20 Photos Teenagers Today Won’t Get At All

Today’s teens were born after the turn of the millennium, seemingly with a smartphone in their little newborn hands. There are so many things that device has replaced that kids will never have to worry about, covet, or beg for from their parents.

If you find yourself describing life in the 1980s and ‘90s, but lack a handy reference when your kids make a perplexed face, you can show them these twenty images (or “Stranger Things”…whichever is easier).

20. Atari

Anybody who had one of these was the coolest, most popular kid on the block. Now you can play games with better graphics and memory on your watch.

19. Television sans remote.

You had to hook your Atari up to the TV, and you had to actually GET OUT OF YOUR SEAT TO CHANGE THE CHANNEL. This might be why people were somewhat thinner back then.

18. VCRs

If you had to miss a show on TV, you could tape it on your video cassette recorder, which also played them back. But the Atari couldn’t be hooked up at the same time!

17. Camcorders

Every corny dad had one of these, taking awful, boring footage of Christmas Day and plodding vacations. And every aspiring film-making teen begged to use it to concoct their own movies, which you then played on the VCR (after unhooking the Atari).

16. Fotomats.

Now, if you were an aspiring photographer, you had to have a camera (which you unwrapped at Christmas while your father taped it on the camcorder), and you had to buy film. And when you’d taken all the pictures on the film, you came to one of these tiny little shacks in your local strip mall parking lot to have it developed. A week later, you had your pics. Instagrammers have no idea how good they have it.

15. Boomboxes

If you wanted to listen to music while flipping through your photos, you had to have a boom box. They played the radio AND cassettes, which was cutting edge back in the day.

14. But what’s a cassette?

If you had one of these, you could record songs off the radio (so illegal, so pre-Napster) or make your sweetie a mix tape. We’d spend hours recording the most perfect songs for our crushes to tell them how we felt and share our taste in music.

13. Columbia Record Club

The fastest way to expand your music collection was to join the Columbia Record Club (which had ads in every magazine), spend the 1 cent, and get your twenty cassette tape albums (8 track if you were a ‘70s teen). Then every month you’d get a card telling you what your next tape would be, and it was always something crappy like Debbie Gibson.

If you didn’t mail the card back in time saying “NO” to “Only in my Dreams”, they’d send it automatically and bill you $12.99…a king’s ransom for someone on babysitting or lawn mowing money. But it was so easy to refute the charges, nobody cared.

12. Rotary phones.

Now that your crush has fallen for your mix tape of The Jets, Depeche Mode, and Keith Sweat, you’re “going out” and talking on the phone all the time. But the phone is attached to a cord, and you probably still had to dial the number. But you knew that pattern by heart.

11. Hair gel.

Once you’d talked for twelve hours, it was time to go on a date. You had to go to the drug store and get any number of neon green hair concoctions to look extra fly. Nobody in their right mind would make their hair sticky or pointy these days.

10. High bangs.

A lot of girls (and boys) did this on purpose to their bangs. This involved an hour of teasing, then holding up the gelled hair and spraying with hairspray, then blow drying, then doing it again. It’s okay for your teens to laugh at your yearbook photos. They are right to do so.

9. Swatch watches.

If you were extra fresh and fly, you had at least three Swatch watches strapped to your wrist. Back then, you never knew when Flava Flav was going to jump out from the bushes and demand to know what time it is. That’s why you needed more than one colorful watch.

8. Cigarette machines.

If you were a teen under eighteen, this was the only way to get your smokes…and they were everywhere. Restaurants, hotels, bowling alleys, and recreation centers were just a few of the places you could stand just a little taller, look over your shoulder, and buy a pack of cigs without anyone carding you. Now teens are ostracized for smoking, but back then, it still held a certain mystique for various subcultures.

7. True to life water guns.

This is an actual picture I took on my camera of my little brother and sister in 1987. That is a water gun. The only way you could tell back then was the red tip. Many were full on replicas of real weaponry, not the neon yellow super soaking devices you see today.

6. Road maps.

The skies did not used to be filled with satellites whose mission it was to tell teens how to get to the cineplex. If you wanted to go somewhere you’d never been before, you had to get out an actual paper map and plot a course.

These maps were only printed periodically, and did not account for construction or new businesses. If you got lost, you had to pull over and find a new route. Weirdly, we survived many a road trip to see our favorite bands this way.

5. Tipper Gore.

You may know her as Al’s ex, but to ‘80s teens, she was the devil incarnate, getting the Parents’ Music Resource Center to put parental advisories on all our music. Of course it was more complicated than that, but if you were a teen, you flipped her off every time she showed up on your TV.

4. Blockbuster video

If your parents wouldn’t let you see your favorite band because their music had been labeled, you could always rent a video to play in your VCR. These stores used to be as ubiquitous as Starbucks, and you had to physically drive to one to pick a movie to rent.

3. Encyclopedias

If your parents wouldn’t let you rent a movie because they themselves had a rental past due, you could always have a study date. And if you needed to look up anything at all, you needed access to an encyclopedia.

If your parents were upper middle class (or suckers), you owned a family set of these twenty-six books, one for each letter of the alphabet, that contained brief snippets of information on all the world’s known subjects at the time. If you were normal people, you went to the library to look at these and take notes.

2. Payphones.

When you were done at the library, you needed a dime and to find one of these to call your folks for a pick up. If you didn’t have a dime, you could call collect, which would charge your parents’ phone bill. A sneaky way to get past this would be to tell the operator your name was Will. U. Comepickmeupnow so that your parents would get the message, deny the charges, and know to fire up the Oldsmobile.

1.Waterbeds

If you want one of these now, you have to build it yourself, because they are awful. But in the ‘80s and even early ‘90s, anybody extra fly had a bed with a rubber mattress filled with water.

For a while, people thought these were rad. It was a great way to get girls to sit on your bed: “Have you ever felt a waterbed before?” The first couple of times you sit or lie on one, it’s very interesting. You do have the sensation of lying on a pool floatie. But you also quickly realize you are never getting out again, and are now buried in a corner somewhere, hoping someone has a phone with a cord long enough to call your parents for help.

Three decades from now, someone who is currently fifteen will write a holoblog with a similar title, showing pictures of iPhones and tempurpedic mattresses. Until then, be glad you live in the future, kids! For one, you don’t have stupid bangs.