This thread got several folks feeling old, so I thought I’d let others come up with the kinds of questions that make you feel old. I’ll start:
“How did you change channels before remote controls?”
When talking about music:
“What’s a 45?”
“Why does this say LP? Isn’t this a record?”
“What do you play this in?” - pointing to my 8-track collection.
I was talking with a group of people after work about our jobs in college or just out of high school. I mentioned that I had worked for a computer company a learned to repair various types of printers.
A rather young coworker asked, “What’s a daisy wheel printer?”
Some youngster says “You mean Paul Mccartney was in a band before Wings?”
You watched black and white tv? EEEWWWW! How could you stand it?
Just the other day I was asked by a seventeen year-old what an 8-track was.
So, what, a Commodore used, like, the first generation Pentiums, or what?
When trying to explain to a teenager that the really cheap secondhand VCR was a Beta: “What’s a Beta?”
From the New York Times Metropolitan Diary:
A woman and her four-year-old daughter were Christmas shopping. As four-year-olds are wont, the girl kept singing “Jingle Bells” with no end in sight.
Mommy: Honey, could you please stop? You sound like a broken record.
Child: What’s a broken record?
:eek:
Mommy: Um, it’s like a CD that skips…
This past October, my seven year old asked me if they had Halloween when I was a little girl.
A while back a cow-orker of mine brought in some leftover hot wings from a party he’d had at the local Hooters the evening before. When putting them out he pointed out one pile as being mild, another as being hot, and the third as being “Three Mile Island” wings.
One of our sys admins asked, “Why are they called ‘Three Mile Island’?”
I said, “You know, it’s in honor of the near nuclear meltdown at the nuke plant near Three Mile Island, PA in 1979. Don’t you remember that?”
She looked at me incredulously and said, “I was THREE!”
Oh, well.
“you mean they didn’t always have just two-letter abbreviations for the states?”
Boston, Mass <—this used to be correct! No, really! YES IT DID!!!
When you see a thread titled: “How did libraries work before barcode scanners?”.
“What’s the big deal with this “Deep Throat” person?”
What do you mean there were only three channels?
Why is that gas called “unleaded?”
In the early 80’s my sister was babysitting for a girl who could not tell time on a clock face, all her life she had used digital clocks of some sort.
“When did Aerosmith do a remake of Run DMC’s Walk this way?”
When I was asked this, I swear, my jaw hit the floor!
“Have you heard that great new band, the Grateful Dead?” In 1986! (OK, I was 18 then, but stilll)
All right! In order to make everyone feel better, so far every question that I have read has given me this reaction: “How the hell can someone not know that?!” And I’m 20.
I had 8-tracks. I still use my record player, I had to explain to someone OLDER than me what “unleaded” gas was, I know about Deep Throat and Three Mile Island, and dammit I loved our Commodore!
Now, the questions that make me feel old:
“Okay, so, records have two sides of music, but how do you know which side is going to play when you put it on the player?” :eek:
" ‘Telnet’? What the hell is ‘Telnet’?"
“I wonder how people did trigonometry without calculators…” (Jeebus, I just finished Calculus 3 and we couldn’t use calculators! Might as well live in the Stone Age, huh? :p)
“Mountain Dew came in glass bottles???”
(a repeat, but still) “What is a BETA?”
“You mean cars didn’t always have fuel injection?” :eek: :eek: :eek:
I’ll come back with more, I swear.
When my 24-year-old and balding (in other words, adult) brother asked me what a Bicentennial quarter was.
While watching “The Osbournes” with the five-year-old I sometimes babysit:
“So, you mean Ozzy was famous before this show?”