Things my kids will never know

In the past several years I’ve occasionally made note of worldly things my some-day children will never experience or know about outside of history class. Most of my observations end up focused on technology, but there are some other gems in there, too. Here’s the list I’ve constructed so far:

• A world pre-Internet (and pre-Wifi), pre-cell phone, and pre-GPS
• CRT computer monitors or televisions
• CDs or DVDs (in the same way my generation doesn’t really know about vinyl, but we sort of do; I played Fraggle Rock record over and over when I was younger)
• Carbon copy (even ask some adults today, they can’t tell you what “CC” means in an email)
• Non-optical mouses, and trackballs
• Car antennas
• Land line phones
• the Y2K panic
• Postage stamps that had to be licked
• Cassette tapes, and rewinding
• VHS tapes, and along with this, VHS subscription services, where you’d get one video each month with two episodes of a TV series for $20, and you’d do that every month until you got the whole series, because DVDs didn’t exist, and you couldn’t just download the entire series on iTunes. I bought the entire series of Lost in Space this way from Columbia House when I was younger.

And here’s my “I’m an optimist” list:

• Gasoline
• Cars that aren’t auto-driving
• checkbooks (and balancing a checkbook)
• hard drives with moving parts

There are other lists, too. This one looked good. Looking forward to the future. Feeling a little nostalgic, too.