When my brother got his first car, it had a built in 8-track player; he bought an adapter that allowed it to play cassette tapes
I have seen and used 8-tracks, but only because my musicophile uncle (born in the late 50’s) had one in his music room in which I spent much time in in the later 80’s / very early 90’s.
My kids, 13 and 16, know what phone books are, and why there were white and yellow pages. They are also familiar with dial phones (of the rotary disk type), even though they have never used either IRL.
I’m 46, non-American, and I’ve never handled a check in person.
I can’t fathom a teenager of today being baffled by the Save icon in Windows.
Nitpick: toilet tank. I don’t think even Gilligan could be enticed to ride around in the bowl.
I’m notoriously bad at predictions, but I have a feeling that set-top cable boxes are not long for this world as providers switch to streaming (mine is in the process now). Rooftop antennas may outlive them.
It’s a little older, but I’ll go with the slide rule. I’m 45 and wouldn’t know one if I ran across one in the wild.
Depends on exactly what is meant by “baffled” - today’s teenagers will know that you click on that icon to save something but they won’t know why it looks the way it does rather than resembling a USB flash drive.
And the antenna that made them possible.
Citizen Band radio (as well as Amateur “Ham”) are very much in use in the overlanding community, and while this is a pretty niche hobby a significant proportion of overlanders are younger people. I would agree that in general most people of all ages have never actually used a CB radio or seen one outside of ‘Seventies trucker films even though it had a brief popular surge of enthusiasm at that time.
It’s not quite there yet but the dedicated electronic calculator is going to be as anachronistic as a slide rule in the coming generation. Most STEM students still learn to use a graphing calculator to some limited extent but you can get emulators on your cell phone which are just as capable and powerful. I have a habit of bringing my HP-48 to meetings just to do quick unit conversions or run the handful of programs I have to for calculating dB margins and octaves instead of firing up Matlab or Python, and I not infrequently get some younger person boggling at carrying an entirely separate device for doing calculations. Even better is when someone borrows it to try to do some simple arithmetic and can’t figure out how to use Reverse Polish Notation.
Stranger
Those multicolored disks absolutely were “floppy discs,” even if the plastic cases housing the disks weren’t floppy.
Floppy disks were distinguished from hard disks, which are still around.
How many young 'uns know what this is?
I don’t recognize it. If I had to guess I’d say it was something a magician would use as part of their act.
So you could take the phone into a closet and have some privacy when you talk.
True (although plenty of people just called them “discs” or “diskettes” ) - but my point was that if she had ever seen the type that was actually floppy, she would have known what the person was talking about. She didn’t know what the person meant precisely because she had never seen one.
Other than the thermometer, I’ve never seen any of these items, and I’m an old fart of 55 years.
8-Track players never made it to Germany (maybe not even to the whole of Europe), and I first heard about them on this board. Compact cassettes were king from the 70s to the early 90s, especially in cars.
Now that I think of it, I don’t think they made it to Israel, either.
I’m just shy of 42 and:
Have no idea what this is.
I also have no clue what the other items you posted (post 18) are.
I actually own a slide rule, I think. It was given to me years ago by one of my hospice patients. It went into a box and I havent seen it in recent memeory but I don’t recall throwing it out. One my projects this summer is organizing my garage so I may yet come across it. Of course I have no clue how to use it.
A couple of years ago my then 15 year old son and I helped a friend clean out her garage. We came across a box of 3" floppy disks. My son had no clue what they were; he didn’t even recognize them as computer paraphernalia.
OTOH he not only knows what paper checks are but knows how to fill one out.
I don’t know. They have two major advantages over phone apps that may be enough to keep them around indefinitely: (1) They’re useful in testing situations when you don’t want students to have access to their phones, and (2) the fact that they have physical buttons makes them easier to use (at least for some people) than using a touch screen.
I used to make these when I was a kid and tractor feed printers were still in use. You’d tear off the two edge strips with the holes and fold them over one another to make those springy things. I remember using them for “pop-up” holiday cards.
I see those quite a bit when I’m in suburbia. Usually college/high school sports teams.
Hard to say with this because so many places have all the power and phone lines underground. No poles or wiring above ground.
Some of you guys must be ancient. I’m 60 and I’ve never seen a bunch of these things.
