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The days of dial-up internet and painfully slow computer software may not seem long ago for some, but for others it is simply history.
A YouTube series has laid bare this distinction by confronting baffled 21st century teenagers with technology from the not-so-distant past.
This week, they came up against Windows 95, which was released before they were born.
One girl summed up the general mood: “It’s prehistoric, it’s an old dinosaur.”
Windows 95 was one of the first mass-market operating systems, which, upon its release in August 1995, brought computers into millions of households worldwide.
The Microsoft-developed software had people queuing at midnight to buy it at shops in the UK and came hand-in-hand with the first version of Internet Explorer. The system sold seven million copies in the first five weeks of its release.
But, despite acting as a catalyst for years of future technological development, few of the teenagers in the video had ever seen it in action.
In fact, even the computer was the source of some confusion to one boy, who said: “It’s a Dell. Not the singer (Adele), but a Dell.”
Almost all of them then failed to actually turn the machine on – instead repeatedly pressing the button to activate the monitor.
Things were only about to get more complicated, however, when they realised the computers did not have WiFi, but required a dial-up modem.
“Wait, what is a modem?” one perplexed teen tentatively enquired.
Benny Fine, one of the brothers behind the video, told Cnet that the results were “pretty great and also makes you feel quite old”.
