What Do We Need to Know About Yesterday's Technology?

[robvalue]

"Daddy, what's a phone call? Why wouldn't you just beam your thoughts directly into their brain via the ubernet?"

[Rhondazvous]

I remember when floppy disks were actually floppy.

It's fun being bi-millennial.

[AFTT47]

I'm collecting early calculators.  It's fun and interesting to me.

In High School I was taught vacuum tube technology (mhos and transconductance, grid bias and thermionic emission) and maybe I haven't used it much, but it gives me an understanding of the 'big picture' that freshly graduated techies these days do not have.

They're still used in high-power RF transmitters.

[Anomalocaris]

I remember when floppy disks were actually floppy.

It's fun being bi-millennial.

Ahh, but do you remember when they were the size of a diner plate and held an astonishing 79 kilobytes?

[Minimalist]

Sadly, yes.

[popeyespappy]

In High School I was taught vacuum tube technology (mhos and transconductance, grid bias and thermionic emission) and maybe I haven't used it much, but it gives me an understanding of the 'big picture' that freshly graduated techies these days do not have.

Me too, and I spent several years working on tube driven radar systems afterwards. I still piddle around with rebuilding the occasional old audio amp every now and then.

What today's generation needs to know about vacuum tube technology is that if they want to buy the mid 60's Marantz 8b currently sitting on my workbench is they need to bring a stack of Ben Franklins when they come to pick it up.

[The Inquisition]

The Save icon on most office applications is still - STILL - in the form of a floppy disc. Very soon there will be an entire generation that barely knows the reason for this.

I wonder if some day I may be explaining to my grand children that cell phones are called phones because they used to be used to make phone calls, and subsequently blow their minds

And then explain that they didn't have screens or buttons, you had to look up a person's name in the phone book and DIAL the number. Watch them recoil in horror as you explain the dial concept.  

[popeyespappy]

Watch them recoil in horror as you explain the dial concept.  

Then before they have a chance to recover hit em again with party lines.

[Longhorn]

In the 1980s, my stepfather would not let my baby sister have a digital clock until she got the big hand/little hand thing down pat. Today, I don’t think they even sell face clocks anymore, yet clockwise/counterclockwise remains a part of our culture. Even my image editor lets me choose between rotating an image clockwise or counterclockwise. Is it retro to hold on to those designations, or is it an important tradition that we should pass on to our children?

My parents didn't want me to have a digital watch until I learned the regular one. And they made me learn telling the time in the 12hr format before the 24hr format (it's a language thing, doesn't have an equivalent in English)
But that wasn't in the 80s

[Thumpalumpacus]

In High School I was taught vacuum tube technology [...]

This warms my guitar-playin' tube amp heart.