TechStuff Goes Obsolete?

full disclosure, I AS and I are friends. I know it's shocking, So any sarcastic barbs, I take it, Jonathan, or he throws back at me. We do that out of love, entire absolutely true, absolutely true. And today, Uh, you know, I always asked my guests if they have a preference for the topic they want to cover. I has actually looked through the list of articles and suggestions and things that I've been collecting for potential tech Stuff

episodes and picked one. There was a listener suggestion listener named Jare shared a link to an article on Web designer Depot and it was all about technology that had gone obsolete, and Jared said, wouldn't it be great to cover an obsolete technology podcast? So We're going to look primarily at the technologies that appeared on that list, and then we're gonna kind of talk about, you know, what made them go obsolete. In a few cases, we might

even debate if it is in fact obsolete. I think there's some that are on the list that might have been a little premature to say it's obsolete. When I think obsolete, I really think that it no one uses it anymore. It's been completely replaced by newer technology, you know, like the crossbow. Not a lot of people using those. What's not obsolete that that still has a function, So that they will argue at that planning, like, what is the true definition of that is it's just no one

in the world ever uses again? Or is this just basically something that's been or its function has been traded in for another device. Well, I mean sure, a crossbost functional. I'm not saying it's not working. I'm just saying that, you know, they're okay, that you're right. We're gonna get into this throughout the entire episode. So, uh, spoiler alert, crossbow does not appear on the list, so we're not

going to be covering that. However, I wanted to begin kind of where the list began, although I should also add these are not necessarily in the same order as they appeared on the article, because a lot of the technologies in the article were similar tech or at least we're technologies that fulfilled a similar role, and so I

kind of grouped together quite a few of them. But in any case, the first one was super eight or eight millimeter film cameras, which the article referred to as video camera rus and I immediately got the giggles because film and video are two different things. Now, I as, have you ever actually used a film camera? Surprisingly, no, The only cameras I ever used when I was growing up were ones that used VHS tape, and that's it. I never I never had the experience of the super eight.

I think a lot of people are familiar with it with the Wonder Years. That's what it looked like, kids. If you wanted what it looked like, this film actually going through but no sound, usually I think, yeah, exactly, it's a you know, you you had to record sounds separately if you wanted to have sound with your films, which meant that you would have to slate it. Slating of course for those who aren't familiar with the the

film production world. Slating is where you have some sort of visual and audio Q that tells the producer how to line or the editor how to line up both the audio track and the video track. So if you've ever seen the little slapboards are often used to you know, whenever you're seeing a behind the scenes shot of a movie or it's just a television show where they've got that in there, as you know, usually it's when they're showing someone making a movie, that's what that's all about.

Uh So, yeah, usually these were just silent films. It was interesting to me that eight millimeter film was actually sixteen millimeters wide. Uh. It was just that you would when you were shooting, it would record on one half of the film lengthwise, and then you would turn the cartridge upside down and reinstall it and then you could shoot on the other half of the film lengthwise. So that was what allowed you to double the amount of film that you had per cartridge. Um that's one of

the things that is very different these days. Obviously, like we used to talk about film in terms of footage literally footage, how many feet of film did you shoot? And that's while we still use the term ntage today, and we still use the term film today. That's no longer the case. Now we're talking about how many bytes of data did it fill up? So I agree that this is obsolete in the sense that I don't think you're gonna find a lot of places offering super eight

uh film cameras or even super eight film. But you can still find a few places. It's just really tricky, and it's also tricky to find places that can process that film because unlike video or digital film, you can't just view it immediately. You actually have to process the stuff you shoot in order for it to become viewable. So I'm I'm okay with this one being called obsolete.

What's your opinion. It's definitely obsolete. Although I'm sure they're parts of Brooklyn where this is like the coolest thing that kids do or hitchers do. Um, There's there's no way I would see anybody using these things these days. And unless you're like some kind of crazy enthusiast. It's like somebody who who set but like a flash with that powder stuff that would go up flash that would

seem to be very unusual. So I would think absolutely, absolutely, Yeah, yeah, unless you're a film student trying to make some sort of statement, I don't see this happening. Uh, it is interesting. Another little bit of trivia. The old super eight film could hold thirties six hundred frames worth of film, which amounts to just a few minutes, so two and a half minutes of footage at twenty four frames per second. If you change the frame rate, you could get more

or fewer minutes of footage. Helt. But just imagine, you know, the fact that you are doing a take using a super eight film camera, No take could be longer than two and a half minutes. Obviously, that kind of pressure makes movie making take a lot more time, and it's a lot more stress I think. Um. Going along with this one is home movie projectors. Again not a huge surprise, because if you don't have the came rus to shoot the film, then why do you need something to show

the film? Um? Yeah, I mean that's that's been gone forever. I mean I've seen these back. Actually I have seen this in school, back when they actually the real the reels would come in the wheel, this a V unit in and they'd have an old projector with this. But usually there were science things not necessarily home movies. But I'm just thinking back to the the how quick you'd have to shoot things. I'd imagine the stress levels would

be very high for families. It's like, get the shot right, getting right, because we've got two and a half minutes and that's it. We're gonna have be happy here, that's it. Jimmy, you gotta you gotta at least give a a a false sense of happiness to everyone back home, and we get one shot. That's it. It's not like the days where we got to to retry everything right. If you know, these days, if they take a picture with like a smartphone and you don't like it, you just delete it

and do it again. That was not the case in the old film days. Well yeah, these these projectors have been largely replaced with DVRs, DVD players, Blu ray players, VCRs, even in some homes, and then some people have digital projectors, so kind of a spiritual successor to the old real home projector, but it works on a very different technology. Now,

the next one I remember from my childhood. I didn't own a Beta Max machine, but I remember the the cassette wars between Beta Max and VHS and those are the next two on the list. Now, this is the early video market for the consumer. Video had been used in professional capacity for quite some year, for quite a few years, I should say, before it ever hit the consumer market. And then you had the VHS versus Beta

Max battle. Um. The main differences between the two well one, uh, Beta Max was made by Sony and v HS was uh that came out from our c A I believe, and uh, so you had a format war that way. But Beta Max also could record in a slightly higher resolution and was limited to at least for the longest time, to one hour long cassettes for home recording, whereas VHS didn't have that limitation. You could get longer recording VHS

tapes and that gave it an advantage. Also, Beta Max tended to be more expensive than VHS, so this was a battle that we'd see play out again with Blu Ray versus h D DVD. That's sort of a fight that broke out, um. And in many ways the two format wars are very similar to each other. So if you remember the old h D DVD war, then this

story is really pretty close. Uh. The big difference being that I didn't go to the c e S where Beta Max pulled out of the show at the last minute, but that did go to the c e S when HD DVD suddenly decided not to show up, uh the day of the show opening. Yeah, this is Sony's like revenge. At least the Blu Ray one was because when it

came to Beta Max, the quality was there. It was higher quality, like you mentioned, and a lot of people thought that quality went out, but VHS was I'm just much cheaper and you could have longer films, and I believe there was the adoption of pornography on VHS, so that kind of led the way at times. But son you got to win finally with the Blu Ray. I think the last major player they boughtut I want to say it's Warner Brothers, but they basically paid a truckload

of money and ensured their victory in the home theater space. Yeah, VHS, while I would say it's pretty, you know, it's it's mostly dead and the Princess Bride sense of things. There's still plenty of companies that are offering up vhs like VCRs, but they're usually combo VCRs. There VCRs that are packaged as like a DVD or Blu Ray, even a Blu

Ray vcr UM. But there still are some out there, and in fact, some movies are still being released on VHS, but it's almost always a gimmick, like The Horror Anthology VHS two was released on VHS cassette, but that again was kind of a one off, like aren't we clever sort of thing. Yeah, you can tell someone has gone to the obsolete point when you see the prices start

taking on things like VCRs, the playback machines. They start going down and they start decreasing to this point and then like they're practically giving them away for free, and then they start slowly increasing the price because so few companies are making it. Because if you look up a VHS player now, it's not as cheap as it would have been back when if the market was flooded. So I don't know if it's it's not dead, it's definitely

actually obsolete when it comes to video technology. It doesn't have the quality, it doesn't have the amount of I mean, I wouldn't say bit rape if you're not in the resolution. When it comes to this, you're not gonna have the same amount of audio coming out of this this technology. So it's definitely uh, it should be on its one way out, but it's that it won't just die. Yeah,

I think obsolutely. It's a fine word because, like you were saying, I as I think, absolutely does not necessarily mean it has been white from the face of the planet. It really just means that. I mean, if you were going out today to buy a brand new home entertainment center, you probably wouldn't think of a VCR as a necessary component. But what about a LaserDisc player. I loved when the LaserDisc came out. I was I saw it. It came

out in the store. I saw this massive box and get these record size, shiny platters, and then I begged my folks to buy me one. They bought me a laser disc player. I came home with it and then I'm like, wait, how do you record on this thing? And they said it doesn't record, and I go, we're

taking this back to service merchandise right now. So at a lasers player in my ask for all of three days because I was not happy about it, and my folks were very nice and they were very happy to get what I believed to be a four hundred and thirty dollar credit back from this store because that was really really expensive and they were very nice enough to get for me, So they get to uh, they got to enjoy the stork about it later. That's so hilarious that that you owned a LaserDisc for all of half

a week. Uh. Yeah, I didn't have a LaserDisc player at all. I did grow up in the era of the the home video you know, wars everything from the Beta Max to VHS. We had a VHS VCR, not a Beta Max. We didn't have a LaserDisc player. We did have a totally different obsolete technology that I'll mentioned towards the end of the show, but it's it was. It didn't make the list that we were talking about

right now, the online list. LaserDisc players had a much higher quality than vhs when it comes to resolution and sound. They were kind of the predacess sirs to DVDs. Uh. They were and you know, really the first optical based

home media's format. And it also brought in the era of full motion video because there were laser disc arcade machines that um used laser disc footage as the means of showing off the game, like like Dragon's Layer is the big example, where you know, at certain moments within Dragon's Layer, you can make a decision and the character would go and either succeed or fail based on that decision. But everything has already been prerecorded, nothing was being rendered

at the time that you were playing. You were really just unlocking various sequences. And that was the limitation of the laser disc format. It couldn't do anything beyond that. But on the other hand, people who own laser discs love the quality of the picture and the sound. I remember going to parties with people who had laser displayers. They would always have, you know, one of the movies on in the background, and it it was it just

blew away anything that was on vhs. You didn't have that tracking artifact that would go across when you know your tape is not quite right, you have to fix the alignment so that you don't have the static or whatever on there. That was never a problem, but a LaserDisc ultimately didn't catch on in the consumer market. UH to a wide extent. It had a very dedicated core of followers, but it eventually lost out to things like DVDs, UH and blue rays later on. So by two thousand

in the United States. Um, they were pretty much gone. So sad to say that it never really caught on in a big way, but it did kind of pave the ground for the following types of optical based media like DVDs and blue ray. Uh. Then we've got a whole bunch that I grouped together because they are similar. There's the phonograph, turntables, vinyl records, transistor radios, boom boxes, the Sony Walkman, and the Sony Discman. So some of these I could argue are technically not obsolete. Uh, they

might be niche markets. Um. In one case, the Sony Walkman, the brand still exists, so I guess you could argue it's not the same piece of technology. That's not exactly the same they The Walkman used to be a cassette player. For those of you don't remember. Cassettes are like with analog way of getting audio to you, and when the tape itself would have an issue, you have to get a pencil and kind of rewind the actual tape. Yep. So there's there's a whole generation that people have no

idea you know what I'm talking about. But when you had these cassettes, you'd want to walk around with them, and unlike something that that succeeded them, like the discman, you didn't have a lot of skipping problems. You could run around with the tape and there was no real issue there, but you did have to deal with the destruction and whear and tear of the actual tape. And I remember when I had a discman at one point. Uh,

it was great. Once they they invented anti skip technology was which basically just reading ahead and having the audio set to go in case of a skip because optical media not exactly designed to be ran around with back first came out. Yeah, it had to buffer that audio so that should you encounter a bump, it could continue

to play seamlessly. And like you were saying, the cassette didn't have that problem, you have other issues, Like there were times where maybe the tape could get caught on something and unwind from the cassette and that was a huge headache. Uh. You know, obviously it's a magnetic storage medium, so if you were to work near i don't know, super conductors or something, you might end up having some issues on your music. But but I, you know, I

certainly was a big fan of the cassette. Back in the day, it was one of the easier ways to have your music be portable, and the Walkman specifically made that easy. As for things like, well, the phonograph, Sure, the phonographs obsolete. It's been obsolete for ages. I don't even know how it made the list. It's kind of like saying, you know, uh, I don't know, like the horse and buggy is obsolete. Well, yes, that that is obvious. Turntables,

I'm I don't know. There again, it's like a niche market. But there are lots of music artists out there who will release their music on vinyl and you play it on turntables. I'm sure there's some people who collect that kind of stuff, even if they don't have the device to play the media on, but they're just a collector. But I know that turntables and vinyl certainly still have a place. I mean, DJ's alone, make sure that that

doesn't die out completely. Would you go so far as to say that turntables and vinyl records are actually obsolete, definitely obsolete at all, because their replacements would be something like digital music, and they're The big claim is that there is some kind of analog warmth that you get

that you just can't reproduce on it digital medium. And so as long as long as as there's gonna be music, if there's still gonna be vinyl, because you know, of all the things that try to replace Vinyl, the fact that it keeps coming back or just refuses to die, I don't think it's it's ready to be called obsolete, because then why why don't we other why don't we ever see other analog audio take off as well as

vinyl does. I'm not really sure, yeah, I mean, the only thing I can think of is that the cassette tapes have the magnetic media tend to have a hiss behind it, which people say that obviously takes away from the fidelity of the recording, whereas vinyl doesn't have a hiss, assuming that your equipment is clean and the record is unblemished, I mean, obviously, if your record has wear and tear, there's going to be some pops and scratches in it.

Some people say that actually adds character to the recording, and uh, for a for a full generation, that was the way people were used to music, and it sounded weird to not have those kind of pops and scratches in it. So yeah, I agree with you. I don't think that one's obsolutely I would say that that one that one probably does not merit inclusion on the list. Uh. Cassette tape recorders and cassette tapes are actually the next one that we're listed in the the article, and I

can see why. I mean, obviously, the music, like the prerecorded music stuff. The music industry going out to buy an album has largely and almost totally abandoned the cassette format, with with a little one off exceptions, things that are really more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. For example, the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack They're Awesome mix tape is going to be released or has been released out on cassette tape, but that's because the cassette tape played

such an important part in the movie. It's really more movie memorabilia, I would say, than an actual musical album in that sense. Yeah, cassette tapes, obviously I was talking about before. My big life with cassette tapes was recording stuff off the radio. I'm sure you've done this too. It's like you got your boom box, You're waiting for it. You're waiting for a song because there was no way to get audio very easily. You just have to wait

around for it to come in through the airwaves. Have your cassette tapes, and like back when we're talking about the Walkman, nothing more. Nothing would cause a panic, like seeing that tape getting stuck between the heads and you're like, Okay, did you get twisted? Isn't busted inside? Uh? When it comes to the cassette tapes, I remember just having a ton of them. I liked how small they were. That was something that was a big nice thing to have

a portability. But I think definitely obsoustely at this point. Yeah, I used to have cases of these things. My my college roommate and I had dozens of mix tapes, including tapes where we were doing just dumb things like we each had vinyl record collections, including singles and full albums, so we once did a mix tape that was all vinyl albums played at the wrong speed, so we would have singles played too slowly, and we have full albums played too quickly, and we thought that was the funniest

thing in the world. Because our senses of humor had uh, stayed at the eight year old level. I have since gone up to twelve years old in my sense of humor, So there's progress there. Did you have a tape player that variable speed so you could actually listen to it back normally if you wanted to, or you just thought, that's it, one speed, this is how it's going to be.

It was one speed. Yeah, we I remember distinctly like we had um Anarchy in the UK played super slow, which sounded more like a rob zombie cover of the Sex Pistols made it really really scary and ominous. But we also had a super fast version of Comfortably Numb and hearing Alvin and the Chipmunks cover Pink Floyd was amazing. So but we yeah, once once we recorded it, that's the speed it was gonna be. We didn't have a

variable speed tape player. Now, all of this so you know, by two thousand one, those cassette tapes made up less than five of music sales, and so pretty much you don't find them for prerecorded music. You can still find blank cassette tapes because apparently there are some people out there who are still using them to record stuff, but as for like an actual album release. It's incredibly rare

except for the the random one off. However, the next one on the list eight tracks, I think we could just say is obsolute without even you know, any debate on the subject. It was obsolete during the era of the cassette tape. Yeah, I think that's just like enough said, is an eight track And if you if you're miss hearing me, you're thinking the Sony a track, that's not what I'm talking about. The eight track cassette tape that

just kind of when went away. It was supposed to be be higher quality audio then you'd be getting from other methods, but it was these giant cartridges. They kind of look like atry cartridges, at least that's where I remember them to be. I don't think I've ever been in a car that had an eight track player, have you? I have been in a car that had an eight track player. My my family did not own one. We always had just the A M and then later the a UM FM radio, but we never had an eight track player.

Eight track players had a lot of limitations. For one, uh, you couldn't rewind a cartridge. You could only play it forward. Now, some eight track players had a fast forward so if you really wanted to get to the other side of it, you could fast forward the the cassette, or if you wanted to hear a song again, you could eject it, turn it over, fast forward to what you think is the beginning of the song you wanted to listen to again, eject it, turn it over again, put it back in

the player, and push play and hope that you guessed correctly. Um, you could also fast forward, or rather, when you did fast forward, most of these players would cut the audio, so you're just fast forwarding. You wouldn't actually be listening to the stuff played super fast, so you wouldn't be able to listen to music played at the wrong speed. But yeah, this format died pretty much in the seven knees. So I was a kid in the seventies, but I was a very young kid in the seventies and I

have no real memory of eight tracks. It was only when I was writing in someone's car that dated back to that era that I ever saw an eight track player. So we never had one in my family. There should be, uh, I don't think there's any adapters that have like an eight track to Bluetooth adapters or adapter. Your CD player not a thing. Causette Cassett's still kind of live in cars.

The last car I owned had a cassette deck in it, and that car was from two thousand and four, so like, yeah, so they still had a tape deck and it was had the ability at least for me, It's like, Okay, I'll get the adapter. But I've never seen an eight track to c D or eight track to Bluetooth adapter, so definitely dead. Well, I I haven't even seen, like it's been a while since I've seen a car that had a CD player in it, much less eight track

or cassette player. But again, might be that bias creeping in where I just I tend to hang out in the other podcaster cars and we're all gadget breaks, so we tend to get the the various systems that are all digital. Well, how about real to real tape? You think that one's still a contender or is that one obsolete? It's not dead. I know this because I think one of the last Food Fighter albums was recorded on real too real. It was because they wanted total analog, they

wanted to not use pro tools. So there's some certain bands that still use this to record, and the Food Fighters are kind of a big band, so and so that's it's it's unusual that somebody would choose to do that. And I just remembered back with the cassette tapes, I us have a four track machine so I could record music on different tracks, and that was my second big cassette moment because I was totally into CDs at that point.

But real to real tape, this is another like kind of niche kind of thing that people would be trying only if you want to have the analog sound from the very beginning, because there's no other real reason to do it, because it's kind of limited. Yeah, it's it's really for one, thing is just really big, right, I mean, it's it's a bulky medium, and so you have to have a lot of physical space to store it. So that alone makes it less attractive than a lot of

other alternatives. Granted, you still have again this this sort of perception that the sound quality on the medium is fundamentally different from other types of media, and that might that might actually be true. There are some things that come up during recording that you know, you wouldn't hear

if you were actually in the room. While the recording was being made, it wouldn't be something you could perceive, but on the recording you get these kind of distortions and interference of various frequencies as they're being recorded, and that becomes part of the song or whatever is being recorded onto that medium, which is kind of cool. It's an idea that the the media itself is playing a part in the quality of the song or whatever else it is that you're trying to set down. And I

think that's really interesting. But I don't I think outside of that realm that you're talking about, I s it's not terribly uh um popular or well known. There's some I know there's some computer systems that still use a real too real type system to do backups, just because it's a legacy system and that's what they have to work with. But I don't think that's terribly common either. I agree that it's not quite obsolete, but it's definitely

very niche. It's very it's very useful if you're making like a period sci fi movie, because if you have a large computer, they almost always had two real to real decks constantly going never knew what it was doing, was always in the background with the flashing lights. So if you're wondering what those giant discs are, that would be real too, real in a lot of these sixties sci fi movies, and a lot of twilight zones as well. It makes me think of airplane too. These lights are

blinking out of sequence. We'll get them to blink in sequence. It's pretty much where that goes. The next one is is another one that I don't think really fits is obsolete. It's ham radio. I think at this point I would argue that the the author of the piece is perhaps equating something that is not terribly popular with something that is obsolete. But ham radio, amateur radio is still a thing, right, This isn't It didn't people didn't just stop. There are

quite a few amateur radio operators out there. Yeah this, I know, it's not dead. I used to work in a place where this is very big with a certain group of people. But it's definitely not something that is

marketed towards the general consumer or anything. So like like we talked about with other devices, things that if we want to think about it as will the normal person be like, Yeah, I'm totally into this and this is what I will choose to you was over a cell phone or whatever would be Uh, this thing is obsolete and that kind of not people Not many people are using it that way. Yeah, I guess yeah, from that perspective, certainly they're not using it as a primary communication tool.

But it's one of those things also that I don't think was ever popular enough for you to say that it's been replaced by something else. It was always kind of this hobbyist, uh market, and not something that you would see, you know, it's not I don't think the average home a few decades ago had a ham radio sitting around in it. It was one of those things that people who had a very specific kind of interest. That's those were the homes you founded in. Otherwise it

was it was just not there. So I don't really think of it as obsolete. I just think of it as, you know, kind of again very niche. But the next one, telegraph, I feel it's pretty obsolete. Yeah, I mean it's pretty cool and if you don't again legraphs um. I think the last time I saw one on Madman, that was the last time I saw one. It was an ad campaign for it and it was a pretty good episode.

But it's basically a piece of trivia in your head when it comes is when a telegraph is because you just text people nowadays, right, Yeah, I mean there's so much stuff that's replaced it the telegraph system. I mean, it was all introduced in the nineteenth centuries, so the eighteen hundreds. Um, it really got running towards the end

of the eighteen hundreds and wireless telegraphy came in. And the thing that surprised me was when I was doing some research just looking into this, was how long the telegram business lasted in the United States. Western Union shut down their telegraph service in two thousand and six. I would have imagined that to have been much earlier. With things like, um, uh, just the telephone system, computers, you've got cell phones. The smartphone really wasn't a thing in

consumer markets in two thousand six. You'd have to wait till two thousand seven when the iPhone came out for that to really happen. But still it was amazing that it stuck around that long. Uh. And then you have telex machines, which were teleprinters. Uh. Telex actually itself is the name of the network. It's not the name of the device, but the network allowed printers that had been hooked up to it to print text based messages that have been received over the network. So um, it's not

entirely obsolete either. It's still being used in maritime functions. In fact, it's a requirement in the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, mainly because other systems could fail. This is like a backup system for communication. It's not necessarily something that would be relied upon as the primary source for communication, but still an important network. I can see why you'd say obsolete, however, because it's not like it's something that the average person is going to ever come

into contact with. I'm actually generally unfamiliar with telex machines other than like I guess the Simpsons referenced at times Burns. Mr Burns does retalex, but that's about it. Like I I don't know much about it at all other than what you just said. Yeah, yeah, I mean I've never I've never personally encountered one. You know. My parents wouldn't let me into the telex room at home, so yeah, they kept in that cabinet and we weren't allowed to

touch with the fancy soaps and the beautiful dishes. Actually, I have to correct you, as they kept me in the cabinet. Everything else was outside of it. That's much more efficient. My folks should have done the same thing. They just locked us in the rooms. They should just lost us in a tiny one Harry Potter. Potter was largely based on my background. You and your owls man. Real problem. Yeah, yeah, well, okay, let's let's not reveal my entire personal life to the internet. Let's move on

to to Whang calculators. This was the Yeah, I remember Whang computers, but only because I remember people talking about it after the computer company had already faded away, and it's you know, it's one of those things where the more juvenile among us joke about it, Wanging computers. But Wang Laboratories was founded in nineteen fifty one, and the Wang Loki two or l o c I two was the first desktop calculator that the company offered in nineteen

sixty five. They were enormous. Have you ever seen one of these? I have not? Okay, well, you know, like the really big um office telephones, the ones that have lots of different bells and whistles to them, not just your average ones, the ones that take up a good quarter of a desk. If you've ever seen one of those, that's kind of the size of a weighing desktop calculator. These things were enormous. They weren't It's not like a

pocket calculator. It was a big piece of machinery. Uh, and these really have become Obsoletely, you can get a basic scientific calculator that could do everything that the Wang calculator could do, and you can put it in your pocket, whereas these things, again were huge. Uh. The company Wang Laboratories went bankrupt in two and it was eventually acquired by a company called g Tronics in and then essentially dissolved. They folded it into their other divisions and it no

longer exists as its own entity anymore. It's kind of sad, but yeah, the I can't disagree that an enormous desktop calculator is now obsolete. Definitely. Now I am looking, okay, I found some pictures of this thing. It looks kind of like a word processor. Yeah, it's just it is enormous. This is um it's it's a computer. That's what it is. Exactly. Does it computes things? Yeah? Yeah, specifically bath that's really what it computes yea various like scientific calculator type um functionality.

But yeah, it was. It was big now. Granted, at the time it was a very advanced piece of machinery. It's easy for us to kind of joke about it now, but at the time it was it was cutting edge. So it shows that we've gone a long way where you can hold something in the palm of your hand that can do everything that machine can do. Plus you can just carry it around with you, and you know, depending on the device, you could connect to the Internet.

So that's something that that that machine never could have done. Uh. Analog telephones is our next one. Uh. The landline service has been declining steadily since the mid two thousand's, and digital systems are a huge, huge deal. I've heard that the FCC will allow phone companies to stop supporting analog lines by and that by we would expect them all to be gone. Uh. I asked, do you still have

a landline? No, I've moved to avoid box. Uh. Landlines are They're really helpful for things like, UH nine one one calls because you actually can of the dispatch, can actually see where you are with that kind of thing. But these days I believe you can set your home location with E nin one one, so at least you have that kind of functionality built back in. Although analog just regular landlines in general just they run with no

power since this power always going through them. Is there a digital version of that that exists where you can have power going to it all the time, you know? I don't. I've never heard of one. I've always seen the digital lines having to get supplemental power, so I don't know. I also don't have a landline. I really like solely on cell phones now. Um. In fact, I haven't had a landline and probably a decade. UM. It's it's been a really long time since I bothered to

to maintain one. I know there are a lot of people who advocate that you should keep one like a just a phone just plugged in somewhere, even if you don't have a regular phone line, just in case of an emergency. UM. I know a lot of my friends out in San Francisco do because that's part of their earthquake preparedness kit. But here in Georgia, I don't have

to worry about that. We get if we get an earthquake, it's likely not strong enough for us to notice it, So, um, I haven't bothered with it, But yeah, I can see why this one's on the obsolete list. It's still again, if you live in an area where you have to worry about various kinds of power outages or whatever, often the phone line, not all the time, but often the phone line can remain unaffected by that depending on the nature of the outage, and it can be a really

useful tool. I just it's just one that I never really think of. How about p d A S. Did you ever have a personal digital assistant? I did. I had a Handspring Visor, and uh, if you guys don't know what that's like, it's kind of like a smartphone without the phone connectivity. But the Visor was show because it had the ability to have something called springboards in the back, kind of like a game Boy cartridge slot.

You'd remove this little plastic placeholder you put in something like a physician's dictionary, dictionary if you wanted, or encyclopedia, that is. You could even attach a cell phone attachment. So I actually my first cell phone was a Visor phone, which anytime I handed to other people to use, they did not understand that they had to use a stylist or touch the screen to actually dial a number. And they were like, what about all the face grease. You're

putting your face against the screen. That's just really weird. This is back in like two thousand and two, I want to say, so this is a long time ago. That concept was very foreign back then. Were you a p D A guy? I was not. I never had one. I I was actually a late adopter of cell phones. Um, but once I did adopted, I never looked back. So I went from not having any kind of personal digital assistant, nothing like that. I had a computer at home, and I had a landline at home, and that was it.

You know, if I was out and about, there was no getting in touch with me and I if I needed to call somebody, I had better have that phone number memorized because that was the only way I was going to get it, unless they happened to be in the phone book. Yeah, we used to have phone books. Boy, I remember those two. Yeah, I still get them, even though I have put myself on the do not send list multiple times. But yeah, it's that is certainly one

of those things the Internet has helped replace. But yeah, I never I never carried one around and by the time I would have cell phones were a thing, and they were. They had enough basic functionality for me to have a list of contacts with the people that I would call more frequently than anyone else. Um and I never really worried about using them to keep schedules because uh, no one ever wanted me to go to anything, so I didn't need it. Um. Yeah, I was more of

a second gen p d A guy. I just realized that my dad used to have the radio shack Rolodex, like the large one that you would pair with a smaller one with I R so you can actually send it over. And these little the small ones like a clamshell little device. It kind of looked like a business card holder had very very like the spongy little keys on it. It It kind of like rubber membrane that you push and actually input stuff. But if you didn't want to do that, you could use the larger Rolodex one

that had much larger keyboard. It looked like a child's cashier kind of toy if you wanted to remember that look like. And then for myself not only have the visor phone back in college, I had some p d A with a stowaway keyboard, because back when I was in college, kids didn't use laptops for anything, and we didn't really have We didn't have WiFi. I'm not even making this up. There's no WiFi and cell signals are

basically for the really wealthy. So I would download my mail, I'd be between classes, type out the responses, and then go back to my dorm and then sink it back to send out my messages. That was a long time ago, and that is really scary. Yeah, I skipped all that. And see the thing is that these truly are obsolete. The smartphone has completely negated any need for the p d A. The smartphone can do everything that the PDA could do and more so. Uh, these days, I can't

even imagine not having my smartphone with me. In fact, I start to go through withdrawal if I haven't, if I've left it behind. If I happened to leave the house and I realized I left the smartphone back at the house, it starts to gna me, which really is more of an issue with my psychology than anything else. But uh, you know, I have to force myself to go on vacations where I don't have cell service or WiFi so that I can just get away from it.

It's funny because it's something that I never used until the smartphone came along, Like I never used the p d A or anything like that, and now I can't imagine not using it. I think. I think that speaks highly of the technology and not so highly for me. Yeah, you are definitely somebody we should all pity so with you. That's fair. So what about pagers? Did you ever have

one of those? I really wanted one when I was a kid, but my folks were like, no, not getting a pager, and they were right because who would be calling me? It was like an eighth grade. There's no reason for an eighth period to have pages. But my friends had them, and I'm like, wow, that's so cool.

Who's calling you? And you'd have these cool messages, like the special number code because you couldn't text yet, so they'd be like, I know, four one one means there's some information, or there's nine one one means there's some kind of emergency. I better go home or whatever it was, or you call those people back. But I did not personally have a pager because I was deemed not popular enough.

I didn't have a pager either, and I never got one, mainly because I couldn't imagine a scenario where someone needs to get in touch with me that badly, where if I wasn't next to my phone, uh, that it would be something necessary, you know, that they would need to go to that extra step to get my attention. I figured my phone and my answering machine were enough to take care of all of that. Uh. And again, now that we've got cell phones and smartphones, pages are largely obsolete,

So I agree with it being on this list. What about portable television? Well, I'm being reminded in my head that pages aren't dead. I mean, doctors use them, and there there are other versions that are available, like when you go to a restaurant and they give you a pager and still technically a pager. So so everybody wants them writing to go. They're not dead. They're not dead. We just think that, you know, these days, you wouldn't be going to the store to get a pager. Right.

What was the the other item you just mentioned, portable TVs? Oh man, I I wanted them to work. These are definitely this is obsolute, like crazy, because there's enough streaming services. You can get things on your phones. But I had a Sony Watchman. Okay, do you know what that is? Yes, Okay, So if folks I don't know, it was this portable television had about two point two inch screen. It was like a brick. It was pretty large, had a telescoping antenna.

It was black and white. I had a mono speaker. And because the old days before the transition, UH, pretty much getting a signal on the go kind of impossible. So if you were in a moving car it was useless. You basically couldn't watch anything. It was really about. You could bring it with you and you can stop and look at it, and it just it didn't do a very good job when it came to that. Battery life

was terrible, the audio was terrible. And then something like recently there was a version of this that came back for cell phones called media Flow or flow TV. They had their own spectrum. Once the analog to digital conversion happened with television waves here in the US, they were all these free frequencies. So they had bought this frequency and it was gonna be here. People are gonna have sort of cable like TV on their phones, it folded

within a couple of years. Apparently nobody really wants to watch live TV on the go. I'm not sure why that is, but that's what apparently has been happening. I think I think live TV in general has really taken a hit. I mean, we've had so many ways of watching stuff on demand whenever we are ready to watch it, you know, so that we are not held to the schedule of a television station or a channel or anything

like that. I think that's really kind of filtered out through the entire spectrum of platforms that you would get television on. Granted, there's still shows that I will set myself down so that I can watch it when it comes on, but there I think there are only two that I do that for right now, and only one of them is what I like. I watch a show I don't like when it comes on ahead? Which one? Is it? Sleepy hollow? Oh? You just watched as you

can criticize it? Is that right? That's yeah, it's mostly so I can feel superior by criticizing the historical inaccuracies and ridiculous plot holes in that show. I think my favorite I think you tweeted about a scientific inaccuracy, you do my it seems like, yeah, you can let go of the anachronisms, you can let go of the license is being taken. But when they can't get basic science right at times, that's your Your tweet was quite hilarious. Yeah,

I go a little bonkers with that. Yeah. I can handle the fact that there is a headless horseman walking around. But if you get basic science wrong by trying to create gunpowder by just lighting sulfur on fire, then I really flip my lid. But listeners of tech stuff, no, we did a full episode about fireworks and I explained how to make fire gunpowder essentially, and they know you can't just light sulfur on fire and have it explode and be gunpowder unless you live in the world of

sleepy Hollow. I guess I'm getting off track, all right. Our next one is another batch which I think we can just kind of dismiss out of hand, which is um led watches, TV watches, the Saco wrist, computer calculator watches. Basically all the little gimmick watches and watches in general have really taken a hit. I mean, they're largely used as an accessory now as jewelry because almost all of us have some other device on our person that has

the time on it, so they're not as necessary. In fact, Uh, it's gotten to the point where even the smart watch, which is still trying to make headway into the consumer market, is having some issues because a lot of people ultimately say, well, why do I need this? So I definitely agree that these watches and watch form factors are all suitably on the obsolete list. Yeah, and I think there's a need for him other than fashion. I have my own wristwatch that i'd like to wear, and the big reason why

I wear it is because it's a kinetic watch. That technology has made watches a lot more palatable to me because then they never die. That's the big thing holding back. I think a lot of these things, like the spot watch back when Microsoft tried it, or like the smart watches that are coming out in this generation, is the fact that you have to charge something every day or it could die. And this is not the device you want to die. You actually want to know the time.

It's relatively important because you know your life might have a schedule. So uh, these gimmick watches, yeah, nobody, nobody really needs to have like a time X watch you hold up to a cr team monitor that flashes a signal that will give you the data. That was a thing. I love that idea because it was so ridiculous and and when I saw the demo it looked like it was going to induce seizures because the cr team monitor flickering. Which was brilliant idea of getting data from one device

to another. It wasn't the greatest in execution. Definitely great curiosity. I loved these devices when they came out, but they just didn't hit it. It was a very creative approach to trying to solve a problem, just not one that was necessarily effective. Um. Yeah, and our our next one would be CRT. You it's good that you mentioned the CRT monitor because CRT monitors and CRT televisions are on the list now. These are cathode ray tube displays. They

had a vacuum tube and an electron gun. The gun fired electrons at fluorescent screens and that would create the images. So uh, these were that This was like the main kind of television before you got all the great technologies like l C, D, l E ED plasma stuff that allowed us to have these super slim flat form factors. Everything before that was CRT uh, And by two thousand

that technology was pretty much on the way out. And it's you know, depending on the store you go into, you may not even be able to find a CRT monitor or display in the door. Um, did you do? You have a CRT and e CRT displays laying around? Not anymore. I used to have some CRT suh. You can. You can probably pick up c RT s free on the streets to New York. I've seen them outside. They're just literally by the garbage and says free on it

says working. But I mean, nobody's really using these devices anymore. It's like the idea of a thirty two inch television, Like that's really tiny nowadays. But if you're in a thirty two inch television and it's a CRT, you're talking about a good one hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds of television. So it wasn't like, hey, you wanted this TV upstairs, It's like, what is it? It's a thirty two in CRT. No, that is noting downstairs. Yeah

that's gonna be the basement TV. Yeah that yeah, yeah, No, I I have some sitting in storage that I just never got rid of. I need to find a an electronics recycling program and put them through that way, because like a lot of electronics, CRT s can have some some materials in them that are toxic, and so you don't want to just throw it out if you can avoid it. Um, it's better to find a way of of taking that to a recycling area where they can they can strip it of anything that's useful and dispose

of the toxic stuff in a responsible manner. But yeah, I was happy to get away from the CRT technology. It's just it's so bulky, it's inefficient to it. It uses up more electricity than other types of displays, so uh, you you can only get to a certain size before it just got too heavy to be practical and it was an electricity hog. So yeah, I was glad to see this on the list. I definitely agree that it's obsolete.

I've seen, you know, some CRT s still being used in places, but usually it's because it's part of a legacy system. Once again, like I've seen c rt s in some um air traffic control towers, but these are usually older air traffic control towers that have it upgraded their systems yet, and they're relying on eighty pound CRT s. And I know this because I had to move them once upon a time. The syrtes were fascinating subject for me in school. They were in a physics textbook. They

explained how how things worked when it comes to this. Uh. They mentioned the electronic gun that was in the back shooting. Basically, he's drawing the picture in line by line. It's happening so quickly, and it was it was drawing the screen like like the first line and the third line and the fifth and then it would fill in the even numbers. And that's why you have something called interlacing. So it's just interesting to see that this stuff actually does permeate

and cause issues like even today with some DVDs. If you see interlacing, it's based on this idea of how these televisions were drawing the screen for you. It's the picture for you, which I was. I was fascinating because whoever thought this is the way we're gonna show a moving image is let's just fire a gun really fast, back and forth. Pretty freaking interesting. But yeah, the c RT they fully for my back and yours. Uh is no longer a modern day issue, except when you move

eighty pound ones like you do. Yeah, that was not a fun job. I'm glad I don't have that job anymore. So we've got lots more to get through. But what I'm thinking, I AS, if you're amenable to it, is wrapping up this episode and then maybe chatting on a second one about the remaining ones. And uh, I just have a discussion about any kinds of technology that we think are obsolete that should have made the list but didn't.

That would be excellent. I'd love that all right. Well, for our listeners who might not be familiar with your work or where to find you, what would be the best way to track down I as actor, you know, in a totally friendly kind of way, not a scary Liam Neeson kind of way. Right, So, if you want to be able to find me on the internet, the easiest way is to find me on Twitter. My husue name is i As I y A Z. I got it early, so I'm usually just i AS on the Internet.

If you want to find me, like at where I work, check see net dot com. I have penn some things every now and then I do some videos every now and then, uh so check me out and I usually mostly Twitter. I just if you want to find out what I'm doing, like second to second and find out what's irritating me today, Twitter is the way to go.

There you go. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook or Tumbler that's the third one, or handle it all three is tech Stuff H s W. And we will continue this obsolete discussion releases for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it Works dot Com