Which is doubly obsolete because people still make the window crank gesture to signal others to roll them down.
Club DJs who spin vinyl using turntables with styluses are fairly commonplace.
Computer diskettes are still known as “floppy disks” although they are now made with rigid plastic casings. (At least it provides a shorthand way to distinguish them from the “hard drive.”)
!!! Is that really where the word comes from? (Sounds plausible, to be sure – I’m getting a picture of techs trying to clean dead bugs out of the vacuum-tube bowels of ENIAC.)
Yup. Here is the Wikipedia entry on it. They even have a picture of the little bugger.
I was amused when I got my latest cell phone, and the little symbol indicating “make a call” looks like a stylized version of an old-fashioned phone receiver, and the little symbol for “end the call” looks like the same receiver, but sitting on a little base, as though it’s been “hung up.” By the time my kids have cell phones, they might not even understand what those little pictures are supposed to be!
And let’s not even get into the Information-Age usages of “file” and “folder” and “document”! Although, to be fair, these are not words with obsolete origins, they are simply used in a broader way than their original meanings.
How long will the word “tube”, meaning a TV or computer screen, remain with us, with CRT(ube)s going the way of the VHS tape? Everybody knows what Youtube is, and I don’t think Youscreen or Youmonitor is likely to catch on.
Do people ever still refer to the computerized index in a library as the card catalog?
I think “icebox” will remain with us at least in occasional use.
and one can still visit a “one-horse town.”
I recall a bit from the '80s workplace-satire comic strip Duffy (haven’t seen it in years, don’t know who wrote/drew it, can’t find anything by Googling): A female executive (forget her name) comes across Miles, a snooty uberyuppie, who is working at a computer keyboard.
FEMALE EXEC: Typing, Miles?
MILES: I beg your pardon! I am an executive, and executives do not type!
FE: Oh . . . Well, what do you call what it is that you’re doing?
MILES [with smug smarmy smirk]: I’m keyboarding!
As **Mycroft’s ** Wikipedia cite makes clear, this is NOT the origin of the term “bug.”
looks at her watch
Could’ve fooled me.
OTOH, there was a time when many clocks struck the quarter, half, and three-quarter hours. So I’ve read. Actually, I’ve never known a striking clock to sound at anything but the hour and half-past.
My grandfather’s clock (which was *not * a Grandfather Clock) struck the quarters and halves. Bloody irritating it was, too.
The quarter would be one quarter of the “Big Ben” chime. Bing bong bing BONG.
The half hour would be that sequence twice over.
The three quarter, three times through.
The hour, four times, a pause and then one long sonorious BONGGGG! for each hour.
Us kids used to hate hate *hate * staying overnight with our almost deaf grandparents.
I still light the fire, even though it’s an electrically operated oil heater.
My grandfather clock strikes quarter hours using the “Westminister” chime sequence of four tones (C, B-flat, A-flat, E-flat). Four notes for a quarter, eight notes for half, 12 for three-quarters, 16 for hour, played in groups of four. It also chimes hourly (after the other tones), one bong (lower B natural) for each hour. Quarter hour chimes can be enabled/disabled (all of them at once) and hour chimes can be enabled/disabled. You can have [ol][]Quarter hour chimes only[]Hour chimes only[]both quarter and hour chimes[]none (silent)[/ol]Cheap cookoo clocks often chime on the hour & half only, but I’ve seen larger ones with the quarter-hour sequence using 2 birds and a metallic chime. There are many, many varieties of this – you should hear what it sounds like at my favorite clockmaker’s shop around noon. If they don’t all chime at once, he has some ‘splainin’ to do.
I burn the midnight oil all the time.
The ‘shift’ key on the keyboard doesn’t actually shift the typewriter carriage.
The last time I worked in a library, spring of 2007, the database program was called “Cardcat”, I can’t remember if we called it a card catalogue or not.
True, but it does “shift” the case from lower to upper (or vice-versa), which in itself is a carryover from manual typesetters who used storage bins, called cases, to store individual type letters. That’s like two levels removed from current practice.
Gotta disagree with hanging up the phone – it’s not in the least bit obsolete as I’m sure an astronomical number of businesses and offices do not have cordless phones in them. I can tell you that every classroom in my district has a wall-mounted, corded phone, and every office has a corded desk phone - that’s a thousand phones accounted for in one school district in one city, and we’re far from the largest district in the area…Heck, I have four phones at home, and two of them are wall mounted.
The word “case” is two levels removed – the word “shift” only one.
Recording artists still refer to their upcoming albums (sometimes even to their new record) even though new LPs are only pressed once in a blue moon and then for collectors. Likewise, artists still have gold and platinum records. (True, record can come from the verb “to record”, but everybody has the same round black plasticky image in their mind when you say record.)