Chris Higgins
Adorable Kids With Obsolete Technology
by Chris Higgins - January 7, 2011 - 12:55 PM

Ready to feel really old? In this video, some French-Canadian kids are presented with technology from the 80′s and 90′s. They then try to figure out what the items are, and the results are delightful. Although the video is in French (and I don’t speak any French), I could easily follow what was going on.

My favorite parts: upon being presented with a Gameboy, a girl declares it a “telephone” (makes sense from her perspective — a little screen, some buttons, made to be held in the hand); and the part around 2:30 where kids encounter a 45rpm turntable, one recognizes it as a tool of DJs, and he spontaneously figures out how to scratch.

Delightful. And welcome to a new decade. What will kids in 20 years think an iPod is? My guess is “telephone.”

(Via Waxy.org.)

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Comments (39)

  1. Similar to the time my then 7 year old son came home and told me about these giant black CD’s the teacher had.

    posted by Hyacinth on 1-7-2011 at 1:15 pm

  2. I will never forget the moment my then 8 year old step-son walked up to me with a VHS copy of Howard the Duck and asked me if “Old-fashioned box movies are able to rewind and fast forward.”

    posted by EMStoveken on 1-7-2011 at 1:17 pm

  3. If my French is right, that last little girl just called the last record a rug! She said tapis I think, which means rug or carpet!

    posted by Annali Tu on 1-7-2011 at 1:25 pm

  4. I just sent it to my school’s technology facilitator.

    posted by KerriD on 1-7-2011 at 2:05 pm

  5. My 20-month-old granddaughter was startled by the phone ringing on the wall at my mother’s house. The look on her face was priceless. Her family has never had anything but cell phones since before she was born.

    posted by Barbara on 1-7-2011 at 2:52 pm

  6. That was sweet.

    posted by The Creature on 1-7-2011 at 3:39 pm

  7. A favorite story of my parents to tell is the one where I was maaaaybe six or seven, discovering a record for the first time. Remembering my shocked face and exclaiming, “It has music on both sides!” cracks them up to this day (and it’s been nearly 20 years).

    posted by Erika on 1-7-2011 at 3:55 pm

  8. We still have a landline, and an old fashioned black desk style rotary dial telephone (because I had the perfect place in my kitchen for it). It rang recently while some friends of my children were here and one of them jumped, startled, and said “What is that?” She did not even know that at one point all phones had cords!

    posted by Maranda on 1-7-2011 at 4:49 pm

  9. Um…I’m 34 and I didn’t know what a few of those things were. How does that make you feel :P

    posted by Cheryl on 1-7-2011 at 5:11 pm

  10. @Maranda Still have a landline? Don’t most people?

    posted by Bakedpotatoes on 1-7-2011 at 5:13 pm

  11. Yes, most people do, but it’s climbing fast. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/08/18/businessinsider-chart-of-the-day-almost-a-third-of-us-households-have-cut-the-landline-cord-2010-8.DTL

    posted by Fricky on 1-7-2011 at 5:27 pm

  12. What’s the white thing with the ball at the top? That was the only thing I didn’t recognize.

    posted by Vicki on 1-7-2011 at 5:35 pm

  13. The only thing which stumped me was the 8 track player – not that I don’t know what one is, I’ve just never seen one like that – most of the ones I ever saw were in cars!

    posted by jennifer on 1-7-2011 at 5:37 pm

  14. @Vicki – I think it’s a trackball. It’s a form of mouse-like pointing device where you move the ball with your fingers rather than moving the whole mouse around. I knew some people who were totally into their trackballs in the 80′s and slowly gave up on them in the 90′s as mice went optical and/or trackpads became better. (One popular Mac trackball had a ball that was the size of a typical billiards 8-ball, so hip nerds would use a real 8-ball instead of the plastic ball that came with the thing.)

    I will admit it’s pretty obscure.

    For more:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackball

    posted by Chris Higgins on 1-7-2011 at 5:44 pm

  15. I remember watching Tron on the old video disks. They rocked!

    posted by James on 1-7-2011 at 5:55 pm

  16. A few years ago, while tutoring a student, I likened something to an antenna on a TV. He gave me a blank stare. He’d never known anything but cable TV!

    posted by Chad on 1-7-2011 at 5:55 pm

  17. I’m surprised these kids even knew the word “cassette”!

    Also, I’m 26 and have no idea what that big yellow square thing was.

    posted by Cat on 1-7-2011 at 6:04 pm

  18. I’m 36 and pregnant with my first child. It cracks me up how much of a generational divide there will be between my husband and I and our child. They won’t be able to understand life before internet or cell phones.

    posted by Lisa on 1-7-2011 at 6:55 pm

  19. We had a ton of those old RCA videodiscs. Almost literally: they were incredibly heavy. We had Tron, too!
    I still get a weird feeling during certain older movies and realize I’m watching at the point where you had to flip the disc.

    posted by TheLoneIguana on 1-7-2011 at 7:02 pm

  20. When I first started working in the 80′s the place I worked
    had old technology even for those days. Our secretaries had these
    GIGANTIC IBM word processors and in order to start them up, every
    time they would have to put in a couple of huge floppy disks to
    install the operating system (I think – or do some sort of
    initialization routine), which took forever. I remember when I got
    a PC (which was a big deal there) and our IT guy spoke longingly of
    the days when PCs would have “half a gig” of memory!

    posted by OldBroad on 1-7-2011 at 7:24 pm

  21. An experience of this kind involved my then young son (about 8 at the time), my father-in-law and the aftermath of a trip to the grocery store. My son was helping to put away the purchases, and my father-in-law instructed him to put the lettuce away in the icebox. Hours later, when getting ready for dinner, the lettuce was discovered utterly frozen and ruined in the freezer. My father-in-law, of course, grew up at a time when iceboxes were wood & metal cabinets loaded with a large cube of ice every day. Many of the next generation continue to call the appliance an icebox even though their proper name is refrigerator. My son interpreted the instruction as icebox = freezer where the ice cubes are kept.

    posted by dan on 1-7-2011 at 9:23 pm

  22. FYI All: “Souris d’ordinateur HP” means: HP computer mouse. (@Vicki)

    posted by Laura on 1-7-2011 at 9:44 pm

  23. I was Skyping a few weeks ago with my daughter and 5 month old granddaughter who live on the other side of the country. I realized that she may have a hard time understanding what it was like to only be able to hear people when you call them. There is no way she will believe that it used to cost so much to talk to people over long distance that I only called home once a week when I move away to go to college.

    posted by Diana DeForest on 1-7-2011 at 10:46 pm

  24. I’m sorry but those children were a little dumb. As a child I knew what things were in past decades. Children are getting dumber as so called technical age progresses. Sad I say.

    posted by Nike's Momma on 1-7-2011 at 10:55 pm

  25. I recently told my 4-year-old daughter about the day that my parents brought home our family’s first cd player. This sparked a conversation about which technologies we have now that were not around when I was a kid. A couple of days later, at lunch, she looked at me and asked, “Mom, was there chicken when you were a kid?”

    Hrmm… Which came first, the chicken or our unbelievably ancient Mother??? ;)

    posted by Amy on 1-7-2011 at 11:53 pm

  26. Those kids weren’t dumb, just uninformed. It’s our job to pass this stuff on, not theirs to inherently know it somehow.

    posted by margoGo on 1-8-2011 at 3:16 am

  27. The kids weren’t dumb, but how often do you see outdated technology? I didn’t know what a eight track tape was until I was ten and saw that my grandfather had some (born in 1987). It’s like if someone handed you the sort of pockets worn by women in the colonial period – where they tied on around your waist and you reached through the slits in your dress to access them. You would probably wonder what they were, because we’re used to pockets that are sewn into our clothes.

    I vividly remember when my sister and I were walking in Walmart – she’s nearly eleven years younger than I am, so she was about three and I was around thirteen. The electronics department had records hanging on fishing line above it. She looked at the records and said excitedly, “Look Kate, CDs!” That was when I realized the “technological generation gap” existed. I think if you handed her a rotary phone now, she’d have no idea what to do with it.

    posted by Kate on 1-8-2011 at 2:36 pm

  28. Come on. Those kids were not dumb. I’m smart, but I messed up the identity of the item at an antique store when I said it was a door knob. The elderly woman shopping next to me laughed and told me it was a darning nob used when people used to fix their socks instead of throw them away. Hell, half of the modern kitchen items in a thrift store are completely unidentifiable without their original box! Do I squeeze an orange with it or make yogurt with it? I don’t know.

    posted by Corduroy climber on 1-8-2011 at 11:25 pm

  29. Nike’s Momma, I think you’re missing the point. Things are going obsolete faster. The old things you knew were less and more recent than the old things these kids are confronted with.
    And then, how should they know what these things are? Who’s aducating them on this? Their parents? Their history teacher?

    posted by Daan on 1-9-2011 at 6:43 pm

  30. I agree. The kids were not dumb. Asking children (who look to be about 6 or 7 years old) about technology that is over 30 years old is like asking a kindergartner to write a five page essay on the causes of the civil war. They are not going to know.
    Also, a lot of them figured them out eventually anyway. Plus, in the 70′s and 80′s only a few had that technology (few users=few people that actually know what the stuff is). Now, technology is widespread. Now everyone that doesn’t live under a rock knows what an i-pod or a computer is. In the 70′s and 80′s only computer nerds and rich/ upper middle income people could actually afford the new technology (a lot of which became obsolete in a short amount of time) I-pods and computers at least are being constantly improved, but not obsolete.

    posted by Ilse on 1-9-2011 at 8:10 pm

  31. I teach first grade and we have a social studies unit called, “Then and Now,” which allows me to introduce my students to the fact that the internet, cell phones, etc. didn’t exist when I was in first grade (in 1988)… I had one little girl who asked me once, “But how did you use Google??” She was shocked when I told her that we didn’t- we looked stuff up in books! :) And, another time, I was working with high schoolers in a play that was set in the 1940′s, so we had a rotary dial phone in the set. We didn’t realize that we had to teach the kids how to use a rotary dial until after the first performance when we saw the students putting their entire palm on the dial and randomly twisting it back and forth… It was highly entertaining!

    posted by greenstrawberries on 1-10-2011 at 7:18 am

  32. all these comments, and really what I got out of it is I feel old right now.

    posted by Wayne on 1-10-2011 at 9:28 pm

  33. Some of my 12-13 year old students ran into the room last year with things the school store was giving away, asking “what are these?” They were 3.5 in floppy disks, like ones I had used just a few years ago!

    posted by Megan on 1-11-2011 at 11:12 am

  34. I’m 27 and I’ve never seen an 8-track tape or player- I used casettes. Is that what the yellow thing was?

    posted by Megan on 1-11-2011 at 11:16 am

  35. I actually knew what all of those were, and I’m only 13.

    posted by Haley on 1-11-2011 at 12:51 pm

  36. My wife and I took her 14 year old sister to a bowling alley in 2009. They had a landline rotary phone near the entrance. My wife’s sister looked at it and asked what it was. When we told her, she said, “Why does it have a cord and what happens if you have to call someone again?”

    posted by David on 1-11-2011 at 1:48 pm

  37. Trackballs are obscure??? I admit that one might look a little odd to modern kids, because of its gargantuan size and outdated industrial design, but all that’s really obsolete about it is the cord. (It’s probably either serial or PS-2.) Logitech and Kensington are still cranking out trackballs today. I’ve got an optical Kensington Orbit at home, and I miss it when i’m at work using a mouse.

    posted by Calli Arcale on 1-12-2011 at 2:52 pm

  38. I’m 12 and I know what most of those were. The giant yelllow box thing confused me…and i THINK the last thing was a lazerdisk but I’ve only seen 2 copies ever-a TRON one that was hidden in a cardboard case and a copy of Pulp Fiction.(I believe that’s the title..) the Pulp Fiction one was later microwaved by Jory. (Both of those times were only online so i can’t really tell…)

    posted by aj on 1-15-2011 at 5:55 pm

  39. These kids and your kids need to go to summer camp at iD Tech Camps!

    http://www.internaldrive.com/

    I have taken courses in game design and robotics, but they offer a lot of other courses too. You can create video games, programs, websites, movies, animations and this year they have an iPhone and iPad game design course.

    I went to the camp at Princeton last year and this year I am going to iD Tech Camps at Stanford! They have camps at cool universities all over the US.

    posted by Jen on 1-27-2011 at 6:03 pm

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