Defunct technology....

[Goliath]

Overhead projectors and transparencies are now obsolescent, if not actually obsolete.

Same with microfilm, microfiche, and (especially) microcard.

Here's a truly defunct piece of technology: the opaque projector. I actually used one of these in class, to make a presentation after I forgot to make transparencies, in the autumn of 1996. The damn thing looked like it was a hundred years old, but it worked.

Fountain pens have a tactile quality that is entirely different to other forms of writing implement, and the script is also differently visually, so they will always have a niche. Just as vinyl's auditory quality means it retains a musical niche, so fountain pens will retain a writing niche.

Damn it--now I want a nice fountain pen.

 

[SVD]

Overhead projectors and transparencies are now obsolescent, if not actually obsolete.

.....

Here's a truly defunct piece of technology: the opaque projector. I actually used one of these in class, to make a presentation after I forgot to make transparencies, in the autumn of 1996. The damn thing looked like it was a hundred years old, but it worked.

Oh, yeah, forgot about the former, teachers in high school used them sometimes, and one in college used that tech.

The latter can be simulated these days, which was the method used by a classmate of mine in an art class to do her presentation.
Which remins me of De Ol' Slide Projector, now obsolete, but still used at Butte by some of the art teachers

 

[Canadave]

Newspaper. Quickly dying, though still very prevalent due to convenience. It will all be electronic soon.

I really hope newspapers survive. Nothing electronic can quite match having a cup of coffee and reading the paper, IMO.

 

[SVD]

Newspaper. Quickly dying, though still very prevalent due to convenience. It will all be electronic soon.

I really hope newspapers survive. Nothing electronic can quite match having a cup of coffee and reading the paper, IMO.

Totaly! Sometimes you cant beat the feeling of the hand(s)-paper-eye interface system!

 

[Spot's Meow]

Overhead projectors and transparencies are now obsolescent, if not actually obsolete.

Same with microfilm, microfiche, and (especially) microcard.

I have to disagree with these. I see overhead projectors in school classrooms all the time.

Also, microfilm and microfiche are still very much alive. Go to any university library or archives and you will see this. At the job I just recently left, we were still actively converting documents to microfilm daily, and people were coming in to view them daily, for reasons ranging from geneaological research to lawyers investigating legislative intent. You can argue that these mediums aren't mainstream outside of the research community, but were they ever?

 

[Finn]

Overhead projectors and transparencies are now obsolescent, if not actually obsolete.

Same with microfilm, microfiche, and (especially) microcard.

I have to disagree with these. I see overhead projectors in school classrooms all the time.

I think they are talking about ones like this one. They tend to sit in the back corner where present instead of actually being used.

 

[Goliath]

Overhead projectors and transparencies are now obsolescent, if not actually obsolete.

Same with microfilm, microfiche, and (especially) microcard.

I have to disagree with these. I see overhead projectors in school classrooms all the time.

Also, microfilm and microfiche are still very much alive.

That's why I called them 'obsolescent': in the process of becoming obsolete, but not obsolete yet.

Go to any university library or archives and you will see this.

Actually, I work at a university, as a history professor, so I'm familiar with both university libraries and archives. And over the past five years, since I was hired, I've watched as our own library has gradually gone digital.

We still have a number of cabinets of newspapers on microfilm, for example: but their days are clearly numbered, with the advent of searchable online resources like Paper of Record. And I for one won't miss them.

In addition, I was one of the last professors I know to lecture with an overhead projector. All of our classrooms are now equipped with multimedia suites, and I finally made the transition to PowerPoint year before last.

I still see overhead projectors around, so someone must still be using them. But they're clearly on their way out as well. Our bookstore doesn't even sell transparencies any more.

 

[Sakrysta]

Overheads are still used a great deal in education. The more modern alternatives are only now becoming affordable enough to begin to be used, but even with that, many educators don't have the time or means to learn how to set up and use a digital projector.

Do people still use pagers?

 

[Trekker4747]

Not "defunct" yet, but will quickly go that way if the luxury car people have their way.

Tactile controls in cars. A lot of high-end cars, and some middle-end cars, anymore have controls where you have to interact with a screen to do something as basic as turn on the air-conditioner. The BMW iDrive system is a great example of this. You operate a "knob" on the center console to move icons and such on a screen to do anything you need to do with the climate controls, radio, NAV system, etc. So instead of "knowing" where a button or knob is, reaching for it, and manipulating it without looking you'll probably soon need to take your eyes off the road and watch a computer screen.

 

[scotpens]

Public phones - killed by mobile phones

I don’t know how things are in your neck of the woods, but around these parts there are still plenty of public pay phones, though there are fewer of them each year and you hardly ever see anyone using them. In fact, I wonder how many remaining pay phones actually work.

The fountain pen. Until modern pens with a built in ink supply and particularly the cheap disposable pen (popularized by Bic) this was the way to write...unless you used a pencil.

Far from defunct, and if anything, currently experiencing a revival.

Fountain pens have a tactile quality that is entirely different to other forms of writing implement, and the script is also differently visually, so they will always have a niche. Just as vinyl's auditory quality means it retains a musical niche, so fountain pens will retain a writing niche.

Also, they have a status role that will also ensure their ongoing usage. Many people switch from rollerballs to fountain pens as their career progresses, and there's a similar image/cachet associated with high-end fountain pens as with high-end mechanical watches (which is why they can't be considered defunct technology either).

Just to clarify things, a fountain pen does have a built-in ink supply -- that's what makes it a fountain pen. It has a metal nib, like an artist’s or calligrapher’s pen. The ink is a free-flowing liquid rather than the thick, viscous inks used by ballpoint pens. Modern fountain pens use disposable, pre-filled ink cartridges.

And, as Holdfast mentioned above, they’ve acquired the cachet of status symbols and are still often given as graduation gifts and such.

Reel to reel: My very first job was tape editing at a local radio station. I think I'd still know how to splice tape.

I still know how to splice tape -- and movie film. Obsolescent skills.

Newspaper. Quickly dying, though still very prevalent due to convenience. It will all be electronic soon.

I really hope newspapers survive. Nothing electronic can quite match having a cup of coffee and reading the paper, IMO.

I don’t think paper periodicals will ever be completely obsolete. After all, thirty years ago, they were predicting there would be no more printed newspapers by the start of the 21st century. And books, of course, will always be with us.

And speaking of classroom technology -- who remembers filmstrips and filmstrip projectors? The 35mm strips were usually accompanied by an audio track on an LP disc, with a click or chime to signal the operator to advance the projector to the next frame. High-tech visual aids in the 1950s and ’60s.

 

[Warped9]

I really hope newspapers survive. Nothing electronic can quite match having a cup of coffee and reading the paper, IMO.

Very True.

I mentioned fountain pens, but I think I got that wrong. Were they called quill pens? Those things you dipped in a bottle of ink then wrote with it. My mother said she used them in school in the '30s.

 

[Miss Chicken]

For a long time my parents still had an old Kodak brownie or box camera. I remember using it decades ago to take shots of my first AMT model of the TOS E.

I wonder whatever happened to that camera.


Oh, yeah: the dot matrix printer. And carbon paper.

when my parents moved in the late 1980s, my sister rescued dad's two old cameras (which were going to be thrown out). This included Dad's box brownie. Both cameras are on dosplay in my sister's house. Here is a photo

I am not sure what the make of the camera in the case is.

When my parents' moved into my second childhood home in 1965, Mum was still using a copper to wash in. Maybe a year later she got a washing machine to replace the copper.

Turndials on phones - do most of you even remember such things existed?

Not only do I remember turndials but when we moved into the house I mentioned above we had a phone that we had to crank. It was similar to the phone in this photo (but ours was a much darker wood).

It was located in the hallway and I think it must have been at least three years before Mum had it replaced and the phone was resituated into the loungeroom.

 

[clint g]

Id like to say the typewriter but apparently the NYPD still uses them in full force.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Paper checks

 

[Miss Chicken]

Did anyone here have one of these stereoviewers when they were young

All four children in my family had one. The cards for them used to come in the Lipton Tea packet and i think Mum had to send away for the viewers. I remember that all our viewers were coloured red. We had dozens and dozens of cards - I think Dad used to bring cards home from his work.

Twenty years later my children's stereoviewers looked like this

 

[STR]

CRT TV. It's less than ten years ago that the death bell rang for CRT televisions. Mind you there are businesses still using some CRT computer displays, but they're not televisions. Are tube TV's even manufactured anymore?

China still cranks them out by the millions. They're cheap to manufacture and are far sturdier than LCD's. CRT's are incredibly popular in the 3rd world. They're also used in radar and sonar displays, for reasons mostly related to government cheapskatery. Finally, they're popular in image editing houses where absolute color fidelity is important, since LCD and Plasma are inferior in that regard.

VHS. I remember when video rental stores were crammed with VHS tapes. Now I know you can still buy blank cassettes (if you can find them), and some are still used for security monitor recordings, and there are still some DVD/VHS combo players in stores. But isn't this pretty much toast? Mind you the porn industry owes its breakout growth in the mass market to home VHS.

Go anywhere with a lot of government training or records, and you will find vast numbers of VHS tapes. I do expect this to die quicker than some of the other technologies here since DVD players are stupid cheap now, and it's fairly straightforward to convert from VHS to digital (so long as you have the equipment).

Vinyl records. Long gone...well, not quite because there are still some turntables available for what few records are available on the market. But I wouldn't even know where to go to buy a new vinyl album.

Vinyl has had something of a renaissance lately, with audiophiles picking up copies for their warmer sound. It's holding steady at a couple million records a year in sales. The LP will outlive the audio CD.

Reel-to-reel. Before audio cassette ruled the mass market there was the bulky reel-to-reel, which remained for awhile for the discriminating few. How many can recall having to thread your own tape?

Tapes are standard issue when data centers need to keep backups of terabytes worth of data. They have excellent storage density (you can fit a lot of info in a small area), the last almost forever so long as the climate is right, and since you only need to write to them once, then archive them, re-usability isn't a factor.

With solid state drives soon replacing mechanical hard drives, and hard drives never having the cost or long-term storage durability of reels, tape may outlast not only the diskette (including the venerable floppy disk) but the mechanical hard drive.

Typewriter. They're everywhere...in office scenes of old films. Any still around since they've been resigned to museum relics because of the modern PC?

The NYPD was recently (2009-ish) criticized for purchasing thousands of typewriters because it was less expensive than digitizing the paper work for the whole force. The typewriters are used to type out incident forms.

 

[Trekker4747]

By the millions. They're cheap to manufacture and are far sturdier than LCD's. CRT's are incredibly popular in the 3rd world.

So is pissing in a drainage ditch. I don't think we're talking about the Third World here.

 

[Captain Ice]

3D slide viewers - Most had at least a vauge resemblence to binoculars. The most popular brand had seven image pairs on a disk, but another had rectangular cards with the image pairs down the sides. toy departments used to have a sizable rack of media for these viewers with at least a hundred different titles. There were even souvenir packages sold at many popular tourist attractions. There was even an original series "Omega Glory" set.

I still have one of those tucked away somewhere....

The Super 8. Very popular in the day, non-existent now

For another obselete technology - when was the last time you saw a home movie camera of any type?

Same with microfilm, microfiche, and (especially) microcard.

Also, microfilm and microfiche are still very much alive. Go to any university library or archives and you will see this. At the job I just recently left, we were still actively converting documents to microfilm daily, and people were coming in to view them daily, for reasons ranging from geneaological research to lawyers investigating legislative intent. You can argue that these mediums aren't mainstream outside of the research community, but were they ever?

Libraries still purchase items on microfilm/fiche and probably will for a little while. Digital technology is still a little too new and untested. We library people are very, very resistent to change in some respects, while embracing it in most others. Until one can show that computers and digital documents have sustained availability (library will not lose access to it) there will still be a market for microfilm.

Filmstrips and filmstrip projectors: These classroom staples have long since been replaced by televisions, VCRs, and DVDs.

Rotary dial telephones: Once a staple, now only seen in a museum. These were replaced by phones with number pads somewhere around '82.

Speaking of phones, when was the last time that you saw a phone that was hardwired to the wall with a non-removable cord?

Mimeograph machines: Ugh. I used to hate these things. You'd get a handout from the instructor printed in some godawful purple or blue ink that was hard to read because it was so badly smudged. Long since replaced by Xerox machines and later laser printers.

CB radios: These used to be in every store. When was the last time you saw one that wasn't in a semi? Even the truck drivers have gotten away from these.

Daisy wheel printers: Yes, there was a printer technology that dot matrix replaced...

Betamax: In all fairness, this was a niche technology even when it was popular. It lost to VHS and disappeared much like HD-DVD is now.

"Portable" VCR: I use quotes here because this monstrosity really wasn't what I'd call easily portable. Basically it was a VCR that you could remove the tape deck portion from and carry around with you. The deck portion could be powered by the wiring in your house or by a battery inside the unit itself. Unfortunately, the unit we had was like 50 pounds by itself. Also required a completely separate camera which would weigh another 40 pounds. Replaced long ago by the camcorder and with good riddance.

Dial tuners: Tere have always been television remotes. Unfotunately for us, back in the days before handheld remotes, the remotes were known as children. Channels only went up or down one step at a time and made a loud "ker-chunk" sound when they did.

 

[TorontoTrekker]

Here's a truly defunct piece of technology: the opaque projector. I actually used one of these in class, to make a presentation after I forgot to make transparencies, in the autumn of 1996. The damn thing looked like it was a hundred years old, but it worked.

I'm in my 40s, and I've never heard of these before. We had overhead projectors when I was in school.

Paper checks

Hardly. I have to write a cheque every month for my rent. I also wrote a cheque last Sunday to one of the friends I shared a hotel room with at Dragon*Con. And in my last job, we were paid with paper cheques every two weeks - the company was too small to set up direct deposit.

Does anyone still use mainframe computers? The last job I had where we ran our code on a mainframe was in 2004, and while I do still see the occasional reference to COBOL, they're few and far between.

 

[STR]

By the millions. They're cheap to manufacture and are far sturdier than LCD's. CRT's are incredibly popular in the 3rd world.

So is pissing in a drainage ditch. I don't think we're talking about the Third World here.

Well sorry if I pissed on your nostalgia just because it's myopic.