They don’t know how good they’ve got it, etc., etc.
1 Teletext Gaming
These days, when you’re watching TV, pressing the red button on your remote, even on Freeview, will open up all kinds of wonderful menus and features. You can get weather reports, video services and more, including, yes, games.
But not that long ago, if you wanted to play games using only your TV, then it meant using Teletext, a service that provided text and simple graphics via a television signal. If you’re anything like us, you would have wasted many hours of your life playing Bamboozle on Channel 4, a multiple choice quiz that involved answering questions by pressing the coloured buttons on your remote. If you’re nothing like us, then you probably had better things to do.
2 Old Text Messaging
People of today are spoilt when it comes to messaging. They can easily send text, photos, sound and even video via apps like WhatsApp and Skype, but 20 years ago, things were much different.
Back then, predictive text was in its infancy, and for most people, sending a short message meant pressing each key several times, cycling through a series of characters until you reached the one you wanted. And, of course, if you were a bit overzealous with your tapping, then you could easily overshoot and go past the letter you required, meaning you’d have to go back round again.
Kids, next time you complain about predictive text on your phone or inaccurate dictation features, just think about how much worse it used to be.
3 Geocities
One of the great things about the internet is that it allows for people to easily share information via personalised websites. However, there’s no guarantee those people actually have any design abilities…
Thankfully, services like Blogger and WordPress have plenty of fantastic templates that can be used to knock up a fairly attractive site in minutes, but back in the day, one of the most popular methods of getting a website online was to use Geocities.
We’re not sure why, but when people used this service, rather than choosing which fonts they were going to use, they just chose to use them all, as well as dumping tons of clip art all over the place and perhaps even the odd excruciating sound effect.
If you’re too young to remember it, count yourself lucky. If you’d like a taste of it, though, head to www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer.
4 Dial-up
With today’s superfast broadband connections and high-definition video streaming, it’s hard to believe that we ever relied on dial-up internet. Of course, websites weren’t so big back then, but even at the time, our connections often seemed slow.
That’s not something we miss, because we really didn’t enjoy waiting 15 minutes to download one lowquality MP3, but who doesn’t get a bit misty-eyed when they recall the screeching and squealing of their 56K modem? It’s that mixture of joy and pain that makes dial-up so special.
5 Tape-based Media
It’s amazing to think that physical disc-based media is on borrowed time, with many people preferring to stream video and music or to download their content to their computers. It wasn’t that long ago, if think about it, that VHS and audio cassette tapes were still popular.
We’d love to see how young people nowadays would cope with this technology, which would no longer allow them to skip chapters or tracks, or go right back to the beginning at the tap of a finger or the click of a mouse. And if they wanted to share the content, rather than clicking the Facebook button, they’d have to eject the tape and then physically hand it over to someone else (remembering to rewind it to the beginning first, of course). Amazing.