11 “Modern Antiques” Today’s Kids Have Probably Never Seen
7th October 2013
Yeah, this makes me feel old. I remember all of them except the milk pass-through — back in the day when there were milk deliveries, we had an insulated box that would sit on the porch into which the milk guy would put the stuff. (This was in the early 60s, so it wasn’t all that long ago.) (Or maybe it was….)
October 7th, 2013 at 08:39
It was that long ago.
If I’d paid attention, I would’ve noticed that cars don’t have the little triangle window anymore. No idea why not, they clear a foggy windshield up in no time, as opposed to minutes with a heater plus A/C.
October 8th, 2013 at 09:50
Skate keys pre-date me, and I’m old. The only item on the list I miss is the “wing” window. You could crack it open even on a rainy day and get fresh air circulating in the car. It didn’t just let air in; it also allowed you to direct the flow.
There are plenty of other things that could be added: Floppy disks (terrible technology), modems, etc. I was visiting some friends and the kids were watching the movie, “War Games”. Made me laugh to see them hacking the DOD with an acoustic coupler! As far as that’s concerned, CRTs are now ancient history. Charities won’t even take them. I won’t mourn their passing; LEDs are much better in every respect.
When I was a kid, we had the old tube-type TVs. My grandparents had a big color one and at least once a month my Dad would have to get in the back of it and replace any number of tubes. That often included getting shocked by the electricity stored up in the old CRT. Those TVs sometimes took hours to get “warmed up” so that the colors more-or-less looked right. They shouldn’t be considered “antiques”, because antiques are old things that are cool enough that you want to keep them around. 150 year old Colt pistol or any of the old solid metal toys would be great antiques. Floppy disk drives are only good for melt-down.
October 10th, 2013 at 03:33
And these are the sort of transitional technologies that are fated to have their day in the sun and then fade away as we find better alternatives.
One of the most amusing things about ‘progressives’ is that, for all their religious belief in the inevitability of Progress, they never can accept that technology always improves over time, so they always run around yelling ‘The sky is falling! We have to take action NOW!’ with respect to whatever ugly transitional technology catches their attention for the moment, without ever reflecting on the historically-proven fact that ‘this too shall pass’. Some method of generating power or manufacturing widgets is dumping stink into the air? OMG, after a hundred years of this the air will totally be stink! We have to suppress this process NOW or our grandchildren will grow up with lung cancer! Well, no, this technology isn’t going to last for a hundred years; it will be gone in ten or twenty when we learn a better way and replace it with something that doesn’t dump stink in the air. But they have no real faith in human ingenuity, so they can’t accept that the technology level we’re at now is not going to go on forever if we don’t take action NOW!; the normal course of human events will take care of it. We don’t make steel the way it was made by Andrew Carnegie, we don’t do oil the way John D. Rockefeller did it, and we don’t make cars like Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan — so whatever Bad Thing they’re up in arms about NOW will inevitably go away, but they just don’t believe that it will happen without them at the wheel of Government making it happen.
They just have no confidence in anybody’s intelligence other than their own, and that’s a very sad and narrow point of view.