Older folks can steer clear of fine lines with skin care. Some teenagers like to listen to jazz. But only a thirty-something can remember when they had a cell phone without a camera. The best predictor of your age isn't your wrinkles or your taste in music, it's technology.
Nothing will make you feel more gray-haired than when your nephew asks, "What's a Walkman?" So in the spirit of fun, here's a Jeff-Foxworthy-style list of ten more tech-minded memories designed to make you feel old.
You know you're old when...
1. Your email address is @hotmail.com or @aol.com.
2. You had a cell phone before they had cameras.
3. You've bought something from a catalog over the phone.
4. You know that the "save" icon is the image of a floppy disk.
5. You can remember your childhood neighbor's phone number, but not any of your current friends' cell numbers.
6. You've ever had to wait for film to develop to see the image you captured on your camera.
7. You've ever carried around a CD case for your Discman.
8. You still think of 3D glasses as the ones with red and blue lenses.
9. You remember when modems made noise while connecting (also if you remember the difference between baud rate).
10. You listen to FM radio more than Pandora or Last.fm.
*A few more added:
- You still use a mouse with a roller ball inside.
- You still refer to going online as going onto the net.
- There's still a tinge of excitement when you hear, "You've got mail".
- You've still got files saved on Jaz and Zip Drive discs.
- The keyboard you're using is an original model which makes a clickety-clack mechanism sound when keys are pressed (which we sorely miss).
Must-See Small Cool Homes: Week Two
Beth's Romantic & Retro Residence
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Commercial Flour Sa...
How to Cook Moist & Tender Chicken Breasts Every Time
How To Cook Tender, Chewy Wheat Berries on the Stovetop
hahaha this is freaking amazing!
Some one says "last decade" and you think of the 90's
You know you're old when...
- you can remember that computers used to come with two floppy drives and NO hard drives
- 100mb hard drive was amazing! So much storage.
- Windows installations used to take 12 floppy drives!
Real floppy disks and Oregon Trail - with one color screen.
@dmanciniaz
I had to think about that one for a minute, before realizing that the 90s are not, in fact, the last decade... we ARE old!!!
I'd like to add:
You're still driving your first car, and it has not an ipod dock, not a CD changer, but a tape deck... and you still use it to play mix tapes.
and/or
You remember making mix tapes... hovering in front of the double tape deck of your stereo, pressing play and record at just the right moments to catch your favorite track.
• You once owned a Macintosh clone.
• You still use AOL signup CDs as coasters or for DIY projects.
• Home automation in your house is The Clapper.
• The only portable smart device you carry is a Casio calculator wristwatch.
• You still know how to alphanumerically communicate to a pager.
• The printer you use sounds like the one at the DMV.
• The term "baud rate" still means something to you.
• You sometimes think when people use "IM" they're referring to themselves, as in, "I am..."
You're also old when you remember saving data to cassette tapes.
OMG I am older than these!
Floppy disks! Oregon Trail - I'm with you joecrawford.
Remember real "clickers" for TVs? The ones that you had to actually click? And it was just like 10 channels and had a cord?
I don't think I'd give a company my real (gmail) address. hotmail is perfect for that!
Violet Veil: you could always open a secondary Gmail account specifically for signing up/company sites; less spam, and easier for log-in purposes.
You kind of miss tearing off the perforated edges of printer paper.
.....so if I base my age on these recommendations that means I'm old? Haha I'm only 20 and yet I can still remember some of these things :p
Opening a secondary gmail account is a bad idea imo. Say you set up automatical log-in to your google calendar or reader or gmail, then you will have to log out to get to your "junk" (aka groupon, hotel, gilte etc emails) account. Then you have to re-log in to your main acct etc.
And don't forget encylopedias on CD-rom (which I thought was so cool for schoolwork)! Or those math question games on floppy disc where you type in the answer before the math equation hits the bottom of the screen.
I love my clack clack clack keyboard! I left it in my old cube and my previous manager was nice enough to order a new one and ship me the old one.
Maybe I should have stayed....
I remember most of these things, I am only 20 though...
niche: secondary gmail - that's easily resolved by keeping two browsers open, something I do anyway for a variety of work related reasons. Switching back and forth is as easy as switching a window and hasn't hampered my workflow. Sure beats dealing with the onslaught of spam after just a few days Hotmail is left unattended (yes, even with filters set in place)!
... when you know how to convert single-sided floppies to double-sided ones ...
(and I suppose knowing how to boot a TRS-80 from an 8-inch makes you positively ancient?)
Anyone here ever use a Dyson disk to store files?
Dos used to come on one diskette.
I still have a 10 Megabyte hard disk lying around somewhere, 5.1/4 inch, full height. If you know what full height means, you're an ancient wise man.
VGA was a resolution on a monitor.
Gregory--I already have to have three browsers open--one for my personal gmail, one for my work email and one for my business email (those are own domains). So not practical to have another gmail account--I don't really care what businesses think about my choice of email. And I've never had spam in my inbox of the live.com (hotmail). I have another old addy on zzn.com that I use for shadier businesses--and even there I don't get that much spam. But I get tons of spam in the one that I use for signing up on illegal file sharing sites (I do that for my job to bust them). So yeah, I have lots of email addresses (even a yahoo one from the 90s) and I think that hotmail is a great one for using when ordering online--it has a "quick view" for shipping updates (and other things).
Here's my contribution:
You thought Maniac Mansion was the coolest thing ever.
Your first purchase of Excel came with a run-time version of Windows because no one had it standard on their PC yet.
You still remember MS-DOS commands - and that was the only OS your PC had.
Your first PC had a 40 MB hard drive - despite the sales guy warning you that you'd never need more than 20 MB. (And that PC cost more than my current 17" MacBook Pro.)
Your first email account was with CompuServe.
Like joetron2030, I've used standard cassette tapes to store data. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. :-D
My solution to the email problem is sneakemail. It's paid, but it lets me use my main gmail to consolidate all of it and turn off the individual addresses if they start getting spammy.
I guess I'm not that old, there were at least 3 things on the list that didn't describe me. Ouch.
I had to explain what a daisy wheel printer was to an intern last year. Never seen a floppy.
For those of us who don't remember the Windows related things above because we've been Apple fans for far too long:
You remember signing onto the internet using eWorld and getting excited to see which theme would come up.
You can link your gmail accounts. I don't know the exact process off the top of my head, but you can give permission for one account to have access to the other and this allows them to be open/accessible at the same time.
I never did make it to Oregon....
wow...i guess it's bad when 25 is old...i remember all of these things...
Trying to explain to the kids at school that no you didn't learn 'keyboarding' you learnt to TYPE on a MACHINE called a typewriter that didn't plug in to anything! They really don't get it!
The typewriter I learned to type on really didn't plug into anything, not even the wall. It's not that I'm that old, it's just that the school could only afford electric typewriters for half the class and guess which half I was in.
Yep, 25 and remember everything. When did that become old??
I'm with LBro - I'm not ancient, and remember all those things. Only in my twenties, people.
What is scary is I am still using a DOS prompt order entry system at work. No one sees the purpose of replacing it.
I remember when tucows was relevant. I remember certain websites that have vanished over the years.
I also remember when I got my first Walkman. I remember when microwaves were huge and they weren't that common.