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Recently a tweet in which a user asked how to burn music to a CD went viral. The tweet had many millennials in their feelings because they were either shocked, laughing or feeling old.
Some of us were perhaps feeling and doing all three.
Maybe its just the generation z in me but how did people burn CDs? Like how did you just get a blank CD and put songs on it? pic.twitter.com/EVUVaDX645
— alyssa (@tamaranians) October 21, 2018
And naturally Twitter had a lot of jokes in response to that, most of which went along the lines of “I’m nine million years old”
Is this what getting old feels like?!? https://t.co/l7KiQGXr0W
— Breanna Danielle (@ItsBreDanielle) October 21, 2018
1. Dial up internet
Out of all the nostalgic things in our life – this relic from the dark ages is one no one will ever, ever miss. Not only were you limited in terms of the amount of time you spent on the internet (your telephone bill and internet bill were one), but you also had to wait for your mom to get off the phone to connect to the internet.
The worst thing though was having to listen to that awful dial-up sound – it kind of sounded like a cross between a squealing pig and a witch’s screeching. Oh and the speed - this is what we all felt like:
READ MORE: Power-walking – the latest nostalgia trend to try?
2. Cassette tapes + recording your favourite song on the radio
The joys of making your own mixtape made us all feel like we were our own DJs in the making. The only problem with this is that often when we were recording music, one of the following things would happen:
a) you’d only record half the song because you had to run to the radio to press the button
b) you’d never experience the joy of hearing the end of the song because DJs often interrupted and spoke over the song so your mixtape wasn’t never quite what you wanted it to be.
TBH, it was a joyful thing when the song you wanted came on and you hit the record button and you knew that you had it ... Then the DJ talked over the last minute of the song and you cried.
— Simon Kearns (@spiralisation) October 23, 2018
Of course, worst of all was when the cassette reel got all tangled and you had to use a pen or pencil to twist it and get it back in order.
3. Floppy disks
Before flash drives and hard drives we had floppy disks. And when we did we used to think that 32MB was so huge. What did we even save on them that we thought those disks could carry the world? MS Word documents?
Today we laugh when someone dares to sell us a 1GB flash drive.
4. Instant messaging and chat rooms
And no, we’re not talking about Whatsapp. Remember when you still had Hotmail or AOL addresses and you could just connect to the chat rooms and talk to anyone.
Those were fun times. I made plenty of internet friends through the MSN chatrooms – and the beauty of it was that there were themed rooms that you could join at any time and jump in on any conversation that was currently happening.
You could either be part of a general group or you could private message someone. Of course, because people like to ruin things, it quickly became so toxic that MSN eventually shut down their chat rooms.
5. Nokia 3310 phones were all the rage
You were the real MVP if you had one of these. With it came the iconic snake game, but also the fact that with the advent of these phones – and more like these – you had to work extra hard to send messages.
Touch screen was but a concept, so you had to press that button at least three times before getting that letter you wanted in order to sms your friend.
Ah, those were the days.
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