Oh my God, they killed technology...you bastards!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Inspired by the “How many times must I buy Abbey Road” thread, I came up with a list of modern technology I have seen born, live, and die in my lifetime:

Music

8-tracks (deserved it!)
Cassettes (not dead yet, but looking pale and weak)
Vinyl records (LPs & 45’s) (some vinyl is still being produced, but it just ain’t the same)

The Captured Moving Image

Super 8 film (film & art school types may still be using it)
Beta (would it have killed you to at least try and out-advertise VHS?)
VHS (as soon as recordable DVD goes mainstream, you will be dead within 10 years)
CED discs (moving parts in contact with the media=bad)
Laserdiscs (better than video, but no recording ability)

The Captured Still Image

Cartridge film (110, 126, etc) (great for kids’ cameras, but way too grainy for decent pics)
Instant cameras (not entirely dead, but with modern digital film processing, the end is in sight)

Please add to, or debate this list.

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Gee Mr. Blue Sky, you forgot about:

The ENIAC Age
The 8.5" floppy, the 5.25" floppy, the tape drive, and DOS.

The Softdrink Wars
The technology that brought us the drink Orbitz…you remember that…the drink with the suspended blobs of sugar in the bottle? With the neutrally bouyant glucose orbs for those of you who dislike the simplest of terms…

The World Of Sports
FoxTraxx Sports Puck for Hockey…

But I’m not that old so the list of technology I’ve seen born i incredibly small…For now that’s all I can think of.

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Reel-To-Reel (dead and buried, but damn, I loved that format…before recordable CDs, I could fit 6 or 8 hours of music on a reel-to-reel (although at that speed, the sound suffered)

Fenris

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Mr. Blue,

IIRC the problem with Beta was Sony wouldn’t license it. JVC came up with VHS and sold licenses to anyone who wanted to build one. Many companies building VHS, they started to dominate the market, and the video stores then aimed at that segment, so fewer and fewer people bought Beta, a vicious cycle.

You know, the kind of strategy IBM is so fond of…(MCA, OS/2 Warp…)
…and thank God the puck track is gone. In that blur you lost the rebound half the time. Distraction. I like the new camera angles (low angled shots) but not that. Worth trying, best dying.

5

Speaking of hockey technology worth dying…

Panasonic Scan Vision…you know, that LAME attempt at the Matrix effect they so poorly employed for the Stanley Cup Finals Playoffs? What a waste of money.

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::Sigh::
Kids… Such a short sense of history.

  • 10-inch floppy disks
  • Low-density disks
  • Bernoulli drives
  • Full-height drives
  • Audio cassettes as data storage
  • Typewriters
  • Fixed-purpose word processors (Brother, etc)
  • Teletype

The list of dead computer tech is longer than the Main Line.

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Clear Soft Drinks - whatever happened to those?

Stereo AM Radio - now there was a stupid 80s idea if i’d ever heard of one.

Modular Lounge Suites - you know the ones, they’re normally made up of four L-shaped pieces and a corner piece, and you’d move the individual pieces around to give your couch a different look. These are normally covered with a putrid brown velour. I think they stopped making these around the same time that Culture Club broke up.

VHS - the end is nigh. some of us have already stopped using it, opting for turning our PCs into digital video recorders and cranking out VCDs. VHS will be lucky to survive for 5 years.

VCD - will die off once DVD Recorders for TVs and/or DVD-R Drives for PCs come down in price and pirates from South East Asia get access to DVD production facilities ;).

Digital Compact Cassette - anyone remember these? Philips released this in the mid 90’s to compete with DAT and MiniDisc. Same size as a regular cassette, but digital. With CD-R drives and CD recorders becoming more readily available at the same time, this is one idea that really didn’t fly.

Speaking of which, MiniDisc. These are deader than Elvis and Osama put together. Again, Sony’s wacky licencing policies. These will be history within 3 years. Again, thanks to CD-R and, to a lesser extent, MP3.

Car CD Stackers - will die rather quickly once in-dash MP3 head units reach USD$200 or below. Why take up all that room to fit 10 CDs somewhere, when you can fit what used to need 10 CDs onto 1?

Dialup Modems. 'nuff said.

Traditional ‘landline’ telephone networks. Given 10-15 years, it will all be wireless. Think about it - the cost to maintain all those wires, mechanical switches and the like must be horrendous. OTOH, all you need to do with a cellular network is put a few towers up and make sure the software doesn’t crash. Or, in areas with a more sparse population, two way satellite dishes and access to a satellite will do quite nicely, thank you. Much cheaper to maintain.

The internal combustion engine and electric cars. I know, one you can never see dying, the other never really lived. Think about it though, hybrid-electric cars (that is, cars that have an electric motor and a small internal combustion engine working simultaneously) are coming down in price and are becoming more practical. Give it 5 or 6 years, this type of engine will be an option on Camrys and Accords. Give it 10 years time, it will probably even be available on the lowliest of Korean cars.

Microsoft. As time goes on, Linux makes more and more sense. Critical mass will be reached in 3 or 4 years time, once we’re up to Microsoft XP Service Pack 7, the X-BOX has bitten the dust and Linux has slowly crept its way into more and more corporations worldwide, so much so that the average slob on the street says “I need a machine at home that can run StarOffice 8 and is Linux-compatible”. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Hmmm…almost any type of silver-halide based film is on its way out. Purists will keep it alive for a long time, pretty much the same way purists kept LP’s alive, but once the resolution on digital cameras gets a bit higher…

One technology that died almost as soon as it was born was Polaroid’s instant developing movie film. Even if camcorders weren’t coming out about the same time, this was an iffy idea.

The rotary dial telephone is history, not that anyone misses it. (Although the damned phone company still charges for dial tone service as if they were doing us all a great favor.)

The Zip drive had its brief moment of glory, but wasn’t cost effective compared to cheap CD ROM and media. The CD ROM drive is itself quickly getting phased out by DVD RW drives. The only thing that keeps floppy drives alive at all is the sheer flakiness of Windows networking – sometimes it’s just not worth the bother of trying to fuss with it.

In the woodshop, the radial arm saw has largely been replaced by the sliding miter saw.

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Oh, they’ll be around for a lot longer than that. Cell networks are expensive as all hell in mountainous/sparsely populated terrain, and satellite setups are pricy.

When we were looking at getting rid of our Manual Mobile service and replacing it with MSAT units, the customer base rose up in revolt. Manual Mobile service was $20 for the radio and basic network access, plus LD rates. MSAT service was $6000 for the base unit plus air time plus LD rates.

We still have Manual Mobile.

And we don’t want to talk about what happened when one of the Anik satellites went off-line.

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I think you can soon say goodbye to…
the analog television signal (and set)
the cathode ray tube (computer monitor and TV alike)
the 35 mm camera

…and before long you can add, to that list, …
the telephone (and the analog voice connection)
the FAX machine (even FAXING via computer)
the analog radio signal (as a mainstream occurrence)

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Am I the only one who owned a Quadraphonic 8-track player?

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You mean like 7-Up and Sprite? csg, sorry couldn’t resist.

As per the OP, how about Napster. Although file sharing as a whole is not dead, not by a long shot, the powers that be are fighting it like all get out.

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Video game systems have seen their days.

The old pong only systems from the 70’s.
Atari 600/800/2400 etc.
Collecovision
Nintendo (plus Super Nintendo, that stupid VR thing, Gameboy and N64)
Sega (Genisis, Dreamcast)
TurboGraphix

I am sure I am missing some.

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Sega: Master System, Genesis with 32X and Sega CD, Game Gear, Saturn, Dreamcast.
Atari Jaguar
3DO

Oh, and it was the Turbographix 16 (I played so much Keith Courage in Alpha Zones).

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How about:

Wire recorders (before magnetic tape and my time)
Vacuum tubes (outside of high audio equipment)
Carburators
Stereo chairs (you know, those egg shaped chairs that surrounded whomever sat in them)
Mattel Intellivision video game

All gone and forgotten for the most part.

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Now that I think about it:

Timex/Sinclair computers
Commodore computers
Atari computers
Wang computers (What a great name!)

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Hope your time isn’t up yet, they are still used in aircraft black box recorders.

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psychogumby, I think the OP was referring to things that have died, rather than ones that will die.

I agree it’s dead, but it is a bit of shame. FM carries line-of-sight for about 90 miles. AM can carry for potentially thousands of miles, so it’d have been nice if the quality could’ve been improved. Obviously there are issues of bandwidth saturation that I’ll conveniently ignore.

Hmmm, these still seem to be relatively available at the local low-brow furniture store. Mostly in putrid earth-tones.

VHS may be around 5 years from now for home recording. I agree it will decline to nothing in video rentals by then.

Hmmm, I don’t agree (if that was your point) that MP3 and current distribution (buy CD-> fire up computer-> rip CD, transfer to MP3 player-> stick into car) is optimal or what we’ll be using universally going forward. I think you’re quite correct that multiplayers may decline, but maybe not. It is a heck of a lot less time-intensive (and, yes, more money-intensive) to just stick 50 CD’s into a changer than to transfer the contents of those same 50 CD’s to another format. The big change will come when the (stodgy, defensive, panicked) music industry offers to sell digital content in a convenient way. It’s too early to tell how this is going to go, but FWIW I agree CD’s days are somewhat numbered and content will at some point go entirely digital.

I assume you mean because DSL etc has already killed them? Or maybe this was a future prediction?. In any case, broadband has serious problems right now, and it’s quite probable that more than half the folk in the U.S. will be unable to get or, if available, afford broadband for years. The DSL ISP business has collapsed, and DSL is mostly in the hands of ‘Bell’ companies that aren’t interested in selling it. Cable modems are coming along, but with very uneven penetration, and it’s unclear if at current prices the cable folk will be profitible on this front; Excite@home is not doing particularly well right now. In any case, I sincerely wish 56k dialup would die, but I don’t see this happening for years.

Hmmm. I’m very skeptical that wireless will be able to provide the needed bandwidth to eliminate all wired communication in any timeframe. More likely is a big-fat-digital pipe to every business & home, and a much more pervasive and capable wireless network for phone, data, whatever over the next decade and more. Jeez, I’d settle for just that, what do I care how the bits get to my home?

Geosync satellite links have abominable latency, 1+ seconds round-trip. Speed of light, non-negotiable. Low-orbit has promise, but is not proven or in more than specialized use. I have high hopes, but low expectations, for low-orbit applications to be in wide use during the next decade.

I’d love if your prediction came true in that timeframe, but I’m skeptical. Oil & gas seem destined to be pretty cheap technologies for some time.

Bwuuhahahahha.:slight_smile:

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But like everything else, these will come down in price. I know that the infrastructure is still expensive, but the ongoing maintenance costs are negligible compared with land lines. As more telcos realise this, more will buy wireless technologies, thus pushing the price of this technology down and so on it goes.

I don’t think that, say, 15 years is an unreasonable expectation for telecommunications to become completely wireless. Not unless there is conclusive evidence that there are health risks, and these risks aren’t covered up. :smiley:

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I should have surrounded these portions of my post with [Nostradamus][/Nostradamus] for it to parse properly. :wink:

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Probably left over stock from 1985.

Speaking of extinct furniture, remember when it was oh-so-cool to have a bed that had a clock radio in the headrest? Again, the only time you see those in furniture stores now are on stock that has been sitting around since before the Gulf War.

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With the advent of cheap CD-RW drives, CD-Rs and (hopefully) cheap in-dash car MP3 players, I don’t see why this wouldn’t happen.

I note that you mentioned commercial reasons as to why car MP3 players may not be the ultimate option. This may be true, however the only way that the recording industry will be able to completely control this and make money out of it is if car audio systems that download the songs you want directly from a satellite can be developed, and the songs that are downloaded could be charged for.

This may be the ultimate goal for the recording industry and maybe for the car audio industry, however I think that in-dash car MP3 players will serve us well for a number of years, and I have no doubt there will be a large percentage of car audio users who would never adopt a ‘pay for play’ system like the one I described above. MP3 CD players are now available for under AUD$200 (USD$100), it is only a matter of time before car audio follows suit.

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There are only limited resources of oil and gas available. By going to petrol-electric hybrid this could help us stretch maybe 50 years worth of fossil fuels to say 100 or even 150 years.

I can see such vehicles becoming more widespread over the next 5-10 years. Toyota and Honda have production vehicles powered by petrol-electric hybrid drivetrains (the Prius and Insight respectively). These vehicles have been on the Japanese market since the late 1990s and have been on the market in Australia for about 12 months. I don’t know if either of these vehicles are on the road in the USA yet.

The only problem with both of these vehicles is their cost - the Prius is the same size as a Corolla and costs twice as much, and the Insight seats two people and costs almost AUD$50,000 (USD$25,000). Again, as the technology becomes more common, prices will come down.

It will be good to see this technology filter up to larger cars - Holden (GM’s Australian brand) have made a petrol-elecric hybrid concept car based on their Commodore family car (Think Chevy Lumina but with styling and handling. ;)), the ECOmmodore. This hybrid powered Commodore is claimed to deliver up to 50 mpg in the city, which is amazing for what is basically a taxi.

:smiley: