Things your kids may not know about - or will soon forget about

I wrote last week about the near-disappearance of the drive-in movie theater. That got me to thinking about things that we once knew as familiar parts of our lives, but are no longer around, or are on the brink of vanishing.

To be sure, there are a great many more things that could go on this list, like milk being delivered to your doorstep in glass bottles (with cardboard disks as stoppers), or telephones with no dials or buttons that required the operator to complete a call, but I've tried to focus on the things that were familiar to me as an adult. Some of these things might still be in your closet or attic, and they may even be for sale somewhere. Perhaps the litmus test is, do your kids know what these are or were used for?

Here's what I came up with:

1. VHS tapes.
2. VCRs to put them in.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo (i.e. Walkman).
4. Ditto the Discman.
5. Transistor radios.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control (the kids were the remote control).
7. Black and white televisions. 
8. Snow on the TV screen (now it's digital artifacts).
9. Outdoor TV antennas.
10. Tubes in radios and TVs.
11. Tube testers in most drug stores.
12. Analog TVs. 
13. TV stations that signed off after Johnny Carson.
14. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations.
15. Shortwave radio.
16. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long.
17. The distinctive noise of a dial-up modem connecting.
18. Spending many minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
19. The sound of a dot-matrix printer.
20. 5-inch and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
21. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
22. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
23. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
24. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
25. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
26. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
27. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
28. The four-pound Sears catalog.
29. Ads on the back of comics for "X-ray glasses."
30. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and mailing it.
31. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
32. Airmail letters on a wafer thin blue paper.
33. Smoking allowed on airplanes.
34. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
35. Real keys for the motel door.
36. When Spam was just a meat product 
37. Typewriter erasers (round eraser wheel with an attached brush).
38. Typewriters.
39. Dittos - spirit duplicated pages. 
40. Mimeograph machines. 
41. Carbon paper.
42. Fountain pens.
43. Super-8 movies and cine film of any kind.
44. Putting film in your camera.
45. Sending that film away to be processed & mailed back.
46. Snapshots (on paper) in your wallet/purse.
47. Polaroid cameras.
48. Carousel slide projectors.
49. CB radios.
50. Green Stamps.
51. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
52. Walk-in telephone booths.
53. Rotary-dial telephones.
54. Pay phones.
55. Paying for long distance in the US.
56. Phones with actual bells in them.
57. Remembering someone’s phone number.
58. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
59. Trig tables and log tables.
60. What a slide rule is, let alone how to use it.
61. Actual card catalogs at the library.
62. Swimming pools with diving boards.
63. See-Saws or Teeter-Totters. 
64. Lawn darts (okay, that was a bad idea anyway)
65. Chemistry sets.
66. Clamp-on roller skates (with steel wheels)
67. Cap guns with paper caps.
68. Juke boxes (yeah, but I don't go into those places).
69. Having to manually unlock a car door.
70. Gas station attendants.
71. Coin operated scales to weigh yourself on.
72. Bottle caps with cork liners
73. Barbershop poles.
74. Leaded gasoline.
75. Running boards on cars.
76. Fender skirts.
77. Flash bulbs and cubes.
78. Standard shift automobiles.
79. No power steering or power brake assist.
80. Side vent windows in autos.

What can you add to the list?