My kids won’t know what life was like without the Internet, before computers were in every home. They’ll never know what a modem is or the wonderful (yet grating) sounds it would make when you dialed a BBS. They won’t know the joy of getting online 1200bps (and all the free time you had when you waited for downloads to complete.)Even their perspective on the Internet will be different. They won’t know about Mosaic browser or text-based (only) browsing with lynx. They’ll never know Prodigy or Compuserve. AOL is just a website. They won’t know that Yahoo was a directory of links, or that Altavista, Excite, HotBot, and WebCrawler were once prosperous search engines with a large market share. They won’t know that there were years of Internet without Google at all…
They won’t know of life before the convenience of microwave ovens.
They will think (rightfully so) that everyone has a phone and they are almost exclusively cordless or completely wireless. They won’t know that at one time all phones were wired into the wall, that long distance calls were expensive and infrequently used. They will never know what a party line or a rotary dial phone was. They won’t realize that phones didn’t used to have cameras, games, music, and full QWERTY keyboards on them.
They won’t know that people used to shave with just one blade.
Lightweight 27-speed mountain bikes with disc brakes and super travel full-suspension will be mainstream and affordable. They won’t know the relatively low tech, heavy, inefficient bikes we had to ride. They won’t realize that mountain biking was started in the mid-1970s.
My kids will never know what a caboose is for. They will only see them in train museums (and so we take them.)
Film photography will be some long-forgotten technique that people used to use before digital photography. They won’t know what camera film looks like. They’ll never know the growing pains of digital photography from low resolution to slow, delay-prone cameras. Everything will be high resolution, automatic, and instantaneous. It seems normal to them that you can store thousands of photographs on a memory card smaller than your thumbnail. Digital photo frames will seem normal to them. Static real photos printed and tucked into frames will seem pointless.
They’ll think ketchup has always poured easily from a flexible, upside-down bottle.
They’ll never know what a reel-to-reel, an eight-track, a vinyl record, a Mini-disc, or a cassette tape is. Even CDs are going to the wayside as things gradually swing towards completely digital music delivery, played on the all-pervasive MP3 player. Walkman and Discman will be largely historical and unfamiliar to them. They won’t ever know about VCRs and Laserdisc players. They’ll have always known DVD, Blu-Ray, and DVR.
They’ll think televisions were always flat and thin. HDTV will be the norm for what they are used to viewing. Their music will be all-digital and all multi-channel. They will think that films were always projected off perfect digital copies with high-resolution digital projectors. They won’t know the magic of the imperfections of a real film projector.
My kids won’t know what a floppy disc was (8”, 5.25”, or 3.5”) Wow! They won’t know DOS (and I’m doing all I can to make it so they won’t have to use Windows.) They won’t know about daisy wheel printers, slow and noisy dot-matrix printers or fan-fold paper.
My kids will probably never know much measured in terms of ‘megabytes’ and will likely be more familiar with the concept of ‘terabytes’ rather than with ‘gigabytes’.
I’m excited about the rapidly changing world they’ve been born into, but I’m sad they won’t know the world as I do. I’ll try to teach them what I can and maybe if I’m lucky they’ll help me see their world through their eyes someday. Wired recently published an article titled: 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know.
