Popular Inventions Our Kids Won’t Recognize

During high school, my sister Sarah did her fair share of babysitting. One day while sitting for our favorite boy Jeffrey, he asked her if she had ever seen a record player.  She told him that if he was curious, he could check out my old record player that still worked. His response was, “Whoa! You have a record player in the house.  That’s great you know, I love history.”  Keep in mind that this record player was brand new when I got it as a kid. Thanks Jeffrey.

While Jeffrey’s comment may sting, it’s also a sign of things to come: with all the technological advances of the past 20 years, items that were once staples will soon become foreign concepts to our children and our children’s children.  Here is a look at some of the innovations of yesterday that will soon be all but forgotten:

Pay Phones

It’s hard for me to fathom that I survived the first two decades of my life without a cell phone. However, I certainly remember the days of digging for quarters at the bottom of my handbag just to place a quick call home. Now, with the advent of cellular tech, those booths have quickly become forgotten totems, and the number of payphones in most metro areas has shrunk significantly over the past decade. Only a handful in NYC are seeing a second life, having been converted into wifi areas. Otherwise, most are going the route of one of my current favorite gifts, the children’s book The Lonely Phonebooth.

Non-Digital Cameras

It is hard to argue with the money-saving value of digital cameras.  I remember my old 35mm camera and not knowing until I got the photos back from the developer if I had any decent shots. Now, we have the luxury of deleting unflattering shots without wasting dough on a stack of developed photos. Of course, it should be noted that some forms of film have made a resurgence over the past few years. For one, Lomography cameras are certainly back in vogue. But on the whole, traditional film cameras are becoming scarcer.  Some forms of film aren’t even being developed anymore: despite the loving anthem crafted by Paul Simon in the 70s, Kodak did take our Kodachrome away in 2010.

Video Stores

Roaming the aisles at Blockbuster was a weekend ritual when I was in high school. However, thanks to the advent of Netflix, On Demand and effortless live streaming, many video stores are turning into vacant lots. In fact it’s not only the stores that our children won’t recognize: think of how the format of home film has changed over the past thirty years. We went from Beta and VHS, to Laserdisc, to DVD, to our current Blu Ray tech. How many of these will be recognizable to a 10-year old in 2025? By our calculations, not many.

Computer Disks

I remember how amazed I was when computers transitioned from using humungus floppy disks to the more compact 3.5” disk.  Now, over 20 years later, most of us are diskless altogether, having replaced the floppy with USB flash drives. With online storage solutions such as Google Drive and iCloud becoming more and more accessible, storage hardware may become altogether obsolete by the time our kids are old enough to use it.

Encyclopedias

Oh the many hours I spent using volumes from Britannica to work on school projects. In fact, I grew so attached that I’m pretty sure I landed my homeroom teacher’s old set of World Books when the school ordered new editions. As a concept, printed encyclopedias were amazing: you had the answers to every question you could imagine asking, all packed into in 27-or-so volumes. While I’ll admit that the web provides much more in depth information than any Encyclopedia could (and is far easier to use), I still get misty-eyed when I think about those cheesy Britannica commercials from the early 90′s, and what little meaning they’ll have to the next generation.

What other popular inventions will our kids not recognize? If you think of one we missed, post it in the comments section below!