^^ Thanks!!
I’m fairly sure that anyone who came of age after the '90s would have absolutely no idea what to make of this;
I came of age well before that, but have no idea what that image is.
Clearly you never changed the cable box to channel 99 at midnight after you were pretty sure your parents were asleep. 
A vintage tech youtuber I watch made the observation that almost every reasonably popular obsolete technology has an nostalgia powered enthusiast community behind it that obsessively collects, documents and discusses the minute details of that tech but one that really doesn’t is ball mice.
There’s absolutely no love for those things, nobody is collecting them, nobody is talking about them, the collective world was pretty unanimous in breathing a sigh of relief as soon as we could move on from them and there’s seemingly no desire from a single person to look back fondly upon them.
So I think it’s a good candidate for a technology that probably upwards of a billion people interacted with as recently as 20 years ago and yet almost everyone who grew up after that age would be totally ignorant of.
Cable? What is this cable of which you speak? Maybe I’m too old to remember that.
That photo is what it looked like in the days of analog cable when you tried to tune in on a premium channel you hadn’t paid for - be it HBO, Cinemax, pay-per-view, or certain other channels that came on late at night and featured the kind of programming that they used to hide behind a beaded curtain at the video store.
The video feed would be discolored and scrambled and mostly incomprehensible aside from when you could occasionally catch a brief glimpse of a shimmering green and purple nipple, but the audio was untouched.
If nothing else, you could at least hear what was happening at Wrestlemania if your parents refused to drop $40 for it.
Remember when soda cans had a little tab that came fully off? Those things were everywhere, but not really mentioned in print. In a thousand years people might well puzzle over all those curled little Fritos of aluminum.
Not just cable, but any subscription TV - most of NYC did not have cable until at least 1988 but it was possible to get services like HBO and WHT that transmitted a scrambled signal over a UHF station. If you didn’t have the descrambler box, you got a picture like the one in the photo.
Yeah, I went straight from antenna to satellite dish. Never had cable. Can’t get it where I currently live.
Blew out my flip-flop/Stepped on a pop top/Cut my heel/Had to cruise on back home
My former boss (born in 1970) had one of those. I don’t remember seeing one before, and I’m older than him (not by much).
As he grew up in Switzerland, he started using computers much later than me and never had a chance to use CAD software before he started working. I first used CAD software in my freshman year of college. I even had a desktop in my dorm room, using a token ring network.
Speaking of which, who knows what a IBM hermaphroditic connector with locking clip looks like?
Might be, but both our summer tires and winter tires are alloy wheels s and have the stick-on weights.
My friend’s parents’ van had an 8-track player, but I don’t think they had any cassettes for it.
There are some older restaurants and shops which have ashtrays in the restroom stalls. Not just in the restroom, but in the stalls themselves. Hard to believe indoor smoking only got (mostly) banned in 2010.
When we first moved here, many apartments wtill had a Reichle socket for the telephone. Most apartments have changed over to newer technology, but if you’re unlucky, it’s still possible to buy an adapter. As it’s only in Switzerland, there’s limited information, and it’s mostly German, French and Italian.
This seems to be a reference to a bottle top. The little tab things do not seem to have a name.
Per dictionary.com:
pop-top: (of a can) having a top with a tab or ring that when pulled up or off exposes a precut hole or peels off the entire lid.
Hey! Qadgop_the_Mercotan! It is good to see you again, and I take your posts very seriously.
Good to be seen, and pop tops are serious subjects that deserve proper attention and respect, for certain. 
Obviously. I am chastened.
But why??? Pop tops have been subject to serious debate and concern over the decades, and are certainly not trivial! Take of the chastenity belt!
The scourge of metal detectorists everywhere.
I’m familiar with most everything in this thread, sad to say. 8-tracks? Oh yeah, although that was the one format that I skipped, as I hated the song interruptions. I had a reel-to-reel, cassettes, and most other formats though.
I’ll add Beta tapes, if it hasn’t already been mentioned. They were a precursor to VHS and lasted about as long as the 8-tracks did. There was also the Videodisc, which looked like an LP. I also had floppy discs and most of the other formats of computer storage. My first computer was a Tandy 10000 with an 8088 processor that boasted 256KB of memory.
There even was a third competitive video tape standard, Video 2000, developed by the German company Grundig. It never made it out of Europe and soon lost to VHS like Betamax.