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    #51
    Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

    Bored of Education wrote:
    Originally posted by johnr
    Originally posted by Bored of Education

    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.
    I don't do either of those...however, you can download the apps and use the internet etc...it's just that they'll only be able to use them when accessing an internet rather than phone network.

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      #52
      Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

      I think the death of some of the products on this thread are somewhat exaggerated.

      * Camera film and Polaroid film are still being produced
      * Faxes are still the only option for some types of contracts and transactions
      * With all the hacking going on, I wouldn't be surprised if some people reverted to typewriters
      * I still use a pocket calculator. Best tool for the job
      * Analogue Ceefax and Teletext are no more, but the service is still going
      * Lots of IT operations still use tape backups
      * China and India have manned space programs
      * I think spinning hard drives will still be around for a while

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        #53
        Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

        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.
        It's almost literally an iPhone without a cell radio*. Basically any iPhone app runs on it. There are some that are of limited use because of the lack of radio, but certainly anything that works over WiFi is fine.

        * To be precise, it lacks a cell radio, a GPS and a compass, and it has a slower processor, but is otherwise identical. A tiny minority of apps are gated behind the compass (as a proxy for the faster processor of the iPhone), but it's literally only happened once to me, and then for a game. Any apps that are entirely dependent on the cell radio or GPS would obviously not work, although most location dependent apps can use WiFi location.

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          #54
          Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

          My one (the iPod that's not an Ipod) does have a GPS. Ha! Take that Apple!

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            #55
            Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

            Ginger Yellow wrote:
            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.
            It's almost literally an iPhone without a cell radio*. Basically any iPhone app runs on it. There are some that are of limited use because of the lack of radio, but certainly anything that works over WiFi is fine.

            * To be precise, it lacks a cell radio, a GPS and a compass, and it has a slower processor, but is otherwise identical. A tiny minority of apps are gated behind the compass (as a proxy for the faster processor of the iPhone), but it's literally only happened once to me, and then for a game. Any apps that are entirely dependent on the cell radio or GPS would obviously not work, although most location dependent apps can use WiFi location.
            Does it do texts to non-I-phones?

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              #56
              Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

              Sam wrote: 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.
              I did mention that. Astonishing really but also I realised that the Space Shuttle came and went.

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                #57
                Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                Cal Alamein wrote: Are pagers gone yet?

                I was wondering that but, apparently, there are still places that use them including hospitals.

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                  #58
                  Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                  Elvis Wilbury takes a turn wrote: 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.
                  How old are you, EWtat? You do realise I meant technology that started in your lifetime as well?

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                    #59
                    Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                    Bored of Education wrote: Does it do texts to non-I-phones?
                    There are somewhat convoluted ways of installing WhatsApp on an iPad or iPod Touch. I've no experience of this though.

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                      #60
                      Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                      Does it do texts to non-I-phones?
                      Not via iMessage, which is locked to Apple devices. But there are loads of web services that let you text. Just use one of those. Or, you know, a phone.

                      Incidentally, I think you people are forgetting the "in your lifetime" part of the OP, unless you really do predate the Wurlitzer and camera film.

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                        #61
                        Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                        And fax machines for that matter.

                        Anyway, this:

                        delicatemoth wrote: I just don't understand the need to chuck out old formats when a new one comes along,

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                          #62
                          Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                          ursus arctos wrote:
                          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.
                          Hence Bury being chucked out of the 2006/07 FA Cup because Stephen turnbull's registration hadn't gone through.

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                            #63
                            Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                            My right eye hasn't stopped twitching since I saw mention of MiniDisc players, mainly at the memory of laboriously adding names to tracks on compilations by scrolling through an alphabet to add ONE CHARACTER AT A TIME. Who needs GraceNote?

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                              #64
                              Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                              USB media will not be dissapearing any time soon. In It has replaced the rewritable CDDVD as the portable media of choice.
                              As for Standard Hard drives. They will be sticking around too as SSD's are still prohibitally expensive for large capacity drives. The current trend seems to be to get a small SSD for you applications and OS and then have your data on a plugin USB drive.
                              This especially makes sense for laptops and tablets and with USB3 providing even faster read and write speeds, this is a no brainer.

                              For speed and security reasosns. The cloud will not be a primary data store for most people.

                              Up til very recently, My work contracts had to be posted or faxed over to my employment agency.

                              SAM, you can transfer data wirelessly via bluetooth, WIFI or even NFC(which is pretty new). But performance is alot slower than USB and there are the obvious security issues.

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                                #65
                                Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                Tactical Genius wrote: For speed and security reasosns. The cloud will not be a primary data store for most people.
                                Probably should be—most people don't have any backup strategy. There's much less chance of it disappearing from OneDrive or Google Drive than from their computers.

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                                  #66
                                  Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                  Crikey, is Google Drive part of the "cloud"? That's brilliant, I've been putting documents on the cloud without even knowing that's what it was!

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                                    #67
                                    Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                    Erm, where did you think it was?

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                                      #68
                                      Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                      I hadn't really thought about it to be honest. Google Drive comes across like a kind of virtual document storage room with a couple of drawers reserved for me in a filing cabinet somewhere. Kind of tidy and structured. Whenever I read the word "cloud" I thought of something altogether more fluffy, wafting around shapelessly.

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                                        #69
                                        Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                        .... and, apparently, wafting naked celebrity selfies into the atmospheric path of malicious peeping toms.

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                                          #70
                                          Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                          Evariste Euler Gauss wrote: .... and, apparently, wafting naked celebrity selfies into the atmospheric path of malicious peeping toms.
                                          That's why I still produce all my homemade grot on VHS and lock the tapes in a vault.

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                                            #71
                                            Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                            Google Drive comes across like a kind of virtual document storage room
                                            So, the cloud, then.

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                                              #72
                                              Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                              Well, yes, but my point is that "cloud" is an absurdly inappropriate label for such a concept. If you keep up with such things, whether because you're interested in IT or because you have to for work purposes, then of course you'll know what the "cloud" is, and that coinage will become second nature to you. If, on the other hand, you struggle to stay awake whenever the topic of IT comes up, and you have the luxury of working in a large organisation where others look after that side of things, you won't necessarily know what people mean by "cloud". And that name, to state the obvious, conjures up an image which is the very opposite of stable, structured or secure, which are the kind of qualities one would want to see in one's document storage facility. One can only assume that the word was coined by the enemies of cloud storage providers.

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                                                #73
                                                Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                                Pharmacists don't use faxes in my town, as far as I can tell.

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                                                  #74
                                                  Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                                  Your drug dealer is not your pharmacist, Reed.

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                                                    #75
                                                    Technology that has come and gone in your lifetime

                                                    CVS?

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