100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.

That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …

Photo credit: makelessnoise via flickr

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
Photo credit: smin via flickr" width="240" height="160">

Photo credit: smin via flickr

Computers and Videogaming

18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.


Photo credit: ghbrett via flickr

The Internet

36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.


Photo credit: Chris Devers via flickr

Gadgets

57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.


Photo credit: ansik via flickr

Everything Else

70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

By Nathan Barry
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about?npu=1&mbid=yhp

Real Estate - Home Sales, All Over the Map

Memo to those wondering when the housing slump will end: It depends on where you live.

The Wall Street Journal's latest quarterly survey of housing-related data shows that the market for residential real estate is healing at varying speeds in different parts of the country. The Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and many areas in California that are near employment centers have shown signs of stabilizing, housing analysts say, while the outlook in other places -- much of Florida, Detroit and Las Vegas -- still appears bleak.

Thursday morning's report from the National Association of Realtors on June home sales is sure to inflame the debate on whether the housing market is bottoming, but clear answers are likely to remain elusive -- partly because of the variations in performance around the nation.

In June, home sales were up sharply from the depressed year-earlier levels in Orlando, Minneapolis, Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, according to reports from local Realtor groups and MDA DataQuick, a research firm. But sales dropped 50% in Manhattan, according to Miller Samuel Inc., a New York-based appraisal firm. Sales also declined in Long Island, N.Y., and Charlotte, N.C., among other areas.

A flood of foreclosed homes sold by banks over the past year has crushed prices of low- to mid-range houses down to levels that attract investors and first-time buyers in some areas, notably parts of California.

For Amy Musial, who manages a Starbucks in Sacramento buying a house became "a no-brainer" this spring once she and her husband realized that their monthly payments would be slightly lower than the rent they had been paying on a two-bedroom apartment. They paid about $229,000 for a three-bedroom house that had been through a foreclosure. Several years ago, the same house could have sold for more than $350,000, estimates Shelley Hescock, the real-estate agent who represented the Musials.

But prices of higher-end homes around the country have been slower to fall because there have been fewer foreclosure sand other forced sales of such properties. That is changing as more owners of fancy homes lose jobs, fall behind on mortgages or chop asking prices to realistic levels.

At both the high and low ends of the market, there are still plenty of reasons for caution. Rising unemployment is removing potential buyers and turning others into sellers. Credit remains tight. Appraisers have become more conservative and their estimates are causing many potential sales to fall through. Large numbers of foreclosed homes are likely to weigh on the market for at least another year or two. And a federal tax credit of as much as $8,000 for first-time home buyers ends Nov. 30.

"People are being more conservative with what they're buying," says Matthew Montgomery, a real-estate agent at Hammond Residential who works in the Boston suburbs of Newton and Brookline, Mass. In general, he adds, "the bigger the house, the harder it is to sell."

In the Washington, D.C., area, government-related employment has held up and helped revive housing demand, says Jody Kahn, an analyst at John Burns Real Estate Consulting, a research firm. "Good locations in Alexandria and Fairfax [Va.] are seeing some emerging price stability and even small increases," Ms. Kahn says, and Maryland's Montgomery County "is showing price stability." More remote suburbs will take longer to recover, she says.

In California, San Diego and Sacramento both have become much more affordable, she says. Ms. Kahn also thinks prospects are relatively good in Denver; Raleigh, N.C.; San Jose, Calif.; and the Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio -- areas that generally avoided the housing bubble and so don't have as much need to adjust.

Thomas Lawler, an independent housing economist in Leesburg, Va., says areas that seem to be nearing stability include San Diego, Sacramento, Minneapolis, Boston and the Virginia suburbs of Washington.

Among metro areas that "still have a long road to recovery" are Detroit, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Chicago, says Ms. Kahn. Mr. Lawler includes New York, Seattle and Portland, among others, in this category. Problems in these areas include high unemployment and large numbers of vacant homes.

Of course, there are lots of variations within metro areas. The most appealing neighborhoods, offering short commutes and good schools, may vastly outperform marginal areas that thrived during the boom.

The job market outlook is a major wild card for those seeking to divine the direction of house prices. Looking ahead one year, Moody's Economy.com sees the metro areas of Washington, Minneapolis, Houston and Dallas among those likely to have unemployment rates below the national average. Those expected to be above the national average include Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Sacramento and Portland, Ore.

Unemployment may be the most important factor in assessing a metro area's housing-market prospects, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "If people don't have jobs or fear losing their jobs ,then buying homes is out of the question," he says.

provided by

by James R. Hagerty

Memo to those wondering when the housing slump will end: It depends on where you live.

The Wall Street Journal's latest quarterly survey of housing-related data shows that the market for residential real estate is healing at varying speeds in different parts of the country. The Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and many areas in California that are near employment centers have shown signs of stabilizing, housing analysts say, while the outlook in other places -- much of Florida, Detroit and Las Vegas -- still appears bleak.

Thursday morning's report from the National Association of Realtors on June home sales is sure to inflame the debate on whether the housing market is bottoming, but clear answers are likely to remain elusive -- partly because of the variations in performance around the nation.

In June, home sales were up sharply from the depressed year-earlier levels in Orlando, Minneapolis, Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, according to reports from local Realtor groups and MDA DataQuick, a research firm. But sales dropped 50% in Manhattan, according to Miller Samuel Inc., a New York-based appraisal firm. Sales also declined in Long Island, N.Y., and Charlotte, N.C., among other areas.

A flood of foreclosed homes sold by banks over the past year has crushed prices of low- to mid-range houses down to levels that attract investors and first-time buyers in some areas, notably parts of California.

For Amy Musial, who manages a Starbucks in Sacramento buying a house became "a no-brainer" this spring once she and her husband realized that their monthly payments would be slightly lower than the rent they had been paying on a two-bedroom apartment. They paid about $229,000 for a three-bedroom house that had been through a foreclosure. Several years ago, the same house could have sold for more than $350,000, estimates Shelley Hescock, the real-estate agent who represented the Musials.

But prices of higher-end homes around the country have been slower to fall because there have been fewer foreclosure sand other forced sales of such properties. That is changing as more owners of fancy homes lose jobs, fall behind on mortgages or chop asking prices to realistic levels.

At both the high and low ends of the market, there are still plenty of reasons for caution. Rising unemployment is removing potential buyers and turning others into sellers. Credit remains tight. Appraisers have become more conservative and their estimates are causing many potential sales to fall through. Large numbers of foreclosed homes are likely to weigh on the market for at least another year or two. And a federal tax credit of as much as $8,000 for first-time home buyers ends Nov. 30.

"People are being more conservative with what they're buying," says Matthew Montgomery, a real-estate agent at Hammond Residential who works in the Boston suburbs of Newton and Brookline, Mass. In general, he adds, "the bigger the house, the harder it is to sell."

In the Washington, D.C., area, government-related employment has held up and helped revive housing demand, says Jody Kahn, an analyst at John Burns Real Estate Consulting, a research firm. "Good locations in Alexandria and Fairfax [Va.] are seeing some emerging price stability and even small increases," Ms. Kahn says, and Maryland's Montgomery County "is showing price stability." More remote suburbs will take longer to recover, she says.

In California, San Diego and Sacramento both have become much more affordable, she says. Ms. Kahn also thinks prospects are relatively good in Denver; Raleigh, N.C.; San Jose, Calif.; and the Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio -- areas that generally avoided the housing bubble and so don't have as much need to adjust.

Thomas Lawler, an independent housing economist in Leesburg, Va., says areas that seem to be nearing stability include San Diego, Sacramento, Minneapolis, Boston and the Virginia suburbs of Washington.

Among metro areas that "still have a long road to recovery" are Detroit, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Chicago, says Ms. Kahn. Mr. Lawler includes New York, Seattle and Portland, among others, in this category. Problems in these areas include high unemployment and large numbers of vacant homes.

Of course, there are lots of variations within metro areas. The most appealing neighborhoods, offering short commutes and good schools, may vastly outperform marginal areas that thrived during the boom.

The job market outlook is a major wild card for those seeking to divine the direction of house prices. Looking ahead one year, Moody's Economy.com sees the metro areas of Washington, Minneapolis, Houston and Dallas among those likely to have unemployment rates below the national average. Those expected to be above the national average include Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Sacramento and Portland, Ore.

Unemployment may be the most important factor in assessing a metro area's housing-market prospects, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "If people don't have jobs or fear losing their jobs ,then buying homes is out of the question," he says.

provided by

by James R. Hagerty