32 Comments

    1. Fortunately they’ll be able to download the audio themselves. Unfortunately they’ll be thrown in jail for copyright infringement when they do.

  2. I already feel old telling my 4-year-old what life was like before mobile phones, TV remotes, and air conditioning (I grew up without it and have no idea how I lived like that).

  4. I am trying to explain to my children that when I was there age there was no cable TV, no internet, no personal computers and no video games. If something was on TV, it was on ONCE and if you missed it, you missed it.

    They think I am either lying or that I’m some sort of caveman transported to the future.

  5. I’m already telling them, inadvertently:

    Kid: “Dad, what was your favorite video game when you were a kid?”

    Me: “There were no video games when I was a kid.”

  6. I’m still working on explaining to my nephew that I was born in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Once he grasps that concept, we can move on to the finer points of history like when Madonna was young and when video games were terrible, but we liked them anyway.

  7. I’ll tell them about how you could buy a starter home for only a half million dollars (complete with a whole second bedroom, and single bath!)

    I’ll tell them how, in my day, Yosemite ONLY got 4,000,000 visitors per year and it wasn’t so damn crowded.

    And I’ll tell them (hopefully) how we were actually trying to pursued people it was appropriate for the government to allow a same-sex marriage rather than fighting against it.

    I’m sure there are others…

  9. “Well, sonny, we had these things called video arcades, where you paid a quarter (that would be about a sixth of a euro to you) to play an 8-bit video game for a couple of minutes.”

    Actually, I’m only 45 and a few years ago I had to explain to a guy in his 20s what an 8-track tape was. He had no clue. He also couldn’t think of the word for vinyl album and called it, “one of those bigger (making a 12″ circle with his hands) black ones that DJs use.”

  10. I will tell grandchildren that news arrived in a rolled up paper on the driveway.

    That the telephone could be used to make anonymous prank phone calls. Many, many prank calls could be made and nobody had any way of possibly identifying the caller.

    That we lived our young lives in wild abandon without sunscreen or seatbelts.

    That nobody could ever verify urban legends before the advent of the internet and therefore every single one was True. Copperheads were in the dark ride at Six Flags so we kept our hands in the ride at all times and Ayds diet candy contained tapeworm eggs so we didn’t eat out of that box when babysitting the neighbor’s kids.

  12. what it was like to be ‘stranded’ somewhere in highschool, begging for some change to make a pay-phone call to a friend who’s phone number you memorized to pick you up and help you get home.

  13. I will describe to my not legally recognized grandchildren about how their father is my son but not legally, and how his parents are not really his parents but legally they are, and how my brothers are their real uncles but not legally and his brother is not really his brother but legally…I’ll stop there

  14. When I was a kid in the 1970s the President was an idiot and the economy was bad. When I was a teenager in the 1980s the President was an idiot and the economy was bad. When I was a young adult in the 1990s the President was an idiot and the economy was bad. When I was an adult in the 2000s the President was an idiot and the economy was bad. But that’s not the way people talk about it. Because we like to remember good things and forget bad things, Presidents go from idiots to legendary heroes and economies go from terrible to “the good old days.” The news doesn’t just keep you informed it also tries to change your mind about things. Stay away from Rush Limbaugh and Radio Pacifica, Fox News and MSNBC, Free Republic and Huffington Post. Every day it’s their job to think up something terrible to say about their opponents or they know you’ll lose interest and they’ll be out of work. They’ll fill your head full of crap, your heart full of anger and fear and make you think you’re smarter than everyone else when you’re not. Also, don’t be surprised if you do a 180 degree turn in your life. The things you’d sacrifice your life defending in your 20s may turn out to be something that just doesn’t matter or even that you’re fighting against when you’re in your 40s. At some point you’re going to realize you’ve been deceived by people you trusted, you’re probably already noticing it now. If you’re the same person at 50 that you were at 20, you’ve wasted 30 years of your life.

  16. “The Simpsons wasn’t on the air yet. Then it was on the air, and it was really clever and funny. Both claims seem implausible today, I know.”

    Maybe I’d also try to explain the ridiculous ubiquity of those AOL cd-roms. But I think you had to be there.

  17. I’ll tell them about my trips across country. They will hear about camping, and seeing a whole sky full of stars.They will hear about my adventures in the woods, and my modern archeological finds, like the old bottles, tools, and toys I would find. I’ll show them how we made popcorn on the stove when there was a blackout. I’ll teach them about internal combustion engines, and how magical and special they were, before we over did it and ruined the air. I will try to make the world feel as wonderful and strange and endlessly fascinating as it was when I was growing up.

  19. At the university I used to work at, they actually used an old elevator shaft to run the necessary wires to every floor. My co-worker said that we would one day tell our children that we had “wires! Wires everywhere!”

    1. Also, assuming its possible, I will show them episodes of Seinfeld. I recently discovered that virtually every plot on that show wouldn’t have happened if there were cell phones.

  20. There was this thing called a batch file that would do that for you. It was edited with a program called Edit. Even W7 still will run batch files and they can be put in the scheduler.

    Bootstraping from paper tape was fun too.

  23. Back in the day the internet was barely censored and could be used to learn about almost anything for the price of nothing more than a subscription to a service provider.

  24. It’ll probably be about 30 years before I have any grandkids, but this is what I’ll tell them:

    -It used to be illegal for gay people to get married. I know, we were a bunch of assholes, weren’t we?
    -We used to have to drive our cars. Yes, thousands of us died, but we did it anyway.
    -Smoking used to give you cancer! And we still loved it!

  25. “What’s with these new-fangled video game controllers? Back in my day, all we got was a stick and a button. And we LOVED it!”

Comments are closed.