This Younger Generation...lol moment

Today a student was totally amazed at a gadget I was using...that gadget was a date stamper. What other "old timey" gadgets do you find that teenagers find unusual?

>2 MrsLee: I have a Manuel typewriter from the 1940s. I typed a letter to my great-niece on it and he mother told me she was fascinated and trying to wrap her head around how it worked.

I have seen videos of young people trying to figure out how to use a rotary phone...

>3 clamairy: My daughters and I were in a local consignment shop some years ago and there was one there. They both took turns dialing our home number in fascination.

>4 Marissa_Doyle: We had one of those decorative but functional ones (that looked like it was old, but it wasn't) so my kids knew how to use it, but when their friends came over they would play around with it.

I ran an online quiz during lockdown for a group of colleagues which includes three people in their twenties and one in her forties. One round included pictures of old family items I have. These included a last and an old, gas-fired clothes iron. No one could identify them.

Many years ago (1973 to be precise) I had the good fortune to visit the museum in Bennington, Vermont. Where I was interested to see they had a candle mould, the exact twin of items to be seen in every museum in South Africa that houses "voortrekkeriana". A mother and small daughter came past while I was absorbing this, and the kid wondered what it was for and how it worked, so I told her the voortrekker make-do version. At least she had the good manners to disappear behind a row of display cases before turning to her ma and saying "Gee he must be old to know that!"

A whistling kettle (is that the right word?), a rotary phone, and....a phone booth.

Recently saw a video where a young boy mistook an ironing board for a surfboard.

>8 Ennas: Indeed. And if you are both elderly and South African, you may still call the last-named a "tickey box": a long time ago local calls cost 3 old-fashioned pence for 3 minutes, and the small silver coin was colloquially called a tickey.

>8 Ennas: Poor Superman has nowhere to change any more...

>11 gilroy: Starbucks restroom!

>10 hfglen: Haha! A "tikkie" nowadays is something completely different here. It's a payment request you can send using your bank app on your phone. It's extremely popular.

not a gadget, but I took a writing class where we would start off each session with a 10-minute 'free write', just filling your journal with thoughts to get the words rolling. at the end of one session i realized that the young lady next to me was staring in amazement at my journal and said "did you just write all of that in CURSIVE?" she had not been taught handwriting, and had never actually seen anyone do so at length before.

i can write in cursive much faster than i can print block letters so i don't really know a better way to go about it.

Further to the discussion of phones in #8 and #10, does anyone else here (Haydninvienna, maybe?) remember phones connected to a manual exchange -- no dial, but a little handle you turned vigorously to wake the operator -- and party lines, where several users shared a single pair of wires. A Belgian gent I once met was curator of the nature reserve at Springbok (Northern Cape) about 50 years ago, and told the expedition I was part of that when he phoned home using the reserve's party line and spoke Flemish, the line was dreadful and he couldn't hear a word. But as soon as he switched to French it improved miraculously and became crystal clear. As all the Afrikaans-speaking gossips on the line stopped eavesdropping, of course. On the other hand, if there was a really good operator and you asked for a number, they could tell you if the person you wanted was in.

>14 Darth-Heather: For me, I type on a keyboard so much now, my brain goes faster than my fingers if I try to write cursive, so it is really, really messy. I do like doing it when I'm taking notes or writing myself notes for a project, but then it tends to be a mishmash of printing and writing.

>15 hfglen:
In the 1970s, when I started visiting the part of Donegal I go to whenever I can, the telephones were the type you describe. The local manual exchange was operated by the local postmaster who ran a grocery store and was the local undertaker. The area covered by this exchange had 372 people living on an island which was connected to the mainland by two causeways. The local numbers were single digit.

If you used the phone-box to make a call you would burl the handle and wait for the person manning the shop/postoffice/undertakers to respond and then connect the call for you. In fact, from the phone-box you could see into the shop and see Jimmy, the postmaster, or his daughter if she was minding the shop, finishing their transaction with a customer and going to the switchboard to connect your call. In general people would go into the shop first and tell the shopkeeper they needed to make a call and give the number they wanted before going across the street to the box.
One advantage of the arrangement was that you could watch Jimmy listening in on your call. That gave everyone the opportunity to say something scandalous on the phone and wait to see how long it took the rumour to spread around the island. That was great fun.

>15 hfglen: Fair crack of the whip, Hugh, I’m not that old (quite)! I certainly remember rotary phone dials, but none of the other stuff.

I visited my aunt in Canada in 1996. I had a calling card issued against my Australian phone account so that I could call from overseas and charge the call to my own phone account. To use it I had to dial a string of digits first. Calling from my aunt’s rotary dial phone didn’t work because it was impossible to dial the string before the call dropped.

Today, a different student was so fascinated by an electric stapler that he tried to get his friend to get some paper just to use it. Can't wait till he learns about the three-hole punch...

>15 hfglen: We had a phone like that when I was a little girl, but I don't think there was an operator any more. These phones were connected to five or more neighbors and each house had their own ring. One for Herringers, two for our house, three for my grandma, and so forth. I think they kept them connected after the rotary phone system was installed just for fun. Of course it didn't really matter how many rings you gave because everyone picked up and listened whether they admitted it or not.

My fountain pen.

When I first started teaching, worksheets, letters and materials were produced on a Banda machine (no photocopier at that point) - think it's called a Spirit Duplicator elsewhere. For those not familiar, you would write/type on to a front page that was more or less normal paper, but behind there was a waxy sheet. The pressure as you wrote would lift the wax to stick on the back of the first sheet. When complete you separated them and put the reverse side of the sheet onto the banda machine drum where the ink would cover the newly lifted wax and then transfer onto clean paper creating the handouts. The one we used had a very temperamental hand crank at the side so you had to lean in real close to get it to turn smoothly and invariably ended up with a link of purple ink across the front of what you were wearing. Not sure why the ink was always slightly purple but speaking personally I quite liked it. The fumes from the inks were something else too - definitely one of those love it or hate it smells but also not entirely healthy (a bit like standing in a petrol station for a while but I think it was alcohol based!).

Photocopiers and printers were a definite bonus but maybe it's the alcohol fumes that I missed when the old banda machine went.

>22 Peace2: There were a number of different kinds of duplicator. The one I remember best is the Gestetner, which used a stencil typed on a normal typewriter without the ribbon. The type perforated a wax paper sheet which would then be wrapped around the drum of a printer. The ink for this one also had a distinctive smell, but it was black—basically printers’ ink.

>23 haydninvienna:
I used Gestetner duplicators. Potentially quite a messy operation. About six years ago we visited a friend who is the curate in a small rural parish. He was, and possibly still is, using a Gestetner to produce his weekly parish newsletter. His big worry was his supply of stencils disappearing.

I am the only person in my office that remembers using a photocopier where the toner came in a canister and you had to spoon the black powder into a little drawer in the front of the unit.

I used to entertain kids at the car dealership with carbon paper. They thought it was magical.