Antiquated: Let Me Teach You Something About History

I'm 24, and I know I have a generation gap with people below the age of 8 ... even people half my age at 12.

I know that because I can tell them about things that they have never seen or may not have even heard of in their short little lifetime ... and they probably won't know what I'm talking about until well into high school. Things like the following will undoubtedly amuse them:

~ Typewriters. Decades ago, these not-so-handy machines that served as our word processors produced a sophisticated and classy alternative to hand-written scribbles. To operate these machines, you have to P-O-U-N-D on them keys to make sure the ink gets onto the paper. You also have to manually white-out any typos you made. As technology advanced, so did typewriters -- they finally came out with this "correction key" that whited out your mistakes. Ta-Da! My family actually had one that came with a black plastic case with a handle on top. I remember trying to pick it up, but I ended up dropping it on my foot because it was so heavy. It hurt.

~ 5-inch Floppy Disks. My mother, being the hip little Asian lady that she is, decided to learn how to type. Oh, that mother of mine ... she brought home an old ("new" then) IBM black-and-white DOS-OS platform, (what we now consider) barebone computer, one that used 5-inch floppy disks. These scarce memory cards are about 25 times bigger than the regular SD chip that you put in your digital camera and maybe 50 times bigger than the 1GB Micro SD chip you put in your cellphone. But back in the day, 5-inch floppies were THE SHIT. The fact that we could put information not on notebooks of paper, but on one "small" disk was just mind-blowing.

~ Cassette Tapes. There was a time when Walkmans were cool. That, in case you don't already know, is a small device that enabled us to bring our music everywhere, much like what we do with our MP3 players today. I remember having trouble knowing which way to put the tape in, and if it meant I needed to rewind the tape when the little black ribbon is all on the left side of the tape. To this day, I still don't really know. Aren't you glad you don't have to deal with all that now?

~ Waterbottle Cellphones. Cellphones haven't always been palm-sized. Back in the early 90s, cellphones were about the size of a large Nalgene bottle. Now practice putting a whole waterbottle to your ear, and then try storing it in your purse. You'll realize that not only your phone conversations must be brief due to your sore biceps, you will need to carry a backpack to accommodate to your "portable cellular phone."

What else do we take for granted? What else belongs in our "obsolete pile," our personal museums up in the attic in hopes that, one day, we'll make it to "Antiques Roadshow?"

Feel free to leave a reminder.