I was there

If you've ever worked customer service, you know that automatically providing instructions is warranted; half the people you run into in public would struggle to operate a spoon without guidance.

Just try getting a technologically illiterate person to click in next during an install is like finding hens teeth, except if it comes up with an error they'll dismiss it instantly without reading it.
- I used to work tech support during the Windows XP days. One time I had a customer call in and, as part of the troubleshooting process, I asked them to click their Start button. The customer didn't know what that was so I told them that it was the button in the corner of the screen. The customer said that they did that and the screen went blank. They'd hit the power button on their monitor.
And it is me. I am people.

Vinyl records being popular again is very cool and not a comeback I would have ever expected. What's really interesting to me is how much better quality they are than in previous decades.

Records had been around for a century (vinyl for about 40 years) by the time they were phased out of mainstream music distribution in the late 80's. Over time, manufacturers used cheaper and thinner vinyl to the point where they were just complete and utter shit.

The ones they put out today are thicker and closer to audiophile grade than their predecessors.

It seems hit or miss. Most of my vinyl is 180 gram, I guess because it isn't the primary means of consumption for music these days, people expect to pay a little more for better quality. But I definitely have a lot of cheaper, thinner records that I bought brand new in the last few years.
- People probably kinda forgot how to cost cut when it went out of style, as the vynl market was mainly just audiophiles for a little while, and now that the market is growing again there's more incentive to cut costs again.
Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.
Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.
Similar story with VHS to be honest.
There's a "minimum acceptable quality" which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.
Audiophile now is very different, because it's not a mass market consumer format any longer - it's a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.
- Really? I've heard the opposite: that modern cassette players are garbage because they all reuse the same Chinese mechanism with mono playback and no Dolby noise reduction.
  If you want a good cassette player, you're supposed to buy one from the 80s or 90s, preferably a Sony.
Hasn't vinyl been around longer than 1985?
I suddenly feel old, doing the math wasn't nice to me
- They're saying that by the late 80s when cassettes and CDs ultimately replaced the record, records had been in use for over a century, and the recognizable 12" disc format had been in use for 40 years prior to their replacement.
Erm I have vinal records my dad gave me from the 50s
You are correct they are thin as shit though compared to the ones I buy now

My eldest asked me "have you seen the memes about this One Pound Fish guy?"

I'm like "dude, I paid my 79p to try and get that song to Number 1"... back when it mattered.

I'mma be honest, I've used disposable cameras, but not in a long time. I'd appreciate the reminder if I were handed one. Something about winding after (or before?) each photo?

For most of them, it doesn't matter. When the film is wound on, it would hit a ratchet stop to prevent you winding it beyond the next film cell anyway - which would only be released when the shutter button was operated, so you'd intuitively feel whether the film had been already wound forward or not.
This thread reminds me of inexpensive package holidays as a child. It's brilliant.
- When I was a kid my parents used to buy loads of those disposable cameras whenever we went on holiday to keep me and my sister quiet. It's hard to believe that we found it diverting.
  Today's kids would not be happy with anything less than an iPad.

Isn't showing how to use the camera just a common courtesy if you're asking them to take a photo for you? It's not really specific to a disposable camera, nor today. Even back in the day, people would do the same, despite cameras generally having a big clear button to take the photo with.

Two teens asked me if I would take their picture and I said sure. One of them handed me her phone and I ran away with it. Hey, free phone.

(shut up, it's a fucking joke)

I actually saw a shop that developed film the other day in my local area. Genuinely surprised and delighted me. Got a brief trip through time and space to nostalgia land where I was constantly being told off for taking photos of landscape.

Okay Boomer