I love obsolete technology, but it’s hard to think of good examples that fit your criteria.
The last North American Laserdisc release was in 2000 according to Wikipedia. This may not count, because they were never really that popular at all and certainly here in the UK their mainstream availability was over long before the late 90’s.
If you want to include games consoles there’s been quite a few, the PS1, the N64, Xbox 1, Gameboy Advance, the Gamecube and probably several more are no longer available. It’s difficult to think of a more mainstream electronics product, but I suppose you might not count this as the generic technology is still very much alive even if specific examples are no longer made.
The instant camera - Polaroids etc - is pretty much dead now, I certainly haven’t seen them in a long while, but I’m not sure when they died. Were they still readily availalbe 10 years ago?
Yeah fax machines are pretty useful for business still. If you need to get signed documents from one place to another you can expect a fax, as they seem to be more available than scanners (which you’d use to scan a signed document for email).
I have a fax for my business. I use it about 6 times a year for business things. Once or twice a year, every year since I’ve had it, a friend or family member asks to use it too.
I still see several different brands and models of microcassette recorders in normal brick-and-mortar stores in the US. Not really niche, but many prefer them to digital recorders for lectures, public meetings where minutes must be composed and the law requires physical audio records to be saved, records of therapy and counseling sessions, and so on.
I assume you mean the big cartridges for IBM-mainframe scale machines (also a niche market).
But for the general user - yes. More and more of medium-small businesses ARE bumping up against the limits. DLT drives have reached 800GB and exploit compression technology, but with terabyte drives so common, it is getting harder to fit everything on one drive and finish the job in one night. The VMware virtualization craze is making it worse. Need another server? Just create another copy of the disks, and customize it. There’s another hundred-plus Gig to back up. Not to mention photo archives - some businesses rely on digital camera techonology and can’t justify deleting stuff. One client has 150GB of purchased aerial photos as part of their survey business.
Many places have given up on limiting mailbox sizes. It’s just too convenient to have 5 or 10 years of email at your fingertips.
Tape can’t keep up.
Swipe cards are on the way out; I just got my first chipped VISA card yesterday.
Dot matrix was a dying printer technology 10 years ago. It’s extreme niche now. Ditto for carbon copies. I suspect carbonless is not far behind.
External modulators, speaking of analog TV. If it needs to put out channel 3, the device (VCR’s, Satellite and cable boxes) does it. Most consumer electronics bypasses channel 3 (modulated signal) tech altogether because every TV has had at least the yellow “video in” for a decade or 2.
Separate answering machines (and caller ID units) also seem to be disappearing, since it’s built into the phone nowadays.
Many phone companies are refusing to support old dial (pulse-dial) phones. Touch-tone is manatory. I found out during a VoIP conversion at a business, that some modern switches also often do not support the 90v required to ring those old electro-mechanical phone bells. Warbles are mandatory now.
Subway tokens are disappearing in a lot of places.
Fax machines are still in regular use in law firms, because they have an advantage over sending a scanned document: the document is physically present and will likely be noticed by somebody, whereas if you e-mail something to someone, it’s virtual until that person logs on to their e-mail.
When you’re serving a document, you want to be sure that someone on the other end will notice it.
Plus, your own fax machine will print out a report confirming delivery, in case there’s a dispute at some later point. That isn’t always the case with e-mail: you can’t be sure of getting a delivery receipt, depending on how the recipient’s e-mail server is set up, what program they’re using, etc.
Yup. Our entire building is on a VOIP system meaning all the phones and data devices connect to the same LAN. It makes everything very modular and convenient. Except our stupid fax machine, which has to be on specific jack that gets converted to analog in some networking closet. All so a bunch of our customers can keep faxing orders to us. It’s stupid but not obsolete yet.
The Fuji 4900z digital camera that I bought in 2000 used a SMartCard, IIRC. They peaked at about 128MB and died as a format a few years later. The Canon A80 used a CompactFlash card; too bulky now - that is still available, but only as a very marginal niche product in top-end digial SLR’s (and fast disappearing there too). SD is the medium of choice.
Black and white film was almost imposible to get printed 10 years ago. Try finding a processing shop now. If you want to develop your own film and photos - that’s even more niche than colour film. Do they still market those odd sizes? IIRC they announces 126 film was toast a while ago. Polaroid? ha ha ha ha …
I don’t know why he needs a VHS player, but I don’t use mine to view current movies anyway. They’re for taping shows I want to show to other people in different locations, like in a school classroom.
Fax has a level of security that’s not easy to get in any method and there’s a lot of business that can’t be done any other way.
Furthermore, fax technology is definitely advancing. Most of my faxes are sent from the Print dialogue box on my computer, and I view all of my faxes as electronic PDFs. Given this, I don’t see fax dying out as a standard business tool until we have some protocol that eliminates phone lines.
Admittedly I haven’t looked in a few months, but last I checked, Best Buy had a couple record players for sale, as does the Fred Meyer nearest my apartment. The 3 record stores closest to my house all have large stocks of new vinyl and all three sell turntables too. Obviously they’re not nearly as widely used as they once were or as CDs and MP3s are now, but they’re far from gone. In fact, they’ve been experience a fairly healthy resurgence lately.
You can buy Compact Flash cards everywhere. They’re hardly scarce. As for black and white film processing/printing, there are at least three local processors here that will process and print B&W film. Two of them even told me they’ll process 127 film (though not print, only scan it).
Do telegrams count? Most of the commercial telegraphy services in the developed world died between 2000 and 2005, though you can still find companies that provide the service for novelty purposes.
Film is plenty niche, but there’s still plenty of professionals/artists that still use it. However I don’t know anyone that still shoots APS, which probably had the worst timing ever. It was meant to completely replace 35mm for point-and-shoots, (and it was doing a very good job) but it came out just a few years before digital took off.
Think Memory Stick will die out soon, like other failed Sony recording formats such as Beta and Elcaset?
I’ve got an early Sony Cybershot digital camera that uses full-size first generation Memory Sticks, with a maximum capacity of 128 MB. It’s been impossible to get new first generation MS cards for about seven or eight years, and used cards sell on eBay for a hefty premium given the very limited capacity. No firmware updates allowing the camera to work with larger capacity Memory Sticks are available, so those seven or eight 32MB and 64MB MS cards I have are dear.
Having been screwed by Sony, I made sure my second digital camera accepted SD cards.