Kids nowadays will never know the struggles faced before the days of the internet and modern technologies. Many believe it was a better time, a simpler time. However, kids of today will never understand.
Here are the top ten vintage thing kids nowadays will never understand. Read on!
1. Having to use a physical fold-out paper map
Kids nowadays will never know the struggle of having to pull over during a long car journey, to figure out exactly where it is you are and more importantly where you are supposed to be going.
Most kids today have more computing power on their smart-phones than NASA had to launch rockets in the 90s. With apps and sites like Google Maps becoming so readily available, paper maps are slowly becoming a vintage thing of the past. The impossibility of folding these back together will never be known again.
2. Having to rewind VHS tapes by hand
Video home system (VHS) tapes another vintage thing for the today younger generation. It was the most popular way to watch movies during 80s-90s. DVDs didn’t outsell VHS tapes until 2002. Some people miss tapes, but no one is going to miss the tedious task of having to physically hand-rewind the tape after each viewing – or discovering that someone has taped over your favorite show. Kids nowadays will never understand the pain of rewind VHS tapes by hand.
3. Trying to listen to music while moving but the CD player keeps skipping
For around ten years during the 90s, Sony’s Walkman was the most popular device for listening to music on the go. It allowed you to carry and play one CD and insert headphones no version with external speakers was ever made. However, unless the device was perfectly parallel the CD wouldn’t spin and would skip the track – making it redundant as a portable music player. That didn’t stop them selling more than 400million of them.
4. Going to the shop and waiting for a day to develop your disposable photos
Kids nowadays can take a photo in an instant and send it to anyone in the world. However, some of you will remember having to rewind the camera after every shot.
Even, you were unable to preview the pictures you’ve taken and taken your photo-film to the shop to have them developed in a dark room and printed overnight for next day collection. Not to mention the embarrassing moment the cashier hands you back your embarrassing and explicit photos. Yea, this another vintage thing kids of today will never understand.
5. Looking through the yellow pages to find a phone number
It takes less than a second for Google to provide millions of results. Yet some people will remember having to search tediously through the endless Yellow Pages to find the phone number for the local takeaway, a tradesman or anyone you need to contact. Thanks to the internet, this has become a vintage thing of the past.
6. Waiting for one of your favorite songs to come on the radio so you could tape record it
Does anyone else remember sitting in front of the radio for hours, waiting for your favorite song to start play? So you can hit record on your tape recorder to be able to listen back to it again later on – and then having to rewind the tape and basically guessing when to stop. With the likes of Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes this surely will never happen again.
7. Blowing on your game cartridges to fix it
We all remember the days when we were just about to complete the final level in Super Mario or about to beat your time-trail record on Sonic when suddenly the screen freezes or the game closes. There was one tried and tested solution to the nightmare that is being unable to play, and that is blowing on the cartridge.
If that didn’t work, blowing inside the console was sure to solve the problem. And for some reason, we all had that one friend that thought they were better at blowing on it that you.
8. Having to knock on your friend’s door to see if they were coming out
Before the days of instant messaging and face to face video chat, we actually had to leave the house and knock on our friend’s doors to see if everyone was coming outside to play. Most of our time playing out was spent walking for miles ‘calling on’ our friends to see who was coming out. Kids nowadays, a simple group message makes this process almost instantaneous. Knocking on doors and running away is a whole other story.
9. Wait months for a repeat of missing favorite show episode to be aired
This is another vintage thing kids nowadays will never understand. For a long time before the internet, there were only a few channels. Not all channels had a +1 as they do nowadays, so if you were to miss an episode, you would have to wait months or sometimes years until the show is re-aired and you could re-watch it.
Being able to pause and rewind TV was not a thing of the past either, so if you missed it, you missed it. With catchup TV being so readily available across multiple devices, the kids of today will never have to know the struggles we did.
10. Having to answer the phone without knowing who’s calling
It’s the simple thing that kids nowadays take for granted, such as having the ability to know who is calling your phone. We used to answer phones like ‘Hello, who’s calling?’, That is not necessary anymore given the Caller ID shows on smartphones today. We were also unable to save numbers, so it was more than common to have a notebook or piece of paper with a unique number written on them.
The kids nowadays take many things for granted, such as having the ability to contact anyone at any time or being able to watch any film and listen to any song. The internet has made many things obsolete while granting the power to be able to answer any question almost instantaneously.
