MP3 Players
Public Pay Phones
Modems
Film-Based Cameras
Take a photo sitting “on top” of KICC today and come for the picture next week. That was the norm some time back. These are the days when the your photos had to be developed in a dark room, then came the digital camera, which changed the game, but still kept camera men around. Nowadays, I hardly see those camera men around, smartphone cameras hit their market hard.
Calculator Watch
This was a must-have back in school. It made life easier, looked cool – for those days, and even gave you bragging rights. Until the mathematics teacher catches you trying to press those tiny buttons to get some calculations done.
Video tapes and cassettes
These were fun to manually rewind, until the film inside came out and you had a disaster in hand. I actually still have a dozen of these back at home, if anyone knows how to properly dispose them, hit me up.
Fax Machines
I actually never got to use this one, no, I’m not that young, I just didn’t get the opportunity to fax anything before they went off the plank. It was fascinating however to know that you could send a document from Nairobi, and with the right fax machine number, the other person in Mombasa would receive it in a somewhat short while. Now we have emails and scanners, actually you don’t even need a scanner if you have a smartphone and one particular app, but that is a story for another day.
Rotary Dials
Before touchscreens, we had buttons, before buttons there were rotary dials. Remember this one? I know most of you didn’t know they were known as Rotary Dial telephones. One would place a finger one one digit-hole at a time and then rotated the dial. You would then have to wait for the dial to reset between each digit. This technology essentially counted the number of pulses made by each movement of the dial, encoding it into a number.
Gameboy
The Game Boy was the console to have, if we can even refer to it as a console. It accepted different games on cartridges and offered portable 8-bit gaming. This was the brick game of the rich. If you had one of these, major respect, I never got to save up enough to afford one.
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screens
Oldern days TVs and monitors were much thicker due to the CRT technology. We all had one of these, and we loved it. Especially when colored screens showed up, no one seemed to notice (or rather mind) how big that behind was (get your head out of the gutter).
Bonus: Using Proper Grammar and Punctuation
u know urslf. u dnt cmplte wrds, u dnt punctuate anythng. txtng is gd, bt it hs cme @ the expense of grammar. u shld c wt kids txt 2day. bt anywy lets hpe sanity will return n we wunt b seeing emails wth wrds written lke this.