
Do you wind it up?: today’s teens tackle rotary phones, FM radio and map reading - dredmorbius
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/19/do-you-wind-it-up-teens-tackle-old-tech-rotary-phones
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dredmorbius
And for those into video demonstrations, there was some excellent live-TV
experimentation recently:

[https://invidio.us/watch?v=updE5LVe6tg](https://invidio.us/watch?v=updE5LVe6tg)

[https://invidio.us/watch?v=Gjin8t633pc](https://invidio.us/watch?v=Gjin8t633pc)

Laughs aside, the lesson I take is that this is really about familiarity and
training.

There were _entire courses_ devoted to the use of some of these things, most
especially typewriters, starting with how to insert and align paper, as well
as touch typing and styles in business correspondence.

Kodak produced amazing technical materials as with this 1945 manual (recently
featured on HN):
[https://archive.org/details/KodakReferenceHandbook](https://archive.org/details/KodakReferenceHandbook)

Phones, boomboxes, and maps were ubiquitous, the latter also covered in
schools as reference materials -- how to use atlases, maps, and the like,
addressed in primary & secondary schools.

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jascii
I worked at a high school about 5 years ago and our kids knew how to do all
these things..

So, either a stupid-bomb hit the world recently, or there is some strong
selection bias going on in that article..

~~~
johnisgood
Check this one out: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/04/24/schools-
rem...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/04/24/schools-removing-
analogue-clocks-exam-halls-teenagers-unable/) (Schools are removing analogue
clocks from exam halls as teenagers 'cannot tell the time')

