From the OP
So rather than look for things that have gone away in your lifetime, the thread is looking for things that came and went, with the spirit of the thread being things that you remember coming.
Widespread wearing of facial masks. I still see people wearing them on occasion in public, and it’s certainly a bit more common than it was prior to 2020, but it’s, of course, nothing like it was in 2020 and 2021.
The rise and fall of DVD and Blu-Ray were frustrating to me. A couple of really good standards and technologies came and went, displaced by DRM-encrypted unreliable streaming services that brought little real benefit for consumers.
That’s what I get for thinking good consumer tech could be eternal. It’s made me into kind of an inverse Luddite, as in, I skip over a lot of new tech not because I don’t find it interesting or useful, but because I know that the best case scenario is that it gets worse and expensive over the next few years, and the more likely case is that it will simply drop off the planet and lock up a lot of my data and work in the process (whether that means it’s in a hard-to-convert format, or simply gone).
Watch Chimes
When digital watches became common, one of the features was an alarm. And not only that, one of the features was chiming the hour (single chime, not counting).
In 1981, I was in a large lecture theatre with a bunch of teenagers, many of whom had received a digital watch for Christmas. And on the hour (a couple of seconds either way), there were digital watches chiming. (Lectures ran from 20 past to 10 past, term started at the end of February).
By the next day, all the chimes were silent. Became ubiquitous and went away in two months.
They were ubiquitous for longer than two months where I lived, but yes, they did come and go.
In late 1981, I was in the Mormon Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, studying to become a missionary in Japan.
Once a week, they would have an evening speaker and they always made an announcement asking people to silence their watches but inevitably you would hear be-beep, be-beep in the middle of the quiet sermon.
Add to that calculator watches. I don’t know about ubiquitous but at least around my group of friends they were considered cool and everyone who did not have one wanted one. Of course now you can talk to your watch and have it do much more than a calculate, but at the time that was cool.
//i\\
In a military novel I read during the period the opening scene was a war game and a shavetail with his platoon was lying in wait as a pair of scouts from the OpForce were approaching. Noon hit, the lieutenant’s digital watch beeped, and his sergeant glared at him. The scouts, of course, had vanished.
There’s still one in my non-tourist regular old suburban McDonald’s here in Connecticut. It has been here for the whole 20+ years I’ve lived here in town, and has survived at least three interior and exterior renovations.
I wonder if it’s because they wouldn’t know what else to do with the vast high-ceilinged space it’s in.
There are still PlayPlaces at my two local McDonald’s, in the western suburbs of Chicago: neither of them are in tourist areas, or next to Interstate exits; they’re both just regular local suburban McD’s. Both restaurants were renovated in the last 10-15 years, and the PlayPlaces survived that.
The McDonald’s in Taiwan where we lived had a PlayPlace that survived until Covid.
I’ve been sensing that physical media like CDs and DVDs are going to make a comeback, hopefully enough so that they don’t fully go away. Imagine listening to the songs you want with no interrupting ads and having them be always available. Better than streaming!
Fitness videos. Everyone wanted to be fit like Jane Fonda. Fitness gurus wanted to be rich like Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda is still around. Not so videos.
As recently as a couple years ago, my wife did a workout to a Jillian Michaels DVD. But it certainly seemed quaintly antiquated; she had to dust off an ancient laptop with a DVD drive in order to play it.
I’m not sure I follow. The premium subscriptions for Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc all offer ad-free music streaming.
Digital point and shoot cameras.
They took over from film P&S cameras starting in the late 1990s, reaching peak sales in about 2010 with about 110 milllion units sold annually. Smartphones with cameras came out and drove a stake through the digital P&S heart and jammed some garlic in its throat for good measure.
By about 2016 or so, they were down to somewhere around 15 million sold annually , and now are being sold in vanishingly small numbers by comparison(2.77 million annually, up from 1.7 a few years ago), mostly either specialized ones like the OM System TG-7 ruggedized camera, or they’re very casual use things like the Kodak Charmera or Camp Snap cameras.
So long as they rent the rights to a particular song. When some bean counter decides it’s no longer cost-effective – poof – it’s gone. If you treat the channel like a radio station and not a music collection you’re fine.
Well, that doesn’t have much to do with ad-free streaming which is what I was talking about.
I don’t think it’s the streaming service bean counters removing content; it seems to usually be the artists or labels themselves. And even that is a pretty rare or at least temporary thing. How many popular, mainstream acts have been poofed from the major streamers globally over the last 5 years? A fairly negligible number would be my guess.
At the very least, I get the feeling streaming isn’t going to make the OP’s list anytime soon.
Those googie boomerang antennas that meant this limousine has television.
That’s a great one, it was a must-have in about 5th grade. The poor teachers. I also vividly remember playing with their alarm beepers underwater at the pool, it was my first waterproof noisemaker.
Hey Brits, do you guys still have the trucks that drive around with an antenna on top, looking for television watching scofflaws?
You mean from the Ministry of Housinge?