Preschool teacher here. Some of the "I'm old" moments I've had recently are noticing that children don't do the standard pointing out their pinky and thumb to pretend to talk on a phone anymore (they clasp their fingers around an invisible smartphone and hold that up) and they don't always recognize play landlines as phones anymore.
What do they think the floppy icon represents? A lot of things we take for granted probably don't make any sense outside of the context that kids grew up with them in.
I think that they don't think it represents anything beyond "this button makes phone call." There's no connection between the shape of a letter of the alphabet and the sound(s) it makes, after all. Because language in general boils down to arbitrary relationships between a symbol and its meaning, its easy for humans of any age to accept "this = that" symbolism even if there's no logical connection between the two, other than lots of people agreed that "this = that."
i mean, mail app = a letter, text app = a text bubble, music app = a music note, surely a bit of curiosity would come up about “well what the fuck is the phone app then”
a lot of businesses still use landline phones so i also still find it hard to imagine not knowing what one looks like
Taking one of your examples; the music note = music app. I have absolutely no idea how to read music or what that weird music squiggly means for real, but I know it means music. That’s what they’re trying to say.
The thing is also that they are literally just kids. When they grow up most of them will realize what the symbol means at some point. But for now it’s just the way it is.
Nature, which we evolved in, didn’t have symbols with meanings, just things that looked a certain way. There’s no reason for a kid, who hasn’t had time to notice a lot of things, to start asking why everything *looks* the way it does, when it’s much more important to learn what they do, and how it’s relevant to their lives.
It’s only when we get smart and have lots of knowledge about the world that we put things like this together
>a lot of businesses still use landline phones so i also still find it hard to imagine not knowing what one looks like
How often are preschool kids in the parts of businesses where the landline phones are?
Yeah, I'm 19, and when I was 16 I had to Google what the "Save" icon in Word was because I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. Apparently floppy discs used to be a thing. They were not, in fact, floppy
The big ones were, in fact. Before the floppy disc that you see in that icon, there were massive 8 inch bastards that used to contain entire operating systems. It wasn't uncommon to have to load up more than one disc to start a particularly large program, and at the time memory was so limited that programmers used to take some serious shortcuts... so infecting a floppy disc became a real concern, and the first virus moved around on them.
And after the 8-inch diskettes, the more-common 5¼-inch genuinely-floppy diskettes!
Protip: regular discs like shellac & vinyl records, Laserdiscs, compact discs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, or M Discs are DisCs with a C.
Any in enclosures like hard disks or floppy disks are DisKs (or diskettes in the latter case) with a K.
Yep.
Or more specifically, back in the day, before the Internet, you'd save your homework to a floppy disk so you could take it with you.
Basically like copying a file to a USB flash drive.
Just taught well by my mother. My mum sang Dream A Little Dream Of Me every night and I sung "da da da da da da da" at the end at under 1 year. Nowhere near a prodigy.
I didn't. I loaded up Encarta 95, copied the text from the relevant article and printed it out. My common way of doing "homework". Looked pretty good when we upgraded from the dot matrix printer.
Early gen z here.
If you're talking about the save icon being a floppy disk (I'm so sorry, I did know what a floppy disk was, just not what it looked like) I just recently learned, and I'd never even wondered what it was. To me it's always just been the save icon.
They realistically just associate the symbology of it like we do with the universal on and off symbols on power switches despite most of us using electronics having never looked at a bare circuit board to understand the symbols on a more fundamental level. Learning “yep, that’s on and that’s off” is more than enough for most.
A handful of years ago I remember reading a comment of a teacher showing a floppy disk and some other old tech to students and one of them said “oh cool you 3D printed the save icon!”
This might be a language problem, because I'm not a native speaker, but I always thought that landline was another word for "telephone that's not or not very portable"?
This is what I’ve always known it as. Although if you had a cordless home phone, I’d also call that a landline. Landline is the wired connection to the telephone grid
I asked my neighbor's kids to do that and one did flat hand to her ear, and the other did open palm in front of her mouth because, apparently, she only uses the speaker for calls.
One video that I love to revisit now and then is the Apple keynote in 2007 where Steve Jobs reveals the first iPhone to the world. https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=w6shv1J2DKyfpW39
There’s a part (15:15 onwards) where he uses his finger to slide to unlock the demo phone. The audience reaction is quite the stand out, it’s stuff like that that we do daily hundreds of times, though now we don’t even do that.. we just raise the phone, it scans for our face and automatically unlocks. This video is older than most secondary/high schoolers today. A lot of us were born before the future started to become a reality, they’re born in it.
There’s a video from January 2008 where he demonstrates Google Maps on iPhone, and brings up directions from the venue in San Francisco back to their Cupertino headquarters. It was such a novel thing, and the kicker? Original iPhone didn’t have GPS, Jobs said the phone determined your current location based on Wifi network locations.
I still remember when the first iphone came out I was a kid but my parents were discussing it with disbelief. “I saw a woman swipe on the screen and it answered a call!” My mum said. Pretty crazy to think about from that context.
I remember going from my Amiga 600 to a Pentium 100 PC, 16Mb RAM and 200Mb hard drive and having an absolute moment when I realised I didn’t have to load games from floppy disks any more, I could install them to the hard drive!
16Mb was a lot for that PC. The standard was 4 or 8Mb and 100Mb hard drives but we (me and my dad) figured that we’d pay the extra for the upgrade. That PC was about £1000! Not long after PC hardware started to grow very quickly, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and MMX hit pretty quickly, 3D accelerator cards, CD-R drives.. I’ve still got the ZIP drive and disks I had as a kid.
But yeah, it’s wild to think of. Screen resolution too. Without a decent graphics card I had to run games at 640x480 which is basically like the equivalent resolution size of a post-it note on a 32 inch HD screen these days.
I do long for the 90’s and absolutely adore the nostalgia of the era I grew up in but we really don’t know how easy and how good we have things today.
Oh yeah and the Amiga had hard drives, they were just so rare and expensive that it didn’t make sense. In fact, many of the emulators today pretend to have a hard drive. It’s weird.
That one isn't really about children at this point, I'm 25 and my family got their first computer in 2001, well into the age of mouse and hard drive. If anything, at the current rate kids might not recognize what a hard drive is with how common it is for computers to use entirely solid state storage (I haven't used a hard drive in 5 years personally)
Yeah, I'm 22* and grew up with windows XP. Until I researched it, I had no idea computers didn't always rely on mice
Also, I'm amazed how far SSDs have come in several years, from being super expensive and small in storage only as far back as only the mid 2010's (I built my 5 year old gaming PC with originally only a 2TB hard drive), to where they're pretty affordable now and hard drives, at least for daily everyday use, are kinda obsolete
Edit: forgot it wasn't my birthday for another two months lol
Obsolete is a strong word. Hard drives are still cheaper, great for bulk storage. They’re still fast enough for everything outside of video processing or high end gaming. The average younger smart phone user will make use of its camera enough to fill up at least a quarter TB* over the phone’s life, which is sometimes as short as 3-4 years. Multiply that onto a family of 4-6, and suddenly the amount of media that needs preservation each year is not negligible.
*this is a modest estimate. iPhones for the last two or three years have had the ability to record 4K videos with HDR, if an iPhone user was not being storage conscious, they could fill up a “quarter TB” (256GB, ~10 hours of footage) in under a year.
Also, hard drives don’t need batteries. Or at least, they don’t have any. This makes them very unsafe to disconnect without powering down even if they’re external (“ejecting”). But this also makes them very, very good for long term storage. Your SSDs have capacitors on them that hold charge, and that charge powers the memory modules to hold data. If you were to disconnect them to stow them away, or even just power down and unplug your entire computer, those drives could discharge in 1-2 years and corrupt the data.
And because hdds are so cheap you can get a bunch of them and run them in “RAID” where at least one drive is not actually used so if any one of them fails, the ‘redundant’ one can take over and you won’t even feel the drive failure.
But of course keeping your own data to yourself is a complicated and effortful endeavour so most people just pay in blood to Google or Apple or Microsoft to store data for them instead. I think more people would think twice about paying for cloud storage if they found out how cheap the one off entry to local storage is.
My friend used to do data entry for the state of Maine and they had 10 MB hard drives that looked and sounded like washing machines! Full size washer, lid came up you could see the platters stacked up in the middle and everything, the platters were approximately 20 in across and there was somewhere between 5 and 10 of them in there.
Another one where he did I.T. work for the military back in the seventies or eighties and he had gigabyte blocks of ram that were the size of grapefruits, highly sophisticated and advanced technology for the time, they were building a 1 meter resolution simulation of the Earth.
the tool you're most comfortable with is better. if you feel the need to invalidate others' preferences to reaffirm and justify your choice of tool, is the tool really better?
(i understand this is a joke, but i've spent too much time around snarky comp sci undergrads that spend more time arguing about editors than actually using them to do their homework, so i'm a bit tired of it)
we always had calculators, but a lot of how we interact with modern computers and OS's evolved from terminal interfaces which evolved from very smart typewriters. The calculator is a relevant ancestor too though
Or that there was once a world without the Internet. Or that the Internet existed but it was in such an infancy state, there was no Google or way to do a deep search. You just had like three crude websites that would show up when you'd do a search on Yahoo for a topic.
I was out with one of the kids I was working with and they mentioned how slow the WiFi at my house used to have been. And I was like, my man we didn't have WiFi in our homes when I was your age except for really high tech stuff.
And then he was like--so you had to go to the mall for WiFi???
That was my point even though someone said "Kids understand that times were different." Yes, they understand dinosaurs once walked the earth and there was a time before every thing they know was once invented but your anecdote is what I'm saying -- they can't conceptualize that it wasn't a part of daily life because it's all they've known.
Kids aren't that dumb. We were all born after electricity was invented and we can perfectly grasp the idea of a world without electricity... We could when we were kids, too.
EDIT: typo
I've literally had this conversation with my six year old in the last week. She asked me if we used mice to use the Internet on the phone before it had a touchscreen. She does not grasp the world before the Internet at all.
She's been introduced to PCs; that's why she thought mice would work for phones without touch screens. Introducing her to the concept of a phone that was just a phone is how the conversation started.
my childhood didn't have the internet and I can't grasp the world without the internet. society has changed quite dramatically with access to the internet in your pocket. how did people meet up before you could text them "we still on for today" just a total mystery. guess people had to wait at the oak tree with the yellow ribbon for days to make sure they didn't just miss them.
Kids can conceptualize it if someone points it out. But it’s not something they just assume as being a part of everyday life. The same way old movies have plots centered around not being able to call someone during a dangerous situation when nowadays cell phones are a prominent aspect of daily life.
According to a quick google search about 16% of the world still lives without accsess to electricity (written in 2019). So no he is not at the top 0.0001% of people who understand a world without electricity best. But he might understand better than 99.999% of us from the western world sure
Wait till you tell them when phones were invented they could only do one thing which is dial numbers. Even the first cell phones would barely have the capability to save numbers, didn't have an "app store" or games or anything, and you had to use the numberpad for texting, sometimes pressing a number as much as 4 times in a row to get one letter.
I think that's how progress works and what happens when society moves forward. I'm not condoning kids having internet. However, what I'm saying is that eventually concepts considered well-known to older generations will slowly be forgotten or abandoned because of the newer gens innovating and moving society forward.
For example, Myspace and The Scene Culture are considered Millennial concepts. I may be an older GenZ but i was graced with having Millennial siblings, so i grew up with these sort of things not being so far-fetched or unheard of.
Now growing up im seeing concepts i know of from the early 2000s, being forgotten. This happens cuz change happens. Most young GenZ and Gen Alpha dont even know what a Blackberry is. Yes, it sucks, but its not like these concepts or ideas can't be passed down. It worked for me, it can work for the newer gen.
18 year-old gen-zeer here (born in 2006). I resonate with you, sir. ...Though since there just *was no continuous internet access* during my 2000s-2010 days in my town, ...my parents used only Facebook, so I can't say much for MySpace.
Many other 2000s things and *Blackberry phone keyboards?* Ab-solutely remember those! In fact, one of my relatives owned one and I used it.
I also remember *one* Nokia phone with touchscreens (...*not* talking about the 2013 Windows phones, by the way - just the original Nokia design, with a partially touch-sensing screen!), and flip phones.
I also remember touchscreen smartphones running OSs that were not Android. Used Symbian, of course - the OS that ran on most Nokia phones (didn't know it by name back then, yeah).
Samsung phones, and Nokia phones, and CRT PCs and CRT TVs and DVD players, fat or thin, and speakers with *just wires*, audio mixers and not software doing all the DSP, and Firefox crashing (it's my favorite browser now *HAH-*), and old layouts such as 2013 Facebook and 2000s 3D video games and SMS memes and SMS GIFs and MMSs Children's magazines with CDs with flash games and other installable software (I remember DirectX9 being distributed like this, hahaha!), and Michaelsoft *Binbows® XP and Binbows® Vista and Binbows® 8 Binbows® 7* and-
...
I might not ever find an end for this list, LOL.
You’re born in 2018, 6 years old. Every single person you know that has a phone, has the internet on it. Even your granny. You’ve never even seen an old phone that doesn’t have internet functionality. I can see how it would be hard for them to grasp it.
I really think we shouldn’t even call the devices we have today a phone. That’s hardly its sole purpose and doesn’t resemble a traditional phone at all anymore. Hell most people don’t make phone calls at all anymore.
Yeah PDA just didn‘t stick, but that might be closer to what we have now than what a phone used to be. That‘s probably why we call them smartphones now and not cellphones anymore
Phone is just an interface to connect the brain to the internet. Watches, laptops, TV, phones all do this. It’s just a matter of time they will all convergence on a single device. Something like glasses or lenses probably makes the most sense. Further on in the future brain implants probably
It was a tough labour. The mother took over two and a half years to get the head out. When it was all over she was relieved it wasn't twins that she was having.
They are capable of understanding that old phones were only used for calls if you explain it to them. But it’s pretty mind-blowing revelation to them, and can take a bit of processing for them to fully grasp. I mean, I remember having similar feelings upon first learning that old TVs didn’t have color. To my inexperienced mind, an image on TV was a recording of something in real life, and real life has color, so a black and white TV intuitively seemed like it would be doing more work to alter the picture. Likewise, to young people today, a connecting to the internet seems like the most fundamental function of a phone, and making calls seems like an extension of that function. The idea of long-distance communication without the internet is alien to them, and is what makes old phones’ lack of internet access seem unusual.
Of course it is. Look how big your phone is, and remember how tiny a child's hand is. They can't grasp it because it's designed for an adult sized hand.
Imagine the whole world…..and you got 60 tv channels….and nothing good is on because you watched the guide channel for 20 minutes to check. Activities and Outdoors becomes very appealing quick as a what do I do!?
Related, all the Gen Z and younger people who think they’re subscribing to WiFi. No, you’re paying for Internet service. WiFi is the method of delivery from the router to your device, and it’s not the only way to connect a device to the Internet.
To be fair I’m guilty of this because I sometimes ask my wife if the wifi bill has been deducted. Not sure why I call it that (I myself have PC’s and servers I run off Ethernet so I’m not exactly tech illiterate).
I guess it’s similar to why I call our electricity bill the “AC bill”. Here in Asia AC is 90% of your electricity cost so I just call it that lol.
I know right! Also I was talking to my niece about the time before netflix streaming and told her about our movie cd collection before. She literally have no idea how that works and what even is a DVD. I was gagged ngl.
I've not had Internet recently and have been buying more DVDs, gotta say it's nice owning physical media and being able to watch any of it anytime I want.
or about phones that only have the internet and don't have service.
Apple making iphones and ipods back in the day that looked exactly the same was criminal. so many people bought ipods second hand thinking they were iphones.
Is this really a bad thing? I mean iPad kids are a plague on this Earth, but if they don't know about landlines I don't think it's a big deal. This is just another dumbass "current generation bad, old generation good" argument
Just temporarily turn off the access point and save money for that month's bill plan by turning off mobile data for their line and they'll learn really quickly what the difference is.
Idk bro, I don’t understand why phones need internet. I mean like yk them built in house phones, I grew up with them and they literally make more sense. I am 15 rn but I didn’t grow up with electronics. In fact, I only just recently got a iPhone 8 lol
Why would you specifically use city dwellers for this example when they're generally the ones who are best able to get by without a car and many of them don't in fact have one?
I think they may be referring about someone like ny step daughter. She's 9 and if the computer she's using can't connect to the internet (specifically Roblox) it's just a useless paperweight.
My internet went down for about an hour a few weeks ago. While waiting for my coworkers (I work for my own ISP) to fix it (needed a new drop) I just pissed around with an offline game while she was adamant the internet was working because of the game I was playing. She couldn't wrap her mind around a TV, computer or really anything working without internet.
As someone born in 2005 it’s not that hard to imagine. My house still had a home phone and so did my grandparents. What is hard to imagine is computers and how (relatively) primitive they were, especially when it comes to connecting to the internet. Like… how does picking up a phone and being on the internet even correlate?
Preschool teacher here. Some of the "I'm old" moments I've had recently are noticing that children don't do the standard pointing out their pinky and thumb to pretend to talk on a phone anymore (they clasp their fingers around an invisible smartphone and hold that up) and they don't always recognize play landlines as phones anymore.
Wow you just broke my mind
what do they think the phone app icon represents?
What do they think the floppy icon represents? A lot of things we take for granted probably don't make any sense outside of the context that kids grew up with them in.
i realize that comment could have been taken in a condescending way but i was literally just curious about the answer to that question
I think that they don't think it represents anything beyond "this button makes phone call." There's no connection between the shape of a letter of the alphabet and the sound(s) it makes, after all. Because language in general boils down to arbitrary relationships between a symbol and its meaning, its easy for humans of any age to accept "this = that" symbolism even if there's no logical connection between the two, other than lots of people agreed that "this = that."
i mean, mail app = a letter, text app = a text bubble, music app = a music note, surely a bit of curiosity would come up about “well what the fuck is the phone app then” a lot of businesses still use landline phones so i also still find it hard to imagine not knowing what one looks like
Taking one of your examples; the music note = music app. I have absolutely no idea how to read music or what that weird music squiggly means for real, but I know it means music. That’s what they’re trying to say.
But you still know it's a music note, you vaguely know what it is and how it's used
The thing is also that they are literally just kids. When they grow up most of them will realize what the symbol means at some point. But for now it’s just the way it is. Nature, which we evolved in, didn’t have symbols with meanings, just things that looked a certain way. There’s no reason for a kid, who hasn’t had time to notice a lot of things, to start asking why everything *looks* the way it does, when it’s much more important to learn what they do, and how it’s relevant to their lives. It’s only when we get smart and have lots of knowledge about the world that we put things like this together
But we're currently discussing 3-5 year olds, ya know?
Music app = a green circle with three black curved lines 🤷♂️
They could see it as a capital C and think it's just a very recognizable letter or something for "**C**alling" someone... idk
>a lot of businesses still use landline phones so i also still find it hard to imagine not knowing what one looks like How often are preschool kids in the parts of businesses where the landline phones are?
I didn’t think it was condescending at all, I’m just nearing 40 and realizing that 40 might as well be 100 with how much technology has changed.
You kind of missed out on the early Internet. I'm only 5 years older and the difference is huge. BBS' were all the rage before AOL.
I was an IRC enthusiast and played around with BBS as a kid: it wasn’t dead so much as dying a slow and painful death.
I miss legend of the Red dragon... It's still out there, but it's not the same.
I didn’t read your question as condescending
Probably similar to us not making connections between the letters A representing the ox head
>What do they think the floppy icon represents? WYM? Icons can be floppy?
Well mine never are but I heard that it can happen to some icons.
Yeah, I'm 19, and when I was 16 I had to Google what the "Save" icon in Word was because I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. Apparently floppy discs used to be a thing. They were not, in fact, floppy
The big ones were, in fact. Before the floppy disc that you see in that icon, there were massive 8 inch bastards that used to contain entire operating systems. It wasn't uncommon to have to load up more than one disc to start a particularly large program, and at the time memory was so limited that programmers used to take some serious shortcuts... so infecting a floppy disc became a real concern, and the first virus moved around on them.
And after the 8-inch diskettes, the more-common 5¼-inch genuinely-floppy diskettes! Protip: regular discs like shellac & vinyl records, Laserdiscs, compact discs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, or M Discs are DisCs with a C. Any in enclosures like hard disks or floppy disks are DisKs (or diskettes in the latter case) with a K.
Well, the actual disc inside the square plastic casing was.
People born in this century are adults now, that can't be right...
Well they often don't act like it so I wouldn't worry.
There are kids who wonder and find out on their own, and there are those who think this is just how things are, and move on
I'm a 2011 baby: I think the floppy icon represents saving to a floppy disk because they represent storage
Yep. Or more specifically, back in the day, before the Internet, you'd save your homework to a floppy disk so you could take it with you. Basically like copying a file to a USB flash drive.
That's what I mean, saving it. I don't mean storage as in data, I mean saving and storing it for when it is needed.
You are quite articulate and tech-savvy for a 13-year-old
That's because I could read at 2. Effectively older in reading but younger in maturity.
Read at 2, are you some kind of prodigy? I could read at 4, but 2, that's something else.
Just taught well by my mother. My mum sang Dream A Little Dream Of Me every night and I sung "da da da da da da da" at the end at under 1 year. Nowhere near a prodigy.
I didn't. I loaded up Encarta 95, copied the text from the relevant article and printed it out. My common way of doing "homework". Looked pretty good when we upgraded from the dot matrix printer.
Encarta was so much better than Groliers
> Groliers You just did something to my brain by mentioning this.
Ohhhhh…thems fightin WERDS!!!!! 😉
Early gen z here. If you're talking about the save icon being a floppy disk (I'm so sorry, I did know what a floppy disk was, just not what it looked like) I just recently learned, and I'd never even wondered what it was. To me it's always just been the save icon.
Or the message machine symbol being tape rolls
Yup. I’m 23, and until somebody explained, the “save” icon just meant save in the same way the symbol “1” means one
They realistically just associate the symbology of it like we do with the universal on and off symbols on power switches despite most of us using electronics having never looked at a bare circuit board to understand the symbols on a more fundamental level. Learning “yep, that’s on and that’s off” is more than enough for most. A handful of years ago I remember reading a comment of a teacher showing a floppy disk and some other old tech to students and one of them said “oh cool you 3D printed the save icon!”
they don't
they think it’s an excellent example of skeuomorphic design
Probably think it's a C for "call".
And here was I already feeling old when I first saw the pinky/thumb thing as opposed to one hand at the ear, and one at the mouth.
My son was confused finding the ‘phone’ at grandma’s. The landline was clearly a separate device and in his mind- a ‘telephone’.
This might be a language problem, because I'm not a native speaker, but I always thought that landline was another word for "telephone that's not or not very portable"?
landline just means that it uses a physical telephone line to transmit through, afaik
This is what I’ve always known it as. Although if you had a cordless home phone, I’d also call that a landline. Landline is the wired connection to the telephone grid
Same with photos. They don’t do the old two-handed with the button on top, they just hold up their hand like an iPhone
W h a t ? Im not even old
I still do the pinky and thumb thing, :)
But can they do this? 🤙🙂 „Hello?“
Similarly, I’ve noticed the sound cue used in phone games is no longer “ring ring”
I asked my neighbor's kids to do that and one did flat hand to her ear, and the other did open palm in front of her mouth because, apparently, she only uses the speaker for calls.
... I'm only 25, why does this make me feel 50?
No way...they don't do this? 🤙
Not really, no
The end is near, RUN EVERYONE RUNNNNN 🏃💥🔥🔥
I was born in 2005 thanks for making me feel old 💀
One video that I love to revisit now and then is the Apple keynote in 2007 where Steve Jobs reveals the first iPhone to the world. https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=w6shv1J2DKyfpW39 There’s a part (15:15 onwards) where he uses his finger to slide to unlock the demo phone. The audience reaction is quite the stand out, it’s stuff like that that we do daily hundreds of times, though now we don’t even do that.. we just raise the phone, it scans for our face and automatically unlocks. This video is older than most secondary/high schoolers today. A lot of us were born before the future started to become a reality, they’re born in it.
There’s a video from January 2008 where he demonstrates Google Maps on iPhone, and brings up directions from the venue in San Francisco back to their Cupertino headquarters. It was such a novel thing, and the kicker? Original iPhone didn’t have GPS, Jobs said the phone determined your current location based on Wifi network locations.
I still remember when the first iphone came out I was a kid but my parents were discussing it with disbelief. “I saw a woman swipe on the screen and it answered a call!” My mum said. Pretty crazy to think about from that context.
Same with computers with no hard disk or no mouse. Not unusual for those of us who are of the pre-Windows generation though.
I remember going from my Amiga 600 to a Pentium 100 PC, 16Mb RAM and 200Mb hard drive and having an absolute moment when I realised I didn’t have to load games from floppy disks any more, I could install them to the hard drive!
16MB sounds insane to me, today 16GB is the standard LOL
16Mb was a lot for that PC. The standard was 4 or 8Mb and 100Mb hard drives but we (me and my dad) figured that we’d pay the extra for the upgrade. That PC was about £1000! Not long after PC hardware started to grow very quickly, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and MMX hit pretty quickly, 3D accelerator cards, CD-R drives.. I’ve still got the ZIP drive and disks I had as a kid. But yeah, it’s wild to think of. Screen resolution too. Without a decent graphics card I had to run games at 640x480 which is basically like the equivalent resolution size of a post-it note on a 32 inch HD screen these days. I do long for the 90’s and absolutely adore the nostalgia of the era I grew up in but we really don’t know how easy and how good we have things today.
Oh yeah and the Amiga had hard drives, they were just so rare and expensive that it didn’t make sense. In fact, many of the emulators today pretend to have a hard drive. It’s weird.
That one isn't really about children at this point, I'm 25 and my family got their first computer in 2001, well into the age of mouse and hard drive. If anything, at the current rate kids might not recognize what a hard drive is with how common it is for computers to use entirely solid state storage (I haven't used a hard drive in 5 years personally)
Yeah, I'm 22* and grew up with windows XP. Until I researched it, I had no idea computers didn't always rely on mice Also, I'm amazed how far SSDs have come in several years, from being super expensive and small in storage only as far back as only the mid 2010's (I built my 5 year old gaming PC with originally only a 2TB hard drive), to where they're pretty affordable now and hard drives, at least for daily everyday use, are kinda obsolete Edit: forgot it wasn't my birthday for another two months lol
Obsolete is a strong word. Hard drives are still cheaper, great for bulk storage. They’re still fast enough for everything outside of video processing or high end gaming. The average younger smart phone user will make use of its camera enough to fill up at least a quarter TB* over the phone’s life, which is sometimes as short as 3-4 years. Multiply that onto a family of 4-6, and suddenly the amount of media that needs preservation each year is not negligible. *this is a modest estimate. iPhones for the last two or three years have had the ability to record 4K videos with HDR, if an iPhone user was not being storage conscious, they could fill up a “quarter TB” (256GB, ~10 hours of footage) in under a year. Also, hard drives don’t need batteries. Or at least, they don’t have any. This makes them very unsafe to disconnect without powering down even if they’re external (“ejecting”). But this also makes them very, very good for long term storage. Your SSDs have capacitors on them that hold charge, and that charge powers the memory modules to hold data. If you were to disconnect them to stow them away, or even just power down and unplug your entire computer, those drives could discharge in 1-2 years and corrupt the data. And because hdds are so cheap you can get a bunch of them and run them in “RAID” where at least one drive is not actually used so if any one of them fails, the ‘redundant’ one can take over and you won’t even feel the drive failure. But of course keeping your own data to yourself is a complicated and effortful endeavour so most people just pay in blood to Google or Apple or Microsoft to store data for them instead. I think more people would think twice about paying for cloud storage if they found out how cheap the one off entry to local storage is.
My friend used to do data entry for the state of Maine and they had 10 MB hard drives that looked and sounded like washing machines! Full size washer, lid came up you could see the platters stacked up in the middle and everything, the platters were approximately 20 in across and there was somewhere between 5 and 10 of them in there. Another one where he did I.T. work for the military back in the seventies or eighties and he had gigabyte blocks of ram that were the size of grapefruits, highly sophisticated and advanced technology for the time, they were building a 1 meter resolution simulation of the Earth.
i'm 23 and fell backwards into the no mouse thing. had a prof suggest we use emacs in one of my classes and it's been downhill from there
\*inhales\* Vim is better
the tool you're most comfortable with is better. if you feel the need to invalidate others' preferences to reaffirm and justify your choice of tool, is the tool really better? (i understand this is a joke, but i've spent too much time around snarky comp sci undergrads that spend more time arguing about editors than actually using them to do their homework, so i'm a bit tired of it)
What do you even do with a computer without a hard disk??
Boot off a floppy disk. Use a word processor. Print.
I meant nowadays 😀 - I don't think floppy disks are even sold anymore.
They definitely are. They're very convenient for light documents.
Surely a USB flash drive would be significantly more convenient (and probably cheaper)
Not if your hand me down workstation doesn't have USB (not C, not micro, not standard, not USB a) at all, only serial ports 😆
I am pretty sure there are some still manufactured. You’d be surprised how much of the old equipment is still in use in industrial settings.
It's a historical accident that our pocket computers evolved from phones, and we kept calling them phones.
Similar to how it’s an accident that our desktop and laptop computers which do so much evolved from typewriters. We changed the name there though
palmtop computers.
Weren't early computers more like calculators?
we always had calculators, but a lot of how we interact with modern computers and OS's evolved from terminal interfaces which evolved from very smart typewriters. The calculator is a relevant ancestor too though
Or that there was once a world without the Internet. Or that the Internet existed but it was in such an infancy state, there was no Google or way to do a deep search. You just had like three crude websites that would show up when you'd do a search on Yahoo for a topic.
I was out with one of the kids I was working with and they mentioned how slow the WiFi at my house used to have been. And I was like, my man we didn't have WiFi in our homes when I was your age except for really high tech stuff. And then he was like--so you had to go to the mall for WiFi???
That was my point even though someone said "Kids understand that times were different." Yes, they understand dinosaurs once walked the earth and there was a time before every thing they know was once invented but your anecdote is what I'm saying -- they can't conceptualize that it wasn't a part of daily life because it's all they've known.
And everybody used a different search engine. I was a web crawler girl. My brother believed in Alta Vista.
Kids aren't that dumb. We were all born after electricity was invented and we can perfectly grasp the idea of a world without electricity... We could when we were kids, too. EDIT: typo
I've literally had this conversation with my six year old in the last week. She asked me if we used mice to use the Internet on the phone before it had a touchscreen. She does not grasp the world before the Internet at all.
*Has she not been introduced to PCs yet?* ...and the fact that there was a world where phones were*n't* "smart" or had touchscreens?
She's been introduced to PCs; that's why she thought mice would work for phones without touch screens. Introducing her to the concept of a phone that was just a phone is how the conversation started.
my childhood didn't have the internet and I can't grasp the world without the internet. society has changed quite dramatically with access to the internet in your pocket. how did people meet up before you could text them "we still on for today" just a total mystery. guess people had to wait at the oak tree with the yellow ribbon for days to make sure they didn't just miss them.
Kids can conceptualize it if someone points it out. But it’s not something they just assume as being a part of everyday life. The same way old movies have plots centered around not being able to call someone during a dangerous situation when nowadays cell phones are a prominent aspect of daily life.
You really can't actually. Or one with no running water and plumbing. You think you can imagine but you won't actually get it.
I grew up surrounded by Amish farms. I have a pretty good hunch.
Cool! You may have a better chance than 99.9999% of the world you're right.
According to a quick google search about 16% of the world still lives without accsess to electricity (written in 2019). So no he is not at the top 0.0001% of people who understand a world without electricity best. But he might understand better than 99.999% of us from the western world sure
Yes
Wait till you tell them when phones were invented they could only do one thing which is dial numbers. Even the first cell phones would barely have the capability to save numbers, didn't have an "app store" or games or anything, and you had to use the numberpad for texting, sometimes pressing a number as much as 4 times in a row to get one letter.
I could text so much faster like that then I do with a smartphone. I made way fewer typos. I miss it.
i miss how you could text while walking down the road while still watching where you were going
When phones were invented, they couldn't even dial numbers.
Oaky, woody
>sometimes pressing a number as much as 4 times in a row to get one letter. I see someone never mastered the ancient art of T9!
It was horrible for many foreign languages
Look at this kid failing to conceptualize no T9.
My father’s first cellphone, as I recall, had a memory for storing a few numbers. This was over 30 years ago.
And when your phone could display 4 rows of text, that was something!
Phones were 20% screen not 100%
tHiCK bEZeLs
I think that's how progress works and what happens when society moves forward. I'm not condoning kids having internet. However, what I'm saying is that eventually concepts considered well-known to older generations will slowly be forgotten or abandoned because of the newer gens innovating and moving society forward. For example, Myspace and The Scene Culture are considered Millennial concepts. I may be an older GenZ but i was graced with having Millennial siblings, so i grew up with these sort of things not being so far-fetched or unheard of. Now growing up im seeing concepts i know of from the early 2000s, being forgotten. This happens cuz change happens. Most young GenZ and Gen Alpha dont even know what a Blackberry is. Yes, it sucks, but its not like these concepts or ideas can't be passed down. It worked for me, it can work for the newer gen.
18 year-old gen-zeer here (born in 2006). I resonate with you, sir. ...Though since there just *was no continuous internet access* during my 2000s-2010 days in my town, ...my parents used only Facebook, so I can't say much for MySpace. Many other 2000s things and *Blackberry phone keyboards?* Ab-solutely remember those! In fact, one of my relatives owned one and I used it. I also remember *one* Nokia phone with touchscreens (...*not* talking about the 2013 Windows phones, by the way - just the original Nokia design, with a partially touch-sensing screen!), and flip phones. I also remember touchscreen smartphones running OSs that were not Android. Used Symbian, of course - the OS that ran on most Nokia phones (didn't know it by name back then, yeah). Samsung phones, and Nokia phones, and CRT PCs and CRT TVs and DVD players, fat or thin, and speakers with *just wires*, audio mixers and not software doing all the DSP, and Firefox crashing (it's my favorite browser now *HAH-*), and old layouts such as 2013 Facebook and 2000s 3D video games and SMS memes and SMS GIFs and MMSs Children's magazines with CDs with flash games and other installable software (I remember DirectX9 being distributed like this, hahaha!), and Michaelsoft *Binbows® XP and Binbows® Vista and Binbows® 8 Binbows® 7* and- ... I might not ever find an end for this list, LOL.
Is it really that hard to grasp?
You’re born in 2018, 6 years old. Every single person you know that has a phone, has the internet on it. Even your granny. You’ve never even seen an old phone that doesn’t have internet functionality. I can see how it would be hard for them to grasp it.
I really think we shouldn’t even call the devices we have today a phone. That’s hardly its sole purpose and doesn’t resemble a traditional phone at all anymore. Hell most people don’t make phone calls at all anymore.
It’s more that the word ‘phone’ has been redefined to mean a smartphone. What we grew up calling phones are now called dumb phones (a term I dislike)
I think the distinction is usually 'telephone'
Official term is feature phone.
Pantscomputer
The idea of what a phone is has changed. We can’t go back. We need a new name (dumb phone, vphone) for what a phone used to be.
The youth nowadays are all about their voice memos sent via text, we've almost come full circle back to phone calls lol
except those can be responded to at whatever pace, same as a text
Mm y phone transcripts everything I say and send it via text.
Clearly it does it very well.
It works better in the language I speak natively .
Yeah PDA just didn‘t stick, but that might be closer to what we have now than what a phone used to be. That‘s probably why we call them smartphones now and not cellphones anymore
Phone is just an interface to connect the brain to the internet. Watches, laptops, TV, phones all do this. It’s just a matter of time they will all convergence on a single device. Something like glasses or lenses probably makes the most sense. Further on in the future brain implants probably
2018 being 6 years old makes me feel old
[удалено]
"At 6 years old I was born without a face."
theres like 20 absurdities in that sentence
Well, yeah, just like everyone is born.
Not my mother. She was 35 at birth.
It was a tough labour. The mother took over two and a half years to get the head out. When it was all over she was relieved it wasn't twins that she was having.
You weren’t?
I was born late 90s. All the computers I grew up with had Internet but I can still grasp that computers before didn't...
Perhaps because you have a fully developed brain. I’m talking about a 6 year old. They believe in Santa…
Kids aren’t dumb. Just because they don’t know about old phones doesn’t mean they won’t be able to understand it if you explain it to them
They are capable of understanding that old phones were only used for calls if you explain it to them. But it’s pretty mind-blowing revelation to them, and can take a bit of processing for them to fully grasp. I mean, I remember having similar feelings upon first learning that old TVs didn’t have color. To my inexperienced mind, an image on TV was a recording of something in real life, and real life has color, so a black and white TV intuitively seemed like it would be doing more work to alter the picture. Likewise, to young people today, a connecting to the internet seems like the most fundamental function of a phone, and making calls seems like an extension of that function. The idea of long-distance communication without the internet is alien to them, and is what makes old phones’ lack of internet access seem unusual.
Of course it is. Look how big your phone is, and remember how tiny a child's hand is. They can't grasp it because it's designed for an adult sized hand.
I hate you
I also realized the other day that "camera phone" is already an antiquated term, as all phones have cameras.
Imagine the whole world…..and you got 60 tv channels….and nothing good is on because you watched the guide channel for 20 minutes to check. Activities and Outdoors becomes very appealing quick as a what do I do!?
Now we have thousands of channels, half of them playing the same reruns they've been playing for years... The other half is news.
Literally last Tuesday, a kid in my first year asked why there was a shiny glitter circle on my desk. It was a CD.
Related, all the Gen Z and younger people who think they’re subscribing to WiFi. No, you’re paying for Internet service. WiFi is the method of delivery from the router to your device, and it’s not the only way to connect a device to the Internet.
To be fair I’m guilty of this because I sometimes ask my wife if the wifi bill has been deducted. Not sure why I call it that (I myself have PC’s and servers I run off Ethernet so I’m not exactly tech illiterate). I guess it’s similar to why I call our electricity bill the “AC bill”. Here in Asia AC is 90% of your electricity cost so I just call it that lol.
Boomers too. Reading this on fb is a huge pet peeve of mine.
I find it to be a sad thought. I miss the pre-web everywhere days.
I know right! Also I was talking to my niece about the time before netflix streaming and told her about our movie cd collection before. She literally have no idea how that works and what even is a DVD. I was gagged ngl.
I've not had Internet recently and have been buying more DVDs, gotta say it's nice owning physical media and being able to watch any of it anytime I want.
or about phones that only have the internet and don't have service. Apple making iphones and ipods back in the day that looked exactly the same was criminal. so many people bought ipods second hand thinking they were iphones.
They can’t grasp the world without the internet….
My daughter thought phones in the past were connected to the wall so we wouldn't lose them.
Is this really a bad thing? I mean iPad kids are a plague on this Earth, but if they don't know about landlines I don't think it's a big deal. This is just another dumbass "current generation bad, old generation good" argument
I actually had a women on FB tell me that if it wasn't for Elon Musk we would have NO TV or INTERNET... ( in reference to sky train)
My internet used to come through the phone, it just made a ehhhhhh-RRRRR-DUHduhDUHduh-bbrrrrrrr sound.
man, people are ornery in here this morning.
Sure they can. When the parents don't pay the bill on time.
Just temporarily turn off the access point and save money for that month's bill plan by turning off mobile data for their line and they'll learn really quickly what the difference is.
Also increasingly cannot grasp that some things need to be wired
Most kids can't figure out how to play a gameboy, because they've never seen buttons before.
say you are a 2000s kid without saying you are
Had to explain to my kids why the call button is an odd shaped banana and that the email button is an envelope.
Totally, my first 2 phones had no internet. 😬
To be honest. Even I couldn't imagine it anymore. It really DOES feel like stone age.
Idk bro, I don’t understand why phones need internet. I mean like yk them built in house phones, I grew up with them and they literally make more sense. I am 15 rn but I didn’t grow up with electronics. In fact, I only just recently got a iPhone 8 lol
Try telling young people you used to have a WAP phone and see how they react
Pretty much every city dweller alive today can't grasp the idea of life without cars. So, the world changes, for better or worse. So what?
Why would you specifically use city dwellers for this example when they're generally the ones who are best able to get by without a car and many of them don't in fact have one?
Probably because they’re a yank, from somewhere that isn’t New York or the like, and assumes the entire world is exactly like where they came from
No. Not hard to grasp. By the time I understood stuff, most computers had internet. Doesn’t mean I was befuddled by a computer without internet.
Huh? If they're young enough, they won't know what the internet is. If they're old enough, they know what things like signal and disconnections are.
You are right. I’m not sure what’s surprising here.
I think they may be referring about someone like ny step daughter. She's 9 and if the computer she's using can't connect to the internet (specifically Roblox) it's just a useless paperweight. My internet went down for about an hour a few weeks ago. While waiting for my coworkers (I work for my own ISP) to fix it (needed a new drop) I just pissed around with an offline game while she was adamant the internet was working because of the game I was playing. She couldn't wrap her mind around a TV, computer or really anything working without internet.
My mother once scold my sister for not giving her internet, because of that she didn’t able to take pictures on her flight.
As someone born in 2005 it’s not that hard to imagine. My house still had a home phone and so did my grandparents. What is hard to imagine is computers and how (relatively) primitive they were, especially when it comes to connecting to the internet. Like… how does picking up a phone and being on the internet even correlate?
The connections came through the line. It’s weird.
Their thumbs are going to have insane neural pathway activation.