Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

ursus, there's two drawers under a display case for those.

The Reel tapes are in a big bag, and the Records are, well, I don't know where they are. I hope she's factored in how fucking heavy those 78's are.

[Reed John]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

I'm surprised to learn that one can still buy blank cassettes.

[ad hoc]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Yes, as others have said, USB sticks aren't going anywhere any time soon. They are much too useful - plus they are much easier, quicker and more reliable than the cloud. When internet connections are very fast, reliable, secure, and ubiquitous (and free) then maybe, but we're a long way from that at the moment (and not apparently getting towards it any time soon)

[Bored Of Education]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Felicity, I guess so wrote: Some ltd ed. 45s are still produced, eg for the Northern Soul film, the Rocket from the Crypt tour I went to last year etc

We may be bringing out a 7 inch vinyl single later this year as it goes.

I never thought of cassettes being introduced after I was born. That's surprising.

[jwdd27]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

I have a friend who captions live TV, and for some obscure technical reason her steno machine will only work with a dial up modem connection. And yes, replacements and repairs are extremely difficult and expensive to find.

I loved Zip disks, although the drives themselves were pieces of crap, and prone to the "click of death" when a deadline drew near.

20 years ago I worked at a newspaper, where the best computer was souped up with a whopping 40MB external hard drive. It was a very valuable piece of kit, unlike the crappy promotional USB sticks I now carelessly throw in the stationery drawer, which have 100 times the storage.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

johnr wrote:

In my research, I was surprised to find that I-pod Touches are still selling

Indeed, I've just bought my third (2nd hand, I smashed one and lost one); it gives me many of the advantages of a mobile phone - music, apps, camera, a timer for when I do the Independent Sudoku - without needing to get a phone.

Me too - I'm getting one for my birthday on Thursday. No need for a phone contract and I'm able to use my old work Nokia 109 for calls.

[Bored Of Education]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Polaroid cameras (although I appreciate modern versions pop up in some shape or form.

[Bored Of Education]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

johnr wrote:

In my research, I was surprised to find that I-pod Touches are still selling

Indeed, I've just bought my third (2nd hand, I smashed one and lost one); it gives me many of the advantages of a mobile phone - music, apps, camera, a timer for when I do the Independent Sudoku - without needing to get a phone.

I've just had a look and didn't realise you can do texting and FaceTime on them. Can you get Facebook and Snapchat on them. Might be perfect for the boy.

[Gambrinus]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Pharmacy in the UK has to be the last industry still standing that uses the fax machine. Along with GPs, I suppose.

We also still get paid by cheques, occasionally.

My iPod is over 10 years old, and still working, albeit with a very short battery life now though. I haven't put any music on there since 2006 though.

[ad hoc]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

I have an i-Pod touch equivalent too (it's a Samsung version thereof). It's brilliant. Much cheaper than a smart phone and no contract to worry about. Like VT I have an old style phone for calls.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Bored of Education wrote: Polaroid cameras (although I appreciate modern versions pop up in some shape or form.

Fuji do a modern version - Emirates use them to take and hand out photographs of families on long flights.

Traditional camera film - I had about 500 rolls of expired film from my days as a photography student. I was about to throw it away when I saw how much it goes for on eBay. It's now going to pay for Christmas instead.

[WOM]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Gambrinus wrote: My iPod is over 10 years old, and still working, albeit with a very short battery life now though. I haven't put any music on there since 2006 though.

I hadn't done a thing to mine for 2 1/2 years. Finally bit the bullet and re-synced everything last week. What an ordeal.

[ursus arctos]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Pharmacy in the UK has to be the last industry still standing that uses the fax machine. Along with GPs, I suppose.

Pharmacy and football transfers.

A photographer friend of mine who sometimes does weddings uses a Polaroid for candids that the subjects can write on, which she gives to the couple after the reception. It's a nice source of immediacy in the current world of "curated" wedding albums that take months to arrive.

[Bored Of Education]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

jwdd27 wrote: 20 years ago I worked at a newspaper, where the best computer was souped up with a whopping 40MB external hard drive. It was a very valuable piece of kit, unlike the crappy promotional USB sticks I now carelessly throw in the stationery drawer, which have 100 times the storage.

30 years ago, I used to be in charge of putting the data storage discs for our payroll into the safe room. There were 12 of them, they were like a very fragile 12" vinyl disc in a massive plastic pizza box and the 12 were probably a gigabyte each if not between them. They came from the computer room which consisted of a computer which was half the size of the room and 3 VDU operators. My job consisted solely of checking that whatever they printed out matched what they were inputting. Before that, I had a job using a computer that didn't have a screen just a paper printout and a dial-up modem.

Walkmans/men, of course.

[caja-dglh]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

I wish fax machines would go, but unfortunately Government and Doctors seem very reluctant to let the crappy things die.

Agree with ursus on the cloud - way too much operational risk for that to win all the data.

[WOM]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Jennifer Lawrence agrees.

[Elvis Wilbury takes a turn]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Home entertainment:
78s and wind-up Victrolas. I had a portable Victrola and some old shellac 78s when I was about 10. It was more like a toy for me. It was great fun.
The wireless. The ones with the old tube amps in them. When you switched it on you had to wait for it warm up, as did the first televisions.
Black and White TV
The Test Card
Record players that stacked the discs on a spindle.

The Wurlitzer organ. The picture palaces had them and somebody would play it during the intermissions.
For that matter, the Picture Palace too. The classy kind I mean.

Hand Crank for the motor car. I still remember our car conking out in the middle of the Blackwell tunnel and my uncle Terry effing and blinding as he tried to crank the engine back into life.

In the office:
Telephone switchboard, the old fashioned kind with wires, plugs and sockets.
The teletype
the mimeograph
the dictaphone
Typewriters, the IBM Selectric was the Apple Mac of its day.
Before there were desktops with modern GUIs, you had The Command Line Terminal.

[ursus arctos]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Radio City Music Hall and the Castro Theatre in San Francisco still have Wurlitzers. The one at Radio City rises from below the floor on a plinth.

We jealously guard a few Selectrics on each floor. You still can't beat them for filling out non-PDF forms.

[Elvis Wilbury takes a turn]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Yeah, the Selectric was and is, unbeatable. There's a Wurlitzer at Dodger stadium that is played between innings.

[Haddock]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

I thought my MD player was amazingly cool, much more so than when I got my first cassette or CD Walkmans. I also remember my silent derision while listening to a World Service report in about 2000 about how future handheld devices would allow you to make calls and listen to music, along with various other features.
When I saw the first iPods I thought, no way, they've just got the design wrong: too simple, needs a colour LED screen

I don't think William Gibson has much to fear from me.

[Sam]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Reed John wrote: I suspect some kind of physical media will always be around, but it will get cheaper and cheaper per megabyte and perhaps in the future, you won't need to plug it in. The machine will be able to read it remotely across a short distance.

I'm pretty sure you can already get external hard drives which connect via Bluetooth/WiFi/other cable-free medium to the computer.

Prices for solid state drives are already coming down - the laptop my parents are delivering to me in January comes with a 500GB SSD (not huge, I know, but the 500GB HDD in my current laptop has lasted me almost five years and is nowhere near full, so I thought the same size SSD would be a better purchase than a 1TB HDD). I've searched for a few things on how to keep it in good condition down the line, and so on, and the majority of the articles refer to far smaller-capacity SSDs for far more money, a year or two ago. To that end, in a while the spinning hard disc drive will surely start to get phased out.

And perhaps a little less mundane - not in my own lifetime, but in that of Bored (who started the thread): Concorde. First flight when Bored was 2-and-a-bit, retired a month before he turned 37.

[ursus arctos]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

It's interesting to me that not only did Concorde itself die, but all supersonic passenger flight did, including the Soviet version and the various US attempts that never made it into production.

It wasn't a particularly comfortable flight, particularly compared to first class of that period, but it was undeniably cool, and filled a genuine role for those of us who needed to get to the Continent without flying overnight. It made less sense in the opposite direction, though there was always a certain wow factor from arriving in New York at an earlier time than you had left Paris or London.

[Cal Alamein]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Are pagers gone yet?

[Sam]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

They didn't last beyond season two of The Wire, did they?

[Jah Womble]

Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

Polaroid cameras (although I appreciate modern versions pop up in some shape or form.

Also the Kodak disc camera - which probably lasted about eighteen months in the late 1980s. My old man briefly had one and the quality of the images was shockingly poor. I never understood why they didn't hold back and just develop the stereoscopic camera, ie, a device with two lenses that creates '3D' images on a disc, a la Viewmaster. (Oh look, another one.) I'm sure we'd all have loved to have kept pictures of our dead relatives in 3D.

The One-2-One 'phone of course: twenty years ago, we were all going to share videophone calls with one of these. I guess we now have Skype and FaceTime/Oovoo - but it just ain't the same. (Also the Rabbit 'phone: that died on its arse, too.)

The Psion Organiser...the Palm Pilot...etc.

I like the idea of an old motor car being 'home entertainment'.