100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TV's filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax Tapes.
11. Mini Disc
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations.
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Computers and Videogaming

18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long.
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer.
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.

The Internet

36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs.
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets

57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart.
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Everything Else

70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen Episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming Pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger.
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine.
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

Some of these things are so old that I don't even know what they are! (And I'm almost 30!) :)

The inexplicable fashion fads of my childhood

I came across a Yahoo article the other day with trends from my child hood it provided me with a good laugh and a "Hey...I had that!" There were 16 trends on the list, and I only managed 7 of them...I must have been deprived as a child :) J/K!




Scrunchies: Hair elastics may be more mature, but matching your scrunchie to your outfit was the way to go as a kid. We used to literally collect them.

-I had many scrunchies for the long hair I had as a child. I do remember buying most of the at my favorite store Limited Too!



Slap Bracelets: Teachers went crazy from all the disruptive cracking sounds as kids took their bracelets on and off during class, and thus slap bracelets were banned. Boo!

-I remember having these in like 2nd and 3rd grade...I remember them banning them at school, because kids were getting hurt from slapping other kids hard with them.



Stick on Earrings: Before my mom would let me get my ears pierced, I favored these sparkly stickers.

-I think this is where my love for stickers may have come from :)



Jelly Shoes: Available in a rainbow of colors, these made your feet sweat and get blisters, but they sure were fun! High-end designers like Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs still continue to harp on the nostalgia factor of these shoes each summer.

- I remember having some fun jelly shoes from Target as a kid...great for the summertime (Not so much MN winters!) :)



Hypercolor tees: These tees changed colors when you got warm or sweat.

- I remember it not working really well especially after you washed it.



Friendship Bracelets: I would spend all my free time during summer making these and often trading with a pal.

- I remember having a business where we set up a table in the front yard to sell the bracelets we made. We would go to Wal Mart and buy the floss to make our bracelets and all the extra thread we had, we would wrap around the little plastic cards and put them in the floss box (We were so cool!)



Banana Clips: This was the coolest way to pull your hair back in the '80s. And then they disappeared.

- Once again having long hair as a child these were frequently used to pull my hair back off of my face.

Other trends included...
-Charm necklaces
-T-shirt clips
-Jelly bracelets
-Debbie Gibson hats
-Mood rings
-Zinka (Neon facepaint sunscreen)
-Splatter paint
-Chokers
-Baby backpacks


http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/beauty/the-inexplicable-fashion-fads-of-our-childhoods-2022417