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By Mihar Dias December 2025
According to this handy little scorecard making the rounds on social media, you give yourself one point for every thing you’ve never done. Rotary phone? Floppy disk? Typewriter? VHS? Dial-up internet? https://www.facebook.com/share/1CEUFLqDB7/
I proudly scored zero.
Or, depending on how you read it, I scored a magnificent 20 points, because I have done all of them — repeatedly, competently, and without once complaining to customer support.
This makes me a fully certified member of that endangered species known as people who lived through it all.
I come from a generation that began by dialing a phone in a booth — an actual booth, with a door, a smell, and a floor that suggested many emotional breakdowns had occurred before yours — and has now arrived at a point where we can shout commands into thin air and expect obedience.
We went from feeding coins into a machine to feeding data into the cloud. One required exact change; the other requires blind faith.
Oh yes, I am 79, going on 80, and I wear this score like a war medal.
We used rotary phones that punished indecision. If you dialled the wrong number, the phone didn’t politely offer to “edit” or “undo.” It sighed, clicked, and made you start again — a valuable early lesson in accountability.
Floppy disks actually were floppy. Encyclopaedias were not apps but furniture. If you owned a full set, visitors knew immediately that your family was either educated or very optimistic.
We listened to music on vinyl, cassette tapes, CDs, and a Walkman that clipped onto your belt like a badge of cool rebellion.
The boombox was our Bluetooth speaker, except heavier, louder, and more likely to provoke a public argument.
VHS tapes had to be rewound — not for nostalgia, but as a moral obligation to the next human being.
And then there was dial-up internet: that symphony of screeches announcing that the future was arriving… slowly… very slowly… and only if nobody picked up the phone.
My cohorts — oh, my cohorts — would have a field day with today’s technology. These were people who could type an entire thesis, a book, or a newspaper column on a tiny, weeny “Brother” typewriter.
No backspace worth mentioning. No spellcheck. Just conviction. Every typo was a philosophical commitment. You didn’t delete mistakes; you lived with them.
I remember doing this aboard a train proudly advertised as travelling at a high speed of 60 miles per hour. The train shook, the letters danced, and yet we believed this contraption was the most brilliant invention ever. Which it was — until the next brilliant invention came along.
Paper maps got us places. Phone books got us numbers. Cheques paid bills. Postcards carried news slowly, but with better handwriting and far less outrage.
So yes, I have done all of the above. I lived through it all. And I am happy — genuinely happy — to be part of a generation that has watched the world shrink from booths to pockets, from cables to commands, from “please wait” to “done.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ask a machine to do something using only my voice — and then quietly marvel at it, like a man who once thought a typewriter on a train was the peak of human achievement.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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