Now I’m going to have to look for one of my grandfather’s old industry newsletters. Grampa was an ice man for awhile. For those of you too young to know, there were factories that created ice and the ice men delivered blocks of it for use in ice boxes.
The newsletter I’m thinking of had a lot of articles on the health benefits of ice over this new-fangled refrigeration thing that dried out food and blew smells and god knows what all over anything left inside them. There were quotes from doctors and from satisfied users. Obviously from a time before Tupperware.
If I ever find it again, I’m going to scan it and post it somewhere.
Oh lord, token ring. heh. One of my first “adult” jobs involved running thinwire under a floor to make a new network. A “T” at every workstation, and the run terminated at both ends…seems so primitive by modern standards.
Kids these days. No idea that there was an era before 100baseT and 802.11G.
Thinking along those lines, is there a market these days for dumb terminals?
How about the manufacturers of floppy disk drives, and floppy disks themselves? Hell, most data files anyone works with these days are far too big to fit on a 1.4 meg floppy, and USB thumb drives cost like $10 now; there’s just no point in failure-prone floppies anymore. And when I think about how much I spent on special drawers and cases for those damn disks…
When I was a kid in the 1970s, my block was occasionally visited by a knife sharpener. They’d drive slowly down the street, much like an ice cream truck, shouting “KNIVES SHARPENED! KNIVES SHARPENED!”
Once, I remember a ragman making his presence on my block! Yes, in the 1970s … beat-up truck with a stake bed, yelling “RAGS! RAGS!”
One business you don’t see around anymore are old-school coffee houses. Not like Starbucks, but places like Chock Full O’ Nuts in NYC or Edward Hopper Nighhawks-style joints.
DIMM memory
RLL & MFM hard drives
Microchannel expansion cards
Math coprocessors
re: pagers. We just bought about 200 more for the hospital I work at. They’re cheap. They’re great for short text notifications that don’t require a response. “draw blood gas on 634” And seriously, who’s going to steal one?
Back to the list. Anyone tried to find a non-digital thermometer lately?
Ummm…you do that Gigabit ethernet and 802.11n are around now, right? Or do you just mean that the current IT guys that are graduating generally don’t learn about anything older than 100baseT and 802.11g?
We had a token ring on thick cable across 9 floors, entirely passive. Hermaphroditic connectors (“Boy Georges”) that always popped loose because the clips were constantly loose. If the right number of people turned off their terminals, we lost the inherent signal repeat to the next floor and the loop would fall down because it got too “big”, electrically.
Yes, then there was the thin-net cable stretched along the back of the desks. It was constantly kicked by by feet and rolled on by chair wheels. Abuse it enough and everybody from the damaged section “downstream” would go dead.
I remember when ethernet hubs (not one of these new-fangled switches) were introduced.
Try here. There was another science project type estore that had actual oral thermometers for awhile. I bought a couple just because I didn’t trust the new digitals in my price range. I’m so cheap. I’m also too lazy to search hard enough to be sure that it’s gone.
Does anyone use those wax cylinders to listen to music anymore? I know I don’t.
Player piano rolls. I just can’t find new ones for my player piano. But that’s okay, because the parts needed to repair my player piano aren’t available anymore either.
Most digital cameras nowadays show you the picture you’ve just taken. My trusty old analogue doesn’t. Anyway, I do it because I want to, not because it makes sense.
I’m a bit out of date, but my grade school and high school (Catholic) both used mimeographs all the time in the 90s. They’re also really popular in developing nations since they can print brazillions of pages, don’t require electricity, etc.
I also remember going to college and getting handouts and feeling like this was a fancy place because the paper was blank on the back side!*
My grade and high school ALWAYS used scrap paper donated from local businesses. Sometimes it was old dot matrix printing, sometimes it was old letterhead, whatever.
It’s been sad watching the demise of TV- and VCR repair shops. I’ve seen them grow empty, then add extra services (like Western Union and Notary Public), hang on for a couple of years, then grow dark.
CRTs – My BIL works in video editing & post-production, and his company has been buying up extra CRTs before the supply vanishes – their opinion is that CRTs still have the most accurate color reproduction. (However, when everyone is watching his products on LCDs & Plasmas, we won’t notice the bad colors and the CRT-aided-better-color will be wasted on us).
(Consumer-level ) film cameras – my extrapolation of the CRT discussion. Some movie studios may still use film for awhile, but at some point they’re going to look at the bottom line and jettison their film cameras. I occasionally read articles where historians are worried that photographs, which can last easily more than 100 years, are disappearing and being replaced by disk drives (5 year life span) and CD-Rs (15 year life span). We’re going to have a gap in our history between the demise of photographs and the invention of the medium that can reliably store info forever.
In my business, there’s not much call for GTWTs (Gridded Traveling Wave Tubes) for radars anymore; we’re all going with Electronically Scanned Arrays. Ditto (analog) crystal filters; most of that has been shifted to software, which is a shame, because crystal filters have many advantages. Actually, almost all analog hardware signal processing has been shifted over to digital signal processing, either in hardware or software.
BTW: Pagers are also necessary in high-security areas; cell phones & 2-way pagers are prohibited (along with PDAs & flash drives).
Uh, film keeps for a fairly long time: buy 400 images worth of film and you’re fixed for 8 years or so. Might want to get a second camera, too, but they’re likely cheap at the moment.
As for the OP: commercial fishing. People have been complaining for my entire lifetime that there aren’t enough fish to make it profitable any more, and that farmed fish and oil prices have eroded the market so much that you can’t even break even any longer. They’re not all gone yet, but I think open-sea commercial fishing won’t outlive me, except for a few desperate holdouts.
