I travel with my wind up alarm clock with the loud tick - tock and the striking alarm at the top. Made in Germany and still running on time (as long as I remember to wind it). It’s one of my favorite things.
Manual typewriters with moving carriages and reusable typewriter ribbons without correcting tape.
Strikeover slips for correcting typewriting mistakes
These are in no danger. A true performance car will have a manual transmission well into the future.
And I use a dot-matrix printer every day. I don’t have an option of printing off several copies. There are very specific forms with odd sizes that I have to use that are 3 and 4 in one. I have to have the dot-matrix to press hard and make 3 copies.
Cassette Player Walkmans… Haven’t seen a new one since the early '90s, although you can still get Dictaphones using full-size cassette tapes which perform much the same function, sans radio.
LPs and Records are making a comeback, incidentally…
I don’t think they ever completely went away; they are still the medium of choice for DJs the world over due to the ability to make minor adjustments to one deck’s speed to match the other one and manually cue up the next song in the mix. At least, with pro decks, anyway. I doubt we’ll ever see them for general home use again.
Vinyl isn’t going away but I think wax finally has. I could be wrong.
Anyway, tube amps aren’t going away either. Audiophiles, right or wrong, think tubes give them a much better tone than transistors, and as long as they’re willing to buy them someone is going to make them.
Maybe not “General Home Use” in the same way everyone has CD players, but there are so many LPs out there it’s mind-boggling and a lot of people are discovering their parent’s LP collections (or re-discovering their own original collections!) and wanting to play them. Add to that Audiophiles and Purists who like their Vinyl, and you’ve got a situation where Record Players are useful, practical, cool, and just retro enough to be appealing to the younger generation. Record Players aren’t really obsolete, they’re just no longer mainstream, IMHO.
Rotary Dial Phones.
Lava Lamps.
(still have/use both)
Huh, color me surprised.
Ooh, I have a question. I was thinking about alarm clocks the other day (let’s not dwell on that), and realized I’ve never so much as seen a truly old-school alarm. It didn’t take batteries, right? So, uh…how did it work? How were you sure it wouldn’t stop in the middle of the night? Furthermore - did they have any sort of snooze function? I was trying to imagine how that would work, and couldn’t.
Jeez how could I have overlooked this …
Fish 'n Chips…wrapped in NEWSPAPER!!!
Man, they allus tasted better with a coating of printers ink
It’s a wind up clock, and there is a third hand (usually small and red) that you aim at the time you want to wake up (like for 6:30, you point it halfway between the 6 and 7). It doesn’t distinguish Am/Pm so you don’t set the alarm more than 12 hours before you want it to go off. Basically, when the hour hand gets to the same place as the alarm hand, it triggers the alarm (usually a mechanical bell of some sort).
My cube neighbor only got rid of his IBM 3270 terminal about six months ago as nobody was willing to fund the cost of moving what must have been one of the very last Token Ring connections in the enterprise when the datacenter was moved. The well-burned green screen and huge noisy keyboard all met an inglorious death at the electronics recycler.
I’m insanely jealous of some friends that have a card catalog in their kitchen. They store spices and utensils in it.
And… Heads? My hometown public library abandoned its physical card catalog nearly 20 years ago. Took a good while before my mother got the hang of using the computer terminals.
Heh, yeah, I originally said it was already dead, but I figured someone would call me out on it with their particular behind-the-times library, so backed off a bit. Though I was barely alive 20 years ago, and yet I definitely grew up using the card catalog. Perhaps mine was the library behind the times…
For the home segment, at least, this is true: 8 mm movie cameras and projectors. I remember my dad had a Keystone wind up 8 mm movie camera. It was basically a point and shoot affair, and had no sound. After all the film was used, he’d drop it off at the drugstore, and had the developed film returned to him in the mail. Then we’d haul out the movie projector (with the insanely hot light bulb), set up the fold out screen, turn out the lights and watch our home videos. I remember when Polaroid came out with its Polavision system, with the self-developing movie film and special projector. That was quickly made obsolete by the VCR and video camera (they were separate components, the VCR was as big as a home model and it was slung over the user’s shoulder. The video camera was attached to the VCR by a cable), then the camcorder. Now, videotape is being pushed aside by DVD-camcorders and camcorders with hard drives. And with many newer cell phones containing video cameras, everyone can have a movie camera literally in one’s pocket…
May I nominate the paper boy?
You remember him, don’t you? He was the neighborhood kid barely in his teens finally making his own money by walking or riding his bike delivering the newspaper that he carried in the canvas tote with the publisher’s name stenciled on the side. Then once a week, he’d ring your doorbell and collect what was owed him.
These days, my newspapers are delivered by a 40-something through the window of his pickup truck as he cruises my street to supplement the income from his other job.
Those aren’t obsolete at all! Not in India, at any rate. I know plenty of Indian students who use them, preferring them pretty strongly to ball-point pens. A labmate of mine, whose husband is Indian, has adopted the fountain pen habit. New fountain pens get made and sold all the time.
Top of the milk.
I’m assuming you’re referring to the cream that would float to the top of the bottle? That’s not obsolete, it’s just been better separated out of the milk so they can sell cream at a better profit. What remains is more firmly in suspension and distributed throughout, thanks to homogenization.
My parents’ house would probably be a good place to start looking for stuff for the museum. They’ve got several sets of encyclopedias, lots of phone books, a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, a word-processing typewriter, lots of 45-speed records, a record player that will do 78 rpm, at least one slide rule, and one of those little recipe boxes with lettered dividers that was intended for keeping addresses in. I actually looked in it once, back in 2001. They had a phone number for a relative of Mom’s who lives in the far East Bay that had a 415 area code (with his far East Bay address). I couldn’t imagine how old that must be…
CRT monitors are unsexy and make you sterile and give you zits- might as well wear a pocket protector when you sit in front of that thing. I say this as someone whose job used to involve hauling computers and monitors around- my job satisfaction went way up when the users started replacing their CRTs with LCDs…
More stuff for the museum:
Corded phones (though we’ve got one for when Mr. Neville forgets to put the cordless phone back on the charger)
Thermometers with liquid inside them. Especially the ones with mercury in them, if we can get the permits to have hazardous materials in the museum.
Glass photographic plates used to take pictures through telescopes. Mr. Neville’s undergrad observational astronomy class was one of the last ones to use those at our school, sometime in the early 90s.