Ask HN: What technologies have come and gone in your lifetime | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What technologies have come and gone in your lifetime

16 pointszwieback51 comments

I've seen the emergence and disappearance of floppy disks, CDs, fax machines, to name a few.

Now that I'm older I can't really say what technologies have come and gone, maybe I'm not tracking them or don't even recognize the pattern.

What technologies, (HW, SW, mechanical, etc.) have you seen come and go in your lifetime?

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Land-line telephones and ubiquitous pay phones pre-date me but have mostly disappeared.

Touch-tone phones came and went in my lifetime.

Floppy disks, 8”, 5.25”, 3.5”, and various formats like Zip disks.

Betamax, then VHS, then CD-ROM. DVD now seems almost obsolete.

Cassette tapes for music, and the Walkman-style portable players, then the portable CD players.

Fax predates me (fairly old technology made commercially viable as far back as 1948), and still hangs on in the legal and real estate professions.

CRT displays appeared before I was born but color TV was a big deal in my childhood, now obsoleted by flat-panels.

Dumb terminals like the VT-100 and Wyse-60 appeared early in my career and have largely disappeared, replaced by personal computers.

Minicomputers, appeared in the early ‘70s and died when PCs appeared a decade later. RIP Dec, Pr1me, Data General, and HP’s line of superminis.

Too many.

Back in the 80s my father got a new PC from his university. It's a brand new IBM-PC compatible with two floppies, no HD, a turbo button and a turn-key lock.

Fast forward 10 years, in 1993 we got a new 486 machine and we installed Windows 95 a couple of years later using tons of floppies.

Fast forward another 3 years we finally got a new Pentium with perhaps 16MB of RAM and a CD driver. I played first modern game Duke Nukem 3d on that gig and still remember that quiet night. I'll probably remember it till my death.

In a few years we got another machine with maybe 32MB of RAM and I started to play every FPS I can find. I found out about Worldcraft and started to make some levels. Unfortunately this did not turn into a career. I still regret that I didn't push on because I was probably one of the first group of players in my country that actually do any level design.

Now everything above becomes history. Along with it cassette player, CD player, pocket pet, mp3 player, DVD player, etc. Tech moves so fast.

Gopher was a pretty brief blip in my career, but I remember being insanely excited about it for about three months of 1991.

Apple's OpenDoc was a pretty neat idea, until I actually tried it on an anemic Centris computer in 1996.

And I still have a few hundred MiniDiscs and a couple of players in storage. From 1997-2002 or so, those were in daily use on my subway commute, until the iPod came along.

While not as huge as vinyl or cassettes, there is still interest in MiniDiscs and new albums are still released on the format.

- https://www.minidisc.wiki/releases/start?srt=%5Ereleases.dat...

Interesting - I'm curious if the small labels doing releases are using recordable magneto-optical MDs. (I'm assuming so.)

In its heyday, there were a limited number of prerecorded releases, mostly from Sony. They didn't use M-O discs, and were pressed aluminum/plastic inside the shutter case, similar to a CD. They were supposedly much cheaper per-unit, but with a high setup cost.

I still have a handful of the prerecorded ones. My favorite is Pink Floyd's _Delicate Sound of Thunder_, which was two MDs in a special dual case that fit no storage system ever imaginable. Just looked these up on eBay, and I think I figured out my retirement plan.

Cellphones with keyboards. Firewire and esata. WEP Encryption. Didn't see the beginning but saw the end of analog tv. Not really dead for everyone but like... Tivos and dvrs sorta came and went for me. In my adult life I've never had cable television or home phone service something that is surprising to my grandparents.

I remember those things that like... ran credit cards by impressioning them into paper. Haven't seen those since the 90s.

There's also certain things I thought I'd see more when I was a kid from reading books. Dumb waiters, laundry shoots, and pneumatic tubes turn out to not be very common sadly.

> I remember those things that like... ran credit cards by impressioning them into paper. Haven't seen those since the 90s.

An imprinter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

I saw one of those being used not even 10 years ago, though it was at an admittedly hipster establishment.

Yeah that's the one. I don't think it'd even work on my current card, as there's no raised lettering.

I processed credit cards at a bicycle shop in 2007-2008 using the slider-thingy-wot-made-satisfying-clunks.

MP3 players and mobile phones with hardware keys. I still miss the latter. I can not seem to type accurately on a touch screen phone keyboard and it always low key bothers me. I feel like I'd be faster pressing a button 3 times to get to my desired letter than I am now fixing my typos or autocorrect mistakes.

MP3 players, beepers, pay phones and phone booths, phone charger battery vending machines at airports, boom boxes, laser disks... basically everything I remember growing up with in the 90's :-)

I still see vending machines that sell chargers at airports.

CFLs were and are a bad idea that lasted about 15 years. Look at all the don'ts:

https://www.energystar.gov/products/lighting_fans/light_bulb...

Are these gone? I thought they were still around.

Maybe not completely but they will be soon.

I doubt it - these things are cash cows for their producers and prevent tiny manufacturers from producing incandescent bulbs that actually last

What? Who doesn't use LEDs nowadays? I haven't seen a CFL in a long time.

When people are still using kerosene lamps in many parts of the world, many people still being on CFL doesn't surprise me.

That thing called pager. It appeared at once (in India) and before I lay my hand on it, it disappeared. I don't think any other gadget had such a short lifespan.

Supposedly they are alive and well in U.S. hospitals.

(USA perspective) I remember pagers were the hot thing in 1998, but as soon as 1999 happened, no one talked about them anymore, because of cell phones.

I read your post twice thinking you said "paper" as a farewell to books and printed materials. :-) Thinking on that topic, I can think of a large number of items which may be "obsolete" for some people but not all, or that are definitely obsolete but also definitely existed prior to current lifetimes, or that clearly will become obsolete but have not yet...

Devices or products:

- comprehensive printed user manuals with most tech products

- newspapers

- paper road maps

- compact/pocket cameras

- digital SLR cameras

- home slide projectors

- home film/negative scanners

- many hand-held paper scanners, light pens, etc.

- consumer video cameras (displaced by smartphones)

- digital video capture peripherals

- portable, single function "transistor" radios

- walkman-style portable tape, CD, minidisc players (approx 1 album at a time)

- MP3 and iPod style portable players (large music collection)

- pagers

- personal digital assistant (PDA)

- wired headphones, for music or phone

- dedicated, single function wrist watches

- dedicated, single function GPS navigators

- CB radios, as a popular fad

- 2-way amateur radios, aka walkie-talkies

- land-line telephones

- cordless handsets for land-line telephones

- actual answering machines

- analog, 1G, and 2G cell phones

- pagers

- dial-up modems

- fax machines

- wired office or home LAN

- typewriters

- dot-matrix and other impact printers

- CRT displays

- LCD displays with fluorescent backlights

- incandescent home lighting

- incandescent portable lighting (flashlights, headlamps, bicycle lamps etc.)

- incandescent automotive lighting

- high-intensity discharge (HID) automotive headlamps

- compact-fluorescent home lighting

- sodium vapor street/industrial lighting

- dry-cell "lantern" batteries

- gasoline automobiles (in our lifetimes?)

- natural gas appliances in homes (in our lifetimes?)

- wood shake roofing (banned in areas with fire safety concerns)

- mechanical, analog thermostats for home heating

- 26" wheeled mountain bikes (displaced by 27.5" and 29")

- round metal garbage cans

Media and form-factors:

- photography film

- polaroid instant film

- vinyl records

- reel-to-reel, 8-track and cassette audio tapes

- analog video tape (VHS, BETAMAX)

- laserdisc

- digital audio tape (DAT)

- floppy disk

- CD-ROM

- 5.25" HDD from early PCs

- 1.8" HDD from early iPod etc.

- any HDD in laptops

- bus standards: ISA, MCA, VLB, PCI

- disk controllers: MFM, RLL, IDE, SCSI

- laptop bus standards: PCMCIA, PC-Card

- peripheral standards: serial, parallel, AT keyboard, firewire, eSATA, VGA

Services or infrastructure:

- film development/photo printing booths and labs

- milkman home delivery

- "garbage man" who picks up cans to dump into collection trucks

- neighborhood newspaper delivery boy

- mail order catalogs other than those targeting the elderly

- staffed toll booths to pay with cash or get change

- cost effective shoe repair

- diaper service

- retail small appliance, TV, electronics repair

- vacuum tube testers in retail stores

- dial-up BBS or other non-internet services

- internet service from schools and employers (rather than relying on commercial ISPs)

- pager networks

- analog, 1G, and 2G cell networks

- analog television broadcasts

- cable television

(edited to attempt to rescue my obsolete text formatting skills)

Great list, thanks! Opinions on almost every bullet.

Teletext. When I was a kid, there were TV channels with hundreds of pages having news, horoscopes, articles, even erotic adverts.

We still have this in germany and I still love it. Really great for checking sports results or reading a short text about some newstopic. Edit: Onlineversion of ARD Text ( https://www.ard-text.de/ )

Thanks for the link, major nostalgia. I grew up with that, we even had a Bildschirmtext terminal. Should have added that to my original list.

3D televisions. Although admittedly they didn't last long...

VR headsets are so much cheaper than any 3D TV now, and can still do 3D movies, and can be made bigger than whatever TV setup you have, and don't have the drawback of darker image from needing to wear 3D glasses.

I'm curious if 3D movies (or maybe even 180/360 degree movies) might start to become more of a thing again if/when VR becomes more prominent.

> I'm curious if 3D movies (or maybe even 180/360 degree movies) might start to become more of a thing again

I mean, there is lots and lots of porn in this market already, hah.

But for mainstream stuff I dunno; keeping a headset on continuously for two or three hours is a big ask for some people, but maybe the tech will get there eventually. But even then it's limited to watching alone: it won't work for watching movies with someone unless you've got multiple headsets.

Adult content largely avoids both these problems.

Supersonic commercial aircraft (Concorde, TU-144) and ultra large aircraft (Airbus A380 and Boeing 747).

Concorde is a good shout but both the A380 and 747 are still in pretty heavy use, with 121 of the former and 450 of the latter in active service.

The 747 and A380 are still really popular for freight, but for passenger flights they are dwindling. Simply put there are very few routes where they are viable, think long distance and high volume (Dubai -> Sydney or London -> Dubai).

Definitely. But sadly, it's over for both.

I find Concorde and the A380 to be fascinating products. Both were great technological advancements but lost huge amounts of money. Unsustainable amounts. Both were propped up by state aerospace programs, and wound up creating the world's largest aerospace company and the only serious competitor to Boeing. What a ride!

> Supersonic commercial aircraf

Hopefully we will see a resurgence in the next decade. I'm rooting hard for Boom supersonic.

In no particular order:

- Punch cards

- Tape punch/readers

- Dot-matrix printers, in fact impact printers of any sort

- Serial interfaces

- Parallel interfaces

- Whatever that purple (or was it green?) plug was called that you used to plug your keyboard/mouse into

- Zip drives

- ISA and MCA buses

I could go on.

Edit: Some of these are simply things that have gone obsolete in my lifetime.

You've seen punch cards COME? Holy crap! +1 on the dot matrix printers, I was proud owner of an Epson LQ400.

Well, no I agree (also tape) but I did have to write a card punch emulator (on IBM PC) when we could no longer support our physical punches - maintenance costs were huge.

I guess I am sometimes listing things that have simply become obsolete, though some have come and gone in my lifetime - but don't get me started on software!

> - Whatever that purple (or was it green?) plug was called that you used to plug your keyboard/mouse into

Purple was keyboard, green was mouse. PS/2 Port: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port

CD-Rom, DVDs, cassettes, 3D TVs, walkmans mh...

VHS

Don't forget Beta to go with that VHS. Also Video Disk to go with CD-Rom and DVD. The video disk was like a DVD, but had a bigger radius than even a record album.

CDs and DVDs might have a long-ish tail. Public libraries lend music on compact discs (which I listen to in the car and sometimes on a stereo) and movies on digital video discs. I admit the convenience of so much music streamed via pocket computers, but there's also something healthy about being constrained by an album.

Centralising computing resources goes to distributed resources goes back to centralised.

It’s a cycle, usually with more cruft added for fashion.

I've always liked the word squarial.

Had to google that one - must be a British thing.

The Space Shuttle.

Eight-track tapes.

The Wankel engine (at least as found in mass-produced automobiles).

(Arguably) the minicomputer.

The electric typewriter.

Phototypesetters using glass or film negatives (APS-5, Mergenthaler VIP, Compugraphic 8600, etc.)

A bit before my time, it my father described his first and only cinematic experience of SmelloVision

He mentioned that the aroma lingers too long to fit the scenes properly…

iPod.

(Yes the underlying tech exists, but I'm talking about the device itself.)

I think Apple still makes them in some places, though I'm not sure why anybody would buy it today.

But if Apple continues to make them, I suppose there's probably a good reason for that.

The one I really liked was minidiscs.

WAP

Megan Thee Stallion is keeping that one alive.

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