What technologies have come and gone in your lifetime

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.

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.

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 :-)

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...

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

VHS

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.

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