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.
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.
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?"
Hah. I would have thought it belonged to a Thimble manufacturer.
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.
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…
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…
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.
At least when that happens, you know you’re not going mad. Yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
Old timey antenna rotors, once more:
This 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.
We had SKY in the 1980’s. 
“Put down your remote control” is the opening line of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “UHF” 
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.
Pinching the little metal sliders in the back of manual typewriters and sliding them into position to set your tab stops.