100 Dead or Dying Technologies

[dawsongirl]

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07...npu=1&mbid=yhp

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Computers and Videogaming

1. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
2. The scream of a modem connecting.
3. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
4. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
5. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
6. DOS.
7. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
8. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
9. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
10. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
11. Counting in kilobytes.
12. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
13. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
14. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
15. Joysticks.
16. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
17. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
18. Recording a song in a studio.

The Internet

1. NCSA Mosaic.
2. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
3. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
4. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
5. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
6. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
7. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
8. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
9. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
10. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
11. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
12. Archie searches.
13. Gopher searches.
14. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
15. Privacy.
16. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
17. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
18. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
19. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
20. The time before PC networks.
21. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets

1. Typewriters.
2. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
3. Sending that film away to be processed.
4. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
5. CB radios.
6. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
7. Rotary-dial telephones.
8. Answering machines.
9. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
10. Pay phones.
11. Phones with actual bells in them.
12. Fax machines.
13. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Everything Else

1. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
2. Remembering someone’s phone number.
3. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
4. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
5. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
6. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
7. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
8. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
9. Neat handwriting.
10. The days before the nanny state.
11. Starbuck being a man.
12. Han shoots first.
13. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
14. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
15. Trig tables and log tables.
16. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
17. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
18. Swimming pools with diving boards.
19. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
20. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil of break off the first finger
21. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
22. Having to manually unlock a car door.
23. Writing a check.
24. Looking out the window during a long drive.
25. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
26. Cash.
27. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
28. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
29. Omni Magazine
30. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
31. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

[dawsongirl]

I remember a lot of these, but some were even before my time. Sad when things get replaced.


Feel free to add your own to the list.

[Chocoholic]

I remember a lot of those! I also remember playing outside as a child and walking to the corner store without fear of being kidnapped.

Another one: birthday cupcakes in the classroom.

[MickeyMac]

I would hardly call records a dying breed. Besides me I know several people who do music by way of records and are all about turntables. You'd be surprised there are a lot of younger people getting into records, and although there are not as many as there used to be, there are still independent record stores thriving.


I would take a turntable over an Ipod any day.

[Schmoopie]

Oh the memories! And I loved the article on the kid getting the Walkman. I loved those!!! I have yet to get an IPod and I would have no idea how to get the music onto them. Seems much too complicated, but I guess I'll have to learn sooner or later.

I don't have time to read the rest of those lists now, but I'm looking foreword to it!
Andrea

[treky]

Originally Posted by MickeyMac

I would hardly call records a dying breed. Besides me I know several people who do music by way of records and are all about turntables. You'd be surprised there are a lot of younger people getting into records, and although there are not as many as there used to be, there are still independent record stores thriving.


I would take a turntable over an Ipod any day.

yes, in fact on our local news a few weeks ago there was a story about how a lot of people are still into records. And the woman who was doing the story said that she was in a Best But that afternoon and they had a big section with just records.

[treky]

Originally Posted by dawsongirl

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07...npu=1&mbid=yhp

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Computers and Videogaming

1. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
2. The scream of a modem connecting.
3. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
4. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
5. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
6. DOS.
7. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
8. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
9. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
10. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
11. Counting in kilobytes.
12. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
13. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
14. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
15. Joysticks.
16. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
17. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
18. Recording a song in a studio.

The Internet

1. NCSA Mosaic.
2. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
3. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
4. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
5. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
6. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
7. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
8. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
9. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
10. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
11. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
12. Archie searches.
13. Gopher searches.
14. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
15. Privacy.
16. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
17. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
18. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
19. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
20. The time before PC networks.
21. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets

1. Typewriters.
2. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
3. Sending that film away to be processed.
4. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
5. CB radios.
6. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
7. Rotary-dial telephones.
8. Answering machines.
9. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
10. Pay phones.
11. Phones with actual bells in them.
12. Fax machines.
13. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Everything Else

1. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
2. Remembering someone’s phone number.
3. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
4. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
5. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
6. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
7. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
8. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
9. Neat handwriting.
10. The days before the nanny state.
11. Starbuck being a man.
12. Han shoots first.
13. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
14. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
15. Trig tables and log tables.
16. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
17. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
18. Swimming pools with diving boards.
19. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
20. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil of break off the first finger
21. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
22. Having to manually unlock a car door.
23. Writing a check.
24. Looking out the window during a long drive.
25. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
26. Cash.
27. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
28. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
29. Omni Magazine
30. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
31. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

two more things: a lot of younger people think that Jay Leno and Conan O'Brian have been the only two hosts of the Tonight show and that David Letterman's always had a late night show on CBS.

[Hollow]

record companies.

[ekkostar]

I actually sort of miss walkmen because I went through a ton of them when I was a kid. I'm starting to go down that road with my MP3 players as well (I use models of the Creative Zen series). I was just always into music and have always loved having a portable cassette, CD or MP3 player around. I'm really not choosey and I work with whatever format I have with me.
I miss sitting down at my stereo on the weekends and recording all sorts of music from the syndicated countdown shows. It was my way of obtaining hot singles back in the day.
By the way, I hate the shuffle mode and I hate how the MP3 player will only play said shuffled song by how many times you've listened to it. I'm of a rare breed in that I actually use the MP3 player to listen to the full album on continuous play.

[browneyes106]

I have noticed some of things. I know a few people who still record things on VHS.

[MickeyMac]

Originally Posted by browneyes106

I have noticed some of things. I know a few people who still record things on VHS.

I still have VHS tapes. I got stuff that never made to DVD or VHS on tape.

[AB]

Originally Posted by browneyes106

I have noticed some of things. I know a few people who still record things on VHS.

Add me to your list, I still record stuff on vhs.

[Dude111]

Originally Posted by dawsongirl

I remember a lot of these, but some were even before my time. Sad when things get replaced.

Especially when the crap is worse!!


Most of the stuff on that list IS 100000% better than the garbage of today and Im grateful to have alot of it!!

8 track tapes,cassettes,etc..........

I usually dont reply to a thread if there is an invalid link but I couldnt help it on this one!

[TheLittleFaerie]

I still have a landline, phone directory, still love going to movies at a THEATER!, I love going out to eat a sit-down restaurants... I dunno if that's dying, but more and more I see ppl going in for Door Dash, I still write checks, go to a physical bank, etc....

Something very comforting I find in those things, than just doing EVERYTHING from the couch