I still can’t believe that 10 years ago when I worked for DoD, we had a (I guess) a “stress’? class where they gave us mood rings. I was mellow in class–blue–which turned black back in the office
and hush puppies (the shoes)
Yes, my wife teaches high school calculus, and her students all use a graphing calculator. As I understand it, part of the reason is that certain graphing calculators are approved to be used while taking the AP test.
Until recently, I would have said stagflation. I was in grade school when it started ca. 1970. By the mid-1980s, inflation was under control, and the economy had started growing again.
But we may be seeing it again soon.
and slide rules?
I think Target and others still sell all-in-one radio/cd/record players for not much money
I’m wondering if FM Radio is going to be gone before I am. I realized recently that I’d never listened to the radio in my “new” car and it’s 18 months old.
The young people I know never seem to listen to the radio.
They are actually still available, but probably only online.
They do. DVDs, VCRs, CD players, etc., etc., haven’t completely dropped off the face of the Earth, they’re just not so common as they once were. Another thing that was ubiquitous during my lifetime was computer games on disks or CDs. I could go to Best Buy, CompUSA, Babbages, and eventually even Walmart to pick up the likes of Doom, Sim City, Starfleet Command, etc., etc. If Best Buy still has a section of the store dedicated to computer games it’s a very, very small section.
I don’t, and do use such a player (Sony, found two of them for cheap on EBay, all my CDs transferred to FLAC format)–gone into why I don’t here before, but in a nutshell, (a) I have zero worries about signal dead zones when on the road, a frequently common occurence, (b) I also have no concerns that a fave cut will be dropped from the service with no warning, (c) I’ve spliced together some key cuts on Audacity which I consider to be two parts (or more) of a bigger whole, and (d) w.r.t. lyrics I don’t have to worry about mondegreens and can edit my lyrics without restriction.
I thought about cable when I first saw this thread yesterday. Technically cable TV existed before I was born, but it seems like it really became ubiquitous in the 1980s (or maybe it just seems that way to me because that’s when my family got it). It hasn’t completely gone away yet, but it is definitely not the thing nearly everyone has like once was.
And what about those mini satellite dishes? It seems like those started popping up on every other house in the 2000s, as an alternative to cable. They’re not completely gone, either, but they don’t seem to be as common as they once were.
One thing I would be paranoid of is the disc only part of the code, and that you’d still have to download most of it from the Internet, which defeats the purpose of buying a game from a store except for what physical perks come in the box. This Christmas I saw a DVD based game being installed on a new gaming system and it had to download its code for like half an hour over a very good internet connection.
One advantage of this is that you get the latest bugfixes, but you’d think that the game would at least be playable from the get go and you could make the latest patch optional. What if you had your gaming rig in a place without fast Internet, like on a cabin retreat or an RV park?
How different does the replacement have to be before something ‘“disappeared” ? Did answering machines disappear when landlines started to include the “answering machine” ( and people stopped buying the stand alone version) or only when voicemail became common?
You selectively quoted me. Here is what I also said in the OP.
The OP is explicitly saying that it’s not completely gone away, and it acknowledges that there are places it’s used. However, most people no longer encounter it.
Not necessarily. Much depends on one’s preferences and what’s available where one lives. There are dozens of thriving FM stations where I live, among them CBC Radio One and CBC Radio Two (now called CBC Music) which are available nationwide through a network of transmitters and repeaters.
CBC Radio One is a national treasure, offering national and local news and weather and an eclectic mix of interviews, documentaries, and sometimes concerts promoting local artists, all commercial-free. I listen to it all the time I’m in the car and value it like an old friend.
Young people do a lot of things I wouldn’t do, and vice versa.
The insane numbers of rental bikes that got dumped then abandoned seems to be a Chinese thing. In both Taiwan and Japan, the programs were rolled out better and are still doing well.
[raises hand] One of my earliest memories is listening to radio shows (perhaps because the Magic Eye creeped me out no end). And yes, it was a big deal when we got our first b&w television in the early 1950s. It had something like a 16" diagonal screen, multiple controls which required constant fiddling to keep the image centered and stable, and about a thousand tubes that kept burning out; but it was a magical window into the big wide world. Until 10 pm when the national anthem played and the Indian head came on.
As to the topic at hand, are instant pots still a going concern? I know they were widespread not too long ago, but the thrift store where the Younger Ottlet works won’t take them anymore because they don’t sell.
Oh, that reminds me… CDs have already been mentioned, but specifically CD players in cars didn’t exist when I was born, then an in-dash CD player became almost a standard feature in most cars from the late 1990s into the early 2010s. Now they’re completely gone, replaced by streaming audio and Bluetooth connections to your smartphone.
Come to think of it, aux ports on car stereos followed a similar trajectory. They first came about as MP3 players became popular, as a way to listen to your MP3s in your car. Now they, too, have been replaced by Bluetooth.
My parents had no TV until sometime in the late 1950s, and then only because they were gifted a beautiful high-end TV and a bunch of other stuff on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary. Little me was absolutely delighted – it was even better than Christmas morning! 
Of course, this meant that I would soon start hounding them to get cable! Cable TV was primitive and limited back then, but yes, it existed It took a while but my parents eventually gave in, just to shut me up!
Today, ironically, I don’t have cable (except for internet) for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that I watch very little commercial broadcast television, plus the availability of other content sources, and also the way that the channel tiers are arranged quickly drives up the cost, so to hell with it. Paying a relatively big monthly fee for the dubious privilege of watching inane commercials supporting mediocre content is something I can do without.
What?? No rabbit ears?