Disposable flash cubes for cameras
I used one of those not an hour ago to get into a can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup.
Remember the VCR+? And all of those code numbers printed in the TV listings?
The ZIP disk isn’t obsolete, but rather it died an inglorious death due to its technical failure, better known as the Click of Death.
Has anybody mentioned floppy disks yet? I, for one, don’t look back fondly on the days of having to keep track of SSSD on up to DSDD, and the paper-punch trick to turn a stalwart single-side disk into a double-side disk of sometimes dubious reliability.
When’s the last time you saw someone in an office flipping through a fat Rolodex full of their business contacts?
I remember a few years ago I was setting up a raid array on my new PC and I was amazed that I definitely needed a floppy disk and drive to do it. There was no other way, it was required.
I can’t remember how it went exactly, but it involved a downloaded driver executable that would only recognize and install to a floppy drive, and then the OS would refer to the floppy at a later time, something like that. I was amazed.
Fountain pens
The Commodore C64
The England Cricket team
I gave my Commodore 64 away in 2004. It was hard to part with. Dang I loved that thing.
Don’t know about the USA, but here those things were perfectly accurate. You only needed to adjust them twice a year, for Daylight Saving Time (BST here). The reason was that they used the AC cycles of the mains supply to regulate the movement, and the electricity providers were required by law to regulate those perfectly, even speeding them up to make up for “lost” cycles and vice versa.
OK, I’ll add:
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Car radios. You remember, the ones that were just radios?
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(UK only, probably) little “parking lights” that were mounted on the offsides of cars and vans, white at the front, red at the back. On all the time, low wattage.
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Monophonic synthesizers.
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Dustbins (garbage cans) without wheels.
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Coin-operated, wall-mounted cigarette machines for outdoor use in public places.
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School canes.
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The “safety sash” (Brits over a certain age will know what I mean).
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Air-powered tubing in department stores to distribute money and paperwork. Ditto for the ones that ran on overhead cables.
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X-ray machines in shoe shops, used to check if shoes fitted properly.
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Steam locomotives.
Oooh, I’m getting all nostalgic now.
Oh man, I loved those things when I was a kid. On a related note, what about those rub-off transfers you used to get in cereal boxes and stuff? You know, the ones that tore and buckled if you so much as breathed when you rubbed them on to the perfab scene? Do they still make those?
Hey, I still have one of those on my monitor at work! I really should remove it, as it does sod all in my office, which doesn’t get any sun anyway.
What about SuperAudio CD and DVD Audio? I recall when they came out in '01 or so, I thought then that they’d be obsolete before they hit the shelves. Do they even still make SACD players? What about DAT?
- what are those?
- ditto… now I’m curious
- WHAT!?!?! Seriously? They had that?? :eek:
Yes. They had these. And while they weren’t really a risk to the customers, they are considered to have been a serious health hazard to the shoe salesmen.
I, too, am baffled by these. (And by the garbage cans without wheels thing, incidentally—I didn’t know that was at all unusual.)
School canes–used for physical discipline of kids. I think.
Ah. My school just had paddles. Some teachers drilled holes in theirs.
I’ll bet no one under the age of 20 remembers computers without hard drives (I had an Apple IIe), remember what happened when you turned it on…nothing, nothing at all, it just turned on.
Didn’t the Apple II have BASIC on a ROM? I seem to recall that it did.
Fiche readers and filmstrip machines seem to have gone west.
I’m sure there are companies out there that still have dumb terminals hooked up to their networks, but I’ll bet they’re getting pretty thin by now.
LOAD “*”,8,1
RUN
Edited because the board changed my all-caps into mixed caps. shakes tiny fist
Yes, school canes were used to thrash pupils across the buttocks or on the palms of their hands. You can probably still get them in S&M shops.
“Safety sashes” haven’t been explained yet, so here goes, from memory:
At some time in the late 1960s, the UK government decided to play with our clocks. They switched time in some manner - I forget the details, but it was something like the switch from BST (daylight-saving) to GMT (winter time) being different. If I knew what the experiment was called, I could Google for it and provide more exact details.
Anyway, one winter, we kids walking or cycling to or from school were faced with extreme darkness - I don’t remember if this was in the morning or evening, but I’m inclined to think it was in the morning.
To make us more visible to drivers, we were issued with ‘safety sashes’: orange reflective bands to be worn diagonally from shoulder to opposite hip, as well as armbands in the same material.
The scheme was dropped, and never attempted again.
As for wheeled bins, the UK switched from the traditional bins, which were simply a large bucket with a lid, to the “wheelie bins”, which are larger and with a handle and a pair of wheels. This was to save money in refuse collection by putting the responsibility of moving the bins to the pickup point (usually outside the front of the house) onto the householder. Previously, the collectors (the “bin-men”) would enter the property - driveway, garden, yard or whatever - and carry the bin out from wherever it was, replacing it in the same place when it was empty.
If they couldn’t get access - for example, a locked gate - it was common for them to hop over the fence from the neighbour’s property to ensure your rubbish was disposed of. Hopping over a 4’ fence, a full bin over their shoulder … and they’d WHISTLE TUNES! And they’d pick up anything that fell out! Oh, happy days.
Sorry, I’m getting old and nostalgic.
[ul]
[li]Reel-to-reel tape. I don’t know if it’s completely obsolete yet, though.[/li][li]Paper tape. Yep, a lot of computers used paper tape way back when. I don’t think anyone does now.[/li][li]Washing machine-sized hard drives. You could fit a whole fifty megabytes (thereabouts) in the same room as the CPU and the RAM, assuming you had beefy flooring, three-phase power, and good A/C. Racing hard drives across the floor is, alas, no longer possible.[/li][li]Mercury delay line memories. Cathode ray tube memories. Core memories. Memory technologies went pretty deep into the Rube Goldberg prior to the complete transistorisation of computers.[/li][li]Real physical terminals. Whether ASCII or EBCDIC, real terminals are being quickly replaced by whitebox PCs running terminal emulation software. This has had the secondary effect of narrowing down the kinds of terminal escape sequences applications have to generate: VT102 and ANSI will live forever. Hazeltine, Wyse, and Teleray? Not so much.[/li][li]Golf ball printers. The IBM 2741, which provided letter-quality printing in the era before laser printers by rotating a metal ball with type embossed on its surface and bouncing its inked surface against the page.[/li][/ul]
Can you even buy an up to date set of encyclopedias?