'Obsolete' technology that you remember using.

[Zaksav91]

Gah I think it would have to be the floppy disc as well as the VHS tapes. My room is still filled with a plethora of VHS tapes from some of my old recorded shows. Also the Gameboy Color, I still consider that my favorite handheld console, I have so many memories with it. But those floppy discs are my most hated, they broke all the time!

 

[Lovelocke]

Pay Phones. Dial-Up Modems for America Online... or better, for local BBSes. Door Games. Analog Video. Stand-Up Arcade Cabinets. Drive In Theaters. Plastic and Cardboard Milk Containers (Search: Tetra Pak)

 

[geon106]

I remember VHS, VCR, Cassettes, Windows 95, Vista, the original Gameboy, the NES, Floppy Disks, whatever instruments we use in any labs I've taken at college, the PS1, a TV with a dial, an old radio, and a push lawn mower.

...What the fuck, I'm not even 2 decades old here and I realize my childhood was shitty in terms of technology compared to today as well as a few things I'm forced to used now

Isn't VHS and VCR kinda the same thing?

I remember:

VHS, I remember them so much. And how confused and kinda weirded out I was when I was 5 and i'd eject a video to be covered in tape as our player was broke(Someone put a biscuit in it.... not me... honest)

Floppy Disk, hmm, installing Office 98 from its 30 odd disks to get to disk 28 and an error to occour, then to start over again

Amiga, my first computer was an Amiga A500 when I was 4. I loved it so much. I wish they were still made

Windows 95, my first experience with PC's was when Windows 95 was new out, it was quite amazing

IPX networking over 10BASE2, ah the joys of spending an hour getting 2 computers to network only to find out that the coaxial network cable has come lose somewhere along the connection

Dial-up internet. I miss hearing my external Motorola 56k modem dialling out. Although our first connection to the internet was an internal 33k modem dialling out to Compuserve at 25p a minute. Trying to play Quake online was pretty hard on larger matches. It was in 2002 when I got broadband at a whopping 512kbps, I look at my 50mbps fibre-optic connection now and it amazes me how far the technology has come

Dot-Matrix printers, never owned one.. i don't think we ever owned one? We had a Canon Bubblejet with our Amiga but i think thats Inkjet based. But i loved the noise of dot-matrix

I remember when it was MSN not WLM

I remember when WAP came out back in the late 90's. Was expensive, slow and primitive. My Sagem MY3020 was one of the earlier WAP enabled phones and my god I hardly ever used WAP, £10 credit gone after an hour or so. Also Polyphonic ringtones, when the first coloured screens came out. The launch of 3G in the UK on the 3/3/03 with video calling which was so expensive and choppy

BBC Micro computers, used on in Primary School and loved it

ZX Spectrum, we had one when i was young but sadly, it broke when i was about 4 so can't really remember it well but can recal some good games on it

I'm 21 and the world I grew up with has evolved. Both for the better and worse. someone said "i'm still using Windows ME and XP" That's hardly ancient. I have a computer running XP for backwards compatibility and at my work we use XP for obvious reasons

 

[Vanguard_Ex]

a computer with windows 98. Good times, when the best game out there was doom 2. Ah good stuff.

98? You young whippersnappers don't know what obsolete technology is! Back in my day, we had 95, and we were lucky if we could get any game more complicated than solitaire! (Actually, there was Chip's challenge, which was awesome!)

What else? The original game boy, the sega game gear (got it for 50p in a car boot sale), VHS tapes (which I still use, if only to watch Star Wars), 3 1/2 inch floppy disks....

How, at 20 years old, has so much technology from my childhood become so horrendously dated?

Scary isn't it. Just think what our generation will be like when we're elderly. Goodbye current stereotype.

 

[Samwise137]

Oh yeah, VHS tapes... man, I haven't watched one of those in ages. I used to have a massive stash of videos before DVDs became really cheap.

Hell, I STILL use VHS tapes. My parents are too cheap to buy a DVR so if I want to watch last night's rerun of Iron Chef (the original from Japan), I have to tape it! Oh and don't buy CD's. Vinyl FTW! I also remember playing Batman on my Dad's Commodore 64 and my GameBoy Original still works great.

 

[Mortons4ck]

The Rewinder. It was a nifty little device that would rewind your VHS tapes super fast (well faster than the VCR at least).

 

[Not-here-anymore]

Mostly snipped

Also there were plenty of quite complex games readily available back in the 95 era, though they probably weren't designed to run inside of Windows and getting them to run at all was always a challenge what with the aforementioned DMA and IRQ issues coupled with direct hardware addressing - the advent of a widely adopted hardware abstraction layer was seriously the biggest single advancement to PC gaming that nobody ever really thinks about these days.

I do seem to remember having to make the computer run in DOS mode for a lot of games. You basically booted the game, rather than the OS, right?

 

[geon106]

- VHS (Now DvD)
- Walkman (Now Apple Ipod)
- Recordplayer (Now computer with Winamp)
- Horse and Cart (Now car)
- Book (Now E-reader)
- Candle (Now Phillips light bulb)
- Bow and arrow (Now Kalashnikov)
- Fire (Now microwave)

Times have gone fast. . .

VHS went DVD
DVD replaced by Blu-ray
Walkman replaced by iPod and Zen and Zune(iPod wasn't the first MP3 player)
Record Player, replaced by CD player replaced by MP3 Player, Media Centres etc
Horse and cart, replaced by Petrol car being replaced by Hybrids which may go fully Electric one day
Book went E-Reader
Candle went Lightbulb went LED(well, some lights are now LEDs)

lol just thought i'd go the extra bit with your post

 

[ZephrC]

Heh, I remember upgrading my computer from DOS 5 to DOS 6.22 in high school. I had a lot of fun connecting my 2400 bps modem to the local college's BBS.

However, the worst is probably from when I was a little kid. We had an Apple II+, and I was always soooo frustrated by it, because the next model up was the Apple IIe, which was almost exactly the same, but Apple donated thousands of IIe computers to schools in the 80s, so all the programs out there were for them, not my Apple II+. It wouldn't have been so bad, but they were really so similar that I could get some programs to work on my computer, but they always had problems, because my computer only had 48kB of RAM, and the Apple IIe had 64kB.

Oh yeah, I also actually remember having to get up to change channels. On a TV with two channel dials, one with 2-13 and the other with 14 through... I dunno, somewhere around thirty, I think. You had to set the top dial to channel 3 to get the bottom one to work. Fun times.

 

[megs1120]

Mostly snipped

Also there were plenty of quite complex games readily available back in the 95 era, though they probably weren't designed to run inside of Windows and getting them to run at all was always a challenge what with the aforementioned DMA and IRQ issues coupled with direct hardware addressing - the advent of a widely adopted hardware abstraction layer was seriously the biggest single advancement to PC gaming that nobody ever really thinks about these days.

I do seem to remember having to make the computer run in DOS mode for a lot of games. You basically booted the game, rather than the OS, right?

Not quite, unless you had a specific boot disk. Simply put, OSes like MS-DOS Shell, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, etc. up until the release of Windows 2000/Me were built on top of MS-DOS.

DOS would boot up and throw up a picture of the Windows logo to hide the fact that it had finished booting up DOS and started running Windows. If you quit Windows, you'd go back to DOS. Back before Windows, DOS would boot up and that was all you got, a command-line interface, where you do everything by typing rather than clicking.

 

[geon106]

Horse and cart, replaced by Petrol car being replaced by Hybrids which may go fully Electric one day

Hybrid cars aren't going to take over any time soon. They're purely a stop-gap, and not a very good one at that.

No they wouldn't take over, mostly because of their cost. By the time they became mainstream, fully electric cars will probs be mainstream. But they are still an advancement and there is a lot of investment being made on Hybrid and Electic cars

 

[TheColdHeart]

I remember at school having those dot-matrix printers with the paper with the holes in the edges where it was fed through the printer. I also remember it making a shit load of noise and it shaking the table it was on.

Oh and VHS, can't forget the heartbreak when a cheap player would chew up my beloved tape when rewinding as I watched in horror or tried eject it as mangled tape piled out the front.

 

[ZephrC]

Mostly cassette tapes.

You know what's so funny about tapes? You could only record/copy/"download" stuff IN REAL TIME. Like, you want a 5 minute song, it takes 5 minutes to copy. Totally ridiculous by today standards. Anyone thought of that?

Don't you remember high speed dubbing? It would play the music extra fast while winding the tape that was recording at the same increased speed. It was fun to listen to your tapes that way.

 

[missedstations]

OH MAN. I used to have a walkman! I remember when tapes got tangled up, and had to wind the whole thing back in by hand...

 

[Danzaivar]

VHS, Cassette Walkmans, CD Walkmans, Analogue radio, CRT Televisions, CRT Monitors, CD drives, Monochrome display phones, Monophonic ringtones, Polyphonic ringtones, Gameboy, Gameboy Pocket, Gameboy Colour, Gameboy Advance, NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, PSX, PS1, PS2, PS2 slim, Xbox, Master System, Megadrive, Saturn, Dreamcast, Scart cables, Aerial console cables, Polaroid cameras, blah blah blah

 

[Slaanax]

5 inch floppy disks, I remember recording music off of MTV with a Cassette player, hell we even had records at my house when I was a kid. 56k Internet connection was a big deal...

 

[Troten]

VHS, vinyl records, cassette tapes, arcades and I don't know what else is considered obsolete these days. I still love my records. I was born in the 80's and we were always a very tech-oriented home