{"id":9611,"date":"2019-05-15T12:50:59","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T16:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=9611"},"modified":"2019-05-15T12:50:59","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T16:50:59","slug":"obsolete-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=9611","title":{"rendered":"Obsolete tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technology changes. Things that were once revolutionary and new eventually become obsolete.<\/p>\n

Sometimes with surprising rapidity.<\/p>\n

Which is how I ended up, years ago, buying things that were ultimately not only never used, but were never even taken out of shrink wrap.<\/p>\n

Take this 3-pack of high quality SONY 90-minute audio cassettes. When I bought them, I had little doubt that they would be used, and soon, and that future purchases would follow. Never happened.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Or how about this answering machine tape? Back then, I needed them. After all, you never want to be without a spare tape for your answering machine. Except… Well, never mind.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Perhaps a little more surprising is this box of blank DVDs. I have several more boxes of different types, but they have been opened and at least a few disks were put to use. But this box? Completely unused, in the original shrink wrap. Not too long ago, burning a CD or a DVD was something I did almost daily. But when I built new computers a couple of years ago, I no longer even bothered putting DVD drives in them. I have an external USB drive that works fine for software (mostly operating system) installations. And I can still use it, e.g., to rip a CD. But burning one? What for? My USB dongle on my key chain has many times the capacity of a DVD.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I still have never-used floppy disks, too, but not in unopened, shrink-wrapped packages.<\/p>\n

Looking around, I am trying to guess what technology will be next, going the way of the dodo. Hard drives, perhaps? Sure they’re being replaced by SSDs but they still offer a price advantage and better reliability as long-term storage. Desktop computers? Unlikely, for content creators or developers like myself. Or maybe things are settling down a bit? I don’t know.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, I also have a record player and a VCR next to my desk. The VCR was a super-expensive, top-of-the-line VCR that can handle all TV standards, which is why I bought it. I used it to digitize many tapes, including PAL\/SECAM tapes from Europe. I have not used that VCR in many years; not even sure it still works. Its display does show the time, but it is very faint. The record player, however, is relatively new. Vinyl has made a comeback of sorts, so record players are being made again. I didn’t buy into the new (retro?) vinyl craze, but we did have a few older records that we liked very much, and which were not readily available on CD, so the player was needed to digitize them as well.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technology changes. Things that were once revolutionary and new eventually become obsolete. Sometimes with surprising rapidity. Which is how I ended up, years ago, buying things that were ultimately not only never used, but were never even taken out of shrink wrap. Take this 3-pack of high quality SONY 90-minute audio cassettes. When I bought […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,35,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-personal","category-technology","category-25-id","category-35-id","category-12-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9611"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9617,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9611\/revisions\/9617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}