Tamagotchi. That fad didn’t last too long.
Tell that to PSXer.
Huh? If you want a few better quality prints than your printer and paper will provide without spending a gob of money to upgrade, what do you do? In my case I wander down to my nearby Shoppers Drug Mart and stick my camera’s memory card in the photoprinting machine that they have. Works just fine.
The Pinfire cartridge.
Straddled the line between black powder muzzleloaders/percussion weapons and reliable rimfire and centerfire cartridges.
Came on the scene in the mid-1830’s, were very popular in Europe in the 1850’s-1870’s and then died a quick death when safer, more reliable cartridges became available.
R-134 refrigerant. Introduced in 1992 phasing out over the next year or two.
Not for everyone. I love to pencil sketch, but not with a perfectly fine point. So if I sharpen a pencil too much, I wear it down a bit first. Mechanical pencils are useless to me.
The FCC plans to start auctioning off more of the TV band next year. UHF channels 31-51 will be auctioned off. Stations on those channels can voluntarily move to a channel below 31, share a frequency with another broadcaster on a channel below 31, or discontinue broadcasting altogether in exchange for sharing in the proceeds of the auction. This has been in the works since 2010, been postponed several times, and is now scheduled to begin in 2016.
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/fcc-delays-start-600-mhz-incentive-auction-early-2016/2014-10-24
Huh? I prefer wooden pencils. They are not as ubiquitous as they were, but still have a healthy following.
there are more options than were, but that’s still use. Three drugs in that family are for sale otc in my drug store, and my doctor recommended i pick one up just a week ago.
How about canal barges? How long were they used? Replaced by trains and then trucks.
The blackberry and sidekick, etc. The whole original concept of the blackberry was as a dedicated device that could be used to efficiently read and reply to business email and phone messages on the go. The integrated keyboard is because the blackberry wasn’t intended to be an all-in-one do it all device, it’s for responding to emails, texts, and phone calls, period.
The large screen devices are all able to do it all, and you need the entire front of the device to be a screen because web pages, movies, games, etc all need as much screen area as possible.
The ipod and portable MP3 players - pretty much the same story behind it’s demise as the blackberry. All in one devices have mostly replaced them.
The White and Stanley steamers were driven out of business in a generation or less by the internal-combustion engine and the self starter, as were electrics.
Leno blows the lid off steamers (the opening is loud). But it’s back to the past and the 1909 Baker with electrics.
By the time the VAX came along, pretty much the only product lines getting attention were the PDP-11 and the 36-bit systems (-10, -20). The PDP-8 was hanging on in the form of microprocessor-based (from Intersil and Harris) DECmate word processing systems. You could still purchase support for oddball systems like PDP-15’s, but as a marketed product line, they were dead.
The DEC Large Systems Group was responsible for the 36-bit products as well as some of the more eccentric members of the VAX product line. The 8600 (originally to be called the 790) did not achieve the desired performance before shipment. The 8650 delivered the performance the 8600 was supposed to have and the 8670 was never released as the technology was too expensive and thus not price-competitive with newer models. All 86xx shipped with debugging logic that captured many thousands of logic states at the time of a machine problem and wrote them to the console hard drive. Rumor has it more man-hours went into the tools to analyze those dumps than went into the processor design. The 9000 family was also done by LCG and used some pretty bizarre component packaging (and that’s saying a bit, if you’ve ever seen a logic board from an 86xx).
There were PDP-11 based workstations (without native graphics, though sometimes with a Tektronix terminal for graphics, and there were 3rd-party Q-bus framebuffers). The 11/23 and 11/73 (and follow-ons) used microprocessors (the F11 and J11, respectively). But internal politics at DEC killed any hope of establishing the J11 as a part to be sold to other companies - part of DEC was very against it, while another part of the company expected the economies of scale from selling them to offset the higher-than-expected development cost). The end result was a very frustrated Product Manager (Kathy B) who was forced to play “20 questions” with anyone trying to purchase parts - “why do you want them”, “what will they be used for”, etc.). The Pro-350 and -380 were attempts to make a desktop PDP-11 “personal computer”.
VMS V4 was the first version to be fully native, IIRC. Even then there were some pieces that were still in PDP-11 code. I think TECO was one of the last holdouts - in later VMS versions where PDP-11 emulation mode was an option (the 86xx were the last VAXes that had hardware PDP-11 emulation), TECO had its own emulation wrapper.
Phonecards, crikey, yes. In the UK, we had a system where the card contained a strip that was burned away in segments as the credit was used, but yes - they were everywhere, then gone. Interestingly, thiscollector’s page has a newspaper headline ‘They’re here to stay’ !
Belgian phonecards had the same mechanism that Mangetout has described. They were cheap, portable, easy to use and widely available.
I used about one per week when I started University in 1992. IIRC, there was some sort of counter on the telephone showing you how much credit you still had, measured in units. I kept huge piles of used ones in my pockets (I was 17 and too cool to use garbage cans :rolleyes:).
I am pretty sure I stopped using them the following year. 1994 at the latest.
Man-made canals as the primary commercial highway are indeed obsolete.
But barges themselves are far from obsolete. The total tonnage moved on the Mississippi & other rives by barges is huge; a couple billion tons per year total.
There’s always an individual model of machine introduced just at the trailing edge of its tech era. And you’re certainly correct that the DC-7 was introduced just as it was about to be rendered obsolete.
But I’d be hard pressed to say the long range piston aircraft era lasted 5 years. The DC-4 and Lockheed Constellation were both designed just before WWII, but got diverted by the war. And the Connies & DC6/7s, not to mention the British equivalents, lasted in mainstream service until the mid 60s. TWA was the first mainline US airline to operate an all-jet fleet. It achieved that milestone in 1967.
So maybe circa 1940-1968 would be a better timeframe for the lifespan of what we’d recognize today as a “modern”-type airliner but piston-powered.
An interesting parallel is the turboprop airliner. The Vickers Viscount & Lockheed Electra had very short lives as mainline aircraft. And today nobody uses turboprops as mainline large airliners. But even today Bombardier and ATR are making and selling turboprops small airliners. ATR is now preparing to offer a nearly new design, confident sales will be brisk for another 20 years from today.
Gah, hopefully never. As someone who likes to buy whole beans and grind them (and that doesn’t even make me that fancy; I get them at the regular grocery store) and probably drinks about 12-16oz of coffee in the morning, I dread the idea of being confined to Keurig pods.
Also, color me amused at all the “Nuh-uh! <Obsolete technology> isn’t obsolete! I still have one and use it all the time!” posts in this thread. We are such a contrarian and pedantic bunch. 
This poses an interesting question.
Why do things become obsolete?
We assume it is because technology advances, making it cheaper and easier to do same work for less cost. But, that depends on the economic conditions.
Electric trams replaced horse-drawn buses around 1900 and lasted until more flexible diesel powered buses became ubiquitous in the 1930s.
However…trams remained viable in many cities and have been reintroduced in others because they are more efficient than buses when the roads are jammed full of cars. They are a common site in many European cities.
Big cities like London (south) and Manchester have modern electric trams. But…the diesel bus fleet in London is now migrating to hybrid electric power which leaves the air cleaner.
Road space available, reliability, flexibility, cost of fuel, pollution.
Some of these factors change over time and obsolete inventions can become viable again.
I think this is a perfect example of the situation of many of the technologies mentioned in this thread: they’ve become obsolete, yes, but not in the sense of being entirely useless and unavailable, but in the sense of having been replaced as the default technology and chased off into the niche markets.
While vacuum tubes are hopelessly obsolete for things like televisions, radios, and general-purpose computers, they are still the unsurpassed gold standard for guitar amplification, high-end home audio, and certain military aviation applications (they are far more resistant to radiation than transistors and integrated circuits). So while 99% of the population born after 1960 has never seen or handled a vacuum tube, they’re in high enough demand that private companies are reopening and refurbishing Cold War-era tube factories in Eastern Europe.