Giving Thanks to Obsolete Tech

Special guest Iyaz Akhtar from CNet rejoins the show to continue our conversation about tech that is no longer relevant.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in Touch with Technology was tex Stuff from dot com.
Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and I as actar, is joining us once again so
that we can continue our discussion about obsolete technology. The
list of obsolete tech that showed up on an article

(00:27):
that was that Web Designer depot. This was a listener request.
I asked, how are you doing? I'm doing very well.
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

(00:50):
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

(01:12):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:55):
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

(02:17):
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

(02:39):
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

(03:02):
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

(03:23):
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.

(03:47):
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

(04:09):
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,

(04:31):
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

(04:53):
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

(05:14):
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

(05:34):
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

(05:56):
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

(06:17):
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

(06:40):
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

(07:00):
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

(07:25):
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

(07:46):
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

(08:07):
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

(08:29):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:38):
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

(10:00):
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

(10:23):
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

(10:43):
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

(11:03):
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,

(11:26):
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,

(11:48):
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

(12:09):
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

(12:32):
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

(12:53):
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

(13:15):
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,

(13:38):
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,

(13:59):
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

(14:21):
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

(14:43):
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,

(15:06):
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

(15:27):
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

(15:49):
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.

(16:11):
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

(16:33):
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

(16:55):
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,

(17:15):
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

(17:36):
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

(18:00):
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

(18:22):
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

(18:43):
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

(19:04):
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

(19:26):
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

(19:48):
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

(20:09):
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

(20:30):
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

(20:51):
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

(21:13):
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,

(21:35):
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

(21:56):
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

(22:17):
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

(22:38):
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

(22:58):
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.

(23:23):
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

(23:43):
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

(24:07):
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

(24:30):
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,

(24:52):
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

(25:15):
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

(25:36):
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

(25:57):
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.

(26:20):
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

(26:41):
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

(27:03):
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

(27:24):
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

(27:45):
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

(28:06):
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.

(28:27):
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.

(28:50):
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

(29:10):
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?

(29:34):
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

(29:57):
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.

(30:21):
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

(30:43):
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

(31:04):
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

(31:24):
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

(31:46):
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

(32:09):
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

(32:31):
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

(32:52):
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.

(33:12):
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

(33:33):
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,

(33:55):
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

(34:17):
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

(34:37):
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

(34:59):
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,

(35:21):
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,

(35:42):
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

(36:03):
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

(36:25):
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

(36:50):
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

(37:11):
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

(37:32):
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

(37:55):
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

(38:15):
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

(38:38):
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?

(38:58):
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

(39:19):
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

(39:43):
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.

(40:03):
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

(40:25):
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

(40:48):
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

(41:08):
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

(41:28):
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

(41:50):
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

(42:11):
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

(42:34):
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

(42:56):
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

(43:18):
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.

(43:41):
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

(44:04):
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.

(44:26):
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,

(44:47):
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

(45:08):
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

(45:28):
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

(45:49):
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

(46:11):
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

(46:32):
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

(46:54):
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.

(47:14):
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

(47:37):
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.

(47:59):
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

(48:20):
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

(48:42):
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

(49:02):
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

(49:24):
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,

(49:46):
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

(50:09):
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

(50:31):
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

(50:51):
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

(51:12):
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

(51:32):
I carry my little device, right Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well,
this was a great discussion about technology that doesn't matter anymore.
I'm glad that we could have this conversation. I S
For all of my fans out there who want to
follow the stuff you do, where do they find you?
I suggest Twitter dot com, slash I S that's I

(51:55):
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(52:16):
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thank you guys for listening. If you want to get
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(52:37):
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(53:01):
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