A few weeks ago I stumbled across an article (can’t remember where, probably Boing Boing) listing some things children will have no experience of. A piece of nostalgia for times when we were young and slim. Well, most of the good old days were not that good and here is a not particularly well thought out list of things I will not miss about the good old days. In no particular order:
- Compact cassettes (yeah, that’s what they were actually called). Rubbish sound quality, noise, chewed tapes. Invented by someone at (Dutch company) Phillips who had obviously been to a coffee shop that day. I hate vinyl records too, but not with the firey passion I reserve for cassettes.
- Coin operated electricity meters. I am English and was poor. The rest of you didn’t miss out believe me.
- Spotting. Not trains, not planes, not birds. Using a 000 sable brush and spot-tone (in several shades) to gradually remove the dust spots from black and white prints. No matter how clean I tried to be, no matter how well washed, dried and dusted the negatives, no matter that I used a glassless carrier and cleaned the condenser & lenses before every print session more time was spent spotting exhibition prints than was spent printing them.
- Volkswagen Beetles. The Beetle was considered a hardy and reliable car that would not die. Bollox! The Beetle needed constant maintenance. Take a few months off the care schedule and it would need to go to a proper mechanic who would then charge three times the car’s worth to get it going again. All air cooled Volkswagens sucked (I had a ‘59 Beetle and a ‘71 Type 3 and I have had friends with various Beetles, Super Beetles, Kubelwagons, Ghias, Safaris, Type 2s (they’re the vans), and Type 3s – but never a Type 4) – they were incredibly noisy and smelly and had terrible handling – but the Beetle was the worst of the lot.
- VHS. For similar reasons to my hatred of compact cassettes but with one *BIG* addition: rewind. Single sided non-reversible playback mechanism. What were they thinking?
- Fixed line phones. Painful. Analogue modems (I started with a super-fast 14.4k modem) needed them, then came DSL and people still have ‘em. Put them in the bin! If you want a proper national broadband strategy don’t roll out miles of fibre; do what they do in ‘developing’ countries that don’t want to/can’t afford to waste money on cabling: put in wireless infrastructure. Fixed line telephones: like two cans and a piece of string only more annoying.
- Quartz movement time pieces. I have good hearing, and that causes me grief when it comes to quartz movements. It is not the quartz, it is the plastic gears. They don’t tick, they schnick with a sibilance similar to a just off channel analogue radio (remember those – they were pretty rubbish too). Nasty sounding and need batteries – if you must have a watch then get one that winds (automatics, brilliant – don’t even have to remember to wind them, just wear it every few days – see not everything old is bad) and if you must use a clock I have a lovely Westminster Chime mantle clock, with pendulum and key, which you can have for a very reasonable price.
- Portable CD players. CD ‘walkman’ and similar or CD players in cars. Jumpy, sensitive, eat batteries.
- Drive in movies. I used to go to the drive in as a teenager; even had a back seat shag at Goulburn drive in. But apart from the romantic trysts the drive in comprised the worst possible movie watching experience. Apart from:
- In flight ‘entertainment’ comprising a single bad movie on a large screen at the front of cattle class in a 747 on a long haul flight.