This video:
Now, predictably there has been the sort of “oh god those kids don’t know what an eight-track is I’m so old” commentary from around the internets, and that’s… predictable, I guess. But I don’t really see it that way, because other than that one kid who thought the 3.5″ floppy disk was a camera, the kids mostly were dead-on about what these things were. They identified storage media as storage media, the telephone as a telephone – hell, they mostly even figured out what the eight-track was, and honestly I didn’t recognize it as an eight-track until I saw the cassette. (Sure, the one kid thought it was a movie rather than an album, but so what? You can’t tell what’s stored on a piece of storage media until you play it. And anybody laughing at the kids trying to operate the rotary dial phone should think about how much work it took their most tech-unsavvy friend to master their cellphone.)
Hell, when the one kid started turntabling on the kiddie record player that made me feel the opposite of old. Not young, but rather… timeless. Give someone a record player, and they will start scratching with it. We don’t change as much as we think we do, and there’s good in that.
Related Articles
11 users responded in this post
Yeah, same here. I was actually heartened by how clever they were considering, really, how do you identify discs and cassettes’ purposes or content? They’re just circles and squares.
I knew what an eight-track looked like, but definitely not the player.
What? This is adorable. All I feel is warm and fuzzy, and slightly nostalgic.
(Now, when my ex’s 14-year-old brother didn’t know what dial-up was – that kind of made me feel old.)
That eight-track player is very odd to me.
I wonder if they could figure out a victrola …
“Not even thirty years old, and already old things!” Yes, when technology hasn’t been used in well over a decade, they are usually called old. This is surprising?
I’m not sure whether I should be impressed that they recognized the Colecovision cartridge and the Gameboy as being of the same general ilk in spite of being unusable together, or whether it’s the sort of thing which should be glaringly obvious (is there a modern incarnation of Donkey Kong?).
“is there a modern incarnation of Donkey Kong?”
Yes. Several. In fact, a new Wii Donkey Kong game came out like last month.
Yeah, I was also interested in how much they figured out because they are kids and weren’t afraid to look dumb if they didn’t know something.
I didn’t realise what the HP item was a mouse until the kids starting playing with it.
I’m pleased to say that my 5yo daughter would recognize the HP trackball right away: my wife uses a mouse with her laptop, but I use a trackball (better ergonomics). So my daughter has equal experience with both. 😉
–GG
8-track as “a movie”: I’m guessing that the kid has seen some VHS tapes lying about, and extrapolated.
Video games: Yeah — interesting how the form factor hasn’t changed all that much over time: a Gamboy from the ’80s is darned similar to a Nintendo DS, and an old Atari (if you put a few game cartridges next to it, and had the joystick or paddle plugged in) would be pretty recognizable as a video game console. Esp. if you had it already jacked in to a t.v… 😉
–GG
I did like the very calm “oh, I thought it was a bomb” as they continue to play with the 8-track player