Old tech you just DO NOT miss.

[CrystalShadow]

Spoiler: lengthy post

I'm honestly surprised anyone on this forum is old enough to remember any of those things. Being born in the 80s I was generally at the forefront of new technology,

You'd be surprised at the age range around here. Being born in the 80's hardly makes you among the oldest people on the site...

Personally, I don't miss tape drives. They were awful. I don't mean audio tapes, though you used those, I mean the tape drives for home computers.

They were slow, finicky, and you could wait half an hour just to find your program hadn't even loaded!

VHS machines were a nightmare to program, though they were OK towards thecend of their life (I still own one made in about 1998, and it's much easier to use than older ones were)

I do miss the ability to rewind tapes a tiny bit though. Going back like 5-10 seconds has become strangly difficult with DVD, but especially video files and online streaming video...
You gain a lot, yet a handful of things get harder.

I absolutely don't miss old printers. Same tech as new ones, much less reliable.

Command line interfaces, such as dos. Don't miss those, though they are not exactly gone completely, I don't miss needing to use them for very basic tasks constantly. (though I guess that does explain why I dislike using linux)

I don't miss records. I know some people get all nostalgic about the 'sound' of them, but they are bulky, fragile, and a complete pain to play. (especially if you feel like playing a specific song)

Library card catalogs. I haven't used them that much, they were a tiny bit before my time, but they were so irritating when I did...

CRT displays... I'm not sure of. They are bulky, and absurdly heavy, but they still seem to have some image quality features that are better than flatscreens, so...

Anyway, I could keep digging for more stuff, but I'm bored now. XD

CLI is still used everywhere except for home users. I spend most of my work day in CLI as a network engineer. GUI's are unpredictable and when you're working on a box that hosts something 700,000 commercial and home users you can't trust GUI's to do exactly what you want them to and end up crashing the amazon storefront or something.

Perhaps... But I can't stand it. You need to know a bunch of often cryptic commands by heart (or have extensive documentation to hand)
And you'd better hope your commands have no unfortunate typos in them. (especially on unix systems. ugh. Ever seen the weird things you can do with a unix prompt? Some of those are really scary, and can happen due to seemingly trivial typos)

Still... I guess it sticks around for a reason...

Yeah when it comes to ancient technology CRT's are it. I and some friends owned some of the last High tech CRTs. Big 24"'s used at printing and news offices that eventually made their way to ebay for pennies. The problem was the final CRT supported resolution was something like 1600x1200. CRTs are dust in the wind now. Too expensive and bulky to continue even for cult collectors and artists. Just shipping a 24" CRT costs like $80 minimum.

I just fucking hate printers in general. Once ink Printers came about every goddamn printer on the market never lasts a year and toner carts are ridiculously expensive.

CRT'S Yeah... I used a pair of 19 inch ones. They were so absurdly heavy... XD
Like 25 kilos each. And they aren't even that big...

 

[FPLOON]

Jeez... I would be better off listing the tech that I miss instead, but given how I'm assuming most of it's fulled by hidden nostalgia, I'll just say that I don't miss the walkman... which is weird considering all the faults of the walkman today are due to fact that they only played cassettes... or, at least, the one I used when I was 4 played... (Mmmmmm... Disney's Hercules and Tupac on cassette...)

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Dial-up internet and floppy disks. Man, those floppy disks. Not terribly reliable. I couldn't even trust them with a simple .doc. I might as well have been writing on sand.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

I'll have to concur with CD players and handhelds that kept sucking up innumerable amounts of batteries.

So grateful that I can have something that can hold many times the amount of music and also fit in my pocket. And also not to have to have a backup supply of batteries for all of my handhelds.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Yeah when it comes to ancient technology CRT's are it.

Seconded. I don't at all miss those bulky, heavy, eye-strain-inducing things. Though it was funny that you could brag to the tech-unsavvy that you had a particle accelerator on your desk!

I'm not old enough to have used them, but I always loved the stories from profs and old programmers about their punch cards stacks getting blown all over the street by a gust of wind.

Fun fact: The term "bug" in relation to programming actually came about due to a moth getting into a punch-card reader and causing problems when it inevitably got squished.

EDIT: Oh, let me add one that hasn't been mentioned yet: Nickel-cadmium rechargable batteries. I mean, it was nice to try to protect the environment from regular disposable batteries... but NiCd took forever to recharge, sometimes got very hot during the charging process, and had a bad tendency to "remember" being only partially-charged and only ever accepting a charge up to that amount again. Nickel-metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries are just generally better.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Batteries, and meaning the non-rechargeable A/AA/AAA ones. I was rather surprised at the realization I had a couple years back how little use I suddenly had for them anymore. Now I only use them for one purpose, that being my alarm clock. Everything else has become either rechargeable (handheld consoles), has a cord attached to it (my mouse being one) or has been integrated into other devices (MP3 players).

Aside from that I'm still young enough to not really have seen that much technology become obsolete and remember it.

What I miss even less are those phones that were so Liliputian that many grown men couldn't press individual buttons. I'm glad we got rid of those.

I remember those as well. About around 2000 to 2003 or 2004 there was that weird period where cellphones just got smaller and smaller, like the companies were trying to make them reach atomic level or something.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

VCR's weren't that bad. What I really hated though was growing up in the transitional phase between magnetic tape and digital recording for cameras. I learned over the course of 3 years in High School information on capturing video from tape that has become truly obsolete as most small unit companies that I've worked for recently are all digital anyway. 720P HD digital is the oldest acceptable format I've seen floating around these days. Tape recording is pretty much dead for cameras in my experience but I never had the chance to learn how to handle physical film. Bleh. Things are better now for me anyway.

[sup][sup]Also there were a ton of glitches around it all if I'm remembering correctly.[/sup][/sup]

 

[EvilRoy]

Dial-up internet and floppy disks. Man, those floppy disks. Not terribly reliable. I couldn't even trust them with a simple .doc. I might as well have been writing on sand.

I was thinking the same about floppy disks myself. The old-old ones that flopped all over seemed to become unusable at the drop of a hat, but even the smaller stiffer ones were a pain. I can vividly remember having to split up simple text documents or whatever I was using for spreadsheets back then because there was this horrible period where storage technology was way the shit behind the growth of filesizes. But if you worked for a company, you still had to get those files around somehow, so we would have boxes of meticulously organized, numbered floppies, waiting to be misplaced or dropped.

Handheld cd players are my other don't-miss-it-at-all. I hated that you couldn't skip tracks on cassette walkmen, but I hated more that cd players couldn't be moved too much without either scratching up the cd, constantly skipping, or (later when the technology to read ahead on the disk to avoid skips) eating batteries at a ridiculous rate.

 

[FalloutJack]

I dunno... I'm an old-schooler. There may not be much for me to miss. I won't miss dial-up connections either, though. Non-electric razors with shaving cream or gel can go to hell, though. If it isn't furiously zipping off beard when I decide to cut it off, I don't wanna hear about it.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

I do not miss VHS, Parallel port printers/scanners or Floppy Disks. You all died the deaths you deserved and I would sooner resurrect Hitler himself than any of them.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I dunno... I'm an old-schooler. There may not be much for me to miss. I won't miss dial-up connections either, though. Non-electric razors with shaving cream or gel can go to hell, though. If it isn't furiously zipping off beard when I decide to cut it off, I don't wanna hear about it.

Eh, not with you on this one. Electric razors are great in that they give you a basic shave quickly and without hassle, but manual razors with actual razor blades give you a much closer shave, and straight razors even more so.

I love my electric razor because of how convenient it is, but whenever I have a special occasion I always go old school with blades and shaving cream because it just gives you a better shave.

 

[FalloutJack]

I dunno... I'm an old-schooler. There may not be much for me to miss. I won't miss dial-up connections either, though. Non-electric razors with shaving cream or gel can go to hell, though. If it isn't furiously zipping off beard when I decide to cut it off, I don't wanna hear about it.

Eh, not with you on this one. Electric razors are great in that they give you a basic shave quickly and without hassle, but manual razors with actual razor blades give you a much closer shave, and straight razors even more so.

I love my electric razor because of how convenient it is, but whenever I have a special occasion I always go old school with blades and shaving cream because it just gives you a better shave.

I'm not interested in being a baby's butt. I'm interested in being shaven when I want my beard off, bearded when I want to be bearded, and I don't like shaving cream or gel, period. That's just how it is.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

I dunno... I'm an old-schooler. There may not be much for me to miss. I won't miss dial-up connections either, though. Non-electric razors with shaving cream or gel can go to hell, though. If it isn't furiously zipping off beard when I decide to cut it off, I don't wanna hear about it.

Eh, not with you on this one. Electric razors are great in that they give you a basic shave quickly and without hassle, but manual razors with actual razor blades give you a much closer shave, and straight razors even more so.

I love my electric razor because of how convenient it is, but whenever I have a special occasion I always go old school with blades and shaving cream because it just gives you a better shave.

I'm too much of a wuss to do that, I feel my hands are not steady enough. However I am more than happy to get my local barber, who's been in the game for like 30 years, to do it for me. Man has hands a surgeon would envy.

 

[Pr0]

Tape drives.

Cathode Ray Tubes.

Watches.

 

[Zipa]

Wired Keyboard and mouse before they had the USB end to them, I am looking at you!!

This, however, just baffles me. The only difference I've noticed between USB and PS/2 cables is that you can tell at a glance (or by feeling) which side is up, and thus which way it's supposed to go in. Oh, and most operating systems are a lot more reluctant to read USB devices before the machine's finished booting up. What are you talking about?

You can't actually miss or not miss Ps/2 it's still standard on most motherboards and there's a large following still using and manufacturing it. Strictly for mouse and keyboard I agree PS/2 is still better for response time and yeah it's nearly impossible to not plug it in right first time unlike USB. Para I'm calling you out dog, did you actually use PS/2 what is wrong with it exactly?

PS/2 is considered a legacy port at this point, it is likely to disappear in the not too distant future.

Oh one thing I don't miss is dot matrix printers, fuck them and their temperamental bullshit.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Dial-up. Definitely dial-up. Even when there wasn't any broadband, me and my entire family STILL hated how slow it was. Quite frankly, I think that crap should be absolutely free now. My dad also swears he's never ever going back to dial-up. Ever.

And you'd better hope your commands have no unfortunate typos in them. (especially on unix systems. ugh. Ever seen the weird things you can do with a unix prompt? Some of those are really scary, and can happen due to seemingly trivial typos)

Well, even a halfway modern Linux CLI nowadays will prevent you from doing anything bad to your system accidentally unless you're doing your usual day-to-day activities in the all-powerful root account, in which case, WHAT ARE YOU DOING FIDDLING AROUND IN ROOT? Out, out, out!

 

[Creator002]

As mentioned VHS and Dial-Up Internet. Also, old computers. I had a 386[footnote]I'm positive it was a "Something" 386. It had a 500MB HDD and 32kB of RAM. So great compared to my now computer with a 128GB SSD, 2TB HDD and 16GB of RAM.[/footnote] with Windows 98 Plus installed well into last decade until my dad decided to get a Pentium III. We still had dial-up until 2008/2009.

 

[laggyteabag]

Mice without scroll wheels. How did people even function efficiently on a computer without scroll wheels?

Dial up internet. Nothing kills an online gaming session like "I need to use the internet, can you come off your game?". Many games of Halo were missed.

 

[Parasondox]

The bulky huge TV and computer monitors. If you moved homes a lot, you would understand they were heavy as hell, overheats like a mad man. And that squeaky high pitch noise some models had when it was on. THAT DAMN NOISE!! Remember you had to hit some just to get the picture to stop rolling/fuzzing? My old Grundig had those problems. Yeah, GRUNDIG TVs.

 

[Not Lord Atkin]

Spoiler: these monstrosities

I remember dragging one around with me when I was a kid. It ate 4 AA batteries within a couple hours, I had to drag around a folder with all my CDs if I didn't want to keep listening to the same album over and over and when the clasp holding the top cover closed inevitably broke, I had to use a piece of selitape.

The cassette players I used before had most of these issues (in fact I would often have to take the cassette out and rewind it manually just to save battery - but at least you could do that) but at the very least they weren't quite as huge.