I think video is still referred to as “footage”. That is, how many feet long the tape is.
It’s slightly less absurd than that, I guess, because modern smartphones do at least still have telephone functionality.
Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.” It made sense from an ergonomic standpoint and from the point of view of someone who had no interest in understanding what was actually going on inside the machine. It’s a rectangular plastic thing you put in the machine to make it play whatever it says on the label. Just like a VHS tape, see? Same same.
The thing with tape was that it described the actual medium inside the casing, all the way back to the time before the tape itself came in the casing and was just loose on a spool. This would have been state of the art in the 1960’s. It’s possible that Original Series Star Trek foresaw the possibility of solid state-ish storage with no tape reels inside, but probably not. (Their computers also exhibit a distressing lack of displays, so I’m not sure the producers were too good at being prescient.) And for what it’s worth, I do know a few oldsters who now call the various small card based flash media formats “memory chips,” which I guess is pretty close to accurate. TnG did this too with their “isolinear chips,” whatever the hell those were supposed to be made of.
Anyway, we do have a limited selection of “phones” without the phone feature, e.g. things like the iPod Touch which was basically an early-gen iPhone with the phone cut out. Nobody could really decide what to call these, with the closest thing to a standard being “pocket media players,” which turns into the rather non-melodious “PMP.” (With this I guess we missed the chance to call wi-fi enabled variants “pocket internet media players,” and therefore have the opportunity to label these “PIMPs,” which is obviously much cooler.)
upvoted for all the work you put into that, but our judges would have accepted “technically not true”.
all the work
You have, like, seen my post history, right?
Lol
To jump on with this, sometime in TV, especially with sports broadcasts or recaps, I still hear hosts say something like, “let’s go to the videotape” even though basically no one is using tape anymore for these things.
Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.”
Our household referred to NES cartridges as “tapes”, as well. I think for our family, it came from us frequenting a local video rental store, usually once a week. We’d pick up some movies and some games every time we’d go. It started with just movies, though, because our local store didn’t carry games at first. But once we started renting games there, we just kept called everything in the bag “tapes”.
This sort of icon is still used in software all over the world:
I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I used a floppy disk.
Died to become the icon of saving!
I can, 2007… I used them as fkashdrives for school cause it looked cool and a flash drive was a luxury in my country. I lost a lot* of info because of an error and never used one again
They held like 100M. They were gargantuan.
My favorite thing about smartphones is that the “call” icon is an old-school telephone handset. I’ll bet younger people have never thought about what that thing is even supposed to be. My second-favorite is the gear icon for “settings” - like, what the fuck does a gear ring have to do with a list of options you can select? That isn’t even remotely close to what gears are used for in real-world mechanical devices.
Even my two year old can recognize a telephone handset, pick it up and hold it to her ear while saying “Hewwo?”
I’ll bet younger people have never thought about what that thing is even supposed to be.
Oh cmon.
Yes, this supposedly (according to some meme) happened with the save symbol, because a floppy is actually something a lot of today’s people have never seen or touched.
That sort of a handset for a telephone though? Do you think they haven’t seen shows or movies? Never saw a playset with a very classic model plastic phones?
One time I heard a colleague called the settings/gear icon in Windows a flower. I’ve also heard somebody refer to the PuTTY icon as “the two penguins”
Are we referring to this icon? Found here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY
If so I see no resemblance with a penguin at all.
Yep that’s the one. It was on the taskbar so significantly smaller than it looks here. I think he thought the lightning bolt was the beaks.
Sometimes late at night I squint my eyes to look at the icon and, for a fleeting moment, I can see two penguins.
So either your friend has terrible eye sight, was high, or is an idiot.
In German, a phone is called a “Handy”
In America, a handjob is called a “Handy”
In Germany, they employ the whole person, not just the hand!
I have yet to be actually paid for any hand job, in the USA or Germany.
And the girl a handmaiden
It’s hard for people to understand, but there was a time from the late 70’s to early 80’s where after a screen “transition” whatever came up next on the screen was called a “new page”.
So if you were playing Intellivision AD&D going in a dungeon from the overworld was a “new page”. Or playing Karate Champ… going from the Title Screen to the Fight Mechanics part was thought of as a “new page”. Beating the first maze arrangement of Ms Pac Man would bring you to the next maze on “page 2”.
I hear the snake/dragon. Quick, press the button and count how many “bips” you hear to see if you have enough arrows!
Do we not call them webpages still?
They explicitly are talking about movies and nobody uses the term page when talking about different scenes anymore.
How does the internet fit in here? They’re not saying we as a society moved away from the concept of pages…
Intellivision was a game console that came with the game Burger Time. It had many amazing (for the time- 1980s) games, such as Snafu, Metroid, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Minotaur.
I still have mine, but it no longer works. Big nostalgia, it looked like this:
Edit: added image
Transcription: Very basic not even 3d walls graphics with a figure standing. Arbitrary numbers provide HP as there is no armour. Spells, bows, or attacks were more complex though. Very bright colours with no shading; Minotaur was Purple.
I thought he was talking about vodeo games…you know…because of all the video games he mentioned.
“Pocket-Sized Portable Computer with Telecommunicative Radio Capability” is quite a long name, people would just get tired of saying that and call it by a simpler name.
Oh wait.
Portable Handheld Omnidirectional Networking Equipment is also pretty long, we could probably shorten it.
This guy phones.
We could make that an acronym!
Ironically the Brits got this right with “mobiles”. What’s the key characteristic of a cellphone? That it is portable and mobile.
but the key characteristic of a car is also the mobility.
🤔
Not if c/fuckcars gets their way.
Maybe since you can do your entire Job on it we can call it a hand Job
Or perhaps since we have it in our face all day we can call it a facial.
Or since we watch so much porn on it we can call it a video player.
Germans call it a handy.
PSPC w/ TRC lol
🎵Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me…🎵
To pull terms from a couple different sci-fi book series I like, we could go for Hand Terminals or Scribs. I like both, the former when I’m being grandiose and the latter when I’m feeling cute.
Didn’t we had Personal Digital Assistant before?
Hand Terminals imply you no longer have local storage, which wouldn’t describe smartphones today.
Also, I hate the idea of a “Hand Terminal” where everything is on the cloud. I mean…
spoiler
Eros Incident, comms all dead. Screen doesnt even turn on.
With actual phones, they could’ve used something like Briar!
Is the term “Pocket PC” still trademarked? Let’s start calling them that.
Removed by mod
My grandmother said the same when I showed her a Motorola Droid in 2009. She said “that’s a pocket computer”.
No it’s not… Because we know what a cellphone is.
In star trek they called it tapes because they didn’t know what they would be called in the future.
Moreover, it’s called a cellphone as a colloquial term. They’re correct nomenclature is “smartphone”.
Contemporaneously, in some of Larry Nivens’ fiction, it was called a “data brick”.
When you feel like you are getting too attached to the metaphor of the hour, abstract it up a level.
You’re going to play “moreover” and “nomenclature” then fuck up a “they’re/their”? Hang your head.
I also used colloquial. But then again auto correct is a bitch.
deleted by creator
I always liked mobile it works for everything you do on the go
I always liked the German “Handy” … cos it’s great for porn.
What do you call your phone? By its brand?
I call mine by where it’s made, as I do my Davenport.
I enjoy my China, and also my China, and how could I forgot my China…
Don’t forget the china, me old china.
I call mine Tim
I call mine Left Hand Free since half the time i am using it one handed.
I called mine Marvin.
Worse.
Is it worse that I still call them “telephones”?
p.s. I am British, which gives me some allowance for using strange, historical words.
Since you are British, international law allows you to call it a “wireless” if you like.
Thank you, and I shall do so. Very much appreciated :)
It should have been PDAs. For some reason that just didn’t catch on.
To me, I’ve always associated the PDA with devices w/o the phone capability, pre-smartphones. Those existed. Looked similar to modern smartphones, just bulkier and with less capability. That’s been the distinction for me.
Frankly, the only other word for (cell)phone or mobile has been smartphone. I don’t think we have a better word for them yet (pocket computer just doesn’t grab you).
They didn’t catch on because in the era they existed it was very difficult to achieve any kind of connectivity with them to the outside world. By the time that was able to be ubiquitous, smartphones were already happening.
We should have immediately called “smartphones” padds.
