For those not familiar, “buggy whip/buggy whip manufacturer” is a term used in business/marketing kind of like “widgets”. It’s an item or job that was once much in demand but with changing technology is no more.
On the sitcom 30 Rock Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) has an on-again/off-again relationship with “The Beeper King”, a jerk who still sells and leases beepers and won’t accept they’re all but gone. It really does seem recent that beepers were all the rage, some people having several of them.
Of course next year TV antennae will be obsolete. In a few years most people you speak to won’t even known what “rabbit ears” were other than something that distinguished a type of rodents and allowed them to hear.
A friend recently bought a needle for his LP player. It had to be special ordered and cost about $20. At one time they were sold in any K-Mart or other department store for a couple of dollars.
What are some other beeper salesman jobs or turntable needles jobs or items that have gone with the wind in the past quarter century or less?
I remember when slide rules disappeared, when hand-held calculators became cheaper then them.
Film cameras are about to go, except for some very specialised uses. I think even the cheap disposable ones will be knocked out of business by cheap digital cameras and by telephones that also work as cameras.
And, as a librarian, I have to mention card catalogues.
Which is good because to be honest I could never figure out how to work the things.
There was a sad article a few years ago that had pictures (wish I could find them) of card catalogue cabinets literally in landfills with other garbage. They took up so much space that most libraries couldn’t even keep but one or two of them for keepsake value (and usually those were kept for the old records that hadn’t been entered into the database yet). I’m always surprised though at how many students under 25 remember them; apparently a lot of high schools (especially the smaller private ones like Catholic schools that aren’t of the Ecole de Riche variety) apparently still use them.
If you’re talking about the digital broadcast conversion, rabbit ears will work fine for picking up the new digital signal. It’s the interpretation of it, the TV tuner, that needs changed out.
All us getting our TV through coaxial cables (Cable/Sat/etc) will be just fine - they’ll keep converting to analog for us.
Check clearinghouses. The various federal reserve banks have had to lay off a lot of people in recent years, and according to a guy there I talked to, they more or less figure they will be the last people in the business when it’s only a few old ladies writing mortgage checks.
Small electronics repair. Not much worth paying a skilled tradesman to repair, anymore.
I was just reading this book this weekend–very interesting for anyone interested in vanishing Americana–both concepts (like blue laws) and objects (carbon paper and rotary phones).
Why will rabbit ears be a thing of the past? Is the USA phasing out aerial TV broadcasting completely in favour of satellite/cable? I hadn’t heard that.
They are now known as “driving whips” or sometimes “coaching whips”, as accessories in the equestrian sport of driving (Prince Philip famously does this).
No. In February 2009 in the USA, all over-air signals will become digital. The antennas will still work, but if you have an analog-input-only set, you will need a converter box to convert the signal from digital back to analog. Cable hookups will not be affected, neither will satellites.
