It might be useful to define “obsolete”. A lot of you are taking obsolete to mean “no longer used”, which isn’t the definition that (IMO) is most applicable.
I mean, a DVD player is obsolete, as is a Blu-Ray player in large part (“obsolescent” is the term for one). But they’re still widely used, and movies are still produced in those formats.
And as for mechanical pencils, they were around from when I was in elementary school (1978-1984), but were expensive until sometime in the 1990s, when inexpensive single-use disposables came around (I always preferred the Papermate ones to the Bic ones, FWIW). Those are what dented the regular wooden pencil sales, not the existence of mechanical pencils.
And yet the phonograph was far inferior to a reproducing piano (which could reproduce the player’s touch, not just the notes) if you wanted to hear some good piano music.
Of course, the piano was hideously expensive compared to the phono.
I’ve seen them with additional instruments inside (mostly percussion and wind). Once, a particular bar/restaurant of my acquaintance had a (more or less) modern LED display hooked up Karaoke-style (showed you the words).
I can’t reach all the way up there to throw something at JacobSwan, but I would if I could.
I don’t think it was specifically networked PCs which killed standalone word processors. Home and office microcomputers made word processors obsolete long before it became common to connect them using anything more than Sneakernet.
I saw a very clever (and expensive) viewbox designed for auto-optimizing the viewing of x-ray films. This debuted just as computer viewing of images began to gain traction- I doubt they did well.
A few years before KODAK went bankrupt, they had invested billions in photoprinting machines. these were placed in drugstores, covenience stores, etc. the idea was that you would plug your didgital camera in, and print the photos you wanted. Didn’t work-i wonder where they all are now? Were they destroyed?
Fax machines are still heavily used in some industries, particularly healthcare. Just the other day a pharmacist told me that she was going to fax my doctor to authorize a prescription refill.
My doctor doesn’t do email. All prescriptions from the pharmacy, to her, are faxed, and it would appear to me that the pharmacy also doesn’t communicate by email.
For one, they believe it’s more secure, and for two imagine the spam and hate email doctors would get if they communicated via email, not to mention emails asking for advice and opinions.
My local Wal-Mart, too. It’s not a Kodak, it’s another brand, but you can upload photos from a digital camera, a smartphone, and presumably from a tablet, too. They’re far from obsolete.
When I began my present job in the cell phone insurance industry ten years ago, we were still insuring a few Palm Pilots and other PDAs. I think they left our inventory about eight years ago.
Tagamet and other anti-acid medicines. Great advance ca. 1981. No longer prescribed to treat ulcers.
Chlorofluorocarbon propellants and refrigerants.
Carbon disulfide and/or sulfur dioxide refrigeration.
Laserdiscs are a really fun technology that lasted from the late 1970s to the mid-late 1990s. Obsolete in a generation, replaced by DVD (higher quality) and video CD (lower quality).