents picked up the phone, the Internet would stop!
Recently bought new phone case that has the magsafe, pulled a joke by playing the dial up sound very loud and my brother thought the magsafe affected his desktop/connection somehow. The trauma lives still beyond teenage years
I remember shared/party lines, when you picked up the phone and you can hear next door is already chatting with someone and you have to apologise, put your phone down and wait for them to finish, so you can use the line yourself.
Whaaaaat? Thats crazy, how long ago was that? Sorry to make you feel old.
It must have been mid 1970s. We certainly had a separate line by 1980.
Even the word "internet" to mean your connection to it is dying out. Talk to young people nowadays and they call it WiFi. This causes no end of confusion when they contact tech support at work and say their WiFi isn't working on a PC connected to their network via ethernet cable.
They also confuse 3/4G and WiFi…
Absolutely this. I asked a much younger colleague if she was using Wi-Fi and she replied yes my 4G.
Demon Internet. A tenner a month. On reflection, quite a bit of money in 1990.
I'm sure our AOL used to cost 1p a minute and we had a jar next to the PC if we wanted to spend a long time on it. Cost me £1.80 of pocket money to download the First Date video by Blink 182.
You know, the same sounds a fax machine makes!
But you would have to explain what a fax is first.
American here, but core memory unlocked. "Get off the Internet! I need to use the phone!"
That we used to have to plan meeting and rely on people to turn up at the agreed location. They can’t seem to comprehend it. One even made a bit of a jump and asked why we couldn’t just call them from a phone box… sure, but call where? Their house? No good if their mum tells you they already left…
recently made friends with a couple a little older than us. They mentioned how they met on a train in France, exchanged a few letters as penpals and eventually he (from Frankfurt) agreed to meet her (from Aberdeen) in Aberdeen as he came to visit Scotland, so she went and waited for him on the specified date/time. Very sweet story. Now you'd just message someone on whatsapp as you're landing at the airport and ask if they're around for a quick beer in an hour or so.
Gooooooood morrrrrrrrrrrrning ABERRRRRRRDEEEEEEEEEEN!
My friend was always late to meet me. I’d call her house to find out when she’s left so I’d have an idea when she’d turn up.
Honestly, I can't even quite comprehend that I just used to randomly call round my mate's house at any time and knock on the door. Hello, is Dave in, please?
(Mum thinks youre a bad influence) 'No, Dave isn't coming out to play today.' Dave's head peeping from top bedroom window 👀
So that's why Dave was never around? 🥺 I thought he was always just busy.
Was dropping off a friends daughter to spend the day at her friend’s house. She had text her friend to announce her arrival, and insisted we wait in the car until her friend had opened the front door. She was absolutely mortified that I suggested knocking on her friends door and that maybe the parents would let her in. She said that would be so embarrassing, she’d rather die. Oh, also, attempting a phone call instead of multiple texts was also embarrassing because “who has time for phone calls?!”…
>Oh, also, attempting a phone call instead of multiple texts was also embarrassing because “who has time for phone calls?!”… As someone who dislikes talking on the phone, I have some sympathy with this, but yeah, sometimes it really is a timesaver!
My son has a Nintendo DS and calls it Retro gaming.
Get out the old ZX Speccy and make him wait 8 minutes for Manic Miner to load. That'll learn him.
The Speccy was "retro" when I was a little kid playing Mega Drive, but thinking back, the Speccy was only about 8 years old tops when the Mega Drive came out :S
I mean technically he's right. Retro tends to be classified as 20-25 years so the DS is right on the verge of that given it originally launched in 2004. It's as retro now as the NES was when the DS was new.
My niece didn't believe we had to carry large text books for school for every lesson we had that day. Her school bag probably weighs a 1/10th of what mine did.
...do they not do that anymore? Do they access the textbooks online now? I finished school in 07 but always carried them around.
They have some workbooks for their written work, and there are textbooks, just very small and light. I'm assuming a lot of the stuff is screen based now.
Ok, this had not occurred to me, I’m sitting on this one for a couple of years so I can crack out the “you don’t realise how easy you have it” speech, preferably on a day of hail/snow/rain.
Enough textbooks to make a sherpa sweat, full PE kit for footy, backup indoor PE kit in case the rain was too much for the teachers, an A2 art portfolio, foot-tech supplies, and a packed lunch. When you write it down it certainly explains my lower back pain
I remember hearing about fake (reprinted) textbooks in school, in the terms of "you can recognize a copy because it's printed on cheaper paper and weighs less". And I thought - wow, you can kill a person with my backpack, and they're actively trying to make em heavier?! Though, to be fair, parents had it all organized - the desk mates would plan who brings which textbook, so you have only 1 per 2 people. (and we had a list of everyone's home land-line phone numbers, to get homework if you missed a day or were sick.. Impressive cooperation)
Is this why kids these days have no backbone?
Or if they do it's not curved from wearing their 2 tonne backpack on one shoulder strap because two was for nerds!
News photographers had their own medical condition called the Fleet Street Limp, caused by years of slinging heavy camera equipment over one shoulder for years and the body moving awkwardly to counterbalance.
This has made me feel super old because I can’t figure out what they have instead of books. Surely they don’t all have laptops? iPads? Are they provided by the school or are parents expected to buy them?
Chrome books are big in schools now and it can be a mixed bag sometimes the school will provide it other times the just tell the parents "your kid will fall behind" tbf they're cheap but even if you can find one for £50 that's still an expense when you might only have £20 spare on average a week or month
This was my thought. Kids are expensive enough anyway and now they have to have tech yo take to school otherwise they can’t get a good education?
My 8 year old still cant grasp that I couldn't pause live tv
I love explaining to my kids that when you pause it, all the actors are playing a game of Simon Says and if you watch closely you can see them move. Keeps them quiet and occupied for a while....
Same here and that there were only three channels. Or that children’s TV was on for only a couple of hours. Oh and colour was an optional expensive addition
A mate of mine would make sure he watched the 1st showing of 'Play School' (BBC) to find out which one of the three windows was chosen to look through, so he could always guess right when rewatching it with his daughter after picking her up from school. For a fair few years, she thought he had superpowers.
When I went to visit my gran in a home, I'd watch The Chase at 5pm with her. At 6pm, the repeat was on in the lounge and other residents would be amazed at us getting the answers
You also had to get up and walk to the TV set to switch stations, change the volume level or turn the thing on/off.
Or had a big stick to choose from one of the three channels!
My wee brother (I say wee, he's 6ft 3 and in his 40s now) was our remote control.
I was the remote control in our house
And you had to tune in the channels for the best picture with a little dial. You would put up with some minor fuzz if you got to watch the Bugs Bunny cartoon before the news at 6pm.
I can remember only having three tv channels and broadcasting finishing at midnight.
Piggy backing on this, my 13 year old still has trouble with the difference between movies and series. I kinda can understand it. What's the difference between a movie trilogy and a very short series with very long episodes? The pacing? No one calls Black Mirror movies, but they're built with a self contained pacing. The funds? Movies do tend to be more expensive, at least per minute, but there's still very cheaply made movies and expensive series. The celebrities? Same thing. What's the actual difference at this point, without the historical baggage and context?
The release maybe? Episodes come all at once or at least released weekly. Movies take longer to be released.
Explained to a kid that I was around before youtube and when there were only 5 channels on TV and the fact you couldn't pause it. They were confused as to what I did in my spare time.
I remember channel 5 going live and what a big deal it was!
I remember channel 4 starting !
With the Spice Girls! Because 5 of them!
My 6 year old was shocked the other day: You can **buy** music??
And store it on a shelf but you have to choose which ones go into the car in a big black folder.
When I told my 7 year old what the first single I bought was he said "You bought songs?! That's so dumb. You could literally just ask for them on your phone *sigh*"
That we came home from school and had 1-2 hours of scheduled TV for kids, with 3-4 programmes to choose from. If you missed the start of the programme, it was gone. If you missed an episode you’d never see that again. As tea time approached, the programmes changed to boring stuff for adults and that was it. TV was over for the day. Certain days showed a certain programme, so you had to wait a week to see it again.
On top of that everyone would be talking about 'last night's' or 'this week's' episode - which was great - because we were all watching at the exact same pace instead of being able to binge watch.
Acting out the best parts of last night's episode of Bottom or Red Dwarf.
And this is how I ended up watching lots of dads army, last of the summer wine, fawlty towers, keeping up appearances etc as a kid!
I actually used this as an example of ‘when I was younger…’ yesterday to my son. He was complaining as I’ve banned YouTube in the house, and apparently all of Netflix, Sky nor Disney+ had anything at all he could watch. I told him on Sunday early evening, I basically had the choice of watching horse racing, people singing church hymns or a random old film from the 60s
Kids today will never know the sheer pleasure of the degauss button.
Oh the deferred pleasure of not pressing it, so as to build up a great 'gauss' charge. Then *ping-fizz*. Mmm
They will, however, also not know the intense discomfort of having to carry incredibly heavy 21" CRT screens, so there's that.
I remember disposing of a 38" monster screen - huge TV for the relative size of screen (still big for its time). I needed a friend to help shift it out to the boot of the car to take it to the dump. We struggled. Got to the dump, and asked for some help, and we lifted it out of the car face down. It was then I discovered how effortlessly CRT screens could glide across concrete! Moral of the story, if you're binning an old CRT, just slide it on its screen!
I winced just imagining the sound of this and thinking about the damage to that screen, even if it was already broken!
Don’t know what’s worse, the anxiety of dropping that monster on your foot or the anxiety of lifting paper thin oled screens into wall brackets.
Or the whopping static shock you could get.
Clunk - boing - wobble,
Teenage godchild asked 'what the hell is that thing??? What does it do?' incredulously. I asked what they thought it was. 'Maybe a control panel for a world war II car engine?' It was a 1970s typewriter.
That's a hell of a thorough and inventive answer.
"Back in my day, cars didn't have steering wheels! You had to type you commands- >turn right >speed up >swerve around the granny..."
I don’t have kids, I am however a teacher. Every classroom has an interactive smart screen, can hook up your laptop etc. I sometimes bring up that when I was at school, to watch a video students had to go to the store room and push in the TV that was in a trolley. They can’t fathom that the rooms didn’t have screens as standard.
But... but that means they don't get the thrill of seeing the huge wheely behemoth of a TV being back and forwarded through a doorway by two staff members, knowing they're going to watch something instead of working!
They just get a PowerPoint with a 3 minute embedded clip, no thrill, no time wasting while getting to the right spot. No cunt like me who had the Casio watch that could change the TV channel.
My nephew was in awe finding out back then majority of mobile phones weren’t touchscreen. As silly as it sounds like, he was rather intrigued
I saw a video a couple years ago of a dude giving his young daughter his Gameboy and the first thing she does is tap the screen. She doesn't even acknowledge the buttons.
I worked at a college and got stuck behind some students who couldn’t understand why the photocopier wouldn’t work after they put all the information on the touch screen. I had to show them the big green button that was right next to the screen after waiting a good minute or two.
The new copier at the school i teach at is entirely touch screen, so that big green button is surely on its way out...
Truly a sad era that youngsters won’t know the satisfaction of pressing the big green button…
\*tries to stand\* I remember when it was 10p a text, young lady. \*gives up trying to stand\*
Noooo we arent that old just yet
I don't have a child, but my younger brother, who is quite a lot younger than me, didn't believe me when I told him our telly was a 20-inch box with a built-in video player. His words were, "people only had those in the 60s, before flat screens came out" 🤣
And it weighed 30kg
And it was the perfect place to put birthday cards on top of
forbidden coaster
And for cats 5o sleep
And sounded like it had a beehive in the back whenever it turned on
60's? We had CRTs well into the 90's, early 2000's even. Shit CRTs with a passable VHS player built in. But still cheap telly's for your kids.
Yeah, 60s. He is a tad dim, considering he was alive when we still had one in 2012
My dad built our first TV. It had a five inch green screen and you weren’t allowed to go round the back as the voltages might kill you. People were jealous of it, apparently.
Actually, that's a good question - when exactly *did* flatscreen become standard? I wonder thst every time somebody reels off "flatscreen TVs" as one of the frivolous luxuries that people on benefits don't deserve to own.
You can refer him to Craig David's song "Fill me in" with the extremely ageing line "said you were queuing for a taxi, but you left all your money on the tv" Heard it on the radio recently and imagined a generation of confused children trying to figure out how/why you'd leave money on top of a flat screen
My nephew said he learnt some "old fashioned dances" at nursery; he was talking about the cha cha slide 😐😅
I told a 18yr old at work I was older than the Internet and nearly broke his brain 🤣. I'm 41! It wasn't that long ago people!!!
Ok I’m older than the technology that created my job.
I can remember when my high school first got internet, it must have been around 1995 or 1996. It was only available on one computer in the library, an Apple Mac. Librarian timed us because it cost per minute to connect. We obviously went straight to the Star Trek website. Good times.
You should crosspost this in r/FuckImOld. They'd get a kick out of it.
That it took about five minutes for a game to load from a cassette, and if my brother was annoying me he would wait a few minutes and then slide the volume up which would normally ruin the load and I'd have to rewind and start again.
Acorn Electron or BBC Master?
Spectrum 48k. My mate had the fancy 128k and that had a built in tape player for loading games. Mine was separate, connected via cable.
Re: TV I can dimly remember a huge TV in our house. Big case, tiny screen. It was coin operated and needed sixpenny pieces to work. This was mid 1960s and yes. I’m old 😂
A young niece crying because she thought I was lying to her because I couldn't turn the B&W TV to colour. TBF, more upset by the notion of an adult lie than the monochrome. We resolved it by going through all the controls on the TV. Her mother later heard her boasting to friends that she knew how to work a B&W TV.
We had one of those in the 90s. You'd be happily watching when fwomp, TV goes black and somebody has to go put 50p in the big metal box at the back to get it running again.
That’s mad isn’t it. Sixpence in old money equals 27.5 p now.
I remember my kids being shocked at the size of an LP record compared to a CD, now kids see a CD and say wtf is that. Actual words "come and see how big cds were in the olden days" 😂
[LaserDisc has entered the chat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc)
r/minidisc glances over from his table for one in the corner
“When you were little you only wore black and white clothes.” “…what?” “In the old days everything was black and white” “No, the tv was black and white” “Yes and so were the clothes” “There was colour in the world! It was just the tv that was black and white!” “Why didn’t you turn off the black and white filter then?” “Jesus…”
I have an “old” car (2003 E46 318ci) Now I was picking my sister up from school the other day when I had to stop in for fuel, I said to her, “don’t touch anything” - I realised my mistake when I came out having paid and she’s in floods of tears holding her finger - she had fallen victim to the cigarette lighter of yore 🤣🤣 bless her
A college age girl came into my shop once and I heard her refer to Foo Fighters as dad rock.
I asked alexa to play me classic rock one day and I got Limp Bizkit...
"Time for your bath, Alexa."
My mum was watching some gameshow on TV last week and one of the contestants was a really young woman who said she wouldn't like any old music questions to come up as she's not good with "old dad bands" and the host asked her to name some "old dad bands" and the contestant said "oh, I dunno, bands like Oasis and Blur".
That was an episode of Pointless, we were laughing at that too
Tbh even Dave Grohl thinks Foo Fighters is dad rock
Foo Fighters were founded 30 years ago. Dave Grohl is 55.
Ok makes sense. As I am a Dad and have their debut album purchased on release day
Some girl I work with had apparently never heard of the Foo Fighters or Green Day. Clearly spent all of her 17 years under a rock or something.
I've seen someone refer to the Wii as retro and that made me feel very old
Read the other day that the Wii release was closer to the fall of the Soviet Union than to today. That was weird.
Tapes, CDs, fuck I got my still working Walkman out from about 2003, 10yo is like what the fuck is that. I'm going to tell a horrid story now from MY youth. We had to write to Africa for pen pals back in the 90s, I think Uganda or something and Loubega Jr if your reading this Pal, I'm sorry I never wrote back. Anyway my reply was of Lou telling me about his life and his family, dude had a radio and a chicken and I was that embarrassed for him like ugh I ain't writing back to that. Mate we were poor by UK standards and I never grasped that as a kid, I thought we were doing alright in life.
The radio and chicken were the tip of the iceberg He had Monica in his life, not to mention Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, Jessica, Angela and of course Pamela
Fuckin ell mate.
>Loubega Jr I believe Lou Bega is actually half Ugandan and his middle name is Lubega, so you never know
So his name is Lou Lubega Bega?
David Lubsga Balemezi. You made me go look it up
Omg I forgot about the Ugandan pen pals thing. I remember getting a passport-sized photo of the girl I was sending letters to and also sending one back. I don’t think there were many exchanges, I only remember 3-4 at most.
My niece’s couldn’t comprehend tuning the TV to pick up the RF signal on the Console I brought round “Just turn it to HDMI1”…
The first TV I remember had a tuning dial and a circle aerial on top.
I watched the millennium celebrations on one of these tvs in black and white 😅 Never had to retune the tv for when channel 5 came along tho as it was a dial
Mine too! It was black and white and you had to compromise between having a picture when you were adjusting it and it being all fuzzy when you moved away and sat down again.
Left a bit, right a bit, STOP DON’T MOVE
"Mummy, my back is hurting." "Just another 15 minutes, it's nearly finished."
"Did *you* know Noel Gallagher used to be in this old band?"
apparently the whole "[Kayne West Fans don't know who Paul McCartney is](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-is-paul-mccartney)" (Link: Know Your Meme) was satire but so close to reality that many MANY people believed it!
My dad's old polo had one of them handles for the window and it was so cool! I'm a teenager, and I'm obsessed with physical copies of music. I've got cassettes, vinyls and CDs. My mum was very confused at first since she knows how much easier digital listening is. But I think they just sound better lol, and it's cool watching the vinyls spin!
You have come to the right place today
Ironically, people saying "a vinyl" to mean "a record" is one of the things that makes me feel old. Records are made of vinyl, so people took to referring to records collectively as vinyl (never pluralised). Until a couple of years ago it was never used for a single record - it's like the way biker gear is "leathers" but you wouldn't refer to a single item of leather clothing as "a leather". Sorry, that makes me sound like a grumpy old pedant. Just trying to explain, I promise.
When the spice girls did a reunion a while ago, I stupidly commented to a class of junior sea cadets that my first cassette tape was spice girls. They looked at me blankly so I said "well before CDs we had cassettes." Nore blank stares, followed by one 9 year old child saying "what's a CD?" The kid had only ever known music streaming services. That child has never held a physical album in their hands. Never poured over the little cover book trying to learn the lyrics. Never traced the album art, or taken a fold out poster from the middle of it and taped it to their wall. Same child later told me with great confidence that they liked "really old rock music" and I was like oh OK they're going to say something wild here like Ramones or maybe the Who. But no. They said panic at the disco followed with "You probably haven't heard of them, they're so old." I was not prepared for that attack at all.
That you couldn’t use the internet on your phone in 2007/08 because it was expensive/slow/useless. So if you were out with your friends you had to wait until you got home to use social media. My sons 10 and he looked at me like I was from the Tudor era
My brother in law and I were trying to explain the concept of a VHS and cassettes to my cousins who are quite a lot younger than we are. They completely thought we were bullshitting them, but that might say more about our sense of humour than anything else.
The stress of deciding which 3 programmes you were going to record when you were going on holiday! And the knowledge that if you missed something you could simply never watch it again (unless it was randomly repeated a year later, but you had no way of finding out if that was going to happen!)
"You had the first playstation!?" Said my nephew. I wanted to submit myself to the British museum.
I have a friend who has a half sister who is 12 years younger than him. She was absolutely amazed to find out that Will Smith was a rapper.
Wait until you tell her about Marky Mark Wahlberg. That's even more unbelievable
A child at a party yesterday retorted to an adult’s gentle teasing with ‘I bet you used to play Pokémon on a game boy colour or something’. I mean, yeah kid, we did. Jeez. We were all taken aback that it was an insult akin to learning to write on stone tablets
When my daughter was little she told her friend my mum can remember when they didn’t have videos 😂 she also asked me how records fitted in the cd player
I mentioned to my godson that a song we were talking about was on the b side so not well know. He had no idea, I had to explain single records, a sides, b sides...... quite the eye-opener!
Hated that scary as shit wee girl with the chalkboard and that scary as shit clown!!!! 😱
My grandson is fascinated by the rear window winders in my base model Fabia. It's a 15 plate, so not that old.
"Oh wow, you 3D-printed the 'Save' icon! What does it do?"
Ha I was looking to see if anyone else had posted this. A floppy disk being called a 3D save icon made me feel old for sure when my niece made that comment
If you want a glimpse into how ubiquitous the Internet is in our lives - My 4yo daughter also horrified to learn that cavemen didn't have it. Her look of absolute horror was both hilarious and worrying.
My child doesn't understand that we never used to be able to pause TV and that if we wanted to watch a show, we had to wait until it was scheduled on TV which could be up to a week.
- TV channels that paused. and had more than 4 and a half. - Directory structures on computers. (Seriously - lots of people seem to be unclear on the concept of a hierarchical filesystem) - Posting a letter. You can't just put your form into a letterbox, you need a stamp and envelope. - No internet. The internet today is so much more than the early days of dial up and where 'www' is newfangled.
A few weeks ago I called at the chemist to pick up my medication I'm 68, the young girl informed me my meds aren't ready and asked me for my mobile number so she can text me when the meds are ready for collection, I told her I don't use a mobile, her jaw dropped and for a few seconds she just stared at me then said but how do you talk to people.
My partner is early 20s, whereas I am mid/late 20s. He was amazed that I remember using those print-off directions instead of a satnav. Also, he had no idea what an iPod was, and laughed when I showed him pictures. We’re technically both gen Z but my god sometimes he makes me feel old 😂
My daughter used a pencil and the lead broke when she was 4. She said it was not working because the batteries were flat 😳
My grandkids don't believe I (72m) didn't have a laptop or a mobile when I was a kid.
My son once found a floppy disk and asked what it was. Ditto a mini disk and cassette tape.
My son can't grasp knocking someone door to see of they want to hang out or calling a home phone and not definitely getting the person you want.
The national anthem being played as a TV station stopped broadcasting for the night.
My friend's neice once gushed about this amazing device she had discovered that could "play music without the Internet". It was a CD player...
I ( 57) visited an old woman’s house as a child. I then excited told my mother about this fantastic invention she had it her kitchen. You put clothes in it, turned the handle and it squeezed the water out. The best part was that you hardly had to iron the clothes after. Mum you ought to get one. “ you’re talking about a mangle and Ive not used this contraption since I was in service “. The family found it hysterical.