10 Everyday Objects Of The Past… That Have VANISHED
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- Опубліковано 3 лип 2024
- Explore a variety of objects and gadgets that have become obsolete in the digital age. From the Rolodex to the pager (or beeper), VHS and VCR, to the floppy disk, CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), and the answering machine, we cover it all. Join us as we reminisce about the days of phonebooks, yellow pages, PDAs, dial-up internet, and cassette tapes. Discover how these once-essential tech items have been replaced by modern technology.
#gadgets #tech #history #nostalgia #retro
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What other obsolete items or gadgets do you remember using?
I remember that writing letters as a way to stay in touch with family and friends was still a thing when I was a lad. Even as a young adult, I wrote letters to stay in touch with friends after we graduated high school. Mostly because the phone company charged more to make long-distance phone calls and most people avoided making them, if possible. lol
I still miss my old Palm IIIc. I remember having to use the stylus and learning a very specific way of writing in order to get the handwriting recognition to work. It was usually easier to just plug it into this little folding keyboard. I actually had a paid game on there called Lordinium too.
I remember the Telex, mother of Fax machines! I used them, as a intern. Also typewriters, even elétric ones, and a old computer in MS DOS. 😊
toe touch dims/ brights, seat mats, inside shades, curb feelers and 60's 70's do it yourself a/c
I've lived long enough to have used many: Rotary-dial telephones. Slide rules (every STEM student in my high school had one). Black-and-white TV sets with vacuum tubes instead of solid state. Manual typewriters. Fountain pens. When I was in junior high school, my wristwatch had a luminous radium dial.
Pagers are still often used by medical staff in hospitals. Apparently the phone signal doesn't transmit too well in some areas of big hospitals, but pager signals aren't affected as badly.
I worked emergency response. It is because cells are undependable and an unreliable technology in general. We even recommend people keep their landlines for emergencies.
Likewise rural areas still use modems. Fax machines use them, older POS/payment systems...
Not in the uk, my work place and hospitals have their own net/hub
@@Nylon_riot It's also a frequency matter, the lower the frequency is the farer they go and are not stopped easily by concrete 35 MHz/43 MHz used for pager is more robust than the 700-2300 mhz of the GSM. And as the data rate is slow the signal is also more robust.
POTS Landlines will soon get turned off replaced by VOIP, the problem is they rely on a modem that has no power backup at home side.
Fun fact, in France (I don't know for other places) when they deploy GSM they rely on POTS for emergency, so all GSM station have only a backup of 20 minutes that will keep the service up if the power line have a hiccup. Now that they plan to shut down the POTS, they "find out" that in case of a power outage due to a catastrophic event the phone will go silent quickly, when POTS at the time has a 24 hours batteries backup for small place (under 5000 lines) and a 7 day generator powered supply for bigger central office.
And when the power was out they get in touch with the power grid manager to get a power back forecast and come with a mobile generator if the outage was planned to be over 24 hours. This was the "communist" public service era , now after 20 minutes you can die silently but you can be glad to have saved the share holder profit !
Same with ge old Nokia phones. Crazy that my phone can pinpoint my location in the middle of nowhere utilizing satellites, but concrete is kriptonite lol
Without finishing the video, i just want to say that dial up wasn't "known" for it's slow speeds. That's just the fastest internet anyone had back then. I remember when 56k came out, it blew everyone's mind how fast it was.
Hell one of the reasons I bought the house I did was because it was close to the exchange and I could get the "fastest" dial up speed possible..
In 1996 a fellow worker blasted me in front of everyone in the break room because I said my new computer had a 1 gigabyte hard drive. It cost $300 a gig back them. I let him mouth off even after he called me ignorant, stupid, and a bullshitter. That is exactly what he was even back then.
Also sites weren't so data-rich then, so it was faster to get the sites to load than it would using the same technology today.
I am fortunate that I got to experience what it was like going from a 56k modem to a cable modem.
> it's slow speeds
> it is slow speeds
> it is
Also, a speed cannot be slow. Speed is a property, conveyed with a figure and unit. Speed can be low, but not slow. "Slow" already contains the time aspect, meaning "little over time". "Slow speed" would be "little speed over time", meaning a low acceleration. This advisory was brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Watching this videos drove me back so instantly, I could even “hear” the noises when accessing internet dialing 😅
That high pitched noise.. yeah.. I remember it.
My first modem was a 50 baud, then 300, then 1200 etc. Used them all.
(dialer tone)
ding, ding, tom, dang, dang, teh, teh
(call connected, estabelishing communication with terminal)
teeedong to-tiuuuiuuu, awoooawooo ti- wroooooaaaaaajaaaaa-xxxxxxxxxxxkxxxxxxx
indeed makes me wish i could go back and re-live it all again
Awwww eeey awwww eee awwww....hisss. I still hear that crap in my sleep.
The way the products were described.......I realized this was written for people much younger than me that have no clue what these products were or that they existed
pretty much, and you know youre old if you know the connection between a number two pencil or bic pen and a cassette tape lol
When we recorded TV shows on tape via a VCR to watch later, we definitely did not call it "time shifting." We called it "taping a show/movie."
😂
Thank-you!
So many things have changed but for some reasons floppy discs / data storage always stands out to me. Those storage mediums held such a TINY amount of data but we all thought of it as enormous at the time.
I have several floppy disks...8", 5 1/4", 3", pick one.
Don’t worry about my green funk
its all tiny in hindsight, todays enormous is tomorrows tiny
I remember ordering my first computer from Dell back around 1995. I ordered it with an 8 GB hard drive and I remember the salesperson I was talking to remarking how much space that was, and how I'd never be able to fill it up!
@@saviordream haha it's amazing how things change.
Happy to say the floppy disc still lives on as the Save icon 💾🙂
The Yellow Pages book was also famous for giving dads and big brothers a chance to show off their strength by tearing it in half when the new edition came out 💪
True! ❤
💾
There was a trick to it. You started with the spine of the Yellow Pages. Having broken that, the rest followed easily.
My family used them as chair boosters when I was a child.
"Don't sit so close to the T.V. you'll go blind.
And watching T.V. in the dark is bad for your eyes."
Which is true :(
It is still true with flat panels. For a bit different reason, by effect is similar
@@dmitripogosian5084 how so?
Not so much with modern displays! Only CRTs and plasma caused the most of the issues of watching in the dark but ironically it's the best way to view them for immersive and sharp images and video.
You sound like my grandma. 😄 Ahh, the good old days.
Although the cathode-ray tube ("picture tube") has been largely replaced by flat-panel screens, the term "tube" lives on--as "UA-cam." The UA-cam logo is also a stylized CRT screen.
Ya, YouFlatScreen would sound kinda stupid!!
I designed a CRT tube computer, it was what Steve Jobs and his crew used for the first video interface to the first Apple II computer, it's in their museum.
IT was designed as a kit that was sold by Southwest Technical Products, San Antonio, Tx, owned by Dan Meyer.
And floppy discs have been immortalized as a near-universal symbol for a program's save button.
But how many generations before "tube" and "disc" become icons "just because"? 🤷🏾Do we remember why a 'paper clip' is the icon for an 'attachment' or why we refer to "dialing" a phone?
You mean You-Tube isn't just about the Subways.
We still use a VCR/CD/DVD player and there is a treasure trove of tapes out there to enjoy. They practically give them away at yard sales. Also still use my Scott dual deck cassette player for classic gold still available.
I know several people who still use VCRs. The local Goodwill always has a large selection of VHS movies for $1 a piece. VHS tapes still look fine if you're still watching them on an analog 4x3 television, but they look terrible on digital HD flat panel. Hardly any definition and washed out color. I still watch DVDs but I won't go back to VCRs. My first VCR was a 1982 Betamax that was on sale for 839. My first BluRay player was only $89.
@@dean-ph2ww If you notice vinyl is also making a come back. Audiophiles claim that records produce what they refer to as a "warmer" tone over all. Hey, what goes around comes around.
@@ivanleterror9158 Although I haven't listened to vinyl since 1992, I kept about 50 of my old albums because they're valuable. I got rid of my albums because my collection was large and I got tired of lugging them around in milk crates whenever I moved. There are things I don't like about vinyl but I've always loved the big album covers. From 1966 to 1983 those album covers were just as important as the music. They do have a unique sound but you really need quality equipment to enjoy it. I no longer own a stereo. As I get older less is more.
I too had vcr... But now i got Lal my old videos on youtube
I had all of these at one time or another. I still have a working VCR and a couple of working cassette decks, which I occasionally use in digitizing old video/audio. 🤓
Ditto
I can't even see the picture on the VHS anymore.. it is soo distorted lol
We still have some VHS tapes and a VCR to watch them. This is only to watch our few rare movies and documentaries that are out of print and seemingly lost media now.
@@heidih3048 Same, except that I use a 6-head VCR mostly for playing legacy audio recordings. Guests at my home always ask me why would I use VHS for audio when I have a Studer R2R deck and a bunch of Nakamichis... and I don't have an answer. This old-time gear is addiction in itself, like steam locomotives or hardcopy books.
@@jmi5969 haha, yes
The reason that CRTs were so heavy is not just because they had thick glass, but they had leaded glass -- to help keep the radiation inherent in their operation inside the tube.
I am now feeling way too old. We still have ma y of these items,s - somewhere!!! A CRT tv sits in my husband’s home office. I know I have various sizes of floppies around along with a Palm Pilot! I still have all my cell phones - again somewhere. And several old computers and accessories!!! I do love all my personal technology even though I’m not as adept at doing all they can do - but they do what I want!!!😄😄😄.
I have about 20 VCRs and 1000 tapes, as well as over 100 sealed blanks. They still work.
Highly unlikely. The U.S. Military, in conjunction with U.N., executed Plan Q-RN-67-904 that shot enormously powerful EMPs throughout the globe, eradicating and destroying all analog tape systems, VCR/Betamax included.
@@MrTangentyou're trolling.
@@MrTangent🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣watched a video recording of our wedding last night, idiocy
Are you interested in selling one of your VCR s?
@@barryhessel6078 ---I'm in NE Arizona (the cold part). I packed and plastic-wrapped them all, and haven't tried them in four years. One, that I marked, got clogged with oxide from a bad tape, and I didn't get it cleaned before I moved. I would have to test any I was selling, and the shipping would be expensive. (There's no OTA TV out here to record using converters, as I used to do).
You could go back further. My dad had those reel to reel audio tapes, black and white TV without a remote control, turbo broilers and so on.
I still use and maintain a Rolodex at my job. It makes it SO MUCH FASTER to look up plans and acct numbers at the tip if my fingers.
I also still use mine! I keep my work passwords on it. Yes the computer saves the password BUT if the system goes down I still have my passwords 😁
Raise your hand if you used every item featured in this video! Raise both hands if you surrender and admit you are old. Yeah, me too. 😂
I'm only 43 and my kids think I'm ancient 🤦
🖐🖐
Both hands in the air!
Things like this remind me how old I really am 😞
✋🏻🤲🏻🤚🏻
yes. at 48, I'm old enough to be the grandfather of some people reading this.
Cassette tapes and vinyl records have been making a comeback in recent years. In fact the particular Sony Walkman TPLS 2 shown in the video is now known as the "Guardians of the Galaxy" model as it was featured in that movie.
My 18 y.o. daughter just bought her boyfriend a couple vinyl records for Christmas. She ordered them from Amazon.
@@ClinttheGreatyeah but does she actually... y'know, LISTEN to them?
@@lesharkoiste My daughter doesn't, her boyfriend does. The albums were of some Rap group and my daughter is not a fan of Rap music.
The Barbie movie soundtrack also have cassette tapes too
Vinyls yes. My daughter prides herself on having a full collection of Pink Floyd and def L next to her Harry styles.
About as odd as Metallica next to a RUNDMC album.
Cassettes, not so sure that is a thing. I do notice people owning them. But actually using them?
@0:15 VCRs
@0:58 dial-up internet (modems)
@1:45 floppy disks
@2:33 pagers
@3:11 cassette tapes
@4:02 answering machines
@5:00 PDAs
@5:46 Yellow Pages
@6:33 CRT monitors
@7:28 Rolodexes
I think the Rolodex should be brought back, as it is a quicker, less cumbersome way, to access a person's vital information.
I remember the first time I saw a cassette tape and ridiculed it because it was so much smaller than 8 track. No way that thing can compete with my 8 track !
I worked in communications in the Air Force starting in’71 and saw antiques being used alongside the cutting edge technology. It was painful to discard equipment we had worked so hard to maintain when it was made obsolete overnight.
The facsimile machines we used in the Weather Station needed daily maintenance and adjustment and we really felt good when we got it back in service when it frequently needed attention. The last system I maintained was essentially a HF cell phone for international flights. A $20 tracfone has much more functionality.
I remember telephone books that listed names,addresses & phone numbers of individuals in the area you lived on the white pages.There were yellow pages for businesses.
Actually, there is practically no modern equivalent to the idea that you should be able to get (almost) anybody number by knowing their name
I can remember being told at work that the biggest thing to replace all the floppy discs for document storage and management was going to be some "jukebox-like" machine that would hold 20" "platters". (They were related to laser discs, I think.) It never came to fruition, at least where I worked. 😊
That sounds like the "RAID" array of hard disks that supposedly got around the possibility of one of the disks getting physically damaged or electronically corrupted.
they were describing a hard drive it seems. they used to be huuuuuge
@@animeloveer97 Ya, That's definitely what they were describing. The part of the hard drive that stores the data is called a platter.
My female cat was so MAD at me when I switched out my clunky computer monitor for a flat screen because she enjoyed sleeping on top of the other while I was on it! Haha!
I have an old TV with VCR. Paid $3 for it. Bought it at a house sale to watch VHS tapes, like Ken Burns’ Civil War series, also bought at a house sale.
I only switched to Voice Mail when my last answering machine died. Then I learned that voice mail was already included in my "basic" landline telephone package, but that they had never bothered to "provision" AKA activate it. They had been charging me for it for years without telling me or activating it. Grrrr!
Answering machine? Shirley you mean voice mail machine?
You could take them to court or just threaten to get your money back.
Dude, the Newton was NEVER a mainstream device. The Palm PDA would have been a far more meaningful example...
And many of these didn't actually vanish.
You can still get card indexes, but they, pagers, PDA, answering machines etc all merged and became cellphones.
In fact, modern cellphones are just PDAs that can make phone calls and do pager messages.
In the unlikely event that some modern technologies fail ,some obsolete items should be kept just in case.I.e.typewriters and microfilm/fiche,the rolodex.
I had a Hand Spring PDA and I remember reading in a PDA magazine how companies were working on Smart phones that would do everything PDA's did Plus make calls, text, maps that told where you were at, internet.
Man, these people are insane!
Also remember my first computer, Gateway 2000 !, this was in the late 90's, monitor was a 19 inch monster. It also cost a pretty penny.
My first computer was the Gateway 2000! I forgot all about it till I saw your post.
It was shipped to my house, I can clearly see the black and white on the box that somehow seemed like a cow!
🐄
I had such a large collection of floppy disks, both 5.25" and 3.5" I also had a Zip drive, which was a very high capacity 3.5" disk. In the mid to late 1990's I had a Palm Pilot. It was a wonderful device.
I still have s couple Palm Pilots, which I use as EBook readers. Their pocket calculator type screen takes no power (microwatts), so a couple alkalines last up to 3 months or more, always a backup in long trips when phone and book reader batteries have died after a couple days. I have a IIIEX *now* in my backpack with some 30-40 books loaded. Always helps while commuting or waiting in a queue.
Awww, the Zip drive, I remember it well. I kept a lot of um, ahem, "special" videos on those. 😊
I remember all of these. I remember that we thought the answering machine and colored tv were the best things ever to be invented.
I absolutely loved my Palm Pilot. I still have an unopened VCR downstairs somewhere
My grandad still has a beeper for his fire department. Bunch of old farmers in spotty service areas that you typically can’t get more than SOS signal. 😊
You can add to this list, 8 track tapes, rotary dial telephones, rooftop tv antennas, dot matrix printers, and wind-up record players, to name a few.
I'm a 33 year old man and half of what you just said was foreign to me.. I've seen a rotary phone thats it
@@crzycolchris perfectly understandable…I'm 74 years old and I have first hand experience with all of the things I mentioned. My dad was born in 1908, and he went from going to school in a horse drawn wagon in 1917 to watching men land on the moon 52 years later. His father, my grand dad, was born during the civil war in 1864, and died in 1960. Just imagine the changes he saw during his very long life.
@@Mbartel500 that's crazy! Your grandpa lived a long life and got to see drastic changes.. I dont think we can the drastic changes you guys got to see.. I'm already typing this on my mini handle held computer..
@@crzycolchris You and are nearly the same age, and sad that I know EVERYTHING this human named. This is why I say I live in a nursing home, I know WAY TOO MUCH about these old tech. Can't complain though, my parents get free IT support.
Dot matrix printer still used today.
I’m not American (Australian) but I remember most of these. My mother had a VCR and answering machine until she passed away in 2017. In my city pagers were used by drug dealers. Now it’s mobile phones 😊
In my city, drug dealers call up your house. If you're not home, they ask your mom if they can leave a message. You usually get the message when you come home. I'm from California. Northern Cali as we call it.
I’ve never been one of those “I feel old” types, but for some reason, this did it. I think it was the way the items were described like artifacts. X3
I detested the answering machine.
The 5" floppy disk holds a fond memory for me. In the days before networks between computers, as a lawyer I found that it was helpful to store matter related records and data on these disks, keeping one in each client file. I used the older floppy disks rather than the later 3' hard disks because the hard disks could be damaged by impact, where the floppies just "flopped". This allowed me to take a file home and work on documents in progress without having to do anything special. The core files were stored on an in-office computer hard drive, but the floppies made the whole operation very convenient. A side benefit was that as time went on, almost no one used the old 5" floppies, so computers had no compatible drives. Thus, in the event of file theft, the files on the floppy were inaccessible. (It happened once, where another attorney stole a client file off my desk when I stepped out to make him a document copy. He was trying to hide a letter I had sent him warning of a problem he had created for his former client who I later represented. He got my paper copy in the file, but the letter remained available both on the file floppy later recovered, and the office back-up. I testified at his disbarment hearing.) The long term problem doing this was keeping a working disk drive. I found the 3"/%' dual drives from Epson to be by far the most reliable, and I still have one.
Ok boomer
@@beanbean78 is that all the zoomer can respond with?
beanbean78 This whole thread is
about boomer stuff, what are you doing here? "Gen Zetter"
Fun fact, cassettes were also used by Commodore 64. All these brought me back to my childhood 😅 I feel old now lol.
Once in a while I will still look at the shelf where the answering machine was when I walk into the house. 15 years since it was gone.
VHS still has a viable user base. I go to various used stores that sell VHS tapes and I ask them why. They say they are still surprising popular. The main reason is that they still have a machine at home because many have personal family videos to watch so they can watch movies as well. Another reason is having the machine at the cottage so still use it there esp if there is already a big collection of tapes at the cottage. One other reason is that there are some movies that are available on VHS but not on DVD or not streaming. This applies to many B level and made-for-TV movies. Even some movies on DVD are still hard to find in that format such as Looking for Mr. Good-bar, which for years wasn't available on DVD. I think the only way to have the very original version of Star Wars is to have the first VHS release as every version after that was the enhanced versions. Also some DVD's are often unofficial and are copies from VHS or laser disks tapes. Kate Bush's Video Hits of Live at the Hammersmith are good examples as they was only released on VHS. None of Kate Bush music videos have been released on DVD although some have digitized those files and released non-official DVD's.
"These devices were like small handheld computers..."
Not just _like_ small handheld computers; they *ARE* small handheld computers, as are smartphones and tablet computers.
recent apple ads for ipads: 'what's a computer?'
@@richardhockey8442: Which don't make sense, because iPads and other electronic tablets *ARE* computers.
I got an actual Yellow Pages in the mail, yesterday. It has shrunk from a bulky 9" x12"x2.5" to 3" to 8.5"x11"x(about)5/8". The residential section has shrunk quite a bit with how few landlines exist anymore.
I have a landline, although with recent switch of underlying technology to VOIP, it makes less sense now. And the quality of calls on mobiles never reached what we had on landlines
Not all of these are obsolete - VCR/DVD combos are still sold for those of us who have movies, yellow pages, especially answering machines
When I interned, the correctional facility had clear CRT TVs, clear VCRs and clear tapes. Clear portable cassette tape players.
That's wild to me because I haven't seen any of those used in years and years lol
Well how old are you Laurie B? You obviously don't buy them because you don't want or need them.@@laurieb3703
I had one of those combos, (the one that could copy the cassette over to dvd) but we don't get them here where I live anymore. DVD's are also slowly phasing out as we all stream the shows and movies we want to watch.
3:40 I got a Walkman for my birthday that year and it felt like space age technology! I grew up with "reel to reel" tapes so cassettes were a big deal anyway. But to be able to carry and listen to them personally while you *walked around* was ground breaking! 😄
I still think recording a tv program with VHS is the only way😂
We used floppy discs when I was in high school. I also remember when I got my first Sony walkman. It was the coolest thing to me back then
Thanks for making me feel so old. A few months ago I set up an old beta VCR to see what's recorded on some old cassettes I had that was labeled family. The kids came in and asked me, "What the heck is that?" I had to explain to them what it does.
I grew up in the 90s. All of these things you mentioned were in full use when I was growing up.
Listening to someone explain objects that I still used, as if they were centuries-old things that no one knows anymore, makes me feel very, very, very old 😅
Rolled into this video after one that covered stuff from the 1880's-1950's. Wasn't expecting to be educated about items from my own childhood . . .
I got a VCR when I was a teenager it seemed like a miracle being able to watch one show while watching another.
Thankfully, audio cassettes never totally disappeared. In fact, they are making a big comeback these days.
All of those things still exist - just in our phones.
Actually the first floppy discs were 12 inch. We used them on our flight simulator back in the 1970s. BTW, we also had a hard drive that had about 8 copper discs on a shaft. It took both hands to lift it out of the reader.
My father was an engineer at Boeing in the 1950s. I still remember him talking about the new memory storage device they had just gotten - an array of magnetic discs arranged on a shaft. It was going to replace the old tape drives for their mainframe computer. He said that it was "only" the size of a washing machine and could store an astounding 1 megabyte of data. He was very excited!
@@pmbrig Growth of storage was amazing. Still remember having starcraft on 7 diskets (floppys) compresed so much one floppy took 100mgb. Of course, opening those took days. Today i have TBs of data in a pocket like its nothing.
@@jakubkolacek6813 I worked for Apple back in the mid 80s. We had 128k memory that we sold retail for $128. I recently bought a 1T micro SD for less than half that. Crazy.
Are you sure they weren't 8 inches, those were introduced by IBM in 1971. Wikipedia also says they were the first. I can't find any info about a 12" floppy disk.
@@magoffin Thanks for the reply. The bottom line is, yes, I am sure. I talked to another retired USAF buddy earlier today and he remembers them as well. In fact, when the 8 inch came out I was 'astounded' that something that much smaller (roughly half the total footprint) could hold more data. Then the 5.25 and 3.5 came out. Also Apple had a Twiggy disk, (I worked for Apple for several years) and there were even 2, 2.5 and 3 inch discs at one time, which never caught on. These 12 inch discs were used on our flight simulators, not the games. These had full-on cockpits, motion and even radar. They also used punch cards and reel-to-reel tapes. The 12 inchers, if my memory serves me, were made by Ampex. These 12 inchers were a pain to use as they didn't have a protective cover. Also, when Apple brought out the IIGS and had the 3.5 disc, there was a mistake in the owners manual T 3.5s had a little tab that you could slide for protecting the data. The manual had the operation backwards. Hope this helps.
"They were small SQUARE DISCS..."
My mind cracked.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." William Gibson wrote the first line of "Neuromancer" waaay back in the 1980s, when CRT displays were the thing, and tuning to a dead channel meant getting a spectral, staticky glow on your screen, like staring straight into the Twilight Zone. "They're heeere ..."
Nice video presenting object that once were very common. However, there are other things that may have been better than a couple things mentioned: The 8-track tape is more of an "object of the past that vanished" than the cassette tape. Likewise, since Rolodexes are still sold, the "wall phone" that was prevalent in many homes is more of a vanished object.
Every kitchen had a wall phone. It was as much standard equipment as an oven.
To this day, I use an office style phone with answering machine a feature. Although, both the outgoing message and incoming recordings are made digitally today. I have owned cassette tape based systems in the past.
Nobody ever asks me to repeat myself on my land line, and the messages are not garbled (though digital). The same definitely cannot be said of cell phones.
@@bigred9428 For what it's worth, I don't use a conventional land line, although the phone I've connected to it is pretty much conventional.
I use a VoIP device. That device is wired to my WiFi router and the phone into it. Mine is made by Ooma, but there are others. Kinda pricey as an initial investment, at a bit over $100, it's yours to keep and use for years. I've had mine for 9 years and it still works flawlessly.
The best part is I pay only about $6/month, which includes long distance. If I recall correctly, nine years ago I was paying more than $30 per month for a conventional land line. Doing the math, 9*12*(30-6) = about $2,600 saved, plus whatever long distance charges I may have paid. And, the sound quality is not reduced, it's fine until someone calls me on a cell phone.
@@bigred9428 Yep, mobiles never reached quality of voice calls on landlines
as a tech sales guy in the 90's, the palm pilot was a Godsend! i used that thing all day everyday. i've also hooked up plenty of modems, and was bleeding edge when i had an isdn line to my home. we used to call it: "it still does nothing." lol! not so much a commercial success, but great for home office use.
I used many modems and got ISDN as well.
If you have a landline, an answering machine is better than voicemail if you like to screen calls in real time. Voicemail compels you to "check messages" then call back and delete not to mention the fact that providers charge a monthly fee. I finally dropped the landline a few months ago because it was no longer less expensive to get the "triple play" (internet, tv, phone) compared to just getting internet and tv. The decision was easy since I couldn't remember the last time I got a phone call on the landline that wasn't a marketing or spam call. I wouldn't have kept the landline if it was only $1/month - free was the only way it was going to stay.
I still have a landline, because it was not electricity dependent, and could operate during power loss. Not any more, as they switched basically to VOIP over fiber. Also, overseas calling rates are still cheaper in Canada on land line that on mobile
It's funny how a few of these technologies still coexist with legacy companies and the US government
The Chili Peppers, Guns N' Roses, King's X, Scorpions, Zeppelin (twice), Deep Purple, Genesis, Clapton, Pink Floyd, Kansas (twice). Excellent taste!
Wow! You really took me back to my childhood and young adulthood. I used all of these save a pager, but I remember them well as popular items. ❤
I think one of the worst mistakes we're currently making is the loss of media ownership. If you had a vhs or dvd, sure, it might degrade over time, but you owned it. Now we've left what we can watch in the hands of streaming companies, renowned for arbitrary region locking, removing less popular content, and other behaviors that make them unfit to have so much control.
"if you had [...] a DVD"
I still have cabinets full of them
@@lesharkoiste Agree. I'm a big proponent of physical media and buy tons of physical copies of video games, movies, music, etc. I think the only area where I've gone mostly digital is with books, as I buy the majority of my casual reading on Kindle. I just find the convenience and benefits of it outweighs the drawbacks of being fully digital. And at least with those, the files are actually on my device, and the ereader is only connected online when I'm downloading a new book, so there's less chance of Amazon going in and deleting my file.
not totally true some dvds and blu-rays back in the day had various goodies like region locking and often had drm that limited how you could use them and on what devices. many still do in fact.
@@poil8351and some (most) DVD players could be region unlocked...
Wtf, just pirate it. This generation is going to lose their ability to pirate media, and it's up to you to teach them how.
I still use an answering machine. The rest? Nope. My roommate has a VCR/DVD combo and buys VHS movies for about 50 cents at thrift shops.
VCRs and VHS tapes are making a comeback.
Smartphones are what PDAs became when cell functionality became built in rather than a seperate card you had to buy.
I suppose that the reason people think of smartphones as something distinctly different than PDAs is because most people probably only encountered PDAs as those toys that some business people and executives carried around, while "everyone" had mobile phones, so when smartphones became a thing, people saw it as a continuation of them having mobile phones rather than a PDA.
"This technology was first developed in the late 19th century."
How many times was it supposedly developed after that?
Never had a pager. And now I don't need one. Ignore new technology long enough and it becomes obsolete.
Wow! That Sound Blaster device driver diskette triggered some strong nostalgia for me. It was 1994 all over again…
You could also rent VCR players for home
And eventually dvd players and Nintendo, oh the technology.
Dictaphones deserve an honourable mention
Obsolete Items I still Enjoy: Turntable & Vinyl Records, Cassettes, VHS & Betamax VCRs, CD olayers, Stereo Receiver and big Speakers, etc. Also, I've recently taken up CB Radio as a Hobby!!
You make me feel so OLD - explaining how all these bits of old tech were used back in the past - but I remember them all!
Don't forget iPods or portable music players! It was such a rage during that time, especially amongst teens.
The floppy disk lives on as the save icon on computers and tablets.
It also leaves on in my desk drawer :)
I still use a VHS player, floppy disks, and a pager at work...LOL. While these technologies are obsolete, they are absolutely better for some things than current tech. Or, my work's case, are backward compatible with everything.
The first floppy discs were actually 12 inches. The size of an LP.
PDAs were never an everyday object, they were quite rare. And I wouldn't say that they became obsolete but rather they evolved into smartphones. Some PDAs had expansion options that allowed a connection to a mobile phone and mobile phones became larger when mobile internet took off so it was easier to combine both worlds.
I find very funny that until this day, and probably many years to come, the "save" icon in many applications is still a floppy disk. There's two or three entire generations that have never used, probably never even seen a floppy disk, and we still use this icon.
Cassette tapes were also the only the only media in the 1990s too. I was still using Yellow Pages in the late 90s.
Yellow Pages. How nostalgic is that. I believe we were given a new one every year. Too bad I only entered the workforce way after that. 😂
A number of these items still exist today.
Floppy disks, modems and cassette tapes all began being used in the 1960s not 80s. As a computer programmer and operator back in the late 60's I used both floppy disks and modems in my work. I got my first cassette tape in 1968 to use aboard ship while serving in the Navy. Early modems had acoustic couplers where the telephone handset was placed. The modem that I used also had an electric typewriter for printing the data transferred through the telephone. The modem was very slow at a rate of 300 baud. When the 1900 baud modems came out we thought they were super fast. Its all relative I guess.
Still use VCR, still use CRT, Yellow Pages and casettes, if it ain't broke, no point upgrading.
Before Google Maps and GPS, I would find a business in the yellow pages, then look for other business that I knew were in that area and on that road to get an idea of where the one I was going to was on the street.
You forgot Street Maps.
Here it was called A-Z London.
And thinking about it - must faster and better than Google Maps. Always carried one inside my bag, mine was a "Mini" Version, small yet bulky, powerful covering a large area. But you could get even very large ones for the hard of vision.
VCR tapes are still used as a means of saving digital data. They are rugged, and can handle jarring and drops, as experienced in high performance aircraft. A large amount of data can be compressed onto this relatively inexpensive medium. If random access is not a priority, there are many advantages to magnetic tape. One-way pagers have found a niche market in the clandestine world due to their inability to transmit. There are a great many places that still have little to no internet access where things like the Rolodex still have merit. High-tech companies like people to think internet access is available in all areas, but the reality is coverage is less a blanket and more swiss-cheese - data-less holes abound.
I still use an answering machine with dual micro cassette tapes. One micro cassette is for recording announcement and the other is for recording messages. Cool huh.
Still have my fungus infested VCR tapes somewhere lol
I have fond memories lugging my gaming computer, crt and all to LAN parties back in the early 2000s.
PDAs were not wide spread everyday items. It wasn't like everyone had one. In fact, most people with smart phones barely use any of the PDA functions.
I loved my PDA in college, I had a fold-out keyboard that I could attach to it for taking notes in class (I could type way faster than write).
I miss having to pay by the hour for Internet. We used to write down everything we wanted to look up, go to the Internet and look up that and nothing else and then log off as quickly as possible. Getting sucked into the Internet back then would cost too much money but we used our time so much better!
I remember when Videotapes stated being a smaller area in the video store as DVDs came in. I had a pager, it was cool to clip it on your pockets! Hell, I remember all these things, but I didn't get a walkman and VCR until the 90s. I almost bought a PDA, but it's good I didn't because they went out quick!
the 'save' icon in programs which started out in the 90's and have been continuously updated - a 3 and 1/4" floppy disk.
Cassette tapes - use to distribute software for the late 80's era of computers (Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore Vic-20 and Commodore 64) before cheap floppy disc drives appeared
Got an Atari ST 520 STFM which I brought in 1989, with a large library of games on 3.25" floppy disk - the ST still runs fine and all of the floppies I've tested work as well
I loved and miss my Palm Pilot. I thought i was the bee's knees with my Palm V. That thing felt grest in the hand.
CRTs are great - I use them on all my retro systems, such a warmer feel than LCDs. My 19 inch SUN CRT is pretty heavy though...
Even though floppy discs are a relic of the past these days, their legacy still lives on in the "Save" icons of many programs, including some videogames.