Fax machines. People even had second phone lines installed at home just for the fax. Not so much anymore. More and more routine documents are available over the Internet (invoices, statements, itineraries) or are scanned then e-mailed.
Luggage without wheels. It started with large bags, then filtered down to carry on’s and now backpacks with wheels aren’t uncommon.
Mens (felt) hats: market is drying up.
Carbon paper-anybody still use it?
“Welcome Wagon”-when was the last time you got a visit from one?
-Caledars 9from your local funeral home): Nice to know your pals at Abe’s Mortuary have you in their thoughts!
-Garbage Pickup: when pigs could no longer be raised within city limits, the market for garbage went flat!
Unfortunately, Polaroid film doesn’t seem to keep all that long before the chemical packs dry out.
I think Realtors/Real Estate agents are going to be obsolete within my lifetime.
I’ve been waiting for drum brakes to be obsolete.
Complementary calendars from funeral homes are still common in the Jewish community.
Related to VCRs: anyone remember the U-Matic format? Almost all of the VCRs in my high school (early 1980s) were U-Matics.
Doing research for a previous thread, I found a bunch of Telnet-based message boards that are still alive and kicking, complete with old-school BBS-style names like “The Cat’s Lair” and “The Wizard’s Castle”. On a related note, I wonder if any MUDs are still around …
Old-fashioned personal home pages also seem to be a dying breed on the Internet, although they are still quite popular among the working-class glurge, “survivor” and “phenomenal women” crowd that still inhabit Geocities, Tripod and the like.
With the decline of amateur radio (the two meter band is nearly empty now, save for some retirees who complain about their joints and seek Windows 95 support), and CB being nearly dead except among the redneck crowd, radio hobby shops are growing increasingly rare.
Buffalo City Hall still has manual elevators with elevator operators. Another relic still common in Buffalo: newspapers that are delivered by “paper boys”, not adults.
Wow. I don’t really know what they even are, but one of the family stories is how my great-grandfather invented the linograph. http://www.metaltype.co.uk/photos/photo15f.shtml
Wow! That’s pretty cool. I’ve heard good things about the Linograph, but I’ve never actually seen one.
Here’s mine. You’ll note it’s actually an Intertype, not that anybody can tell the difference anymore.
You probably mean spirit duplicators, or “ditto machines.” They are the ones with the smell and the purple ink. I remember these - my elementary school used them in the 1980s! Copies were always referred to as “dittos.” I have always wondered how these worked, and finally with your mention of mimeographs, I looked it up on Wikipedia, which linked to the spirit duplicator, and I realized this was the machine what made the dittos of my youth.
I suspect watches will, in my lifetime, become jewelry along the lines of cufflinks - something a few people own for dressing up or for nostalgia. More and more people are skipping the watch in favor of the cell phone.
OTOH, maybe cellphones will disappear when their functions are incorporated into watches. Who needs to carry another pocketful of gadgets to lose when you have a Dick Tracy wristwatch?
This is what first attracted me to the internet when I was a kid. People could make their own homepages and put them on the internet for anyone around the world to read. It’s sad that it no longer amazes me that I can communicate with people all over the world so easily. They were mostly ugly, badly designed and great! “Click here for pictures of my cat, Meowzers”, “Click here for vacation snaps 1995, Florida” and the like. These days blogs and social networked photo and other sites seem to have taken over and give even the most clueless user a sheen of professionalism and also homogenised the look of people’s online “homesteads”. I think this is kind of lamentable.
Leaded fuel is still in fairly wide use in South America and Asia.
So that’s what those machines were. I remember sometimes in class being given a whole stack of those lovely purple-printed pages, still warm from the copier*, to hand out to the class. That smell!
Edit - at least, I distinctly remember them as being warm, but the Wiki page makes no mention of heat being involved. Is my memory playing tricks?
Colophon, what I remember is the opposite: The pages were cool, when fresh, from the evaporation of the various spirit solvents used.
Hmm. Maybe my teacher used to stack them on the radiator to evaporate the solvent off before it could addle our tiny brains. 
Post it at Project Gutenberg.
Fax machines and pagers are still in use in the medical industry, though I think that’s more because of stubbornness than anything else. I’d love to do all my faxing through the computer but my coworkers would plotz. I can’t wait, because I hate paper, and I hate wasted paper (cover sheets, send confirmations) even more.
Pagers should have been replaced with text message years ago, with the help of relay numbers for those wanting to protect their personal lines but didn’t want to carry a second phone. But they’re still in heavy use around here.
I don’t see brick and mortar stores disappearing anytime soon, as long as they’re done right. Tower & Virgin sold their CDs for like $22. Pft. I can trundle down to Amoeba and pick it up for maybe $17, or wait a week and get it for $10 used. The “big” record stores in SF are dying, mostly because of Amoeba.
Yes. I see all of my clients out of the office, and I need brief written summaries of our meetings - which tend to be somewhat free-form - in duplicate; one for the client and one for my records. CC’s are still the quickest and easiest way of doing it. It can be a bitch to find, though: ask some 18 year old kid in the stationers for carbon paper and they look at you like you’ve asked for wax vestas for your meerschaum.
The guys who made those glass valves for my old radio (which still works).
Tea ladies (or coffee ladies) in the office.
Womens handkerchiefs.