Hi fm2606, I left ambulances in 1991. Probably was 1986 when we got Lifepack 5 (the first one that came in under $12000 AUD and totally manual, the lifepack 3 was in limited use from I think 1983 but way too expensive to have more than two for my city (1M people), cost was a real barrier). On introduction the only thing we had for conductivity was a gel. After a year or two the gel pads came out. The "us kids" was really a comment about my amazement at after more recently being trained in AED and the darn thing does everything for you. It has a whole lot of technologies that simply weren't available then (recognise rhythms, text to speech, record rhythms to storage etc etc). So much cheaper, lighter, don't need spare batteries, and seeing the huge change that technology has brought. (P.S. We were ignorant in the 80's. No gloves, no hard hats, had to wear ties and a fancy cap. No reflective wear except for bright yellow raincoats that we only wore to stay dry.)