Here’s a great little exercise I use to do when brainstorming ideas. The question is, “What will my kids never know, understand, or experience?”(in a tech-centric aspect). Here’s some quick thoughts:

1. How life was like before the life changing credit card.
2. Why we had phones tethered to the walls, or even owned a land-line.
3. What life was like before we carried cell phones around.(easy to experience though)
4. Why we used Fax machines, typewriters, VCRs, Cassette tapes, Film, and maybe CDs
5. What life was like without a computer.
6. How freakin hard it was to find apartments before Craigslist was created.(this counts for many life changing internet services, ebay, email, google, IM’s, weather, stocks, rss, dictionary.com, etc)
7. How hard it was to stay in touch with friends before the days of e-mail.
8. How people use to hang out with just you, not you and their thousands of phones calls.
9. How people could only do one of these at a time: read, watch tv, listen to music, IM, and work.
10. How phones once had something called “1-way text messaging”, where you could receive, not know from who, nor reply..(I still own this phone)
11. How we watched an hour of tv, 20 minutes of it being ads.(whoohoo for tivo)
I’d probably change some of these a bit, but it’s a quick jot. If you have some good ones, let me know.