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Lost Technology
I was at our local school district’s technology department and noticed a bookshelf in the corner. On it, they had all the media types I used to see as a student (I’m 65) and some I used when teaching from 96-2012. Film reels, overhead projectors, slide carousels, film strips, and some other things I have forgotten. Once, around ’98 or ’99, I was trying to explain what IBM cards were to some seniors in the class, and they had no frame of reference at all. Technology moves so quickly now that vast swaths of everyday devices are unknown to the young.
At one job, I had a ribbon printer – remember that awful sound? My truck that I bought new in 1999 came with AM/FM/cassette. Since then, I’ve changed the audio system a few times – it now has a good Bluetooth system and I think it can play CDs but I’m honestly not sure. I’ve got a box of cassettes someplace around here; the same goes for CDs and VHS tapes. The last factory in the world that made VHS players has closed. We have a bunch of DVDs – I’m still buying DVDs because they can’t be woke-edited. One day, my copy of Blazing Saddles will be worth some money, unless our children can only watch it in illegal underground gathering places after the woke police outlaw it.
Maybe the best proof of how quickly stuff becomes obsolete is that drawer of charging cables and dongles everyone has now. I need to get in there and clean it up, but it’s a little scary. What if I need that USB-to-something cable one day?
Published in General
Yeah, I have enough blank CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+RW, and Blu-ray discs to last the rest of my life. And disc labels and jewel cases (both standard and slim). All the floppies were thrown out years ago.
This is danged fascinating. I can remember super-8 prints of movies from the 50s being sold at K-Mart in the 70s. Our own last VHS capable machine, along with our Zip drive and external floppy drive went to …Goodwill? Storage? All we have now is on sticks.
Don’t even know if the fellow is still around, but I think it was 1971, flying back from Japan, I sat next to an IBM service fellow. Floppies were a new thing but he was confident they would never last. Guess he was right.
Yes, they would re-arrange songs from the LP record as best they could to avoid that, but you still often had that happen at least once, along with some gaps of nothing.
You might think so, but some optical media can go bad without ever being used. And it can also go bad after being used, which means you’ve lost whatever was on it.