# What became ubiquitous then went away in your lifetime? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 10, 2026, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180 "2026-04-10T22:01:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 42
**Author:** ![P-man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/p-man/32/3606_2.png) [@P-man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/P-man)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2026, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/821 "2026-09-17T23:23:31Z")
" > [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Certainly Cecil Adams remembered that. “Inexplicably charming.” I think someone sent him one for answering a question. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2026, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/822 "2026-09-17T23:27:27Z")
You might be able to correct the quoting there. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/823 "2026-09-18T00:20:36Z")
I’m not sure if I’ve ever used a daisy wheel typewriter. I’ve used manual ones that relied on finger pressure only, and I’ve used ones that are a hybrid between word processor and typewriter where you can type in 1-3 lines ahead of time before it prints so you can correct mistakes. I know that in the late 80s, for some reason I needed to fill out a form so I went to a library and used their typewriter since we didn’t have one and I didn’t trust my handwriting and I couldn’t print anything out directly onto a form. _That_ one may have been a daisy wheel electric but I don’t remember since I only used it once. I know that for my college applications in the early 90s I solved the handwriting issue by hand writing very carefully in the small boxes, but then printing out responses on a PC and then taping them on to the long form essay-type questions. ---
**Author:** ![dougrb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/76d3ee/32.png) [@dougrb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougrb)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/824 "2026-09-18T01:31:34Z")
I had typing class in high school (class of '82). Easiest “A” ever. ---
**Author:** ![P-man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/p-man/32/3606_2.png) [@P-man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/P-man)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/825 "2026-09-18T01:37:11Z")
I had it as well, and barely pulled out a B-. We used ancient manual typewriters, and I don’t think I ever exceeded 10-12 words a minute. Now, in my sixties, I have no problem having my wpm exceed my age. Of course that’s on a computer. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/826 "2026-09-18T02:34:53Z")
> [@Ludovic](#): > > I’m not sure if I’ve ever used a daisy wheel typewriter. I have used two. One was a regular typewriter just with a daisy wheel mechanism instead of a manual mechanism or the little ball type thingie that the selectrics used. The second one was fancier. It could be used as a typewriter but could also be connected to a computer and used as a printer. You could even enter what you typed into the computer, so it was kinda like a terminal except instead of a screen your output went to a roll of fanfold computer paper. I took a typing class in high school but it was a part of a computer class. Usually girls took typing and boys took shop classes, but in this case the boys used the typewriters that were usually only for girls. The teacher was used to teaching girls how to be secretaries and wanted us to use the lower case L instead of a 1 to save time, until we pointed out that this didn’t work when you were trying to input computer code. On the computer side of the class, we had a Honeywell mainframe that ran about 20 terminals. If all 20 terminals were in use by students compiling programs, the computer got very slow. While the computer itself wasn’t impressive by modern standards, it had the fastest printer I have ever seen attached to it. It was a true “line printer” in that it was a dot matrix with an entire line of dots (in other words, while a standard dot matrix printer at the time had an array of something like 9x9 dots on its print head, and the print head moved across the page, this printer had an array of 132 characters worth of dots by 9 dots and the print head did not move). It printed down the page as quickly as a fast dot matrix printer went across the page. It had a 3 or 4 foot or so stack of fanfold computer paper at the bottom of the printer, so the printer was a bit tall. Every quarter, they used that computer system to print out report cards for the entire county. Computer students got to use the computer the rest of the time. We saved our programs to punch cards. If you were a glutton for punishment you could punch your cards manually with a punch card machine that we had, but it was MUCH faster and easier to type in your program and then send that to the card puncher to save it. The typing part of the class taught me how to properly type, but I had been typing on a computer before then (TRS-80 model 1!), and after the class was over I went back to my own home-grown typing style. In the 1990s, I had a secretary tell me that I typed amazingly fast considering how wrong I did it. Girls took typing classes long before I was born, and punch cards were also invented before I was born. But the daisy wheel printer was invented after I was born and died out in the late 1990s, so that fits the OP at least. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/827 "2026-09-18T02:53:08Z")
I had one and kept it on my truck antenna until it basically fell apart (the hat was gone, and the face was faded away). ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/828 "2026-09-18T02:55:33Z")
> [@ricepad](#): > > I’m sure JitB will bring them out again in the future. I hope. Never say never, but as few modern cars have that a style of radio antenna on which such a decoration would fit, I’m not sure that I’d hold my breath. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/829 "2026-09-18T03:04:18Z")
I took typing in high school for a full year in 1983-84. We used IBM Selectric typewriters. It taught me touch-typing, which came in handy when personal computers later became ubiquitous. (I was curious what my typing speed is these days, and it is about 50-55 wpm.) My first typewriter that I used at home was a manual typewriter. I wrote at least one term paper using it. But for my senior year in high school, my grandmother gifted me a fancy electronic typewriter with a daisy wheel. I used it a lot that year, including for my college applications (which all had to be hand-printed or typed on forms that were provided), but moved on to PCs (actually Macintosh computers) the following year when I started college. I still have that electronic typewriter somewhere in the basement. I assume it still works, though it’s over 40 years old now. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/830 "2026-09-18T04:11:25Z")
> [@robby](#): > > I took typing in high school for a full year in 1983-84. We used IBM Selectric typewriters. I had a single semester of typing in junior high school around 1980 (a result of my schedule being shuffled as I was moved to a higher-level English class). Clunky, heavy manuals all the way - I maxed out at ~25 wpm on them and never really learned how to properly touch type. I found trying to using an early electric thereafter a bit difficult because I was pushing they keys too hard resulting in two or three letters being output. To this day I’m a rather slow and plodding typist. It made typing papers in college a chore. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/831 "2026-09-18T12:18:35Z")
I thought of another really minor one for some of you… flashcubes and flash bars for amateur photography. I remember my dad having a little camera that mounted a flashcube, and when you shot your flash photo and wound the film to the next frame, the flashcube mounting rotated 1/4 turn, pointing a new bulb in the direction of the lens. From what I understand they were introduced in the early 1960s, and were pretty much absolutely gone by the early 1980s when manufacturers figured out how to put reusable xenon flashes on little cameras. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/832 "2026-09-18T12:51:43Z")
> [@bump](#): > > From what I understand they were introduced in the early 1960s I remember them from my childhood as well. We have a lot of different ages here, but something introduced in the early 1960s would not work for a lot of posters here, but would for others. We should have a new thread for things that disappeared that were around when we were children. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/833 "2026-09-18T13:06:14Z")
> [@WildaBeast](#): > > There is a difference between **electric** typewriters and **electronic** typewriters, which I think is confusing some people. > > An electric typewriter works pretty much like a manual typewriter, except it uses an electric motor to move the striker rather than relying purely on mechanical force from your fingers. > > An electronic typewriter (such as the IBM Selectric) uses electronics to translate your key press into the movement of something like a typeball or daisy wheel, with no actual mechanical connection between the key and the typing element. > > ETA: I just read the Wikipedia article, and I just learned that the Selectric was electromechanical, not electronic. So it would actually fall into the “electric” category, albeit a very advanced electric typewriter. I had a definitely electric typewriter in high school, college, and first grad school, on which I developed my idiosyncratic “one-handed” typing system. I type with one hand _really_ fast. It amazes some people, who clearly wonder how, or why, I do it. I just never learned two-handed touch typing. In my second grad school I wanted something of better quality to type out, for instance, my thesis. So i bought a Selectric clone – a used Juki Sierra that used the same ball typing head and one-time ribbon. I still have both, but never use them. It’s virtually impossible to get the ribbon cartridges for the Juki anymore. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/834 "2026-09-18T13:12:56Z")
Yeah as a 54 year old, they were common in my early childhood, but by the time I was in middle school, they were already a relic of the past. As far as the electric typewriters go, one thing that definitely came and went, although I’m not sure about ubiquity were those single-purpose, standalone “word processor” devices. They came around in the late 80s IIRC, and lasted until PCs were pretty much ubiquitous in the early-mid 90s. What they were, for those who are unfamilar, were devices that looked more or less like a typewriter with a tiny LCD screen so that you could see and edit several lines of text at once, and that had the ability to save a document for later onto a floppy disk. The idea was that you’d type it in, edit it, and then tell it to print, and it would then spit out a printed document. Very paper-document oriented, but also digital at the same time, which was a very narrow window of consumer products. They were brutally murdered by word processing software on PCs, especially after emailing attachments became common. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/835 "2026-09-18T13:42:55Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Yeah as a 54 year old, they were common in my early childhood, but by the time I was in middle school, they were already a relic of the past. Yeah, so it’s not a good fit for this thread as we are looking for things that weren’t there when you were a child but became ubiquitous and then disappeared. The idea is that we are looking for things you saw both come and go, and not just things that went away. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/836 "2026-09-18T14:47:55Z")
Yeah, I was figuring that maybe we were looking at “lifetime” as not necessarily _ **my** _ lifetime, but rather the collective “lifetime”. Early 1960s isn’t out of that, even if it’s a bit before my time. ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/837 "2026-09-18T15:10:24Z")
I had one of those from Mitsubishi (Panasonic); it was a damn fine piece of equipment. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/838 "2026-09-18T15:14:08Z")
From the OP: > [@TokyoBayer](#): > > What are things that weren’t there when you were a child, but became ubiquitous or very popular, and then went away? I specifically stated “that weren’t there when you were a child” because I’m interested in things that people watched as they became popular and that they could personally remember the time before they were popular. There are dozens, if not scores of things that weren’t there in Japan at the time I was a child in America, but became popular before I first came here, so I don’t remember a time when they weren’t there. I was here in Japan before the introduction of telephone cards and their special purpose pay phones, painted bright lime green, suddenly sprung up all over. Shibuya had dozens of these right in front of the main entrance. Now it’s hard to find any. The thread isn’t about things that just went away. A lot of posters have brought up things that have gone away, but that’s only part of the equation. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/839 "2026-09-18T15:17:52Z")
> [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](#): > > I had one of those from Mitsubishi (Panasonic); it was a damn fine piece of equipment. What do you mean by Mitsubishi (Panasonic)? ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2026, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180/840 "2026-09-18T15:25:19Z")
I’m sorry, it was Matsushita. Panasonic was it’s American distributor? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180.md?page=41) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-became-ubiquitous-then-went-away-in-your-lifetime/1029180.md?page=43)