Turning 30 - things I grew up with

So I am turning 30 soon and it got me thinking about some of the things I grew up with that some of the younger people I know didn't experience.

Tamagochis

Or rather the cheap versions of them for me. I had one call Bobby the Dinosaur. I also had some robot thing that never evolved but lived forever (until I lost it in Clarks one day) and also I had a Giga Pet but the battery life on it was shit so I got rid of it. I would still like to have a digital pet again though. Those things were life sapping but fun at the same time.

Floppy disks

We didn't get a home PC until I was 14 but I did use them in school. You had your own floppy disk with your name written on it so you could save all your work on to it. When we got a PC at home we had about a million of the things lying about all over the place.

The worst thing is that I have genuinely had people ask me why there were 3D save icons around back when I was a kid. *facepalm*

Encarta

This encyclopedia for the PC was our Wikipedia before the internet was a thing. You could look up almost anything on there and it was amazing! Like Wikipedia you could look something up and then it would give you the idea to look up something else and before you knew it you had worked your way through a weird series of items. The best part was that it came on several disks which you had to load individually when prompted.

The old dial up tone for the internet

This was the greatest and yet most annoying noise ever. Not only that but it would take a couple of tries to connect (at least). The internet would also frequently drop out and then there was the dreaded moment your mum told you that she needed to use the phone.

VHS 

Before there was DVD, Blu-ray and the ability to pause and record live TV onto a box there was the VHS player. You could record off of the TV by setting it way in advance and that was great when you went on holiday (if it worked). Also You could fast forward through not only the adverts but the warnings about illegal copies. The only pain was when someone hadn't rewound the tape afterwards and you came to watch it again and had to sit there for 10 minutes doing it before you could watch the film. I remember my Dad borrowing a video camera to record my brother's birthday. We never watched it back. Oh the joys.

Oh, and everyone had piles of the things like this in their house.

Yo Yos

There was a time when I was at secondary school when this was a craze. We got them banned because one kid hit the fire alarm with it and called out the fire brigade. Nice.

Before that it was all groups of people stood around...'walking the dog'. I had a light up one. The more ball bearings it had the better it was supposed to be.

Opal Fruits

They are not called 'Starbursts' and they never will be!

Cassette tape

You were not cool unless you had the Spice Girls' latest album on cassette. You had to know the joy of turning that thing round half way through.

Portable cassette player

And you had to have one of these to play your cassettes on! (Below is the one I had.)

Pencils were not just for drawing or writing with

MSN Messenger 

Still the best messaging service I have ever used. Things were not the same once Microsoft bought Skype and made us all use that instead.

You would spend hours waiting for your crush to come online and then just send them nudges (but not too often or MSN would tell you off). Then you would speak in nothing but custom emoticons (they were not called 'emojis' in my day)

 

Freddos only cost this much!

RIP OFFS!

There are probably loads of others I am forgetting right now but these ones really spring to mind.