The Grovesnor Room (local history) at the downtown branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library still uses an old card catalog.
I wonder how much of that obsolete technology is truly obsolete, where for all practical purposes it can’t be used. I can still use a rotary phone, record radio shows on cassette tape, listen to a talk show on an AM transistor radio, and navigate with a paper map. (I actually prefer paper maps for long journeys, because they seem to do a better job at showing where you’re going; a GPS display just shows where you are and where to turn.)
What obsolete technologies are truly obsolete, where media is extremely difficult or impossible to find, or they’re functionally worthless except for conversion and archival purposes? IMHO, many film formats, Zip and Syquest Sparq discs, analog NTSC televisions in the United States (without a converter), MiniDisc players, DCC and DAT tapes, Beta VCRs, analog cell phones, and reel to reel tapes.
Along the same line, the invention and abandonment of Bosch K Jettronic fuel injection (constant injection) used on VW, Volvo, Mercedes, Audi, plus several others.
Two point seat belts, with or without separate should harnesses, bias ply and bias belted tires for cars, distributors and spark plug wires are quickly going bye bye.
Hah, Analog TV is probably a good one. I think there are still a few stations that appear to be broadcasting in analog when I flip channels, but that might just be a TV station broadcasting 480p content via digital rather than NTSC.
And while cartridge consoles appear to be gone, cartridge game systems still seem to be around in the form of the Game Boy DS.
I too remember DiVX, and it’s still sometimes a recurring gag on Penny Arcade.
Most of what I can think of has already been mentioned, stuff like floppy discs (and their descendants, such as LS-120 and LS-240) and Zip/Jazz drives, VHS, MiniDisc, CDs are still around (and if they ever do go out, I guess CD-ripping software will be right behind them:D).
You know what might be fun? A spinoff thread of technology that you are a bit surprised has STILL not become obsolete. Such as prop-driven aircraft (hell, the Air Force is currently shopping around for a new prop-driven attack plane, a spiritual descendant of the old Douglas A-1 Spad of Vietnam fame).
Vacuum tubes.
ON THE COMPUTER ALONE (and this could be a much longer list, I’m afraid…):
punch cards
8" vertical old-world floppy drives
reel to reel tape data drives
cassette data drives
5.25" old PC-style floppy drives
Apple oldworld RJ-11 keyboard ports
Apple oldworld mouse ports
Floptical drives
SyQuest drives
Jaz drives
Zip drives
Travan tape drives
3.5" floppy drives
Bernoulli drives
SuperDisk LS-120 drives
Mac classic serial devices
Mac ADB devices (although I’m still using one this very second)
Centronix printer ports
PS / 2 mouse ports
the other PC mouse port
dot matrix printers
accordion paper / tractor-feed printers
Type III PC Cards (the double-height type that required two slots)
Infrared networking port
Motorola 68K processor family of CPUs (in computers anyway)
“AIM” consortium PowerPC processor family of CPUs (in computers)
PReP and CHRP hardware platforms
10-base-2 (thin coaxial), thick coaxial, AAUI, and other non-RJ45 Ethernet ports
ISA slots
NuBUS slots
30 pin SIMMS chips
72 pin SIMMS chips
2.5" SCSI drives
I had this brand, slightly earlier model, same basic concept. Proprietary 3.5" disk format that nothing else on this planet could read, including their own later versions of the damn thing. No way to get my data out aside from printing it out, scanning it, and running OCR software on it all.
I kid, of course. But I haven’t been in a library in at least fifteen years, and I’d totally forgotten about card catalogs. I assume nowadays you just do a search on a computer, and it spits out titles and their locations in the library? Are they still using the Dewey Decimal System?
Interestingly enough, a factory opened up recently to start producing Polaroid film again, with Polaroid releasing a line of cameras to use it. It looks like they’re re-aligning it for the niche market. But yeah, for the most part, Polaroid now primarily sells digital cameras.
I drive a manual five-speed (with overdrive) car.
I own an original, and still working, IBM PC, complete with all the original packaging.
I have a working Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Marantz stereo amplifier/receiver.
Boy, for any technophiles who like this thread, try going to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View some time. Better yet, go with your dad, to see what he remembers. :eek:
Church keys (aka can openers).
You used to need a can opener to open that beer.
Then came the first style of pop tops - rip them off and you could make really cool chains out of them, but they tended to get thrown away on beach sand and could also slice open your foot as you walked along the beach.
Then came the current version of the pop-top that flips inside of the can. At first, people were concerned about the sanitary factor of having the outside metal go into the can, but nobody seems to care about that anymore.
Refrigerators with really bad freezers that you had to completely thaw out every once in awhile when it got so bad there wasn’t even room enough to put a Popsicle into it. It was a pain in the ass to defrost those things - usually requiring large pointed objects and bowls of ice. Also, old doors to refrigerators that clamped down from inside, so that when kids would hide in them when they were discarded, well…not good.
Slide projectors and screens/bed sheet on the wall. Although, that is one technology I am pleased to see die - does anyone remember being invited to someone’s home and forced to sit through 3,286 slides of their trip to Mt. Rushmore?
You forgot the middle step: the pressure release small nipple, open tab with finger and slice it to ribbons getting blood in your beer stage. I hated Coors for the couple of years they used that system. I think it was threat of lawsuits that finally got someone to invent the rocker to push the tab down.
Of course, that’s not a nowadays thing. That’s how it’s worked for the last 20 years. The only card catalogs you still see anymore are in tiny schools that don’t have the money to switch over. Or in small sections of large public libraries that use it as a conversation starter/usable antique showpiece.
Chewing gum is included in vending machines all the time. Do you not?
It’s not any more interesting watching it on their HDTV either.
Interesting…just yesterday I changed the sparkplugs on my wife’s car (Saturn Ion). At 76,000 miles, several were almost gone (the center electrode had eroded to nothing).
Yet, they still fired OK-no HT wires or distributor (coil pack for each plug).
I did all of my Grade 13 (heh!–Ontaridopers of a certain age will know what that is, but not many others) papers on a Smith Corona word processor. It sucked for doing footnotes though, and I got marked down by my history teacher for not following Scholarly Reporting in the Humanties format perfectly. We had to buy SRitH too, along with our other Grade 13 texts.
I also wrote about 1/3 of a novel on one, but I could never retrieve it in any other format after it died. Somewhere in a bad move out scene in university I lost my last hard copy.
Other technologies that are not really around anymore…Walkmen, VCR rewinders, Head Cleaner kits for tape decks. Tape drives for the Vic 20. I had a little credit card sized calculator when I was in grade 8 that you could “program” to play short electronic tunes and had a button to play happy birthday. Height of technology, but the functions were only the 4 arithmetic ones.
