As a senior citizen, a lot of stuff has become obsolete in my lifetime. Does anyone still make any of the following? If not, when did they stop making them? What other major items have reduced consumption/production by at least 95% in our lifetime?
Typewriters which I assume are all replaced by computer printers.
Slide Rulers
Mechanical watches (with balance wheels or tuning forks)
Automobile features:
>Cars without heaters. IIRC, heaters were an option for cars shipped to warmer climates when I was a kid. I assume it’s simply cheaper not make it an option. Does any car manufacturer offer A/C as standard equipment?
>Car dimmer switches on the floor.
>Radios without FM
>Standard shift with only three gears (My VW has six). How about four gears?
>Gear shift on the column
>Free wheeling and/or two-cycle engines as with old Saab.
>Manual crank windows.
>Bench seats in the front.
>Cars without power steering. If I happen to park my VW on a hill, I sometimes jump start it just for kicks. Before the motor starts, the steering, even while moving, seems a lot harder than pre-power, fifty years ago.
Analog cell phones. Three watt cell phones. IIRC, the first cell phones in which the handset was on a cord from the cell phone had a power output of three watts. Cell phones that you placed next to your head were restricted to 0.6 watts for safety reasons. Did three watts dissappear with the analog cell phone?
Copper wire for long distance communications. Do they still use microwave towers or satellites. I know satellites are used for things like ships-at-sea or aircraft in flight or cable tv, but (considering the time lag) are satellites used for everyday two-way communications between two populated places on earth?
I know there are still film cameras around. Do they have more than 5% of the market?
Plasma televisions. How about black-and-white television.
Computers with
> rows of flashing lights, manual dials for input, and push buttons.
> a “stop” instruction. I haven’t seen a computer with a stop instruciton since the 1960’s.
> Magnetic core memory
> Parity (or error-correction) memory bits.
Mechanical watches are still made, and are ironically, the most expensive (and inaccurate) watches on sale. There are mechanical watches selling for 6 figures.
Most of the car stuff is dead and gone.
Plasma TVs are if not extinct, very close to it.
There are no commercial computers using core memory. Maybe some hobbyist is running one.
We have a 2009 Silverado pickup with manual windows, manual mirrors, and manual locks, but it has a CD player and it’s satellite capable. Best of both worlds.
(Audio) cassette tapes
VHS
CRT TVs and computer monitors (thankfully. Those sons-of-bitches were heavy)
Vaccum tube radio & TVs that took forever to come on.
(Automotive) vinyl interiors in the same color as the exterior.
And in the almost-gone-but-not-quite-yet automotive category:
Leaf springs
Hub caps
Carburetors
In vehicles, at least. I dunno if it’s cost effective to make fuel-injected strimmers and lawnmowers. And if they stopped putting carburetors on small outboard motors, I might be able to start the engine reliably all summer, and I just don’t see that ever happening.
I know we do this thread a lot, but I can think of a lot of technologies that have been born and died in my lifetime. The cassette Walkman, various kinds of floppy drive formats, modems (handset modems certainly, and plug in modems, mostly). SCSI drives. Traveller’s checks.
Phonebooks and Yellow pages are looking pretty anemic – the category of “obsolete, but not yet gone” is a large one.
They’re ‘Slide Rules’, not ‘Slide Rulers’. Yeesh. I still have one, BTW.
I also still have a drawing board, T-Square, triangles, scale, french curve, templates and lettering guide.
And my 1967 pro-grade compass and divider with pen attachment in original pouch.
You never know when you’re going to need them again…
And about the 800 pounds of Photo Darkroom gear…
anybody in the CA Central Vally want free gear? There are 3 enlargers, 2 roller-transport print processors…
Not thankfully if you appreciate the best picture quality. LCD doesn’t give anywhere neat as good of the same picture quality at the same resolution. And if you’re watching something not at the screen’s native resolution, well… CRT just blows the pants off of other stuff for multiple resolutions. Too bad they stopped making them right before 1080p became a thing.
Analog broadcast TV is another good one. Digital over the antenna is way too sensitive and drops out for little to no reason, whereas analog would just get a little snowy and keep going.
Early LCDs did not have a good picture compared to CRT. The big issue was black levels that were more medium-grey than black. Today with micro-dimming LEDs or better yet, OLED, the picture quality blows away any CRT.
Same with upscaling. Clunky early on, and today even a cheap TV upscales fine.
Btw, I had a 1080p CRT TV (only a 28" tube, but weighed a ton), so they did exist for a short time.
