Nope, just small town USA. I guess there are just a buncha income tax evaders around here. Example: Just had some work done on my car. Bill came to $345. I got out cash and the guy smiled and said, “$300’s good”.
From my cold, dead hands. Find me an affordable light bulb that works with your standard triac-based dimmer and then you can take back your incandescent lights.
Windows '98
If I go into Walmart or smaller stores, all they have for camera cards is SD variants, maybe some Memory Stick (II?) or XD. Best Buy has a few of the top-end compact flash camera cards, usually like 16GB or 32GB ultra-high speed for $100+; I suspect anyone who has an old CF camera has all the memory they need right now.
You can see what’s really obsolete by what sort of supplies are stocked. If you look really hard, you might find tractor feed paper or cabon(less) paper, but generaly that stuff is specail order. Funny, usually the big drawback to going from carboned printout to multiple laser copies is replacing the program (usually something that’s been around since DOS/dBASE days) with something windows-based that does laser.
Speaking of cassette tapes; definitely cassette answering machines, and microcassettes. Some people even still have dial-up internet.
Yeah, our bank charges a small fee for every transaction, plus I don’t trust Interac debit cards; so I typically take out a few hundred at a time and do anything too small for a credit card with cash. I never understood these guys who use a debit card for McDonalds or Starbucks.
Tapes are definitely still used for backup of large datasets. Price/Gb is I think about even for tape vs hard drives, but more importantly, professional archival tapes that are stored correctly are expected to last for 30 years. I don’t think you can find a hard drive that will last as long as that.
Really? My old laptop ran XP, didn’t have a floppy drive, and everything installed fine from CD.
My medical reimbursement account requires that I send copies of the receipts. Now, I could scan in 16 pages of this stuff, use a ton of disk space for them, and e-mail it - or I can stick them all in a fax machine, have them be stored in its memory in about 30 seconds, and forget about it until the transaction report comes out.
I thought about putting “Fax” in my list but I still see them everyhwere. They’re not going away anytime soon.
Typewriters have been obsolete for a while now.
I thouht about TI-83 calculators. Having been out of highschool for a good 15 years now I thought these things would have been replaced by laptops now but googling around says otherwise.
Are overhead projectors still used a lot in HS?
What about shortwave radios?
Shortwave radio is alive and well. Amateur radio is not going away anytime soon. I believe the Russkies are still transmitting numbers as well, don’t quote me on this one.
Some hdds required the extra drivers. As recently as last year, I got fed up with Vista on my brand new laptop. I tried to install XP on it and it wouldn’t get past the blue-screen installation screen.
Some hdd interfaces required them as well. I had to follow the same process for installing a SCSI card in a computer at work. Probably new Service Pack install discs had the drivers already included so it was less likely to see them.
Is there anything that isn’t a communication or information technology that fits that description? Someone mentioned the steering in his car, but I think most examples people have are either for IT or communications. I don’t know if other fields are seeing products go obsolete within 10 years.
They may have been gone before, but glass bottles for soda are almost impossible to get now. But they were being phased out before that with plastics.
Huh? HDD interface is done at the motherboard level. I have never had any sort of driver needed for a hard drive, nor have I ever heard as much. You mention SCSI-- you would need drivers for the SCSI card, not the SCSI hdd. Am I confused?
If anyone needs to setup Kermit or UUCP, I’m your man!
I also know APL, Cadol, and a dozen or so other completely obsolete systems.
I can also get you a Zip drive for really cheap. The big 200Mb one and I have the installation software on both a 3 1/2 inch and 5" floppy.
I would also add that Windows Mobile is pretty obsolete, but I don’t have the heart to tell ol’ Bill. He’d be heart broken.
Until Microsoft included them in service packs, many RAID controllers required drivers to be installed before the Windows installer could access the disk. Because those were usually distributed from the manufacturer on a CD and the Windows installer would only access floppies, this essentially meant you had to have two computers to be able to install Windows. Good times.
Why not use a credit card for those transactions? With the no-signature dollar amount at about $25 at many places it is becoming quicker and more convenient than cash for those small transactions.
My organization had a fax server attached to the main network. It looked like a printer as far as programs were concern - it just printed out somewhere else. At one time this was very heavily used. Two Januarys ago it failed.
No one noticed until May.
We decided not to bother replacing it.
Yeah, the local big-box grocery store installed self-checkouts that don’t accept cash. I happily use my credit card to buy a loaf of bread of 4L of milk.
If you have a laptop “XP install” odds are it has the drivers slipstreamed onto the custom install CD. (Or the hardware is very generic). If you are installing on something like a big box that has SCSI disk controller, you need to hit f6 at the beginning of the install to tell it to load thed river from the floppy. Because the install process program is pretty minimal, you don’t have a lot of flexibility in which device to point it to.
I do notice that thanks to China, plastic is replacing a lot of items in toys. There was an interview on the radio last winter with one of the few places still retailing wooden toboggans in town. Most sleds are bright plastic. Same with wagons - I see lots of the plastic-body plastic-wheel wagons and not a lot of the old wooden ones. Balsa models and even those plastic glue and paint model airplanes have been on the way out for a long time as a kid hobby. Propeller planes and jets not exciting any more? The local toy stores used to have shelves full of them.
Can’t remember when some of this statred to disappear…
Mechanically tuned radios?
Remember those flip-number alarm clocks? All LED now.
Hand-drawn animation? IIRC, Disney stopped hand-drawing sometime in the 90’s and most cartoons are computer-generated today. The 2-D look is slowly disappearing in favour of CGI.
Distributor points and carburetors? Almost everything is fuel-injected nowadays.
Hand-cranked windows on cars? Those car door locks where you could snag the button with a bent coathanger?
Try finding a street motorcycle that doesn’t look like a fake Harley hawg or a Ninja bike…
Plain cloth hightop sneakers are back because they’re “retro”. Ditto for sensible bicycles.
Can you still get the original double-edged safety razor?
Ashtrays in restaurants? Free or penny matches? Smoking section in movie theatres?
Loans at prime in banks?
I think laserdiscs were on their last legs in '99 and I haven’t even seen one in a pawn shop for years.
Not sure how to put this, but video arcades aren’t nearly what they used to be either.
Hercules, CGA, EGA, and a myriad of other video formats and their monitors can only be found in the backs of garages and landfills.
MFM and RLL hard drives are dinosaurs. I can’t remember the last time I saw a 5 1/4 hard drive in operation.
It doesn’t fit the OP’s definition of “non-niche technologies available at brick and mortar stores,” but I’ll include it anyway.
The technology that allowed 100 people at a time to go from London to New York in under four hours.
(Yes, I’m still sad about Concorde’s demise.)