I wouldn’t be surprised if faxes, at least stand alone faxes, are gone. The last few faxes I’ve had to send anyway were ones with those new cover sheets that go straight to a computer anyway. Plus the faxes I was supposed to send were available to enter the information online which is what I did.
Lack of porn. Some of us spent our teenage years with a couple of Penthouse magazines at our disposal, at best, and, maybe, a Ginger Lynn VHS tape.
Now the romance of it all will be gone forever.
My kids will never know that joy I experiened as a child - going through the phone book with my friends, to look for folks with silly names and crank call them.
Thanks to the internet, and caller ID, this is a lost art.
I’m of the opinion that watches are going to make a comeback, but they’ll be integrated with our phones.
People are already making wrist straps for the little iPod so it can be used as a watch. Either the next rev or the one after that will be able to network with your phone. A little screen on your wrist that can display who’s calling without you even taking the phone out of your pocket, or show you the header on the text/email that just came in, or dozens of other cool little apps that will be quite usable despite the small screen will be awesome.
Faxes fall into two camps: Offices that use them everyday and offices that already discarded them years ago.
Hell, I was born in 1981 and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve sent or received a fax. And all of them were nearly a decade ago.
faxes are making a comeback. Marty McFly has like 5 fax machines in his house in 2015
Comments on a few items:
Encyclopedias: I agree that paper encyclopedias are going away, but it makes me sad. I have a reputation as being a real know-it-all, someone how knows obscure trivia about all kinds of things. My secret? When I was a kid I would often take down a random volume of the World Book Encyclopedia (we owned a set at home) and read it. Not from cover to cover, but page by page, stopping whenever anything looked interesting. You can sort of do that with Wikipedia’s random page feature, but it’s not really the same.
Travel agents: There is still a niche for them. For example, we just booked a family reunion that involved three cabins on a cruise. We used a travel agent for that. It must be said that it was an online agency.
Bookstores: I like Amazon and ebooks as much as anyone. But I also like browsing in bookstores. I have bought countless books over the years that I plain hadn’t heard of until I saw it browsing in a store one day. Amazon’s website tries to create the experience of browsing in some ways, but it’s just not the same at all.
Watches: I still wear one every day. It’s a pain to take my phone out of my pants pocket just to check the time.
Forgotten friends: I haven’t joined Facebook yet, and one reason is that I’m hoping some “friends” of my past stay forgotten.
Talking to one person at a time: I have to believe it will always be rude to ignore the person in front of you in favor of someone on a screen.
Mail: There will be a lot less of it for sure. But I still receive a lot of packages via the USPS, and they can’t come via text or email. My baby son receives even more packages than me, so he surely will know about mail.
VCR-sized cable boxes?
Nah… they’ll be around forever.
- 8-track tape players
- VCRs and VHS tapes, and Betamax
- Bernoulli boxes, ZIP and Jazz cartridges and drives, 5.25 floppy disks and 3.5 disks and drives (8 inch floppies for that matter)
- Music CDs
- Phone booths (in the US)
- What it’s like to be completely incommunicado
I was born in 1982 and I’ve never seen an 8-track except on TV.
Watches won’t ever go away until they come up with another way to put thousands of dollars worth of jewelry on a man and not make him look like Slick Rick. I have a wedding ring and earrings, neither worth more than $100 together. But a Rolex is still a Rolex, it makes a statement (I have too much money and I like watches that can’t keep time) to others and that’s a niche that will be hard to replace.
2-D hand drawn animated feature films.
In a single generation? Too soon.
There seems to be an increase in all-in-one devices (printer/copier/fax/scanner). So faxes will probably live on in that form for a while.
Yes, and if you’re reading this thread you’re not one of them. Come on.
I agree about the US Mail. There are a whole raft of laws that apply to the US Mail that make it preferable to private services, or e-mail. If a law firm ever wants to get in touch wth you, they are going to send you a letter, and quite possibly a registered letter, for example.
PAPER MAPS
I’m involved with tourism and believe me even with map aps on everyone’s phones and a gps on every dashboad, the single most requested item from people entering our visitors center is A MAP!
I have a hard time keeping them them in stock.
I can’t afford a GPS yet, so I print out Mapquest and Google maps all the time.
This is becoming less and less the case. Florida’s First District Court of Appeals recently began accepting only electronically filed documents. That’s not been uncommon in administrative and other slightly informal law settings until now, but it’s fairly unusual for trial courts, much less appeals courts. Not for long.
I was born in 1989 and have literally sent a fax only 5 or so times, half of those times it was at a store where the guy running it does it for you.
At my current job we receive faxes through Outlook which is weird…we get an email saying, “You’ve received a fax!” and then the fax prints out.
Umm…not to be maudlin, but speaking of the airport stuff, I do think it’s sad that even my cousins who were born in the mid to late 90s barely remember (if at all) the pre-9/11 world. Not to be naive and act like everything was just hunky dory (as I was only 12 when 9/11 happened, so perhaps my memories are also foggy) but I remember being able to travel without a passport and my mom and I would smuggle fruit and cigarettes for my grandma into Bermuda.
I don’t think watches will go out of style, even for women…I primarily use my cell phone to tell time, but there are situations where I do need a watch if my phone isn’t with me (i.e. at a dinner). I HATE not knowing what time it is.