Yah, I suspect payphones will linger on in cities long after they die in suburbia. There may be a very, very small number of people who still use them - but in a city, even that modest (and largely impoverished) portion of the population may make them worthwhile. So far as I know, every DC Metro station is equipped with payphones.
I know you’re referring to home machines, but my inner pedant insists on pointing out that the Nintendo DS is alive and well, and is a cartridge-based system.
I live in Japan the land of technology. Huh. I have to use a floppy disk to submit data to the post office for my business. Absolutely unbelievable. And getting harder and harder to buy new ones!
I’ve seen them in cars at car shows but never known anyone who owned one. They might even have been factory installed.
Corded phones will always exist so long as there are offices and classrooms. You have to have a handset tied to the desk or they will walk away. I will always have a corded phone at home as well. It lives in the closet, but if there is a power outage or earthquake, I know I still have a working phone.
110 film
Checking the dwell on your car
Serial cables
b:>
CompactFlash
SACD
CD + G
Paste (tasty school supply)
Carboretors in cars
Laser Discs
Top Loading VCRs
I’m a college student now, but my parents are baby boomers, so I’ve gotten the chance to use some technology that was a bit ‘before my time’. For instance, my aunts had one of those word processors, which I used to amuse myself with. Other things I used as a kid that most people my age aren’t so familiar with:
-45 rpm records (including the soft, floppy kind)
-minicassettes
-downloading programs off stacks of floppy disks
-an electric typewriter
-fountain pens and ink blotters
-debatable, but: folding drying rack for clothes and automatic tie holder
We still use the old rotary phone in the case of power outages. And I make milkshakes with a fork. (And my mom read me bedtime stories out of Uncle Remus, accent and all, but that’s a discussion for a different thread I’m sure.)
As for things that died in my generation:
-the floppy disk (and the short-lived ZIP disk) as portable storage devices
-the Walkman, and then the Discman
-cathode ray tubes
-mini instant cameras
-paper card catalogues
Don’t forget mucilage!
Thanks to CAD and GIS, it’s getting harder to find more specialized and higher-end drafting supplies now, too.
Flashcubes (the battery-powered version) and ‘Magicubes’ (blew up on impact).
I still have a Kodak Instamatic X-35 in my closet, along with 3-4 boxes of unopened 126 cartridge color film and some Magicubes. I never owned a 35mm camera, I kept the old instamatic until the digital camera era. It had gotten to the point that I’d take the film in to one of those “60 Minutes Film Developing” places and hand it to the kid behind the counter and would be asked “what IS this?”
Actually, I still use a cassete converter - My stereo’s not fancy enough to actually have an “auxillery in” jack, so I have to use the cassete converter to hook up my MP3 player. I think they’ll be around as long as car stereos without an Aux In jack are.
Call 412-391-9500. You will be instantly transported back to that magical time when you could call a number and find out the date, time and temperature. (Well, the temperature in downtown Pittsburgh, at least.)
And easier still to make a single mailing label with a label printer. I’m not a fan of unitaskers in my kitchen or my office, but this has the footprint of a coffee mug and when I was working in admin capacities, I fell in love with the one I had at work, and bought my own. Infinitely superior to other label-making options.
Nothing, but the ubiquity of microwave popcorn has made buying an air popper in a store more difficult. I looked for one last fall in Walmart (where I purchased the one I bought before that, some five years back) and no go. I think Target may still have one model available. There are a few on Amazon, but then there’s the wait and cost of shipping.
Tie holders I don’t know about, but drying racks for clothing are making a comeback for several reasons: economy, environment and because air drying is simply better for clothing. And since so many people inexplicably live in places where there are rules against clotheslines, folding racks it is.
Here’s one that I just realized: we purchased two new TVs a couple of months ago, flat screen LCD HDTV dealios, and other than power buttons, there are no functions on the televisions themselves. Everything, volume control, channel changing, every type of setting, it all has to be accessed through the remote control. Within my lifetime we’ve seen the obsolescence of the “dial” (as in “don’t touch that dial, Scooby Doo will be right back after these messages!”) and it looks like we’re also seeing the obsolescence of unit-based controls entirely.
Band instruments - winds, basically - have been getting harder to buy, repair and supply for the past few decades, as all live music slowly contracts toward electronics and strings (guitars for pop, plus a few violins and such for serious classical).
I suspect wind instrument sales and repair will eventually be highly concentrated in a few parts of the country, with a few independent contractors doing most of the work by e-commerce and parcel services.
It’s already that way with a lot of professionals I know. The general public now only has contact with wind music through the schools, and that is now facing another wave of cutbacks. For the public at large, anything to do with horns will be as good as a dead technology in another ten or twenty years.
Yep. There seems to be a few years of “technology gap” containing vehicles too old to have an Aux In jack, but too new to have a cassette player. I recently experienced this when getting rid of a 1997 pickup truck and moving to a 2006 Accord; suddenly I had no trivially cheap way to play my iPod in the car.
The diesel-powered vibrator is apparently no more.
At least the type I remember appears to be gone. This Diesel Vibrator does not fit the bill. Or so the Mrs. informed me after I special-ordered it.
Good God, man! What kind of sick woman did you marry?
(really though, not what I was expecting when I clicked the link)
Cigarette lighters in cars.
Cigarette machines. When I started working as an RN, there was a ciggie machine in the lobby of the hospital and pts were allowed to smoke (unless they were on oxygen) in bed.
I still use a disposable camera and have no plans to not do so in the near future. I have not bought film for our 35 mm though, in some time.
Teletype machines. I remember sending TT messages…and the NBC evening news used to have as background the sound of a TT machine banging away.
Also, those odd change counting machines that you used to drop your fare into (on busses). With the use of scanners and tickets/passes, these things have disappeared.
I had a record player as a child, but my 4 years younger stepsister had no idea how to use it once my father finally found a long-sought replacement turntable in… 1993? They’re still around, of course, and even making a minor comeback these days, but they’re mostly high end machines that are the sole provenience of DJs and audiophiles.
And for the record (no pun intended), take a look at the telephone section the next time you’re in a Staples or Best Buy. There are a large number of (mostly very cheap) corded phones that are in wide distribution.
No-one is asking you to change for the sheer hell of it, but the fact you personally are still using tech items that have fallen into disuse in the wider world doesn’t invalidate the OP in any way.
New (as in, say less than 10 years old) cars, for example, do not generally have cassette players in them (indeed, and albums are not generally released on cassette anymore (in the West).
Try buying a cassette-playing Walkman from your local electronics retailer and see how far you get. Cassettes are obsolete in the wider world, even if you personally still use them and are happy with them (and there’s nothing wrong with that).
The thread is about tech that went from being “Standard and used by everyone” to “Obsolete and only used by small numbers of people”, and so far most of the stuff mentioned has definitely been that.
Sure, you can still buy brand-new electric typewriters, but honestly, do you know anyone who uses one? Of course not. Everyone uses MS Office or something like that, on their computer. Sure, there will be a few hipsters who choose to use a new typewriter for the ironic-retro value, or really old folks who didn’t upgrade their old typewriter for the reasons you mentioned, but “normal” people will be using a computer. It’s just how it works.
I drive a 2006 Hyundai, which has both a cigarette lighter and a electrical port, and I really doubt they’ll be phasing them out completely. People still smoke, and they serve a double function.
I don’t know if I ever saw them in the US, but elsewhere I used to see public phones that would accept a prepaid phone card with a magnetic strip. You could see how much time you had left on the card after it popped out of the slot by the physical scratch the phone had made on the mag strip. I’m pretty sure those have all been replaced by IC cards.