Flashback: Things We Will Have to Explain to Our Kids

I am starting to understand why my parents would shake their head, when I was a kid asking at what point they started to see the world in color or when I would ask my Grandparents why an Ice Box wasn't in the freezer.

Here are 10 things we will have to explain to our kids...and chances are we will be shaking our heads too. And the head shaking is when we realize that we are getting old.

1. Encyclopedias: Yes, we actually had to do "research" from the the tomes of information contained. The worst part was making sure the Bibliography was correct. (The internet does that for us now)
2. Smoking and Non-Smoking sections in restaurants: I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, my mother would cause a major ruckus in any eating establishment where we were sat too close to the smoking section. While today, I can appreciate the lack of smoke around my food, my Mom sure knew how to make a scene. (cough, cough, hack, hack, while waving her hand in front of her face).
3. Paper maps: Before Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, Waze, Road Ninja, et al, we actually had to go to the gas station or library and buy a map. There were 2 hopes: #1.) That the map was up to date and accurate and #2) How do we fold the darn thing correctly without ripping it, when we were done.
4. Calling Cards: This is the old-school version of the Pre-Paid Phone. Of course back then, we couldn't afford cell phones/bag phones or even car phones at the time.
5. Waiting for the film to be eveloped to see how the picture came out. My wife and I had a good time with this a couple of years ago, when we got married. we used old school cameras on the tables and let everyone take pictures. We had no clue of what they took picture of, until we had them developed. Thankfully, nothing too shocking was on the film
6. Why home phones were essential to use when getting on the web (and how you prayed that no one picked up the other phone in the house): Remember the dial up internet that we had to have a closed network like AOL, Compuserve, etc.? Yep, we had to use the home phone to call up one of 10 numbers for our area to connect. Then the fear was while you were finding the information that you were looking for, someone would pick up a hard-set in the house and you would be frozen for 10 minutes and the obligatory "Goodbye" would occur.
7. Social interaction meant face-to-face discussions: Before Facebook, before MySpace, before YIM and even before AOL or bulletin boards, there was this idea that people could talk face-to-face and actually come up with solutions to problems and had a better chance of having good social skills. However, MySpace and Facebook came along, we all became friends and everyone became Passive Aggressive.
8. *69: Who just called you? Today, we have Caller ID on everything, but no one was safe, when you had *69. Until Mom and Dad got the phone bill...then we were in trouble for all the *69s that we used.
9. Recording songs off the radio: Before iTunes, Limewire, and bitTorrents, there was the handy boombox and cassette recorded. You waited all day and night for that one song to show up and when it happened. You hoped that you got the whole song and the DJ didn't talk all over it.
10. TV Guide was a printed magazine: Today TV Guide is a channel that plays TV shows and movies while the Guide scrolls across the bottom of the screen in a horizontal fashion. The version we have is free and it is treated as a regular TV network. The old version was a weekly magazine