Ask Your Kids If They Know What These 10 Gadgets Are (2024)

If you're old enough to have teenagers, you've lived through the fastest period of technological change in human history. The daily tech of your childhood is so far removed from today, that your kids likely won't recognize some or all of these now (mostly) obsolete gadgets.

1 Fax Machine

Fax machines are still in use in some industries, but it's more likely that your bog-standard multi-function printer now has a fax function hidden away somewhere than a true-blue dedicated fax machine being out in the wild. So your kids will likely never have to deal with the stress of tearing that awful thermal paper off properly without ruining that important fax your boss has been waiting for all night.

2 Answering Machine

Actually, answering machines might be one gadget your kids can totally sympathize with, given their own desire to avoid answering phone calls as much as possible. This is voice mail incarnate, or perhaps, to a modern younger audience, it could be described as a voice note machine. I do wonder if all those TV and movie plots that involve answering machines make any sense to kids these days? Well, smartphones ruined horror movies, so I guess fair's fair. You can't argue that those tiny tapes aren't adorable in any decade though.

3 Rolodex

It's not a real Rolodex unless it's made in the Rolodex province of France, otherwise it's just a sparkling personal organizer. Regardless of the now generic trademark, these little gadgets with their rotating selection of index cards were ubiquitous on every desk for decades, even after computers were something that the rank and file office worker had access to.

Older folks like to lament that young people these days don't even bother to remember phone numbers anymore, forgetting that even cave men would have hated remembering phone numbers if they had phones. Which they didn't, if any current teenagers are reading this. You know, now that I think of it, the Rolodex could really speed up games of Cards Against Humanity.

4 Car Cigarette Lighter

Modern cars still have the 12V socket that car cigarette lighters use, and probably have more of them than ever. However, unless you specifically ask for it, a new car is unlikely to come with a little pop-up lighter accessory we all burnt ourselves with while waiting in the car for our parents. Thankfully, smoking is less popular than it's ever been, but I grew up in the era where adults would smoke in a car with their kids and the windows rolled up. Especially hard for a kid on the spectrum who has an extra hard time dealing with nasty smells like I do.

Now, that socket is likely filled with a USB power adapter, which is still capable of starting a fire if you buy a cheap no-name one from a suspicious website, but at least that's not the intention.

5 Dial-Up Modem

The dial-up modems from the latter half of the dial-up internet era would probably be perfectly recognizable to modern children since they pretty much look like a fiber or cable broadband "modem." Despite these modern devices not really being modems in the true sense.

No, the modems I'm talking about are the old-school ones where you literally put the handset of your phone on a cradle and the computers "spoke" to each other using the same microphone and speakers you did to say hi to grandma.

6 Beeper

This is another one of those gadgets that show up in so many movies and shows from the 80s and 90s that I can only imagine mild confusion from younger viewers trawling through older material on Netflix. It's a mobile phone, if you take out the phone part and only have text messages left over. A staple of TV doctors and criminals alike, the beeper lets you know to head to the nearest phone booth and give someone a call. "What's a phone booth?" you say? "Get off my lawn" is the only appropriate answer I can come up with.

7 Credit Card Imprinter

Despite feeling like an integral part of online shopping and the modern internet age, credit cards long predate the computerization of payments in stores. You didn't swipe your card and put in a PIN, instead the person behind the counter whipped out one of these babies and made a carbon copy of your credit card so they could ask the bank for the money later. So you had better be pretty sure that the card's not going to be declined, unless you were the type to count on that sort of thing, as you absconded with the goods, that is.

8 Microfiche

A Microfiche reader could easily be mistaken for some sort of old computer at first glance. These devices blow up tiny images on a sheet of film. This was an effective way to store high-quality records of documents and images without taking up a ton of space, and you could easily find and review information. There might still be a few libraries around that have Microfiche machines, but by and large, Microfiche cards have been digitized.

9 Punch Clocks

I won't suggest that punch clocks are gone or anything, depending on where in the world you work and what sort of job you do, you may still be using a device like this every day at work. You can even still buy your own for a small business. These clocks use paper cards where employees can record their time in and time out, which is then used to calculate their pay.

However, "clocking" in and out is becoming something far more subtle in most modern workplaces, where swiping your door access card might clock you in automatically until you leave the building again, or perhaps you're logged as soon as you start using your computer in the morning. Kids these days will be monitored more at work than anyone before them, but ironically, it might all be invisible, rather than a machine everyone walks up to and "punches."

10 Slide Projector

If you've used PowerPoint, Google, Slides, or any modern presentation software, this is the gadget that software is trying to emulate. Slides were basically transparent little photos that were loaded in order and projected onto a screen. The bane of students, bored workers in a meeting, and anyone forced to see your dad's holiday photos, slide projectors are the ancestors of modern digital projectors, which can be much more fun if for no other reason than having pictures that move.

It feels like just yesterday that I could encounter any one of these machines during the course of a normal day, but now I rarely if ever run into them. Which common gadget is going away next? It's anyone's guess, but appreciate your gizmos while they're in their heyday!