What if… just what if some wise guy gives kids today some gizmos from the past? A rotary phone for instance. Or a cassette tape. Would they know what they are for? Could they even imagine the joy it brought to the world?
Here are some of the yesteryears stuff that people of those days enjoyed having or doing and are now nostalgic about as lined-up by www.thestorypedia.com:
- Cassette tape and a pencil
Duh! What’s a cassette? And what’s the pencil for? They use iPods now so the tape will never come unspooled, nor will there ever be any need to wind up the tape using that pencil that fit just so perfectly within that toothed circle!
- Film cameras.
Really? Cameras using films? It was challenging trying to perfect the art of properly putting the film role in and struggling to catch the perfect shot on a camera because there are only 36 exposures, no filters, no deleting or retakes and no preview screen or (gasp) selfies!
- TV without remote controls
Back in the day, TVs were not hanging on the wall. Instead they were at the center of the universes, right in the middle of the living room with not one daring to come close lest he gets the unfortunate role of being the human remote control.
- Greeting cards
These are still in use somehow – mostly by old school peeps preferring them over GIFs. Nowadays, kids wish people in other cities and countries via Whatsapp or Facebook and if they really, really love them, they Skype with them. But go out, buy a greeting card, use a pen to write, stick a stamp and post it? Why? Because it has personal touch and, ergo, more humanish.
- Typewriters
If it’s any consolation at all, kids today must be all-praises to the “oldies” for having to deal with – and during almost their lifetime, at that! – heavy machines that run on roller inks that smudge the face when you rewind them. There’s more: the noisy machines couldn’t delete (you have to use a white paint that leaves marks on your hands); they also could not redo, undo, spell check, justify, change fonts or font size.
- The boombox
It’s where you put the cassette tapes in to play music, but in this age of YouTube and Bluetooth, kids would most probably be scratching their heads wondering how it works.
- Jukebox
While at it, let’s go back to the day when piped-in music was not so much the norm and people actually had to have some loose change to play music and have real fun. Some say the jukebox, now a thing of the past, could be a bit too complicated for today’s generation to grasp.
- TV antenna
Wireless routers have replaced the antennae to give life to wifi TVs and kids would go berserk figuring out why houses of days past had these contraptions that owners twist and move to bit to the left or the right to get better TV reception.
- VCR players and tapes
Once upon a time, people had no cable TV and so they go to “video shops” and rent movies – too much work for kids these days.
- The encyclopedia
You want to know something, “Google it!” Kids missed the joy of having a whole set of encyclopedia.
- The rotary phone
And the real blockbuster is…. (drum roll please) the rotary phone! These days Facebook newsfeeds are full of funny videos showing kids dumbfounded staring at a rotary phone and trying to operate it. A real shocker in this age of iPhones!
