Top 10 Old Technologies Kids Don't Recognize Today

Consider this: If you had to stream your high-quality music on the first modems ever made, it would take almost 39 hours to download a single song - okay that’s probably an exaggeration, but you get it. By comparison, the same tune would take more like half a second to reach you on a modern-day gigabit connection. The pains of slow internet are something most kids will never understand, or even appreciate. Nor the fact that you couldn’t use the phone when you were online because all internet access went through a regular telephone line. So remember kids, when Netflix needs to buffer, it could be so much worse.

Today, everyone swipes, taps, or inserts a card to pay for items and the transaction shows up on our online bill. Yet, for years, credit cards were handled in a far less on-demand fashion. Retailers would take your card and place it over a metal plate that had the name of the company imprinted on it. A piece of carbon paper would be added on top and they would then “swipe” the machine back and forth to create an “imprint” of the card numbers with their vendor info. The buyer would keep a copy, and the shop owner would send one to the credit card company and get paid. Ask an old retailer about it. They probably have one hiding under the counter.

For years, having milk delivered to your home was as common as mowing the lawn. To help facilitate this service, many homes were outfitted with what they called a “milk chute.” The “chute” was merely a small space within the walls surrounded by an inner and outer door. Old milk bottles would be placed from inside for the milkman to pick them up and replace them with new ones. It was small enough that no one could enter the home through it, but large enough to place the bottles. With the days of milk delivery long gone, people with this tiny door space are left wondering, “What the heck is that for?”

We’d bet good money that Steven Sasson had no idea what his digital camera would do to the photography industry. Having existed for more than 100 years, film photography was the standard for decades. Cameras would expose the “film” to a small snippet of light, causing the “photo” to imprint on the film itself. Then through a chemical process, the film was “developed” into regular photographs. Youth today are so used to snapping photos with their phones that they have no idea there was a time when you had to wait several weeks before you’d see how the pictures turned out.

Long before the invention of the transistor, vacuum tubes were key to the control of an electric current. The tubes were used in countless electronic devices and even powered the world’s first computers. ENIAC, the first digital, programmable computer, used more than 17,000 vacuum tubes alone. Since these tubes were so common, testers were built to determine the status and efficiency of a vacuum tube. Found in many places, including even grocery stores, people could come in and test their tubes directly on the machine. They faded out as transistors eventually replaced vacuum tubes in modern electronics.

In a time before cell phones became a thing, pagers were a highly popular means to contact someone who wasn’t home. They were typically very small, and clipped onto your belt, and had a single-line LCD display. When you got “paged,” the machine would vibrate and a phone number would appear on the screen implying you should call it back. They were quick and cheap and easy to maintain and made it far easier to stay in touch. Pagers eventually began to include two-way communication much like texting. They’ve long since been replaced by regular cell phones, but are still quite popular among doctors and Captain Marvel.

In the days before Google Docs or Microsoft Word, the only way you could type out something was on a typewriter. Invented over 150 years ago, the typewriter used a series of carved metal hammers that would strike a sheet of paper through a ribbon of ink. The ink would imprint on the page and shift the paper to the left ever so slightly. The biggest issue was that if you made a mistake, you either had to re-type the whole thing, or use something like a Typewriter Eraser. It allows you to “erase” the ink in the same way a rubber eraser removes pencil writing. No autocorrect here, just good old fashion muscle.

Do you have a grandparent who keeps their old recipes on tiny little rectangular cards? It might surprise you to hear that those cards were a little miracle in the world of libraries. Long before we could just type something into Google and get an answer, people went to libraries and looked up books to learn about many things. Every one of them had an associated “card” in a catalog that anyone could use to figure out where the book was in a library. You still had to decode the archaic “Dewey Decimal System” to find it, but the card catalogs themselves were found in virtually every library across the globe.

Let’s set aside the fact that vinyl records are still around, and may even be making a bit of a comeback. By far and large, the youth of today know their music through streaming services or MP3s. Prior to that era, we had CDs, cassettes, 8-track tapes, and of course, records. Vinyl albums have been around for years and the two most common formats have always been the 7” and 12” record. Many 7” albums had a much larger hole in the center preventing them from being played on a standard record player. But if you had the little 45rpm adapter, you could put it in the middle of your 7” record, and play it on any machine.

We won’t call it the first operating system, but for all intents and purposes, it was the first one to gain mass acceptance. It was Microsoft’s MS-DOS that was originally licensed to IBM for use on their own PC-based computers. From there, it became the de facto operating system for all IBM compatible machines. Countless business applications and games were written for the DOS platform which was entirely text-based. It ultimately helped Microsoft launch their Windows graphical user interface, which would eventually replace DOS. It is survived by several other copycats of the OS, and serves as the inspiration for the “Command Prompt” mode still available on Windows PCs today.