Tuesday, February 26, 2008

"What Old People Did Before Today"

How funny to look back and remember what skills have become obsolete because of new media. (Hat tip.) The antenna thing isn't completely obsolete - well at least until February '09 when everything goes digital... But my office still as the rabbit-ears which a few coworkers gather around to watch their soap operas every afternoon.

Some of my favorites:

  • Rewinding VCR tapes.
  • Calling collect.
  • Formatting floppy disks.
  • Loading film into a camera.
  • Getting up from a couch to change channels or volume.
  • Dialing.
  • Remembering phone numbers.
  • Using carbon paper.
  • Rewinding a tape with a pen.
  • Adjusting Tracking on a VCR
  • Looking for a job in the classifieds
  • Adjusting the antenna on a TV
  • Remembering passwords (although not quite obsolete)
  • Spelling (also not quite obsolete)
  • Tearing apart pages from a computer print out (also removing the spooling paper on the sides!)
  • Changing the ribbon on a typewriter
  • MS-DOS commands
Here's the rest of them. Can you think of anything else?

comments:

Well, according to some young writers (I'm talking about college/high school young) grammar and punctuation seems to be a thing of the past.