Technologies you learned to use JUST before they became obsolete

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Inspired by this thread, i’ve gotten to thinking about things I learned in school or elsewhere that I never got a chance to use because I was learning them just as they were becoming obsolete.

In college, I took a photography class where I learned how to develop film by hand. This was in 2002, just as the digital camera was on the cusp of taking over.

In 4th grade, my class did a financial simulation where we learned how to write checks and balance a checkbook. I write checks to pay my rent once a month, but by the time I was old enough to have a checking account internet banking had made manual balancing an exercise in redundancy.

That same year, my class learned how to code in BASIC on Apple ][E computers. Granted, those were ALREADY out of date by then, but our school district wouldn’t upgrade to Macs until I was in 7th grade.

Around the same time we got an in-depth course on the ins and outs of using a library card catalogue, which all the libraries in my city got rid of in favor of electronic catalogues about 2 years later. (My high school library still had one, though.)

In 6th grade we learned how to look up and read stock quotes in the newspaper, just before everyone and their mother started using the internet for that.

In junior high, we learned how to write web pages in raw HTML, which i’m fairly sure nobody does anymore. We also learned all about Usenet, Telnet, and Gopher, which i’m fairly sure LESS than nobody uses anymore, and FTP, which I think there might still be like one or two people using somewhere.

A few years back, I remember spending hours tweaking and fiddling and trying to find a way to get my old DOS games to run on Windows XP. Then DOSBox came out.

Any others anyone wants to contribute?

2

I think everyone can count Zip disks as one, that was just a sad attempt to re-invent Floppy’s, then, out of nowhere, thumb drives take over. Hooray!

3

I also learned HTML coding in 1996 or so. It was nice to know, but not something I come back too often.

I just got into recording CD to tape around the time tapes were dying and CD’s had little life left.

I always feel like I just get the hang of Windows versions around the time they die. I got used to DOS 6.1 just before we got Windows 3.1 and loved Windows 98 just before we upgraded to XP. XP, however, I have stayed with for a long time.

4

I learned to use a slide rule in 1974.

5

I use each of those daily. (Ok, not Gopher.) Well, and I use SSH instead of Telnet (which is too insecure). And actually, SFTP instead of FTP (same reason). Still, transferrable skills at least so learning it isn’t a waste.

I wrote my first app for the Palm Pilot just as they got replaced with… I don’t even recall what.

6

I learned to use a keypunch in 1980.

7

I learned to edit video in high school (late 1990s) using an analog editing board – it had two videocassette decks.

8

For the programmers, just about EVERY programming language, especially in more recent years.

I learned COBOL in 1990.

FTP, BTW, may actually be used a lot more than you think – it’s just that it happens behind the scenes. When you download a file, it’s commonly done with FTP protocol, only you (the user) don’t have to sit there yourself and manually type all the GET commands. The browser does it all for you.

To this very day, I STILL have my 21-year-old Winders 98 box (although, to be sure, I only use it for certain specific things anymore). I do work with an old application program that I cannot easily port to any new system. OTOH, I also have 3 WIN XP boxes (which I don’t use much) and an Ubuntu Linux box where I do most everything, and some virtual machines that I play around with.

9

I was a projectionist for a few years. Just after I left, they started coming out with digital sound. These days digital projection is taking over. I have never seen a digital projector up close.
Every Thursday night, the new movies were delivered in two beat up metal tins, with three 20min reels each of 35mm film. I rather enjoyed splicing the reels together to “build the prints” for the new shows opening on Friday.
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Years ago as part of a high school co-op program, I worked in the printed circuit industry and learned to make printed circuit boards, soup-to-nuts, starting with red and blue pencil lines on vellum, going on to create the boards using purely optical and chemical processes, and finally finishing the boards with non-automated machinery and hand-silkscreened graphics.

10

During my sophomore/junior year of high school, I learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute.

That skillset was immediately deprecated when I caught a girlfriend.

11

Phototypesetting, but it had a very short window before being replaced by something much, much better.

I also learned this very cumbersome program to do graphs. Ten hours or so to do something that can be done in Excel in, like, two clicks. Excel may have had this even while I was learning this other program, but it certainly had the feature within a couple of years.

12

HTML is unfortunately far from gone. When it comes right down to it, all pages end up being HTML. To be a really good web developer, a good knowledge of HTML is very useful, regardless of what larger technology you’re using.

13

I learned to operate a tetchy old ditto machine that spit out damp, fume-laden purple worksheets. Teachers went to the copy room to get high in those days.

14

This is a bit esoteric, but I took a class in Photoshop 5.5. One of our projects was reconstructing a badly damaged family photo. We had to painstakingly adjust the tones and shading of cloned areas (a patch, essentially) to match the the surrounding areas (otherwise you end up with faces looking like they had bad plastic surgery or severe burns.) We finished that project, and a week or so later we saw a preview video of 6.0. Which introduced the band-aid tool. Which adjusts tones and colors of cloned areas automatically. The whole class gasped.

We also used Zip disks, which this project made clear were already nearly obsolete, because we were working with files that nearly filled up the disks all by themselves.

15

I studied graphic arts for years in the late 1970’s. Blue pen, white-out, photo paste-up, rubber cement, rud down lettering, black ink, T-square and triangle. Then I became a chef. When I thought about getting back into graphic arts in the late 1980’s, computers had completely taken over. Photoshop? What’s that?

16

When I needed a job in 1990, the employment office tried to convince me to become a key punch operator!

17

I learned how to write newsletter headlines by size/count in the late 90s in journalism school. Of course we were doing the paper on a computer by then but they still taught the skill, perhaps just in case computer font sizing never caught on.

18

An image from my 1984 high school yearbook.

Yeah, I know it looks like it could be 1976. Buffalo, New York. 'Nuff said.

19

Phototypesetting, keyline and paste-up, stat cameras, making marker sketches of proposed design layouts, all the good stuff that went into graphic design before desktop publishing.

Whenever I come across an old magazine or book from the 70s or before, I remind myself what a lot of work went into such things back in the day.

20

From a uni job: type catalogue cards, on an IBM Selectric II.
Another useless talent: PL/1 programming, in 1978. Only good it ever did me was to learn to never cross tags, which I use when…
I program HTML from scratch, in Notepad.