technology

My older sisters had me believing that electricity was in the ground. I used to go around plugging radios and all sorts of stuff into the ground, and to my surprise, it never worked!

John Pratt

I once believed that you could draw circles on a piece of paper and if it looked like a record, and you could drop a needle on it and it would play music. I wondered what it would sound like, until my sister finally let me try it. Very disappointing!

Jeff

My father (who at near 80 doesn't really qualify as a kid anymore) knows one thing about computers: they can only put out what has been put in in the first place. So he once told me he couldn't understand how the computer programmers could know beforehand what text I would want to write one day.

Robin

One day my dad was making me and my younger sister breakfast, when we were very young. We asked him how the toaster worked, and our dad (i suspect now rather than admitting he didnt KNOW how the toaster worked, being a drama teacher and not a scientist) told us that a little man lived inside the toaster. His name was Mr. Frosty, and he had a special trident with a red-hot tip to cook the bread. We got obsessed with Mr Frosty and every morning (mystifying our mum) the three of us (Dad, Me and sister) would look intently into the toaster and say a polite 'good morning' to mr Frosty. My sister and I also used to receive little letters on tiny scraps of pink paper from mr Frosty, thanking us for keeping him in business with all the toast we ate.

Mr Frosty

i used to think that the word e-mail was a sex, like male, female and e-mail.
I'm so thick!

Confoozed

When I was 6 years old I wanted to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs so I wrote it on the side of a video tape, put it in the VCR and pressed record thinking this was going to work. It didn't.

Kris Curtis

When AOL first came out and had it's signature, "You've Got Mail" thing, I thought to myself, "How in the world do they know that the mail man already came by!"

Jenn

When I learned about faxes, I thought you could fax whole objects. Like in Willy Wonka. Ex. Scan a chair, and fax the info, and a chair comes out where you sent the fax.

Skashlee

As a child, I thought that the sky sometimes got dirty and needed cleaning (Incidentally, that was before I'd ever heard of air pollution.). I thought it because I'd heard of skyscrapers, and I envisioned that a skyscraper was a very long-handled blade for scraping the sky clean.

Adrienne

I was told by my grandma that there were things called wim-wams which were used for winding the sun up and down and which were kept on the side of the road just for that purpose. I've realised (only recently) that a wim-wam turned up every time Grandma saw a piece of farm machinery she didn't recognise. I expect there's a lot more of them now.

rosy

As a child, I was travelling by car with my younger cousin. He asked me why there was a flashing red light on top of the radio tower. I told him that was so the radio waves could find the tower at night. Of course, he believed me.

Joe Y.

I used to think I could make televisions or radios using household materials. I gathered napkins, pieces of wood, toothpicks, and other random objects, and set about arranging them and hoping for the best. I figured I just had to position them in SOME way and it would work.

Anon

I saw a commercial for AOL when I was young, and I didn't understand what computers or Internet or anything like that were, right?

So I figured that you get a computer, and set it all up, and when the mailman outside puts your fliers and bills and letters in the mailbox, your computer would tell you that 'You've Got Mail!'.

Why didn't they make the phrase 'You Got E-Mail!'? At least then I wouldn't have been so confused ... ^_^;

Mallory Maloney

I used to believe computer viruses were same as biological viruses.I thought that is why computers were kept in air conditioned rooms to prevent them from being attacked by these ' viruses'.

Ashish krishna

I remember hearing paedophile on the news a lot and I became familiar with computers while i was young. I honestly believed the PDF was short for pedophile since file is pbviously connected to documents.

e.g. I'll attach a pedophile to the email.

Anon

My dear old Grandmother has a little computer with which she only sends and receives emails. Every night, she places a blanket over the monitor to make sure the government can't see into her house.

Annie

On certain three speed bicycles, the shifter is made by a company called Sturmey Archer. On a particularly long ride one time, my mother told me that Sturmey Archer was the name of the little man who lived inside the hub and changed the gears. He had very large ears, which made the clicking noise as you rode, and changed the gears by sticking his nose in and out of the hub. This last bit isn't too far off from how a three speed hub works (sans extremely small man), so she might have been actually trying to teach me something useful...

Michael Pendleton

When I was 7/8 (can't remember!) I went to my dad's office and saw his employee's paper shredder that had a reverse button on it (in case of a paper jam) and I said, out loud, "Oh, that's a good idea, so if you shred the wrong thing, you can have it restored!" OOPS! I was so embarrassed!

Anonny Boy

I used to think that little people (or maybe mice) lived inside traffic lights, because there had to be something inside operating it.

em

In Denmark (where I grew up) a calculator is called something that would translate back into "Pocket Calculator".
Because of this I often wondered as a child, how such a device could calculate the contents of my pockets.

Anon