“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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We all happen to be living during a time when there are great advances and changes being made in the way we live our lives. Some of them are to our benefit, other not so much so.
Politically and financially the world is in turmoil. There is an accelerating and inevitable shift of power and influence towards the east, with former great powers like Britain and America declining in their influence and their economic might.
Perhaps that is a natural phenomenon, after all as they say “every dog has its day”, but I happen to believe that a lot of it is due to stupidity and mismanagement allied with a self-defeating philosophy that the west somehow has a duty to police the world and to create nanny states for its citizens where they will neither have to work nor want.
Technologically there have also been many changes and many more to come. During the past twenty years with the advent and growth of the internet everything has changed, from the way we interact socially, to how and where we work, and how we manage our affairs whether that be banking, shopping or whatever.
What a lot of these changes mean is that future generations will have no idea of how our lives used to be. Already many of us who have lived through the changes have forgotten how we used to have to do things. What would it be like trying to explain the ‘old days’ to a generation with absolutely no point of reference to the world we were born into?
To remind you of how it used to be here is a list of some of things we have known and lost, consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Feel free to add your own items to this list of things that your grand-kids will probably never know.
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Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
Dewey Decimal System
Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
Reference books such as phone books, encyclopaedias
Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
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Having to manually unlock a car door.
Looking out the window during a long drive.
Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
Getting lost in a world without GPS.
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Being able to add and subtract without a calculator
Long division and multiplication
Trig tables and log tables.
Slide rules
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House phones
Phone books and Yellow Pages.
Rotary-dial telephones.
Pay phones.
Phones with actual bells in them.
Answering machines.
Fax machines.
Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
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Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
Betamax tapes.
Video tapes and renting movies
Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
Laserdiscs.
8-track cartridges.
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Casette Tapes
Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
CDs and DVDs
Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.
Taping songs off the radio
A Walkman.
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Rotary tuners that scanned the radio dial and hearing static between stations as you went through the ether.
Shortwave radio.
CB radios.
Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
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DOS.
The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
Counting in kilobytes.
Joysticks.
Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.
NCSA Mosaic.
Netscape
Alta Vista
Being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
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Cash.
Writing a check.
Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
Being able to buy something in Walmart that isn’t made in China
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Privacy.
Being able to take a drive or walk down the street without being surveilled on numerous cameras
Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
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Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
Neat handwriting.
Spelling
Grammar
The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
Typewriters.
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Putting film in your camera
Sending that film away to be processed.
Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
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Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
Ashtrays
Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
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