Things Your Kids May Never Know About By Nathan Barry, GeekDad, Wired.com, July 22, 2009 Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo The number of TV channels being a single digit Standard definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room Rotary dial televisions with no remote control High-speed dubbing 8-track cartridges Vinyl records Betamax tapes MiniDisc Laserdisc Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations Shortwave radio 3-D moves wearing red-and-green glasses Watching TV when the networks say you should That there was a time before "reality TV" The scream of a computer modem connecting The buzz of a dot-matrix printer 5- and 3-inch floppies and Zip Discs DOS Terminals accessing the mainframe Counting in kilobytes Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load Joysticks Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive Booting your computer off a floppy disk Recording a song in a studio Finding out information from an encyclopedia Using a road atlas to get from A to B Doing bank business only when the bank is open Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday Phone books and Yellow Pages Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and mailing it Not knowing exactly what all your friends are doing and thinking at every moment Privacy The fact that words generally don't have num8er5 in them Correct spelling of phrases Waiting several minutes (or hours!) to download something The time before PC networks When Span was just a meat product - or a Monty Python sketch Typewriters Putting film in your camera - or APS or disc Sending that film away to be processed Having physical prints of photographs come back to you CB radios Getting lost - before GPS Rotary-dial telephones Answering machines Using a stick to point at information on a wall chart Pay phones Phones with actual bells in them Fax machines Vacuum cleaners with bags in them Taking turns picking a radio station for everyone to listen to during a long drive Remembering someone's phone number Not knowing who was calling you on the phone Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie Toys actually being suitable for the under-3's LEGO just being square block of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door Waiting for the television network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater Relying on the 5 minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights Neat handwriting Starbuck being a man Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC Trig tables and log tables Slide rules Finding books in a card catalog at the library Swimming pools with diving boards Hershey bars in silver wrappers Having to manually unlock a car door Writing a check Looking out the window and rolling it down during a long drive Roller skates, as opposed to blades Cash Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall Omni Magazine A physical dictionary Polaroid photos Punch cards for computer storage