Glenn Reynolds has an interesting link on “100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About.” I’ve set IRQs before, but anyone who rembers NuBus knows this was the inferior way. It was nice when PCs finally caught up. What things am I too young to remember doing? Not much. Definitely remember using Mosaic for the first time. I remember Gopher and Archie, and I’ve uudecoded more than a few things in my life. I still have a lot of negatives on disk film somewhere. This list had to have been made by guys in their mid 30s. You know, at some point, I should probably look at getting all the video footage from when I was a kid, all on 8mm, transferred over to DVD.
UPDATE: How many have kid pictures on this medium? How many kids today will know that the term “slides” in power point actually dervives from this, and also the term “Slideshow” in image programs.
Bah! My kids are young enough to have never known a world without TiVo. While television was known in my youth, cable was nonexistent, remotes were rare and wired, satellite was something with a very large dish. In other words, not worth it, let’s go outside and play.
Then again, youth of today are growing up without Bugs Bunny, the poor things.
I miss gopher. It was fast.
The one thing that pops into mind that I’m too young to remember doing directly is punched cards. And I never used a slide rule.
I barely remember Gopher or Archie. Does the current generation of web-browsers even support those protocols anymore? The first generation ones certainly did. They had to, most early websites were just shallow frontpages that dumped you to gopher or FTP after a few of clicks.
I barely remember the text encoding. I didn’t get into usenet until the readers were doing it for me. I think it was mostly because doing it through cut and paste was just too much work before that.
I have my doubts about some of the stuff disappearing though. I still use DOS and the command line for programming. The kids probably will see this too, especially if they ever use Unix. Reality TV has also been around forever, we just called them game shows.
I had to punch cards when I took Fortran IV in college. Slide rules were necessary since their were no calculators. I used a slipstick from seventh grade through college.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
I guess it’s been a long time since I have been to a public pool. Has the diving board been phased out? Let me guess, it’s too dangerous, right?
Really, punch cards….try paper tape on a PDP-8 that you had to load the first 10 or so instructions by flipping switches on the front along with a teletype for input/output.
Or actual drafting with pencil and t-square.
One of my computer profs in the mid-1970s was such a System/360 guy that when he died, they buried him face down, nine edge first.
(rim shot)
Despite just making it halfway through my 30’s I have done most of the things on that list – including use a slipstick (though to be fair, it was because I was a geek, not because I had to – I had perfectly adequate pocket calculators availabe).