Feeling Old

Here are some cute French kids trying to make sense out of 1980's technology:

(YouTube video.)

See, even today kids think 8-track players are "the bomb." And what about the kid who tries to use the 3-1/2 diskette as a camera? Not a bad guess really -- the way that little metal part slides open and shut. But let's not forget that kids are pretty smart! As the Indian "hole-in-the-wall" experiment showed us, kids can pick up computer skills on their own with no supervised instructions.

I'm sure those French Kids would have figured out the diskette and the track ball if they had a compatible computer system to use in their experimenting. But in isolation, each one of those artifacts is useless.

And realizing that these once-cool things are "artifacts" makes me feel plenty old.