The other day I uploaded some old photos of FIRST to Facebook. One depicts a floppy being used. And then today I drove by a Hollywood Video store overgrown with weeds, with signs indicating that it was for lease.

This got me thinking about how many things I’ve used that are already obsolete, and how bizarre it is that kids in school now have no concept of some of these things.

• If we wanted to move documents between computers, we had to use floppies, which held 1.44MB, were unbearably slow to use, and were ridiculously error-prone.
• The only way to connect to the Internet was by dialing into an ISP over a telephone line. Modems were “56K” but 33.6 kbps was the realistic maximum I ever got — that’s about 4KB/sec. Since it was a phone line, you couldn’t stay online for too long or you’d miss incoming calls.
• Email was really only over POP, which required that you download each message in full. Downloading the message removed it from the server. Periodically someone would send you a big attachment and it would require that you sit around forever and wait for it download at 4KB/sec.
• Cell phones did not exist. We had landline telephones, and that was it. Some people had cordless phones in their house.
• There was no wireless access. You had to plug your computer into a wired network in your house if you had one. You had 10 Mbps drops with goofy BNC connectors, and used hubs, which would just blast the signal out all ports, so two people transferring a lot of data would take the whole network down. Laptops were good for word-processing on the couch or something.
• We ran Windows NT 4 as a desktop because it was so much more stable than Windows 95 — it only crashed a few times a week, as opposed to every few hours. We could have bought a Mac, but they were even worse. Linux was incredibly immature and would have taken hours to compile a kernel, and we’d be lucky if graphics worked. So NT was really the best OS out there, unless you wanted to play games, when you’d have to reboot into Windows 95, where you’d exit to DOS to play the games.
• TV was a terribly crappy signal and it was hard to make out any details, but none of us knew it because HD video hadn’t been conceived.
• Music came on cassettes. There were no CDs, and there certainly wasn’t iTunes. (And there was no such thing as peer-to-peer sharing of songs, because if you copied a song to your computer off of a cassette, it’d probably have been a WAV file and taken hours to transfer.) Over time they’d degrade and start to sound worn, and for some reason all the tape inside always came out like spaghetti, forming a giant tangled mess, forcing you to just throw the thing out and buy a new one.
• Movies came on VHS tapes, which were huge cassettes. They had all the same problems.
• There were stores, which were quite popular, that just rented VHS tapes so you could watch movies at home.
• If you wanted to listen to music on the go, you could get a Walkman, which was a cassette player with an AM/FM radio. Most people kept a bunch of cassettes in their car.
• There were payphones outside of stores so you could make phone calls if you were out and about.
• GPS was meant for the military and the accurate signal was encrypted. There was a signal accurate to a few hundred feet (look up “Selective Availability”) that civilians could use with store-bought GPSs, but between Selective Availability and the fact that there was no way to store much map data on a portable device, they had no navigation capabilities, other than on boats and airplanes.

Here are some things that we still use, but that I’m pretty sure, in a decade’s time, will have moved up to the above list:

• Computers used to store files on hard drives, which had metal platters inside, spinning really fast. An arm would store and read data on the platters. People wanting better performance would get drives that spun faster. There was a big problem with “seek time,” where it took a noticeable amount of time for the head to find the right point on the right platter. You needed to use a “defragger” to make sure your files were stored contiguously; otherwise the seek time would be multiplied many times and transfers would slow to a crawl. And moving the disk while it was running made a “head crash” very likely — the head make contact with the platters and leave a big scratch, destroying it in a split-second.
• People used to have “newspapers” delivered to their homes. (It saddens me to think that this will make the list.) Instead of looking online, people would have a printed copy of the day’s news delivered to their home every morning.
• People used to have “landline” phones, which were run to their homes over copper wiring.
• People used to have “answering machines,” which were like a voicemail machine hosted client-side.
• Radios used to be unencrypted, so you could listen to the police and fire departments with a receiver called a “scanner.”
• TV and broadcast radio used to be unencrypted, so you could record a show without DRM and use it as you liked.
• Our cars used to run on gasoline, which they’d spray in a fine mist into an engine to explode, which is how cars ran. You’d have to fill your car up every week or so, and it cost as much as dinner for your whole family at a restaurant. All of that money went overseas to a giant cartel that people suspected was complicit in financing terrorism.
• Teachers used “overhead projectors,” which would run light through a “transparency” (like a piece of paper, but with clear plastic instead of opaque paper) to illustrate things to their students, instead of running their computer into a projector.
• You used to be able to call a company and have a human pick up the phone.

What’s especially interesting to me is that this the technology that I remember using. This isn’t the stuff that my parents might have used, like typewriters, VT100s, record players, and black-and-white TVs. Much of this is stuff that we still have kicking around in our house.

What technologies am I overlooking?