Um...how do I use this?

Have you ever brought up the topic of old technology with your kids or kids in general? If you ever get the chance I highly recommend it. Their concept of time and the shock and awe of how it used to be is amazing! My 7 year old is under the impression that I'm from the stone age or something. For example, we had a conversation about the shows I watched as a kid and he blew me away with his idea of how old I was. "Yeah buddy, I used to watch the same show when I was a kid but now a few things have changed on Dragon Ball Z."

"Ohhh, well back then was when TV's were small and in black and white right?"

"Uhh...how old do you think I am?"

"I don't know...old I guess."

Yeah...so he thinks I'm pretty old. I've talked to him about old school tech and it's funny to see the reaction on his face. First off I showed him a picture of an old rotary telephone.

"What's that?"

"You tell me what you think it is Buddy."

"Well...it looks like a telephone or something."

"You're right. Now how do you think you would use it?"

"Well...I guess I would use the numbers somehow."

I had to chuckle over his slight confusion but he did get the concept of it. I also told him how much of a pain it was if someone had a 9 or 0 in their phone number. Do you remember that? It's funny to think that a lot of what we used to have growing up is something that our kids would have no idea how to use it. A good example comes from my wife and our son. Now, this example does not deal with technology but falls under the same idea of old vs. new. Since Logan was born we have always used hand soap in a bottle with a pump. One day we happened to run out of the normal soap we use in the bathroom. A temporary fix was to bust out a bar of soap until we could get to the store and buy more. Logan had gone into the bathroom to wash his hands and after what I can imagine was complete confusion and odd looks into the mirror, he emerged from the bathroom with the bar of soap and asked,

"Um...how do I use this?"

I laughed my butt off when Rebecca told me about this and Logan was dead serious about the bar of soap. I mean, he's schooled now but man that's funny! So let's think back at some of the stuff we had growing up. Let's step into the DeLorean, after adding the needed fuel of course, back up on the road for room and punch it! Once we hit 88.8 mph we're headed back to the future. I think it would be pretty cool if we could but for now, we'll simply time travel through our memories. So what's first? Well for me, I think about the Sony Walkman, which I added a picture of in this post. At one time this portable cassette player was a hot item. If you had this player you were the stuff!

Also I mentioned earlier that my son thought TV's were in black and white when I was growing but I was born in '81. The TV's I remember were huge, heavy, and included knobs with UHF, VHF, and something to control how much snow there was in the picture. I believe the TV we had was a bulky Zenith. We also had a Sony Betamax that included the movie camera which was rather large! Do any of you remember what the last thing was before local TV stations signed off around 2am or so? If you happen to remember, make sure to comment on here. Now, I could go on and on about what I had that my kids have no clue about but what are things you remember? Other items could include, floppy disks, Polaroid Camera's with the 4 bulb flash that was sold separately, rotary phones, three switch cable boxes, typewriters, 45's, and...well there's so much more but I'm drawing a blank now. So here's where you come in. What do you remember from your childhood that your kids or the kids of today would have no clue how to use?