I was picking up some items I ordered online at Sears this afternoon and as the warehouse clerk handed me the items at the pickup kiosk he entered a few details into his handheld scanner PDA style device. I glanced at it and had a double take. It was an old school monochrome Palm IIIXenclosed in a protective plastic housing. It kind of looked like this device.
I asked him about it and he indicated it was indeed a Palm Pilot. He said that parts were getting harder to get but they were still using them. It was real blast from the past. Sears is getting it’s moneys worth out of those things after 18 years!
My anachronistic check out experience: I occasionally grab take out pizza from a small business restaurant. I swear the cash register is a 1970s era adding machine. The one inch wide receipt displays only numbers and dollar signs…no name of the business…no words.
I used PDAs for ebook readers for years, but used Handspring Visor models. Got them cheap on Ebay years after they were obsolete as PDAs (including group lots of broken units, which I would swap parts between to build working units.) I moved on to “real” ebook readers once they broke the $200 level, but I still have the Visors around–probably at least 10 of them of various models working, plus various parts of several more.
When I worked in local government, one of the tenders for a new system (for health and safety checks on playground equipment) was a PalmOS spplication - this was only a few years ago - and the platform was already obsolete then.
The vendor suggested that we buy a fleet of random used Palm devices on eBay (or they could source used devices on our behalf, as a chargeable service - probably also just buying them on eBay).
And the dot matrix printers! Last big trip encountered them twice: once at the airport gate and the 2nd at the car rental place.
I keep and use old electronics/computer stuff years longer than most people. But even I ditched our dot matrix printer at least 20 years ago. (OTOH, still have half a big box of perforated printer paper. Use it for scratch paper when I remember to.)
Dot matrix printers are still in production - there’s a niche where they are still used for printing multi-part NCR invoices and forms - where the customer signs something and the sheets are then all separated.
There’s still a bit of that around, so still a demand for new dot matrix printers - Lexmark has one that can be connected to a network
Yep, they are still being used by various systems to record alarms (like on ships).
For these applications, it needs to print one line with a time, a system, and a alarm code on it. Then sit there for 30 minutes and print one line again. Perfect for a continuous feed dot matrix printer.