Top 10 Things Children Today Don't Recognize

Top 10 Things Children Today Don’t Recognize

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You damn kids with your fancy phones and your fast internet. Welcome to WatchMojo.com, and today we’re counting down our picks for the top 10 things children today don’t recognize. For this list, we’re looking at pieces of technology or pop culture that were once popular and innovative, but have now become obsolete due to the superior technology of today. There’s no set time period; as long as a child growing up today wouldn’t recognize or know how to use an item, it’s eligible.

Quick: think of your sibling’s phone number. Did you know it right away? Probably not, because these days, names and numbers are in our contact lists and a phone call is a button push away. Gone are the days when you actually had to hunt down the person you wanted to call by finding his or her city and his or her last name in the phone book. You also had to look up businesses rather than Google the name and follow the phone number. In fact, it seems like these days, phone books are more often used as fodder to show off your inhuman strength than anything else!

#9: TV Guides

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Ah, the TV Guide. Yeah, even watching TV used to be a pain in the ass, as you had to look up each specific day, find out what was playing, what channel it was on, and plan your schedule accordingly. You see kids, before the internet, pirating, Amazon, and a host of other providers weren’t around to allow access to your shows whenever you wanted. Not to mention that, now, cable boxes come with a guide that’s right there on your screen. Too bad though, we kinda liked seeing which celebrity was on the cover of this week’s issue!

We’re going WAY back for this one. Even before touch-tone phones (do they still make those?), there were rotary dial phones. You may recognize them from museums or old people movies. Basically, the phone had a circle with finger holes representing a certain button that you had to tediously spin one at a time to simply to call someone. Thank God for Google. These started going out of style in the 1960s when touch-tone phones came in, so it’s best to skip your parents and go straight to the grandparents for stories about these relics.

Remember when we said watching TV was a pain? That’s nothing compared to watching movies at home. Before instant access to movies, you had to get in your car, drive to the store, choose and then pay for a movie you want to rent, drive home and watch it. If they had the movie you wanted at all. After all that, you’d have to drive back to the store to return it, and then drive back home again. That’s not to mention the ridiculous late fees if you don’t make it back on time before the deadline! You may still find a Blockbuster sign somewhere if you go urban exploring, although it’ll probably be unrecognizable with all the graffiti and broken beer bottles. Poor Blockbuster, we hardly knew ye.

Until the early ‘90s, there were tons of different pagers on the market. But once cheap and reliable cell phones came along, these wireless telecommunication devices all went the way of the dinosaurs. Which, funnily enough, is what you’ll be called if you still use one. Alphanumeric pagers simply displayed a phone number that you had to call back, while more advanced ones like the two-way QWERTY pagers could send and receive early forms of text messages. This is nothing that a cell phone can’t do though, so pagers are now the butt of ridicule and comedy.

Walk down the street today using one of these bad boys and not only will you look super cool, but also the sound quality and reliability will blow you away! End sarcasm. A Walkman or Discman is a portable audio player – with the former for cassettes and the latter for CDs - that would sometimes fit in your pocket. If we’re talking a Walkmen, then we’d have to deal with turning over the cassette tapes once you reached the end of one side. When it comes to a Discman, it would seem that it always started skipping at the most inopportune times because... well, they sucked. In reality, these portable music players were usually bulky and inconvenient, AND there was no shuffle on a cassette, so you better have had made a really good mixtape. You damn kids with your 128 GB iPods and phones.

Before the days of fancy Blu-rays and 1080p high-definition video, we had VHS tapes. They were awful in every conceivable way. VHS ultimately beat out rival Betamax, despite the fact that the latter was smaller and had better video quality. Then there was the fact that you had to rewind VHS videotape cassettes and fast-forward them if you wanted to get to a particular scene. Recording shows on VCRs was cool, but all older viewers of this video know the frustrations of accidentally taping over your kid’s first steps. We don’t really miss you, VHS.

#3: [Developing] Photographic Film

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Oh, the joys of old cameras. In this video, you’ll see old cameras like your mom and dad had. You see they couldn’t see how their pictures turned out until they got them developed. That’s right, you had to go the store or a photolab and wait a few hours for your pictures to be chemically developed into a photo you can actually see. It was only then that you could finally check your masterpieces, and more often than not, it would only be to find out that that beautiful picture you thought you took was ruined by the flash. We know: imagine a world where you couldn’t retake the same selfie 100 times to get it just right?! The horror!

Isn’t it amazing that you can watch this video in HD without having to suffer through buffering or having to make a sandwich while it loaded? Yeah, this was absolutely not possible in the 1990s. Thanks, broadband! You see, kids, we once had what was called dial-up internet access, something which would make an awful, mechanical noise while it connected to an internet service provider and would be painfully slow when you actually got online. And God forbid your mom needed the phone, because if she did, it was back to the TV for you. As of 2013, only 3% of internet users still use dial-up. We feel for you. Before we blow your kiddie mind with our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions. - Typewriters Game Boys - Fax Machines [aka Telecopiers] CD/DVD Storage Binders

Did you ever wonder just what that symbol in Microsoft Word that lets you save the document you’re working on? That little black and white square would be a floppy disk, which, at one point in time, us older folk would actually use to save our progress on! By 1987, the 3.5 inch disk was all the rage because it could hold an astounding 1.44 MB of data! That’s pretty crazy considering there are thumb drives today that can hold terabytes of information, and such technological advances have effectively eliminated the need for these plastic disks. Maybe in a few years, we’ll be laughing at our measly terabyte thumb drives… who knows? Do you agree with our list? What outdated technology do you think kids today wouldn’t recognize? For more up-to-date top tens published every day, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.