Family living like it's 1986

From The Register:

Disappointed that their children seemed to enjoy using iPhones and iPads more than playing outdoors, a couple in Guelph, Ontario, Canada has chosen to spend a year using only technology invented before 1986.

"That's kind of when it hit me," 26-year-old father Blair McMillan told the Toronto Sun. "Because I'm like, wow, when I was a kid, I lived outside."

As a result, McMillan, his 27-year-old girlfriend Morgan Patey, and their two sons, Trey, 5, and Denton, 2, have spent the last five months living a lifestyle that's a throwback to the 1980s: no mobile phones, no internet, and no computers.

When he wants to take pictures of his children, McMillan says, he does it the old-fashioned way, using a film camera and sending the snaps out to be developed. Each roll costs him around $20.

The family navigates the roads using paper maps, goes to the bank in person rather than banking online, and looks up facts using a set of print encyclopedias from the 1960s.

MP3 players and even compact discs are out. The family only listens to music on cassette tape and watches movies on a VCR, though it's not clear whether they have limited themselves to a diet of period media.

McMillan insists the experiment isn't about being a Luddite. "I have nothing against technology," he told the Waterloo Record. "It improves fuel efficiency and health care. I'm not anti-technology. I wanted to taste, and I wanted my kids to taste what it would be like without it, and to see if we could actually do it."