I mentioned this the last time around something like this was asked but I'll do so again.
My dad was locked up in 1999 and came out in 2013. When he went in cell phones were "small" but were still noticeably bigger than what we had now and had flip bottoms or whatever they were. You know the kind I mean. When he got out he couldn't make a call from my uncle's smartphone, he had to have him make the call and you could tell my his voice that he was really disoriented by using it. As if he wasn't sure where to speak into.
He actually saw me sometime after sending some text messages on my phone and he just stared in fascination. "What the hell are you doing?" "Sending some texts." But all he saw was me seemingly swiping at random on my phone's screen. The really big related change, which he relatively shortly thereafter said to me and one of my younger brothers was, "Everyone has phones now. Everyone. They're always on them too. So I look around and see this and I think 'how can I make that work for me?'" Because clearly old habits die hard. Lol.
The other thing that absolutely freaked him out was in-dash GPS/entertainment setups and systems. When I got the "I'm out of jail" call the first thing he said before anything was, "Did you know cars have this GPS thing in them now?" "Yeah, dad, my phone has that too. It'll do turn-by-turn navigations and everything." "Well... you better still know how to read a map like I taught you! But for real, this thing is tripping me out. I don't understand it, all I know is I told your uncle to pull in at the first Whataburger because I've been dreaming of [insert his very fucking specific order here, which I'll spare you all unless asked otherwise] for almost 14 years."
The other thing was iPods. He understood what an mp3 player was in theory, a small device that you put music into, but seeing them was another thing entirely. He called from a halfway house he was staying in for awhile and he says, "So this guy here lent me his iPod while he was at work. It's neat, but really small. I'd be afraid to lose it. But let me ask you something, since you know about all this stuff. Where do you put the CD?" I laughed out loud. "They don't use CDs anymore. Now it's mp3s and you transfer them from your computer. Or you can just sign up for Spotify or Pandora or whatever and use it on almost whatever device you have." "Hey, hey. Just stop. You're tripping me out. I don't know what any of that is. I just wanted to call to tell you I was using an iPod."
It's great that the man who was an early adopter of all things tech is now blown away by the world we've all become used to. I mean he's fascinated by all of it, it's just learning to use it that has him perplexed. On a related note, he has learned how to send text messages. Albeit on a dumbphone. He had a smartphone for awhile but he says it kept fucking with him (which I take to mean he would hit random things unconsciously and then he'd notice the screen had changed and it pissed him off and/or annoyed him). I mean that or the phone literally fucked with him and he killed it or something. My dad was never one to exercise restraint or patience, so that's just as likely as "I couldn't figure out how to use it" and simply downgrading.
I should totally try and get him to do an AMA on here, I'm sure the idea would blow his mind. "People want to ask me shit? Wtf for?!" But I don't know if I'd want him around me and a computer that long, he would probably be asking what I was doing every moment and it'd get annoying.