There’s an elegiac little list with this title over at Wired.com: experiences, generally technological, that you may have had but your children haven’t and won’t. I remember far too much of it.
So, I will just mention the things on the list that I never experienced either:
- Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds
- 8-track cartridges
- Betamax tapes
- MiniDisc
- Laserdisc
- Shortwave radio
- Using jumpers to set IRQs [not even sure what this means]
- Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it
- Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID
- Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time
- Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load
- CB radios
A lot of these I was aware of, just didn’t have. Anything computational completely passed me by. When I think of all those times I lamented my thrifty, technosceptic parents … maybe they didn’t do me such a disservice.
Even so, that’s 12 items out of 100. My time may be passing.