Regarding the earlier remark about 8-track tapes, here’s a link to a documentary about people who collect them: So Wrong They're Right : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
You are not saying you wasted money on 20 photos without printing contact sheets first? 
In “The Door into Summer”, Robert Heinlein has the protagonist work with a drinking buddy who has a “healthy fascination with the past”. That’s a good phrase. There can be a healthy fascination with the past. Think of the PBS special where a family in Britain tried to recreate the experience of living through World War II, then reported how it felt - good and bad.
Actors of historical dramas (such as Downtown Abbey) have said that dressing in the clothes of a past era has an effect on how they stand and move about - even to their thinking.
In another sense, think of the Isaac Asimov story “The Feeling of Power”. The story is that computers have taken over calculation, and people have forgotten it. Then one person relearns how to calculate. And being able to to this independently gives the feeling of power.
This is what I miss about some of the old machines, the hands-on hackability of being able to splice tapes, speed them up or slow them down, to fiddle with wires, fool around with photo development and whatnot. I enjoyed that greatly when I was a kid. Just that whole direct experience with the machine and media that teaches you a little bit about art, and about the things in the world around you.
Digital has better quality and selection than the older stuff, for sure. But there is something less satisfying about clicking a button and having software spit something out, than the feeling that your hands are touching a continuous physical chain that leads back to the artists, to hold the media in your hands and say “this is mine”.
There are modern lossless digital formats.
I prefer to get music in FLAC format now, rather than MP3. You can definitely hear a difference, even without fancy equipment.
I have no idea how FLAC compares with vinyl, but I suspect it’s better.
FLAC is flexible with respect to sample rate and bit resolution, so it can encode everything from ludicrously crude audio to exactly what’s on a CD to far superior quality.
Sometimes playing with old stuff is just fun. I’m Gen X, and stream music on my sonos with the best of them, but I still play vinyl sometimes - it’s tactile, and fun to have to make deliberate choices. Music listening becomes an active event, rather than just a passive background noise.
I also miss shooting on film. Digital is amazing, but there’s something lovely about getting in a dark room and playing around with exposures. It becomes a craft exercise. There’s a place for both.
And aren’t we all just fed up with staring at screens the whole time?
It’s interesting to see what old format is chosen as the “interesting” format and what is not. As mentioned in the other thread, I work at a record store, so I see young adults buy records all the time.
But for a different field, my partner is a professional illustrator that does all of his work by hand. However, when he does class visits, the students are working 100% digital (for their own work, not necessarily the classwork), and not only can they work much faster, they get much better much quicker because it’s easier to experiment and make mistakes.
I guess the difference here is that playing a song on a phone over vinyl doesn’t actually give you any tangible benefits like digital drawing over analog does. But that doesn’t seem to hold up with photography, where I have also noticed film photography making a comeback (although I’m assuming the film photos are a tiny fraction of all photographs taken).
The shame about this is the hand drawing skills which are lost. I work for a design agency - basically none of the designers under 40 can really draw, whereas us oldies can still sketch when we need to. We were designing a logo a while ago which needed to look hand drawn, and I found the designer trying to do it onscreen - very unsuccessfully. I had to force him to get out a sketch pad and do it by hand - it was the only way to make it totally authentic. I had a right fight on my hands getting him to step away from the screen.
My favourite camera was a Pentax Spotmatic F. It was taken when my home was robbed but I managed to find another one in a second hand shop.
I now have a Cannon Power Shot digital. A big selling point was that it would zoom to 1200, which is pretty useless without a tri-pod and not great with a tri-pod. The camera has countless settings. Many of which I’ll never use because I don’t use the camera each day so 99% it’s on auto shoot. The manual is 286 pages (I checked) !!! who the hell memorizes 286 pages. Pretty sure I could pilot a spaceship with that much knowledge.
My land land line phone - the thing that replaced a basic dial telephone - has a 60 page manual. Smart phone 95 pages.
My car (2019) came with many features, most of which I’ve since turned off because they were just annoying. The worst is the ‘stop & go’ feature that shuts off the engine if the car is stopped longer than 1 second. Fortunately it never works as advertised.
Next was probably the automatic rear hatch which would open when a person got close enough with the key. I finally disengaged that after being whacked by the hatch about 5-6 times as I walked around the car to get to the drivers side.
As I said in my original reply post (scroll way back to the top) many ‘features’ and products we have are because ‘they can’. What they can also do is jack the price of the product for each of these so called features. Thing is; in the case of a car for example, to get a trim level you may want you also have to accept the other pile of useless shit they’ve added to justify the cost.
Going back many years I recall the first time with electric windows. I think someone came over to talk to me. I quickly discovered there would be no talking unless I started the car. WTF!
I’m well over 40 and can’t even draw a scribble. But I’m more pre-press than design. I’m the guy that fixes what designers do.
I wouldn’t expect an artworker (as I’d call pre-press) to be able to draw, even one at your great age 
but for a designer or art director working on concepts it can be a very useful and effective way to get an idea across without burning time on execution (and we’re in the business of selling time, after all). Going back 25 years, it was pretty much obligatory.
(Us oldies can also do the artwork/pre-press that the youngsters can’t, I notice)
Agreed! I always use FLAC. There’s a couple other lossless formats as well. If it’s 320Kbps MP3 it’s usable. 256Kbps if it’s the only option. I don’t even bother with an MP3 under that.
Yeah but the problem is, cassette tape stretches and therefore distorts. And are especially susceptible in a hot car.
We can only hope for a pen and ink revival. 
Give it a decade or so, it’ll probably happen.
Why do I make little steam engines? Because you can’t buy them at Walmart and they go snickety-snickety when they run.
I doubt it. Young people today can’t read or write cursive handwriting. It’s becoming a lost skill.
Interesting that you think the fascination is with Millennials & Zoomers. We GenXers loooove our vintage toys and games. And as far as I can tell, antique stores and flea markets have been a staple of American life for decades. Some of them are destinations particularly for older folks with time to browse. Like, Boomers. And don’t forget the ever-lasting popularity of Antiques Roadshow, Pawn Stars and American Pickers.
Old stuff is cool. Old stuff you can use (as opposed to put on a shelf) is even cooler. It just must be jarring to think that stuff that was new when you were a kid is now considered cool old stuff.
I think that’s always been there, it’s just that it used to be a function of the retail system- you could go buy a super-cheapo at K-Mart or Wal-Mart, or you could go to an honest-to-God camera shop, and buy a “real” camera, and there wasn’t really an in-between retailer. Fast forward 35 years, and you’ve got a different landscape. Camera shops are virtually non-existent outside of the Internet, and those that remain have to compete with Amazon and the NYC discount outfits like B&H and Adorama, which wasn’t as much of a thing back in say… 1988. So there’s a lot more pressure on prices, AND a lot more feedback on what people want.
Apparently the answer is that if you don’t want a smartphone camera, you’re looking at some super-cheap Chinese crap from Wal-Mart, or you’re looking at a Canon, Nikon or Pentax, and spending upwards of $400-500 for the cheapest ones of the current generation.
I don’t know… maybe it’s having actually USED those old things and preferring the newer way. I mean, I remember absolutely loving the ability to immediately skip to the next track, or even skip to the 3rd track right away on a CD with just a press of the button, versus having to peer at the LP and try to get the needle right before the 3rd track, or doing a sort of binary search on a cassette trying to find the start of a song. And having things like remote controls that let me do it from across the room. And being able to take the music with me in my vehicle, or Walkman, whether it was cassette tape or CD was an enormous plus as well. Of course I’ve never been one to literally just listen to music- it’s something that I may play while I read, do stuff on the computer, fold clothes, etc…
Then again, I’m not one for doing things just for the sake of doing them. Sometimes there are pleasant aspects to the journey, but at least in my experience, there are as many things that I’d improve about a process as there are that I’d keep. I mean like I was saying, nobody’s digging up old tube TVs and VCRs to watch old episodes of “The A Team” or anything like that. Or using TVs without remotes.
I do get the connection with the old way of doing things though; just this morning I shaved with my grandfather’s old Gillette Fat Boy razor which is about 60 years old. Part of that is that it reminds me of him, part is that shaving with an old double-edged razor is a different experience, and part is that I can be frugal at times, and double-edged blades are quite a bit cheaper than disposables or cartridges. It’s not one or even two of the aspects on their own- if it was any two but not all three, I’d probably still use a cartridge/disposable razor every day. The combination of all three make it worthwhile.
Unless you’re an audiophile or an old-timer with a collection of your own period LPs, listening to music on LPs seems like an affectation to me (especially if you’re using modern equipment), or at best something approaching a hobby without actually being one (the hobby would be collecting/restoring vintage stereo equipment, or listening to music in a generic sense).
Similarly, I’d think it a bit strange and pretentious if someone were to decide to go buy a shaving brush, double-edged razor and shaving soap, and embark on shaving that way, if they weren’t cheapskates, and/or didn’t have a collection of razors from three generations of their forefathers to draw on like I do.
EVER? I assume hyperbole, rather than ignorance.
Because we just bought one, a 2021. Manual windows, manual door locks, manual transmission.
Still plays satellite radio, though, and has no CD player. But it will sync your phone.