Twenty technologies that divide generations on a forum

Twenty technologies that half of Spain used and the other half couldn't even switch on

How many of these twenty things have you done in your life? A rotary phone. A 3.5-inch floppy disk. A typewriter. Recording with a video camera. Listening to a CD on a Discman. Rewinding a cassette with a pen. Renting a movie at a video store. Connecting to the internet via dial-up and praying nobody picked up the phone at home. The list has been circulating for a while and works like a carbon test: whoever reads it all without raising an eyebrow is of a certain age, and whoever gets lost from point eight onward is of another.

What's striking isn't the nostalgia. It's the asymmetry. Some answer "all of them" and others stop halfway without having done anything strange: they were simply born later. The border isn't marked by will, it's marked by the year the device at home was made.

Which devices make the list and why

The inventory mixes three different layers of obsolescence. The first is physical: the fax, the rotary phone, the paper phone book. The second is about media: VHS, cassette, vinyl, the floppy disk. The third is about habits: calling the radio to request a song, sending a postcard, chatting by SMS for hours with just enough credit.

There's a nuance running through the whole conversation: the virtual pet and the virtual postcard are seen as the most modern of the bunch. Several readers dismiss them precisely for that reason, because they caught them already grown up. And the video store appears as the great absentee for the youngest: some admit they don't know what that was.

The fax isn't dead and that bothers people

Against the cliché that all this is archaeology, the uncomfortable fact appears: the fax is still used in professional settings more often than the modern narrative admits. Some kept it in the office until relatively recently and others keep it at home as a leftover phone, unable to decide to unplug it.

That breaks the clean timeline. It's not that one generation used these things and another didn't: it's that some remain operational in specific niches while the rest of the world considers them buried.

The cassette tricks nobody could repeat today

The richest part of the material is the technique. Recording over your parents' tape by stuffing little balls of paper in the gaps. Rewinding with a Bic pen, because another one wouldn't do. Repairing a broken tape by joining the ends with sticky tape. Making a loop to listen to the recording backwards. Overlaying tracks with two players, one recording and one playing.

It's pure operational knowledge, passed on without a manual, and today it seems as exotic as navigating with a paper map. Someone sums up the feeling: technology back then was nicer because you didn't have to remember a thousand passwords or verify yourself for the fifth time in an app for any procedure.

The list grows at the bottom: what was missing

No list of twenty survives scrutiny. Additions soon appear: sending an SMS from a payphone, collect calls, going out for drinks with the removable radio-cassette on the bar, riding a motorbike without a helmet, writing and receiving letters, receiving money inside an envelope, smoking on the metro, buying loose cigarettes, watching the scrambled porn on Canal Plus, tuning a valve television with a voltage stabilizer because the bulbs at home lit at seventy percent.

The full tally of what each person has done, with its nuances and exceptions, gives a generational portrait far more precise than any survey. And far more fun.

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In the end the question isn't how many you've done, but how many you've done without realizing they were old. That's the figure that doesn't show up in any statistic.