Your parents once waited FOUR MINUTES for one photo of a dog. On purpose.
Go and find a grown-up. Ask them to make the noise the internet used to make. Go on - I'll wait.
They did it, didn't they? And they enjoyed it far too much.
Please Wait... Loading is the funny, true story of the olden days - back when a single photograph took four whole minutes to arrive, the internet came down the telephone line with a scream, and a floppy disk held less than one photo from the phone in your pocket. Your parents lived like that. Voluntarily. For years.
But this isn't just a giggle about old machines and enormous mobile phones. It's really about you:
- why your parents keep saying "not now, not that, not so late"
- how the clever new machines - yes, AI - actually work, minus the fear and the hype
- and the best secret of all: everything you tap on was made by a person, and one day that person could be you.
Across 15 short, laugh-out-loud chapters - with a cheeky dinosaur, a well-meaning robot, and a lot of gloriously old technology - it carries kids from the slowest computers ever built to the smartest machines alive, and quietly hands them something better than a screen: the itch to make things.
Not just for kids. Every grown-up who grew up rewinding cassettes will laugh, wince, and remember it all - which makes this the rare book a parent and child actually enjoy reading together.
Fully illustrated in warm, nostalgic colour. Ages 8 and up (and parents).
Warning: contains modems, floppy disks, one very large mobile phone, a butler who was always wrong, and an entirely reasonable explanation of why your parents are like this.