# Things you're suprised under-30s don't recognize **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 26, 2010, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101 "2010-07-26T21:06:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/81 "2010-07-27T14:26:50Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > I remember thinking it was pretty funny when my (at the time) three year old was pretending to take pictures. She would pick up a block or a toy or something and say “Click…click”. The funny thing was she was holding the object as if it were a cell phone and then she would ‘show’ you the picture on the other side. Oh, yeah . . . I have to keep my _actual_ (and expensive, 5 MP camera) Android cell phone away from my four year old, otherwise she’ll grab it and immediately navigate the touch screen to the camera app to take pictures of her dolls. ---
**Author:** ![Snickers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5daacb/32.png) [@Snickers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snickers)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/82 "2010-07-27T14:35:22Z")
Worse is when you’re taking pictures of your 5-year-old niece with a regular old 35-mm film camera. Snap a pic and she’s instantly turning it around: “I want to see!” Honey, there’s nothing to see. We gotta take 'em in and get 'em developed - it could be a week or so. Such disappointment in one so small. ---
**Author:** ![Tethered\_Kite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a5b964/32.png) [@Tethered\_Kite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tethered_Kite)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/83 "2010-07-27T14:43:03Z")
Driving my teen-something kids somewhere on snowy winter eveing in the country I quoted Rbt. Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” and when I was done my son said, That’s neat Mom. Did you make that up?" ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/84 "2010-07-27T14:48:41Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > > [@whiterabbit](#): > > > > I’m 34 and still don’t get the plate. Do explain, please. > > It was Garth’s car in Wayne’s World Hah. I would have thought it belonged to a Thimble manufacturer. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/85 "2010-07-27T14:51:03Z")
My wake-up moment with this sort of thing came about seven or eight years ago, when I was at the movies with my little nephew. He had to go to the bathroom, and got really upset when we tried to explain that we couldn’t pause the movie while he was gone. ---
**Author:** ![6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/6/e19adc/32.png) [@6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/86 "2010-07-27T14:51:04Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > > [@6ImpossibleThingsB4Breakfast](#): > > > > Hm. Methinks **Joey P** that this is _your_ car… who the hell parks like that in a parking lot? > > You’d be amazed, _amazed_ at the way people park in a lot with no lines. You’ll have 10 people angle park in one direction and someone else do it the other way. Even better is when 10 people angle park in one direction and someone will park behind them and block three cars in. People will park so close to the forklift that we can’t move it. People will park so close to the entrance to the lot that sometimes other people can’t get in. And the list goes on and on… Well slap me with a wet fish and call me Moby! So as not to hijack the thread, then I guess I might want to say…that some people under 30 don’t know how to park… ---
**Author:** ![moldybread](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@moldybread](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/moldybread)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/87 "2010-07-27T14:51:12Z")
Rotary phones!!! YAY 7 tic tic tic tic tic tic tic 3 tic tic tic 5 tic tic tic tic tic 8 tic tic tic tic tic tic tic tic 2 tic tic 6 tic tic tic tic tic tic 9 tic tic…DAMNIT!! sigh 7 tic tic tic tic tic tic tic… ---
**Author:** ![Serenata67](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/serenata67/32/10646_2.png) [@Serenata67](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Serenata67)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/88 "2010-07-27T14:57:12Z")
> [@Joey\_P](#): > > Oooh, this is the perfect thread for this. A few days ago I spotted [this license plate](http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f44/JoeyJoeyPP/audi2.jpg) in my parking lot. No one got it. :mad: > > I’m 29, I was surprised no one else there (about 16-25) knew what it was from. First of all, that was hilarious. I honestly laughed out loud when I saw that. I’m 27 and I recognize most of these items. I remember when I was younger, my brother and I would play with my grandma’s rotary phone. We would dial random numbers just to play with the phone. Then, my grandma got her bill and saw we were making crank calls to Idaho or something. She learned to unplug the rotary phone before we visited. Now my husband and I live in his late grandmother’s house and there is an old rotary phone in the basement. It’s a shame we don’t have home phone service only because I’d love to make a real call from that old rotary phone. ---
**Author:** ![Bytegeist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/9dc877/32.png) [@Bytegeist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bytegeist)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/89 "2010-07-27T15:05:27Z")
> [@The\_Real\_Regency\_Elf](#): > > I went to Staples last weekend to get a set of bookends. The teenage clerk had no idea what a bookend was, even after hearing them described in great detail. … Finally my husband found bookends on the aisle that had other random desk accessories. At least when that happens, you know you’re not going mad. Yet. > [@WotNot](#): > > I’ve been interested by the posts in this thread that confirmed my observations of American TV sets as seen on TV in the UK – sets with dials were common in the US long after they disappeared here, sometime in the early 70s. Another trans-Atlantic difference, one you might already know about, is that NTSC TV sets had an extra “tint” control that PAL sets didn’t need. Sometime around 1980, I think it was, NTSC sets acquired more sophisticated signal processors and thereafter could usually do without user-adjustable tint, though the controls still hung around for years. > [@Koxinga](#): > > > [@jasonh300](#): > > > > If the picture was bad or had static, there was a ring around the dial that you could rotate for fine tuning. > > I grew up in the 70s and didn’t have cable at the time, but I don’t remember this at all. Could be that some sets didn’t have them, or you just never had the need to use yours. I don’t remember fiddling with them very often myself. I also remember at least one TV set where the fine-tuning dial was recessed. You pulled it out, twisted it around for a bit, then when you were ready to give up on that approach, you pushed it back in. Normally then, the dial was out-of-sight, out-of-mind. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/90 "2010-07-27T15:07:37Z")
> [@bucketybuck](#): > > Some of these responses are surprising to say that least. > > I am 29, from I guess a working class background. I can remember growing up with big clunky TV’s, black and whites, funky aerials and snowy, static pictures on the TV. I know it’s hard to imagine if you grew up in Britain or Ireland, but it is so. I moved here in 1996 and was (pleasantly) shocked to discover that even the shittiest new TV then available tuned itself. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/91 "2010-07-27T15:13:40Z")
Our TV had a set of rabbit ear antennas sitting on top of the set, with two aluminum foil “flags” draped from each “ear.” Nonetheless, the reception would fade out when someone happened to stand in the wrong corner of the room – I remember my father griping at us during football games for that reason. ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/92 "2010-07-27T15:30:38Z")
My dad was flabbergasted when I told him I made it through four years of college without ever checking out a book from the library. I’m 26. I’m familiar with most of the stuff mentioned here. The car license plate, however…😕 edit: I see the explanations above… ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/93 "2010-07-27T15:34:06Z")
A phrase I haven’t heard on TV shows for a long time is “Don’t touch that dial!” Interestingly, I haven’t heard “Put down that remote!” instead. When I was a teenager we had cable. The “clicker” was the size of a laptop and had 8 pushbuttons to select the channels. You could access the other 8 channels by flipping the A/B trunk toggle. It was $8/month, double that if you wanted to watch the B trunk. Well worth it becuse there was a channel that showed movies. Uncut. With no commercials! It was called Home Box Office. There was a recent thread where a lot of younger posters knew what a phonograph was, but had no idea what the changer arm was for. ---
**Author:** ![bucketybuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@bucketybuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bucketybuck)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/94 "2010-07-27T15:46:32Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > > [@bucketybuck](#): > > > > Some of these responses are surprising to say that least. > > > > I am 29, from I guess a working class background. I can remember growing up with big clunky TV’s, black and whites, funky aerials and snowy, static pictures on the TV. > > I know it’s hard to imagine if you grew up in Britain or Ireland, but it is so. I moved here in 1996 and was (pleasantly) shocked to discover that even the shittiest new TV then available tuned itself. I think what was throwing me was the impact that cable TV would have on reception. I can see cable making a huge difference in terms of reception issues, but unfortunately it was something that didnt really exist here until the nineties, with SKY, so I hadnt even considered it. I’ll just shut up now. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/95 "2010-07-27T15:50:32Z")
I grew up in a household that had neither TV nor a car. when I was 13 in 1950 I used my Bar Mitzvah money to buy a TV. We lived in a city and got three channels pretty clear with rabbit ears, so no antenna or rotor. Of curse the TV had a tuning dial and a fine tuner. We got a car three years later. Needless to say, we used only rotary phones. In fact, I barely remember when the phone number was three letters, 4 digits. Ours was GRAnite 3277. Later it became GR2 3277. Originally, each exchange was a 100 x 100 plug board. If you were calling us from the GRAnite exchange, the operator simply plugged the line from your phone into the 32nd row, 77th column of the board. I still have one rotary phone in my house. It still receives calls, but I guess I haven’t tried to call out from it in years. I once asked a class if any of them knew what a slide rules was. About half did. The first time I picked up a slide rule, with no instruction, I could see how to do basic multiplication and division with it. So I think that is pretty much self-documenting. The fancy loglog deci-trig ones need instructions though. I also asked the class if they knew what a vacuum tube was. Most didn’t, although at the time, nearly all TVs had a picture tube in them and so did nearly all computer monitors. Ah tube testers. Time was that the main place you saw them was in drug stores. You had a radio that stopped working, you took all the tubes out and tested them. They could sell replacements for bad ones. I guess the only vacuum tubes in my house today are in those old Dynakit pre-amp, amp, and tuner that will never be used again, but, having put a lot of sweat into them, I cannot bring myself to discard. We’ve had cable only since 1991. And touch-tone phones only since 2000 when I had to pay Bell Canada its pound of flesh in order to get a DSL line. I know perfectly well that touch-tone phones are cheaper for them to provide service than rotary phones, but they charged a touch-tone service fee of a couple bucks a month. Bastards. Well, I don’t use them any more and good riddance. (They are so incompetent that, although they keep hounding me to come back, it has never occurred to them to ask why I left and what they are going to do so that it not repeat.) Certainly my grandchildren (ages 8-15) read analog clocks. Their houses have several. Do they do cursive? It never occurred to me to ask. Not writing it is no loss, but not being able to read it is. One of the problems with cursive is that they insisted on teaching us the Palmer hand, very elegant when written correctly, but very easy to write illegibly. If only they had taught us a simple cursive, it might have survived. Someone mentioned 5 1/4" floppies. Before that there were 8" floppies. My department had a 1975 vintage Wang that used them. Now, not only are the 5 1/4" gone, but the 3 1/2" ones are nearly gone. Do the kiddies know what MS-DOS was? What about unplugged music? Have they ever heard any? ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/96 "2010-07-27T15:58:23Z")
Old timey antenna rotors, once more: [This](http://cgi.ebay.com/Channel-Master-TV-Ham-Antenna-Rotor-Rotator-Control-Box-/110551824126?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19bd66f6fe) is pretty much the way I remember the one we had. It sat on your tv and would be connected by a wire to the motor that turned the antenna. You’d turn it in the general direction of the station, and then fine tuned it. Then you could mark that channel on the control dial, so when you tuned to that channel, you knew exactly where to turn the antenna. ---
**Author:** ![An\_Gadai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@An\_Gadai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Gadai)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/97 "2010-07-27T16:23:56Z")
> [@bucketybuck](#): > > I think what was throwing me was the impact that cable TV would have on reception. I can see cable making a huge difference in terms of reception issues, but unfortunately it was something that didnt really exist here until the nineties, with SKY, so I hadnt even considered it. > > I’ll just shut up now. We had SKY in the 1980’s. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![flodnak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/838e76/32.png) [@flodnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flodnak)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/98 "2010-07-27T16:25:45Z")
> [@tdn](#): > > A phrase I haven’t heard on TV shows for a long time is “Don’t touch that dial!” Interestingly, I haven’t heard “Put down that remote!” instead. “Put down your remote control” is the opening line of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “UHF” 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Nunavut\_Boy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e95f7d/32.png) [@Nunavut\_Boy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nunavut_Boy)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/99 "2010-07-27T16:39:32Z")
> [@](#): > > and that there was a time when nobody died from not having a mobile phone. Well, to be fair, there’s probably lots of people that died because they didn’t have access to a phone. You don’t hear too much from them because they’re…well, they’re dead. I’m 30 and have never seen a slide rule. I do remember my dad having an old Philips calculator that took 6 AA batteries and had some sort of weird screen…obviously pre-LCD days. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101/100 "2010-07-27T16:47:37Z")
Pinching the little metal sliders in the back of manual typewriters and sliding them into position to set your tab stops. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-youre-suprised-under-30s-dont-recognize/548101.md?page=6)