technology

When I was a kid, I used to believe that changing our clocks actually made daylight savings happen, and that the sun would not change if everybody did not change their clocks.

Anon

This is actually an early adolescence belief: when I was about twelve through fourteen, I thought viral videos were ones that gave your computer viruses.

Anon

I used to believe that your computer mouse was really a mouse, in camouflage. I would pet them everyday...but I was puzzled why they wouldn't accept the food from me.

SAMANDMAU

When I was about 10 I went to my dad's office. They had just invested in a new piece of kit called a fax machine. My dad told me that it worked by tearing up the paper into little tiny bits and sending them down the wires, and at the other end they all got put back together again in the right order. I genuinely believed this, and in some respects I still do even though I'm 27.

Katie

I used to believe that when you shut the TV off,
when you turned it back on, the show you were
watching would be right where you left off. So whenever my parents said "Lets go" right in the
middle of my favorite saturday morning cartoon, I had no problem jumping up and shutting off the TV,
believing I would watch the rest when we returned. Thank God for my young brain's short attention span!

PixieGoth

I didn't quite get the concept of mechanical printing as a kid. I figured whoever wrote books must have been quite exacting and meticulous with his pencil to make all the little letters perfect and regular.

Brendan

1) I was about 10 in 1980 and worried frequently about nuclear war with the USSR. I didnt understand how it worked and somehow concoted this theory that our country and the USSR had buried wires that ran all the way through the Earth to just underneath the other country. If one wanted nuclear war you just push a button and poof! that country vaporizes.
2) One girlfriend I had didn't understand how the space shuttle left the Earth's atmosphere b/c she thought the Earth was surrounded by some sort of glass-like window. She was 25! My current girlfriend confessed to me that when she first immigrated to the US from Vietnam she saw her first vending machine in the airport. When she saw someone use it and get change she figured there must be a midget inside to couint the money. She was 18!

Ryan

someone once managed to convince me that there was such as thing as a sand magnet. i had been to the beach one day and was complaining about the sand in my shoes. he said "what you need, is a sand magnet"
"what?" i replied. so he told me
"you know that sand makes silicone, and silicone makes glass? well how d'u think men carry those big panes of glass across roads? they use a glass/sand magnet"
he almost managed to convince me that i could pick one up from a D.I.Y store.
thank god i didnt attempt to buy one...i might have looked a little silly. sad thing is...the person who told me this was a boyfriend, and it was only about 2 yrs ago....i'm 20 now!

jen

I used to believe that I could record sound with seashells. I tried recording the Pastor at my parent's church when I was a kid. I tried several times, and finally gave up, dissapointed it wouldn't work. It captured the ocean's sounds, after all!

Teala

I used to poke my fingers through and try to look inside of the In-Car tape deck at home all the time when I was about four or five years old. Thought there were little people singing inside of the machine and I really really wanted to meet them.

Sophie

When my mother was little, she believed that every time you put a record on the musicians would have to play the music. As a result, she never played records in the evenings or at weekends so the musicians could have some time off.

Adam

One time, I was playing in the living room while my mother was watching something and a character on the TV said, "Oh! I forgot to close the fridge door!", and so Mum turned to me and said something along the lines of, "Don't you ever forget to close the fridge door."

Then later, I saw an episode of "Spongebob Squarepants" (which is this wacky cartoon about a talking sea sponge) where Spongebob gets sick from leaving his fridge open.

Both of those made me think that every time you left the fridge door open, something random, but always very bad, would happen.

Anon

I used to think that when you send a fax, the actual paper that you put in the fax machine goes through the plug to the other place you're sending it to and comes out there

Anon

i used to think technology was "flying cars" and that we would have them by the year 2000.

josieg

When I was young I used to fear that when somebody takes a photo of me I would go inside the camera and cannot see my parents forever. For this reason I used to cry when anybody tries to take a snap of me

Priya

I used to believe that telegraphs worked by pulling on a cable and the person on the other end would be able to feel when it was pulled. I figured that to send a message a really long distance you had to pull really hard, but could never work out how someone would have enough strength to pull the cable hard enough to send a message overseas.

Claire

I used to believe that a calculator has a mind of it's own and knows what you're going to do next and sits there waiting, bored, for you to input the figures. Then when you do the same kind of calculation again it cynically thinks "oh here we go again, la-di-da, b-o-r-i-n-g".

Jason

I used to believe that somone used to have to go round and switch all the cats eyes on at night time, it was only when I got older I realised it was the cars headlights reflection that lit them up as they travelled along!

Tracy

I thought google was a place where they sold goggles online

google

The Fast Forward button on a cassette recorder is often marked simply “F.F.” for Fast Forward. I used to think that was the button you pressed to make it go “F-F-F-F-F-F” (which it is, of course, but that’s not what it means!).

Alan, Sheffield