There’s a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to what counts as an invention, how many years counts as a generation and what obsoletion means, but as an example the video tape recorder became ubiquitous when I was a kid in the 80s and is now pretty much obsolete.
Are there earlier examples of useful products that came and went as fast?
The Wang word processor. Stand-alone word processor system that meant you didn’t ahve to type and re-type on a typewriter.
Killed by networked PCs with word processing software that could be used for all the other things PCs can do.
From market leader to bankrupt in about 20 years, if I recall correctly?
Depending on how you define invention there will be many examples within the world of computing, since PCs themselves have only been widespread since the early 80s.
e.g. the 3.5" floppy disk. Ubiquitous (there were around 5 billion of them around in 1996), then obsolete.
Answering machines.
Food processors.
Pornographic magazines.
Leg warmers.
Aerobics.
Stone washed jeans.
Billy Ray Cyrus.
Mullets.
The list goes on…
Yeah, which is why I used an example contemporary with the PC explosion and asked about earlier examples. 
The three first examples have a much longer reign than one generation, although for answering machines you could make a case for the particular technology used, considering my use of video tapes as an example. But neither food processors nor pornographic magazines are obsolete the way VCRs are.
You’re going to have definitional issues.
For example, take the minicomputer: Originally, it was a computer in the company car price range (tens of thousands of dollars, as opposed to hundreds of thousands or more) which was physically smaller and cheaper to run than a “real” computer, which everyone in 1960 knew was an IBM which took its own room and A/C unit and polyester-clad card-punch-operating DP Professionals to run. This was enabled by the fact transistors allowed us to put, like, five whole components on a card smaller than your average sandwich! (Oooh, aaah!)
Laugh all you want, but the PDP-8 family sold like hotcakes and found itself integrated into things like assembly lines, doing stuff that previously had been done by specialized machinery because any previous computer would have been too big, too temperamental, and too expensive to use there.
By the mid-1970s, the new Tiny Joke Systems were these cute little things being made by fruit companies that only idiots bought stock in and bizarre little boxes named after places Captain Kirk went to. Minicomputers were now the middle of the pack, not the ultra-low-end, running database software and actual, you know, operating systems, instead of being the computer you used when you were too poor to afford a computer.
By the time the VAX came out, it was extremely hard to tell where the minis ended and the mainframes began: Everything was built around microprocessors, everything ran some variety of Real OS (Multiple Real OSes, in the case of a System/370 running VM/370 and a few guests…), and the budget systems were now clearly targeted at home users, which minicomputers never were. (Well, there was that one time, but a one-off recipe database system in a clearly deranged wish book shouldn’t count…)
So, did the minicomputer die off when the VAX brought a minicomputer architecture to the high end? Did it die when mainframes found a niche as high-volume high-availability databases instead of being the default style of computer? Or did the basic concept evolve into what we now call rack-mounted systems, somewhat specialized versions of PCs designed to do networking tasks?
I don’t take any firm stand. I will restate my point: This thread will get mired down in people arguing over what, exactly, qualifies as “obsolete” and expanding definitions in odd ways to prove points.
Oops, I read it as something like “are there other examples?” :smack:
The cassette tape: come and gone in a generation.
Derleth makes a good point - to make it more complete - perhaps the crucial thing is not to focus on an implementation, but on an invention. A minicomputer isn’t an invention.
Digital systems have brought about both a plethora of inventions with limited lifetimes, but also brought about the commercial death of many other products based upon other inventions.
You could argue that the LP lived about a generation. But that doesn’t really take into account about four generations of audio recordings based upon dragging a needle through valleys whose geometry directly encoded the audio, right back to Edison’s cylinders.
Home VCRs were an implementation of rotating head magnetic tape recording. That did last about a generation, from the first 2 inch AMPEX behemoths, to the last 4mm DAT. In data recording rotating heads really only just died out. But we all have our PVR or HTPC boxes. So the home video recorder is arguably alive and well.
Magnetic tape recording is on its death legs, and the entire period it lasted is probably about 2 generations. Rotating media magnetic recording is probably going to vanish in a decade, and from the first magnetic disk to then, a couple of generations.
Polaroid film probably truly lasted about a generation. Other than as a toy it is a technology without a use case. But photosensitive film has a very long history, and hasn’t gone yet. (But it is feeling very poorly.)
Acoustic coupler modems?
Aviation technology made insane strides in the first half of last century. You would have a huge list of inventions that came and went.
I don’t think you’re saying that early VAXes used microprocessors? The 78x family were TTL for the actual VAX CPU (the front-end was a LSI-11). The 750 used gate arrays and the 730 was implemented with a technology similar to bit-slice. The 86xx was ECL macrocells. The first microprocessor-based VAX would be the MicroVAX II (the original MicroVAX had an ALU chip and an FPU chip, but the rest of the processor was implemented in TTL).
I’ve seen this type of comment before and remained silent, but Polaroid film was used extensively in my company to photograph problems we wanted to share with suppliers and shippers.
In fact, we had a Polaroid mounted to a microscope to take pictures of printed circuit board defects, and I’m pretty sure we weren’t the only company in the world using such “leading edge” technology at the time.
This wasn’t just a toy to share beaver pictures with Larry Flynt, although it worked well for that too.
The electric pencil sharpener arrived on the scene just in time for mechanical pencils to make its functionality moot.
Right, I should have known I’d get that one wrong. The VAX was longer-lived than I thought; I didn’t realize it was ever TTL, for example, and even then I was sloppy with my terminology: I should have said something like “IC-based” instead of only using the term “microprocessor”. Anyway, my point is that DEC used the VAX architecture to replace practically their whole range of systems, eventually killing off the definitely-a-mainframe PDP-10 line and replacing it with the top-end VAXen, which were, after all, designed as extended versions of the definitely-a-minicomputer PDP-11 line.
I should have used the workstation as an example: It was never stringently defined, instead being used for a number of different kinds of systems, all sharing the basic properties of being expensive computers designed to be used by one person at a time which fit near, under, and, eventually, on a desk; later versions extended that to having some way to be connected to a LAN and having better graphics and, sometimes, sound capabilities than home computers had. This category was fairly well-defined circa the era of the Xerox Alto, but it was already faltering when the Apple Lisa was redesigned into a member of the Macintosh family and it was pretty much gone when the average desktop system was built around an 80386 or a 68030 and could handle a mouse, a color display, and an OS which could run multiple programs at once. Basically, every defining feature of a workstation gradually migrated into the home computer realm, from graphics cards to Ethernet hardware to really big hard drives; I suppose you could say that the current definition is “a really expensive desktop system that isn’t meant for gaming” but what’s the point.
Mechanical pencils never replaced traditional color pencils, making electric pencil sharpeners still very much relevant (I have a newer one on my desk).
I just bought a new electric pencil sharpener last week.
Sorry, my friend…not obsolete, merely taking a break. Mullet shall return, with a great vengeance.
Sorry, I should have been more clear - it is now a toy. You can still get it.
I have a Polaroid back for my medium format camera. Probably a bit of a white elephant, but I did use it for macro work - and occasional difficult lighting setups. No doubt, it was very useful, and had a wide range of valuable use cases before the advent of digital.
Heh. I have a near complete set of 11/780 boards, plus a MicroVax II main board in storage. It makes for interesting contemplation as to how far we have come. Worth remembering - the compete name is Virtual Address eXtension 11. Where 11 is PDP-11. Early versions of VMS still had huge slabs of the OS and libraries written in PDP-11 machine code. They didn’t drop the compatibility mode feature for quite some time.
The pager? Cool little gadget, but obsolete within less than 10 years due to the introduction of mobile phones. Upps, just found out that the first one was introduced in the 50s, so were around much longer than I figured. Link