Giving Thanks to Obsolete Tech

How are you very well? It's almost as if we didn't just stop recording a previous episode seconds ago and started it up again, as it's almost just like that. It's just yeah, I'm having a weird sense of deja vu. Yeah, me too. Something. Maybe it's just the continuous voo since it's not really deja At any rate. It is a great band. I listened to them all the time. I think they cover in excess. They are pretty good. Yeah, I saw them on the voo. At any rate, we're

gonna be talking more about more obsolete technology. We had a previous discussion where we went through list the list item by item, and we started debating and discussing whether or not the the things that were on there in fact belong on a list of obsolete tech. Some of them we certainly think do belong there, and some of them we were a little you know, we questioned whether or not they belonged on that list. So let's continue.

The first one for this episode is the idea of a huge mainframe computer, which I think we can say is pretty obsolete. Yeah, I'm just thinking like the idea of one computer that's that large. Today you'd be thinking of just server racks, lots and lots of servers and they're acting as one computer. So if you want to get technical, is it a well know, it is that really a main frame? But it's a giant cluster of a machine. Yeah, exactly like IBM S Watson is a

good example. It's got thousands of processors, and if you ever look at the actual physical um compute, it's really a collection of of server like computers that are all network together that act as a single entity, like you were saying, I asked, But it's not just one gigantic machine that takes up the entire floor of a building.

You know, Back in those days, mainframes had components like vacuum tubes that were necessary because the transistor hadn't been invented or miniaturized yet, and today, in the era of miniaturization,

we no longer have to rely on those antiquated huge systems. Also, like the old mainframe days, a lot of those machines used a time sharing function, which, for the listeners out there who aren't familiar with this type of computing, time sharing essentially meant that there might be multiple terminals all hooked up to the same computer, but at any given moment, the computer would only be working on one set of

calculations for from one terminal, and everyone else would be waiting. However, most computer as we're moving at such an incredible speed that it almost felt like you were having you know, continuous, a continuous experience as you worked on the the computer. It didn't feel like you were actually only getting us a segment of time each time, at least if it was a significantly fast computer. So both of those things are no longer really the case these days, so I

agree that it should be considered obsolete. Although we still have huge computers like supercomputers are still obviously a thing, and there's still a real drive for computer scientists to make the next fastest computer. Yeah, but they're not typically this one giant monolith, these clusters of machines that work together. I do wish kind of that there could be one

that's just a giant monolithic computer. That's how they built it, Like it was just this incredibly fast computer that's in a single form factor, sort of like deep Lot in the Hitchracker's Guide to the Galaxy. But wishing does not make it so, So you're right, you should just buy like thirty or forty servers and then put their parts inside of a refrigerator and make your own main frame. Just call it a mainframe. I might have to figure

out a really good cooling system. Perhaps I'll keep the refrigerator working as a refrigerator in order to make sure that the servers don't overheat. How's that not a thing yet? If that's not a thing, that should be a thing, A refrigerator that doubles as a server rack. Heck, yeah, patent pending Strickland Actor Enterprises. You heard it from us first. All right, Well, then we have typewriters. I as, do you know what a typewriter is? I do know what

a typewriter is. It's that thing you'd use before you had a word processor, And uh my dad would type all the time. So I remember hearing that little flax wax wax wax noise, which sounded more like a metal key smacking a piece of rubber, that rubber roller. And then when do you have the more automated version where you can hit backspace And he would like remove the whole word. That sound echoes in my mind. But yeah, back back in the old days, the typewriter, that's the noise.

If you have an iPhone when you start typing on it, that's the noise it's emulating. Yeah, you have no idea what I'm talking to. Skewomorphism is what that's called, where we take something that has been obsolete and apply it to new technology just for really aesthetic purposes. Uh. Yeah. The typewriter chases its roots all the way back to the eighteenth century, all the way back to the seventeen hundreds.

But really you're talking about the eighteen hundreds before standardization came in, and the early twentieth century before it really became popular. So while there were predecessors to the modern typewriter all the way back in the late seventeen hundreds, it wasn't until the nineteen hundreds that we really selled on a foreign factor that that was popular rised throughout the world. And those early models were purely mechanical. UH

they worked. You know, you had a system of levers and and uh a little pivot systems where you pressed down a key and it would cause a a arm holding a letter to come up strike a ribbon that had ink on it against a piece of paper and that would be what would leave the letter there. You would also usually have a system where the ribbon itself would get pulled by just a tiny amount, so that way you wouldn't consistently be hitting the same part of

the ribbon. Obviously, if you did that, you would very quickly run out of ink on that spot. Although there were some typewriters where you had to actually physically reapply ink to the ribbon. Um Also you had to worry about those little typing arms getting tangled up with each other and some of the older ones. I had a an antique typewriter where that would happen. If you typed faster than a certain speed, it would start to get locked up, which was frustrating. Uh IBM would introduce sort

of the golf ball style typewriter. The and had all the letters on a round structure, and that was the one that had a very distinct sound when you were type it just kind of um uh you know, the clackty clack was replaced by a sort of sound as you were typing with those. And word processors came along a lot of typewriters and word processors were sort of combo things. But word processors allowed you to, uh to to create your documents uh in an electronic format before

converting it to a physical format. Um. I actually had to use typewriters quite a bit in my early career with a consulting firm because we had all these different forms that we didn't have electronic versions for. We just had physical forms and you had to put it through into a typewriter and type things out on it. Uh. Now you went to law school, right, I as, did you ever have to use a typewriter in that respect? No?

But when in law schools like the let's see the two thousands, so we had computers and printers and things and the PDF. Uh we could always use a PDF to fill out things. But yeah, I didn't have to use it in school very often, but I do. You just reminded me how if you wanted to spy on somebody, you could just take the ribbon that was used and you can read the words because it was it's clearly printed on there. Because there's this ribbon of text, and

you can basically find anything you wanted to. I always said that was really fascinating when he came to like this evidence as being left behind constantly. Oh yeah, yeah. If you were using a typewriter, then you were leaving a record of exactly what you were typing. It would also allow people to see what a terrible typist you were, true and see all these mistakes that they they totally

hit that backspace button for this one. Uh yeah. The backspace button often would use some sort of liquid paper type substance in order to cover up whatever it was you just type. Since you could type a new word in its place, it wasn't exactly undetectable. You could always tell when you would get a sheet of type paper where someone had to hit the backspace quite a bit. You can just peel it off if you wanted to

see the original letter. And the other thing was if I remember right effectively the the type, I would remember what you had just typed. So if you're going to, like, let's say, do type to T by accident, just the white ribbon would come up and the tea would hit again. So you just had this perfect space T, the white one over the black one. So it's pretty visible if you knew what you're looking at. Yeah, So so not not flawless. And eventually printers became inexpensive enough and computers

became popular enough that the typewriter largely disappeared. You can still find it in some offices. I know that there are, you know, medical facilities that still have typewriters. There's still

some companies like consulting firms or whatever. Any any company that's using documentation where they don't necessarily keep an electronic version on hand, they still have a typewriter, but they tend to be the oddity these days, not something that is commonly a you know, necessary piece of equipment in your average office. So I agree that it belongs on the obsolete list, at least here in the United States.

There are probably some other parts of the world where typewriters are still a very important piece of technology, but not so much. Here there's definitely obsolete. But again, one of those another one of those fascinating pieces of machinery. When you when you were talking about them being purely mechanical, when you see the leavers moving, when you see the arms hitting the ribbon, it's actually quite a feat of engineering considering what it was. It's like this movable type setup.

It's like, so we're gonna have this easy way to print if I just punch these keys. Just a cool little bit of history. Yeah, I think it's It's one of those things that kind of hearkens back to the aesthetics of steam punk in a way. It's this idea of intricate, purely mechanical technology where it doesn't have the kind of sterile electronic approach. I think that's what a lot of people, you know, why a lot of people find steampunks so appealing is that it has this kind

of you know, the hall, the working moving pieces. It gives it a character that that electronics tend to lack. So, uh, yeah, I definitely agree with you there. How about the next one. Dial up modems? Oh man, uh, definitely obsolete. And if you're using a dial up modem, you probably want to upgrade, is I hope you would? Because they are it can

be finicky I had I remember my bad modem. Yeah, I had one of those, and I was I was dialing into a o L back then was actually was AOL because I remember they had like five phone numbers for their servers. And then you dial in and hear that noise, you connect, and then you're like, mom, no, don't touch the phone. Don't know, mom, and then you'd be disconnected. Right, those are the old days, And the same thing happened to me whenever I would try and

call into BBS. Is to the point where I think we finally got a separate phone line just for the computer, so that way we didn't have to worry about it anymore. But yeah, the dial up modems much slower data transfer rates than any other format. Uh. And also that is where that distinctive sound comes in, that weird statick e uh pinging, buzzing noise that whenever I see it on a movie or television show, I think, where when is this supposed to be set? There was actually we talked

about in our last episode. UH. An episode of the popular series Sleepy Hollow recently had characters access the Internet through a dial up modem, and I thought, really, Sleepy Hollow is I mean I realized they've got a an eighteenth century, uh, former British Revolution soldier walking around, But are they really that far behind the times where people still have dial up? Um? But it does have that

distinctive sound. It's one of those that you can kind of tell the generation someone belongs to, because if they don't know what that sound is, then you know, all right, So I can subtract ten years from the age I thought you were because you never encountered this noise, whereas those of us at a certain age are very familiar

with it. And it just hearkens back that time where you know, you could connect to the to some sort of network service and you would try and download things and even a basic text document would take time to access because the data transfer speeds were so slow. Yeah, and you basically back then, I mean you think animated

gifts were annoying. Now, back then it was forever for them to load, and you would see like, you know, Felix the cat going back and forth, and you knew, uh, like the sites would be done by college students or something because they have like the team one lines in their dorms and you'd sign in to get to this page because you want to really know everything about the Beatles, because you know know anything about him yet, so you

want to read about him. And then you hear the MIDI playing after about like what maybe my I'd say, a good minute of loading and then this music scares the heck out of you because you do not expect it back then. Uh So, yeah, it was. It was definitely a different world with dial up modems incredibly slow. That one was fifty six k that was like the fastest you could go on dial up, and it was like,

this is amazing that water than this. Yeah, that reminds me of when everything back in those days where you would look at the specs of a computer and you would just say, man, this is way more than I need. I will never require all the horsepower, slash, storage, slash whatever that this machine has. It just kind of quate because now my my my phone dwarfs all of those specs.

And speaking of storage, speaking of you know, data storage, ZIP drives are on the list, which was a product from a company called i Omega and zip drives, well, first of all, I think we have to cover the

idea of floppy drives in the first place. Floppy drives are different from hard drives, and that these were portable storage media that used a magnetic storage to to save your work on a computer, and you would end up putting it into a drive and save your work, and then you could take the disc out and go to a different computer that had the exact same programs as

the first one and pull that work back up. Obviously, if it didn't have the exact same programs as the computer that you used in the first place, it didn't do you any good to have the storage because there wasn't an Internet yet for you to go and get that program um. But zip drives were supposed to be a solution because floppy drives had a limitation on how

much data they can hold. So for example, the three and a half inch disc, which although it was a floppy disc was uh in hard plastic five and it was a five and a quarter that was the one that was physically very floppy. Yes, uh this the floppy. The term floppy really confused people. I remember my dad coming home one day. He was teaching a word processing

course at college. He was he's a professor, and he taught this word processing course and it was like an adult education course, and he says, yeah, people just don't get it. I was explained to everyone that the five and a quarter inch discs were called floppy disks, and one of my students immediately folded his in half and put it into his pocket. Uh. Yeah, don't do that is the moral of that story. But yeah, even the three and a half inch disk, despite the fact that

was rigid, was in fact a floppy disk. It could only hold one point four four megabytes. Later on you could get some that could hold two point eight eight megabytes megabytes. That's that was considered a lot of storage back in the day. So it's like for for some kind of framework reference, like I think an MP three like two and a half minute song is at least i'd say could be three to four megabytes. That's on

the small side. So that's one song could maybe fit, or like maybe like thirty pictures if you were getting JPEGs back then. Well, I recorded an hour long podcast with a friend of mine last night, and it was it was about a megabyte per minute, So that's about a sixty megabyte UM file that came out of it. So that would mean I would need somewhere around between

fifty and sixty three and a half inch discs. If I were able to somehow divide that file up into into equal chunks and be able to save it in a meaningful way, it would take fifty to sixty of these disks to do it. Now, zip discs were supposed to be the next step. It was. It was a a high storage medium compared to the three and a half or five and a quarter five and a cord could hold even less than a three and a half

could the zip discs could hold. Depending upon the type, you had one fifty or seven hundred fifty megabytes, so significantly more than what these other discs could have. But it came out pretty late in the game, and there was something else right on the horizon as the zip drive came out that completely negated it, and that was the rewriteable c D, the rewriteable compact disc. When combat disks first came out, they were read only. I mean,

that was that. And there were a lot of reasons for that, pretty much the same reasons you encounter for any kind of medium when it first come out. The established powers that be don't want you to be able to write to that medium because they're afraid it means you're gonna steal all their stuff, right, So same things true with DVD s, same things true with Blu ray samething's true with the even VCRs and the vhs. They didn't want to allow that to be a writeable technology

for a really long time. So CDs when they did come out, they were able to hold a lot more data. They were actually eventually priced lower on a cost per megabyte basis, and once you could have more data on a CD at a lower cost than it would be

for a comparable number of ZIP discs, it was game over. Uh. And what I thought was really funny is that PC world named the zip disc the fifteen worst product of all time in two thousand and six, but then in two thousand seven, PC world said it was the twenty third best tech product of all time. So what what is it, I as, is the best or the worst? It was one of the best things that ever came out for computing. And here's why. Right, Like you were saying,

we had these one point four four megabyte discs. When I it in line to get Windows ninety five upgrade, I had thirteen floppy disks given to me in this box, right, and I was like, okay, I wish one day there was the ability to have a lot of data on a small disc, and the ZIF discs were about the same size as the three and a half inch disc, a little thicker when it came to the the I guess the height dimension. I don't know. I want to say that. So it was in a very familiar format. Uh,

there was. It was so popular to the point where a number of computer manufacturers were including internal zipped drives in their computers. There was this click of death that would happen after a while. You just say this this click, and you knew your disc was fried. It's over. You're

not getting anything out of this. One of the bigger problems with CDs being writable and rewriteable was there was this giant nightmare of C D R C D plus are minus are like, there's like this plus and minus r W. There wasn't enough of this bizarre incompatibility with rewritable discs because you'd have a proper drive that matched a proper disc, and unlike a ZIP disc, which only fit in a ZIP drive, you could get the wrong

kind of optical media in the CD burners. So I think that prolonged the life of the zip disc to the point where two D fifty megabyte version and then a seven D fifty megabyte version showed up. But in the interim these things were pretty much everywhere. I remember, like there was an actual use for the parallel port that wasn't a printer. That was so excited about that, Um it was. I thought it was a really great way to have portable programs. I used to have. I

used to run like Claire's Office on it. Where's Clara's works? Remember this program? I know of it. I never used it. Actually, it was the zip disc was fast enough to run programs, so in my limited hard drive space I would just be swapping out disks zip discs with different programs way back in the day before hard drive media, Like, I mean, hard drives were really expensive back then, So this was I think it was. It was pretty freaking awesome. Uh I Omega probably wishes it had one, but CDR CDs

had to win because they were just so cheap. Technology became so low cost. Well. I also one other thing that I didn't think to mention when you were talking about how the CD did have some drawbacks. The other one, of course, was just the right speed. The early writeable c D s, the right speed was pretty slow, and so it would take a really long time to burn

a CD. And uh, I remember, like this could be a big issue if you happened to be say let's say that you are a musician and you wanted to go ahead and just sort of produce just enough CDs so you're gonna go play a show, and you want to have something for people who like your music to take home with them, and you wanna, you know, create

some copies of c d's. You know, it could take a long time to burn a significant number and and be even though the c D medium ended up getting pretty cheap, the actual production of it could be a real pain in the in the neck. So I think that probably also helped for a while. It took a while for those right speeds to get fast enough and not be prohibitively expensive for it to be something effective.

Like if you had all the time in the world, sure, it's no big deal, but if you wanted to produce a lot of stuff in a short amount of time, that was a that was a big drawback. Hilariously, UH c ds and NED CD drives used to have likeliest to boast giant graphics like four eight x read speed and four x burn speed. I can't remember the last time I've actually seen a drive that had any boastful words on it, because they're almost optical media is so dated that no one's using it because they got SD

cards and everything. It's just so it was such a different world and houselow those things were burned just such a long time ago. It is kind of funny to think that, even though it's not on the list, optical media could almost be on a warning system for this because the solid state media has really taken over to

a large extent. Now that we've seen solid state prices continue to drop, it they're still going to have to drop for a solid state hard drive to be uh, you know, to be something that the average person is going to go and buy as opposed to a spinning hard drive, because it does add a pretty significant chunk of change to a bottom line price of a of

a machine. But when it gets to the point where it's negligible, it'll be really interesting to see if optical media sticks around, you know, how much longer it sticks around, or if it ends up fading into you know joining the same list. Um, how about tape drives. We just talked about the zip drives. Let's go even further back,

shall we. I remember having an old computer that one the accessories you could get was a cassette drive, Like you could get a cassette drive that would allow you to run programs from cassette or to save data onto cassette. But we didn't have that because we had a even newer technology, the five and a quarter inch disk drive.

But but that was definitely something that was part of the home computer system for a while, where tape drives that were either real to reel or cassette based depending upon the model, although real too real was really something you saw more in like research institutions and stuff, and less for the home market. But I think it is pretty safe to say that the tape drive is obsolete. Definitely, Absolutely. The tape drive was a great way, very cheap back

up tapes were very low cost. He was incredibly slow, but the capacities were just enormous. At one point it was like the pretty much the only way you could back up your real PC unless you wanted to break it out, like you was saying, with lots and lots of but definitely obsolete. I don't know anybody who is actively backing up their company with tape drives. Yeah, the the last company I worked for before health Stuff Works.

Actually no two companies back um many many years ago they were using tape drives to do backups of their system. Then I expect that these days they used a totally different methodology. And we've seen a lot of different technologies come into play that have replaced the tape drive. Just cloud storage being able to essentially outsource your backups to some sort of large company like like Amazon is a great example where you could have your backup stored in

the cloud. Uh. Thus, even if you had some sort of catastrophic failure of the equipment in your office, you could still have access to the data that that equipment had generated. Um. You know that that is pretty much negated the need or any sort of tape deck h And as for the home market, obviously there's not really

any point to it anymore. In fact, that this also illustrates something else and another issue with obsolete technology, which is that the stuff that we create one day is not going to be accessible to us because we will no longer be relying on those same methods to produce the the work, to save the work, and to access

the work. And this is a real issue. This is one of those things that people talk about when they say, you can't just assume that a hundred years into the future will have the same sort of access to the stuff we're creating today, because the technology will be significantly different and will either be incompatible or the media that we're using today won't last long enough for that data to be accessible into the future. That's really an actual

problem that engineers and scientists and researchers look into. How do you ensure that we have a continuation of our our knowledge from one media to the next, or one medium to the next. I should say um, because you never know what will be inaccessible tomorrow. Well, thankfully, because of the great historical documentary saved by the Bell, we know that if you bury a VHS yearbook and you leave it there for twenty five years, there will be a VCR in the principle's office later on to watch it.

So that that problem has been solved. Jonathan oh Well, I am happy to hear that Zack has a looked out for us. It was Zach right. Well, well, Zach was on the VHS tape the future future blonde kid who looked just like Zach in the same set of racially diverse group of friends there. Uh. They also were very very happy that the same principle had a VCR attached. You're totally right there. If you're going to leave, this is just here's here's a tip that nobody ever needs.

If you're gonna leave something in a time capsule, make sure you have the reader of the media of llable with instructions with all the cables, because otherwise it's kind of pointless. This just reminds me of my tape drive, which was also made by Omega, that I wanted to use it later on, where I had to get a I want to say, scuzzy to USB adapter because yeah, you just because I needed the data. Not really, I didn't really need the data, but I thought I did

back then, So there you go. Okay, Well, how about slide projectors, Yeah, that's absolutely I mean, who's getting slides made? Right? Where would you go to process it? There? I'm sure there are only a few places in the United States where that are actually still processing film for slides. I mean,

you know, digital projection is so common. I mean, we we've one of the things we've seen at the past few c s s are these pico projectors where you can just have a projector that fits inside your pocket and you take it out and connected to even something like a smartphone and be able to project a large screen version of whatever it is you want to see.

There's very little reason why you would need a slide projector unless you were doing it as really like an art installation, like it's your specifically doing it as part of the experience of whatever it is you're trying to convey. Another one of those great devices. Again, watch mad Men if you want to see basically a lot of this stuff we talked about in these two episodes. If you watch mad Men, you're gonna see a lot of these, a lot of like what's the typewriter look like? What

does this sound like? Yeah, it's slide projector. One of

the best episodes of mad Men called the Carousel. But I always wanted one of these things when I was a kid because to the projectors in general fascinated me when I was a kid, because of this idea of having an unlimited screen size, because all you needed was this one box and it wasn't that big and it wasn't that heavy because we had CRT s back then, uh that you can project this giant image, but then you'd always have the in the horrifying slide shows this

is our family vacation, which now takes place over Facebook or on somebody just showing you their pictures on their phone, like, hey, here's the eight six pictures I took what I visited, the uh, the salt quarry exactly here, here are pictures. I'm not gonna necessarily give you context, or I will give you more context than you ever wanted to know, and I expect you to sit here and be prisoner

until I'm done. It was a lot easier with slide projectors really because it was just impolite to stand up off someone's couch and say I'm leaving now, but or you'd have the image projected on you. That's the worst part, right right. Yeah. The other thing about slide projectors, I remember two things really. The carousel slides there were. This just takes me back to my elementary school days because that's what we would use to look at, like science slides.

I remember tons of classes where we used a slide projector, and I remember the carouselfs were prone to two things. One was that you would have actually have a slide get jammed, so it would stop the entire presentation while the teacher tried to fix the jam, and often that would even mean removing the carousel, which would require us to again find our way back to the proper slide so that we could continue on our journey of education.

And the second was that invariably at least one slide would be loaded either backwards or upside down, so you would either get text that was flipped or you would more likely see something from the point of view of someone in Australia. And uh, while that definitely added levity to the classroom, it certainly wasn't the most effective means of getting information across the students. Extremely extremely antiquated and

definitely obsolete. Yes, however, I will say that that backwards image we still see a remnant of that today with people who take selfies using a phone where it flips the image so it acts like a mirror, and then you end up getting these backwards T shirts and things. I saw a lot of that. We're recording this the same week in the United States as there was an election.

So I saw a lot of my friends post selfies of them wearing the I have voted uh sticker, But the sticker was backwards because we were using that specific mode to take the photo. So I'm glad that that still lives. Like, even if it's not a physical slide, we can still send people images that have been flipped a d eighty degrees. Yeah, we have. We have the

equivalent of jammed images. It's like when a slide doesn't load in the slide show, when you're trying to go in Facebook and you're going into the next image, like, why isn't it a loading jammed? It's yeah, and then you have to click on the picture or whatever. Yeah, you're right. Our our lives are still just as miserable. It's just we've got a different means of producing the problems. Now, Um, we've already talked about floppy disks, so we'll skip that one.

But the Polaroid cameras made up the last item on the original list. And Uh, if you're talking about cameras that are made by Polaroid, that's misleading because that company is still making cameras. They're still making digital cameras. They're even still making instant film cameras, are at least what they call instant film cameras. Some of those instant film cameras are technically not instant film. It's a digital camera with its own printer, so it prints the image as

opposed to captures it on film that then develops. Uh. But they do still have an instant film camera called the p I C the Pick three hundred that takes instant film. So it's actually still a thing. And in fact, I think the reason why this is on the obsolete list is that for a long time it looked like Polaroid was just going to get out of that game entirely. But the nostalgia for the instant film photo demanded that

there be a product to fulfill that desire. So this is an example of something that people weren't ready to let love. I think, yeah, I think this might be with the turntables kind of thing that like this is this still exists. There's a set number of people want to use this. There's a very long documentary on Polaroid's final years. I believe it's on Netflix currently, which I

tried to watch, but the amount of sentimentality was so great. Uh, so much emotion of people crying because people are printing out pictures. I had to turn it off. But when it comes to Polaro cameras, I loved it when I was a kid, and you know, you would try to shake the thing and you try to see the image developed.

That was a really cool idea. And then when you find out the science behind and how it works, how this this thing was being developed right in this this box, that was insane because it just seemed like, oh wait, that's how it stuff, that's how it works. It's not a big deal. But to know more about it as I'm older, it's pretty cool. But do you see yourself going out and buying a Polaroid instant film camera instant camera because it's not film. I I don't see myself

going out and buying any cameras at all anymore. Because now I've gotten to the point where I used to be one of those guys who I like the standalone devices that were dedicated to doing one thing because usually they did that one thing really really well. And the stuff like smartphones could do lots of stuff, but they didn't tend to do all of it really well. It

just did it okay. But now smartphones, either the smartphones have gotten to a level of quality that I am now happy with, or my standards have dropped enough where I don't care anymore. But either way, it's the same destination. Now, a smartphone for me acts as everything. It's my camera, it's my MP three player, It's the way I access streaming media. It's the way I text people or interact with social media. Once in a blue moon, it's the way I talk to someone because I hardly ever make

phone calls anymore. But yeah, so I don't see myself going out and getting an instant film camera. How about you? Are you? Are you nostalgic enough where that's something you you need to have in your life. I am. I'm probably more likely to find a way to hack a Kindled for it to display my images on like a on like a loop. Then I would be a candidate to get a Polaroid instant camera, because for me, the coolest thing about printed photography is that requires no power source.

It doesn't glow at night when you leave the room like a digital picture frame. So but I'm probably gonna hack together a solution of a digital picture frame that uses the inc then I would probably get this polaroid thing. I'm not going to bother with instant film because it's just not it's not it's just I'm not that sentimental

when it comes to that. Well. Plus, I mean you would have to go on and buy refills of it, right, I mean that's the other thing is that you can't just offload the pictures and then make space that you can take more pictures. You actually have to physically replace the uh, the medium because it runs out. So that's also a hassle. And like you can't you just can't shoot a thousand photos. Like however, you can't like like you're not have a burst mode on Polaroid. Okay, there's

no burst mode. You take the shot once and then it spits it out and you better you have to wait, So you better make sure whatever subject you have, which better be a bowl of fruit that's not moving, that's gonna be fine or very still subject because it's not exactly like that friendly unless your dog sits nicely and is trained not like mine, or or you Also, you should know you do not have to shake it on like the song. You do not need to shake a

polaroid picture. Let's develop that great hymn. I remember that. Yeah, Well, that wraps up the list that was online. We have a few more that we were just going to mention, uh from our own experience. My first one was the capacitance electronic disk. Did you did you ever see these? Do you know what this is? I looked it up because I saw it on your list of things and I actually have seen them. Turns out they look like

giant floppy disks. Yeah, yeah, they I thought of them as being about the size of a vinyl album record cover, right, except made out of a semi rigid plastic um and there was actually a disc on the inside of it that you didn't see because it would it would get pulled out when you put the whole case into like it's essentially a cartridge into a player, and then it would remove the disk and play it. It's called a capacitance electronic disc because it actually had a physical needle

that would read the disk through electronic capacitance. So it's kind of in between a vinyl album that uses a physical needle and a laser disc, which uses an optical laser to read information. It was kind of like in between those. It was less expensive than the laser disc. It's also less expensive, I think, than VHS tapes were originally, but you couldn't write to them. You can only read.

It was read only, and each side of a capacitans electronic disc could hold about an hour's worth of material. So you would watch a movie and halfway through the film it would stop, and you'd have to eject the cartridge, flip it over, and put it back in to watch the rest of it. To this day, I can remember precisely where our copy of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc stopped. It stopped right after Sala says they're digging in the wrong place. Then the video

would stop. I'd have to turn the disc over and and watch the rest of Raiders. So it left a lasting impression on me. Ultimately, it did not succeed in the market. It went obsolute pretty quickly. In fact, you might even argue that the word obsolete isn't accurate because it never rose to prominence. So perhaps obsolete is giving it too much credit. But I have a soft spot

in my heart for that particular piece of technology. I haven't had the same experience as you so, I I don't know how that would be growing up, well, uh, it was a magical time, I as. Uh. As for other types of obsolete technology, I'm just gonna lump a bunch of these together and mention the ones that kind of thought sort of might fit obsolete, Like a lot of those ports, like the parallel ports you were mentioning, I as a lot of those have largely been rendered

obsolete by USB ports. USB has really taken over, and so we don't really necessarily need all those other ones these days. In fact, it's been a lot of time since I've bought any technology that required me to plug something else in. It's almost all, you know, just plug and play with the USB these days. There still are some out there. It's not I don't mean to suggest that they're all uh USB, that's not the case, but a large number of them are answering machines. Also, because

now we've got things like digital voice mail. UH MP three players I think are fading away because again we have devices like smartphones that allow us to either stream music or store it natively on a device, so there's less need for a dedicated MP three player. UM. The analog television broadcasts. We mentioned that in the last episode that transition from analog to digital because a huge headache.

Back in two thousand nine, there was a lot of confusion about whether or not you would still be able to watch TV and who needed to have a an adapter and who didn't need to have an adapter. Uh were you covering technology back at that time? Yeah, I was, and I was very into this back then, and I believe it got delayed for a lot of months, maybe even a year. I can't remember how long the delay was,

but I would. I found it just amazing that people were confused because the amount of advertising that was done about this transition, this change that's gonna happen, It's going to happen. It was like, it's gonna be the set date and it was pushed off by three So you should have been up to date at that point, but you weren't. A lot of people weren't. Um. I just couldn't believe how many people were left in the dark.

On top of that, the transition caused so many issues when it came to just being able to receive a signal, because when it was analog, if you were far enough away, you'd get a signal, but it'd be very weak and you get kind of snowy kind of stuff going on, a lot of ghost thing going on with the images. So but you would get something, but with the transition,

you either got the signal or you've got nothing. And so the the blacked out version of this added to the fact that these waves didn't travel as far through buildings that it was a huge problem for a while.

It seems like with the with the years have gone by, a lot of that's been alleviated by different positioning of towers and things so that you can get a place like New York City where I am, you can still get signal because for a while, if you were like on the wrong side of the building, you were not getting like fox, and that's been now fixed. So it was it was a very interesting time that I thought

would have gone a lot worse. I think the government had this program as well where you could get a converter box for a set, and I think it was like fifty less than that if you wanted to steal use your old TV and um. It was. It was an interesting time and I don't think a lot of people remember anymore because it's a lot of people were on cable at that point, so it didn't affect them directly because they were still using their boxes, right. I uh.

I remember covering this as well and seeing the confusion that was around it. One of our first Tech Stuff podcasts was about this very topic. Chris Poulette and I did a topic about it to talk about who needed it and who didn't, because there was a lot of confusion.

Even for people who just had cable television. They were wondering if they needed to have some sort of converter box, and there were there were some manufacturers that were kind of preying on ignorance at the time too, in order to sell devices that weren't needed to customers who who were fine where they were. But I'm glad that I

finally went through. Also, it's an interesting entry on the list because unlike a lot of the other ones where the obsolescence came about as just the fact that people moved on to other technologies, this one was a forced obsolescence. There was no choice in the matter. It wasn't that people necessarily moved on to something else. It was that that thing no longer was supported. Yeah, that was It was a good time now we got not nice beautiful multi caast channels. You can get to four point one,

four point two, all these other things. We have all the airwaves freed up for things like wireless communication, which makes it a lot nicer. Right, and then you have your own entry down here too. Right. Yeah, it's my favorite piece of obstlity technology is the UMPC. This was an initiative by Microsoft and I believe it Intel at the time. It was a geez. I don't remember how many years ago it was, but it was a while ago. I'd say at least maybe eight years ago. The UMPC

was the Ultramobile PC. It was a tiny, full fledged computer that was about the size of a Sega game gear if you if you want to actually have a size comparison, or think of a really really fat seven inch tablet, because it was a pretty hefty device and

you have this touch screen in the middle. Some devices gopsed to have on screen keyboards only where you could just tap and you'd get like the semi circular keys on the left and right so you can do thumb typing, or you get a more traditional keyboard that would come up kind of like a tablet today has or phone has, and this was way ahead of its time because they were cramming in like pretty much laptop processors in these devices with like a six inch screen with a full

operating system, and so you would get like two or three hours of battery life and it was about a grand or so. So it's very expensive. And for me, I've always had this dream of being able to just have one device, one computer that I can carry with me anywhere I go and then crazily enough like come home and dock it. And that's what the thing is supposed to be. And it didn't take off because of a lot of the things I mentioned, the battery life, the price, and it's just it's just couldn't do it.

Did you have experiences with you and PCs? I, uh, only only tangentially. I never owned one. I had read a lot of the drawbacks and I never got into it. They were also really expensive, um, and so they were kind of out of my price range. They were there were enough drawbacks where I couldn't see them being that useful.

I liked where it was going, and I thought that that was gonna be an entire like line of technology that we would see improve over time and continual continue to take advantage of things like mantorization, battery improvement, that sort of stuff. I really thought that's where things were going to head, and then sort of I think cloud computing took a lot of the the need for that out. You know, as as you started to offload the actual processing onto other UH platforms, you didn't need to have

a device that could do it itself. You had all these other things that could do the work for you. You just need a device to be able to access that stuff. And so I think that was a large part of why this never really took off. It wasn't just the drawbacks, which I think you could eventually engineer your way around, or at least try and create as efficient a system as possible so that it was still useful.

It was that it largely became mood. I still I think the drawbacks were just gigantic when it came to using a it was a full fledged desktop operating system that you're using on a very small screen, so it

wasn't exactly optimized. I know, Windows XP they did have a tablet edition that's I believe was running on the number of these devices, so it was capable of being worked with with the stylus, but a lot of the work you would want to do on a desktop computer you wouldn't want to do on a device like this.

And like you're saying, with the engineering, we've seen a lot of things happen where like smartphones now are optimized applications that made those things seem like they were going they would move fast, and if you had a desktop computer versus a UMPC, you would know what it was like for this application to run fast. And there was a lot of pain when it came to this idea

of trying to be productive on this small device. I think the smartphone is the successor in some kind of way to the UMPC because it does prettty much everything you want, and with the larger screens that are happening and multitasking on Android phones, like I mean actual like windowed multitasking, that's so close to this thing that I wanted where you can compare it with the Bluetooth keyboard and you can just prop this up and you can

use it as a full fledged machine. Uh. But yeah, the UNPC was one of Microsoft's early initiatives that failed. They were ahead of a lot of things, including tablet PC's the first gen of that was really awesome. But yeah, Microsoft, whatever they're doing, pay attention to them, because the way ahead, pay attention to them. And then wait a couple of years for Apple to do it and then go out and buy it exactly and then Microsoft try to copy

it again. But then again there is this. As we're recording this, there's a lot of news about Windows ten and basically you're gonna have a full flas desktop operating system in your phone and Windows phone and the apps are gonna run cross platform. So maybe I will get my wish where where I can just dock a phone and use it as a computer, although I don't know

if I need to do that anymore. Now we we've seen we've seen some implementations of that technology over the last few years of people trying to do that, and each of them were you know, you could see where the promise was, but it never quite clicked properly. I remember seeing the the smartphones that were uh, you know, you would plug it into a docking station and you could even uh have a larger display running so that you you could look at a larger display, use a

separate keyboard. But it's all running off the processor of the smartphone. But you know, we never got to an implementation that really met the needs and the price point for the consumer, so maybe we'll see it. That was the Motoral Matrix. I think that was like one of the first ones that that allowed this. Yeah, and I remember, like I was drooling over a patent application that Apple had where you could just pop an iPod into your computer and that would make it your computer like a

giant cartridge. I'm like, that's brilliant, But that never happened obviously, So it's these The future for me is kind of like what do your talk about everything being cloud based, being able to log in and have all your settings, kind of like a chromebook experience. That's getting closer to this kind of every computers your computer, as opposed to I carry my little device, right Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, this was a great discussion about technology that doesn't matter anymore.

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