Seeing how we’re nearing the end of the decade I got to thinking about technologies which have become (mostly) obsolete since 1999. I’m interested mainly in “current” consumer, non-niche technologies available at brick and mortar stores. For example, I’m aware you could still buy a brand new record player but they are really in niche use now. Or are they? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Here’s my list:
-Portable cassette players. (portable CD players are not far behind, are they?)
-ISA/EISA interface. I remember having old hard drives that I could still hook up to a new motherboard in the early 2000s but at one point they stopped providing support.
-Floppy drives (yes, you can order them online, but again, it’s a niche).
-IOMega Zip drives.
-VCRs (too soon?).
CRTs? I think it’s getting close. I was at Best Buy the other day and I was surprised to still see some CRT TVs sitting in a corner. It was only about 4 or 5 but they were there. Not the case with computer monitors though. Those seem to be pretty much goners as well!
Dan Blather: Analog cell phones certainly qualify. So do pagers for most uses/people.
[ul]
[li]Consumer-grade removable storage media based on magnetic film. (This encompasses floppies, zip disks, and tapes. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know if tapes are being used by serious data warehousers now that removable hard drives are so cheap.)[/li][li]PS/2 mice and keyboards. In fact, just about every consumer-grade connector other than USB, FireWire, and whatever monitors are using these days.[/li][li]Pay phones.[/li][/ul]
Analog TV isn’t gone. Millions of cable subscribers have it. I have a digital TV, but only watch it in analogue (actually, I only watch the recorded analog signals recorded via MythTV and streamed to it via ethernet).
Certainly I’m not the only one that’s too cheap to pay for digital television? I’m not talking movies and real entertainment, but television?
The day they take away my analogue option is the day I become a full-time pirate.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but your location may play a role in your choice. It’s my understanding the analog tv has been discontinued in the US (didn’t the entire US switch to digital earlier this year? Or am I thinking of some other widescale platform change?)
As someone who has worked at 4-5 different data centers since 1999, including one 3rd party DR location, I can assure you that tape is alive and well in the Computer Operations world, and won’t be going away anytime soon.
VHS p;layers aren’t gone, and aren’t particularly “niche” – I just bought a VCR/DVD player last month off-the-shelf at Best Buy. That’s as Mainstream as you can get
CalMeacham: Can you find standalone VHS players? What is the selection of new VHS tapes (new means movies from the past year) compared to DVDs at Wal-Mart?
I mistakenly bought a keyboard with a PS/2 plug the other week. I wanted a basic keyboard, I was at Target, and the only choices were a couple of over-featured keyboards and one simple style with a PS/2 plug. My current computer doesn’t even have a PS/2 port. Arrgh. Annoying. The keyboard my computer came with is a USB and has sticky keys so I wanted a new one, didn’t even occur to me that there wouldn’t be a port in the back of the computer.
