That brought us here. Once upon a time, before swipe-rights and ChatGPT, there was a world where the loudest sound in a household was the screech of dial-up internet, where letters came folded in blue aerogrammes, and where an entire family’s weekend plan hinged on whether the Doordarshan antenna faced the right direction. Before emojis, there were pager codes.
Before Spotify, there was the mixtape cassette. Before Google Maps, there were fold-out atlases that never folded back in the same way. Here is a throwback list of things the younger lot may never know, but which once ruled the daily lives of your folks, when they were young.
A Guide to Millennial Childhoods
Airplane ticket booklets
Yup, many of your folks’ first flight tickets were literally booklets.
AltaVista search engine
Search, peaked before GoogleAOL instant messenger
Another messenger, this time with a distinct ‘door opening’ sound.
Ask Jeeves
Search engine with a butler mascot, also peaked before Google
ASL pls
The icebreaker in chatrooms that broke through internet anonymity. Stands for “age, sex, location please”
Betamax
Sony’s failed video format
Calling cards
Scratch to reveal a PIN for payphone calls. Bought for a specific amount
Carbon paper
For duplicate copies in forms and letters.
Cassette tapes
Magnetic reels for music and data. Could be turned around for a whole new bunch of songs
CD tower stacks
Spindles of blank CDs
CD-R and CD-RW drives
Wanted to write something on a CD? You needed to burn it using one of these drives
Clippy
The coolest virtual assistant ever. Siri, Alexa, eat your hearts out
Demand draft
When a payment needed to be made, and a cheque wasn’t enough
Detachable car stereos
It helped avoid car stereo theft. Yup, that used to be a problem.
Dot matrix printers
Loud, perforated paper printing, still found at railway ticketing booths
Encarta
Microsoft’s CD encyclopedia, which was supposed to replace huge volumes of Britannica from library shelves
Fax machines
Curling thermal paper messages scanning letters across geographies
Film roll canisters
Kodak or Fuji rolls in black cases, which needed a dark room to somehow become a photograph
Floppy disks (8″, 5.25″, 3.5″)
Limited MBs — yes, mega byte — storage in a black plastic case. Used to contain entire games
Game Boy (Monochrome)
Green-tinted handheld gaming, for those lucky few kids in school
Geocities
DIY personal websites with glitter text
Monochrome monitors
Heavy, curved glass displays. Early examples had weirdly green text options only
Hotmail
Email, pre-Gmail. Was cool because of it was an Indian dude, Sabeer Bhatia, who created it
In just 20 years, the world went from floppy disks to cloud, from trunk calls to FaceTime, from money orders to UPI. What Gen Z and Alpha swipe through in seconds, older generations once waited days, weeks, or even months for:
ICQ
Early instant messaging service
Inflight smoking
Technically it took till the early 2000s for airlines to ban smoking. Until then, many offered smoking sections at the back
Inland letters
Foldable blue paper you could write on, for when envelopes were too expensive
Cyber cafés
The internet, available in a shop, chargeable by time spent
ISD/STD/PCO booths
Yellow signs, black boxy phones, and long queues. These were public phones with timed billing slips
LAN parties
Hauling PCs for multi-player gaming, connecting them via cables and playing classics like
Need For Speed
Lightweight blue aerogrammes International airmail folded paper letters with blue and red coloured edges, because it was meant to go abroad
Money order
UPI transfer across geographies that involved the postman carrying money sent from afar
MS-DOS commands
Black screens and text input. Introduction to computers for a generation was in commands like DIR and CD
Netscape navigator
Web browser with a star logo. The Chrome browser of that era
Orkut
The social networking site from Google that became a thing in India and Brazil for some reason. Eventually made uncool by Facebook Pager numeric codes 143 for ‘I love you’, etc
Pager
If you’re wondering what a pager is, it’s a small device with a screen where numeric or short texts pop up. No, it’s not at all a mobile phone
Pen pals
Strangers, exchanging letters to build friendship or learn about each other’s cultures, often across countries
Phonograms
Recorded voice messages sent via post or telecom
Photo negatives
Kept in envelopes after the films were developed. People looked funny in ’em
Registered post
Signed acceptance and proof of delivery in the form of an acknowledgment card made this the blue tick for snail mail
Rotary dial telephones
Finger-wheel dialling of a phone, complete with a whirr sound. Dialling numbers would take as long as entire conversations
T9 predictive text
A way for folks to type fast on their alphanumeric mobile phone keyboards
Telegram
The original ‘instant message’ delivered via printed slips. They were short, urgent and always ending in STOP
Telephone directory
Imagine everyone’s number in your city in one book. It was the thickest book in most households
Telex
Pre-fax era long-distance text transmission
Traveller’s cheques
Instead of forex cards, these were physical papers with a prepaid fixed amount for when you travelled, and it worked like cash
Trunk calls
You booked a call via an operator for long-distance landline calls, who then called back once the call was connected. Yup, you could even take hours
Typewriters
Clack-clack and carriage return ding. Typing used to be a skill to be honed in institutes
VHS tapes
Video recording cassettes, which had to be rewound every time to get to the start
VCD players
The hardware used to play the VHS tapes
Walkman
Portable cassette players
Winamp
Skinnable music player, for those illegal MP3 songs
Y2K bug scare
The year 2000 brought about computer panic and pretty much created India’s IT boom
Yahoo! chat rooms
The OG of online mingling
Yahoo! groups
Pre-social media discussion boards
Yellow Pages
Another book, this time for business listings with addresses and contact numbers
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When the current generation looks back at the relics of our past, they may find it hard to believe that there existed a time when people spent hours on dial-up connections and queued up outside cyber cafés, all just to access the internet
