You’re in class, maybe 4th grade, maybe high school—it doesn't matter...what matters is what you see in front of you. The teacher starts wheeling out this large, dusty (even then) projector. They plug it in and turn it on, and you are reminded of detention just yesterday, in this class, and also reminded you that you hadn't erased the profanity and drawing to go along with it, that you had so tastefully drawn on the projector's screen. Everyone sees "Mr. B. sucks ass!" again, complete with a picture. Mr. B was not a fan, and once again, you were given detention and forced to clean the projector's entire three-mile-long flimsy film that was used to write on.
Folks in school now, and kids who started school any time after 2010, will never know what this contraption was or what a pain in the ass it was to see anything on it, "Is it clear now? How about now? Let me change the focus this way…" Those things were awful and sometimes prone to fires or at least overheating. Now schools use better technology, like smart boards. And no fires have been started with those (that I've heard?). Anyways, this was a simple example of a now obsolete piece of technology that had been used for so long but has, thankfully, found its end of life, or at least is used much less frequently.
There are many others out there, and I thought you all might find this a fun trip down nostalgia lane or learn something about a time before yours and the interesting contraptions that people used back then. Things that no longer have much use with the general public due to updates in technology or simply changes in social standards of morality. Sit back and enjoy.
Not a completely obsolete piece of technology. In fact, I still own a large CD collection I refuse to let go of, even though half of them are so scratched that making any attempt to listen to it will cause a level of distress that physically draws my head to the wall and bangs my forehead. CDs used to cost upwards of 30 dollars if they were a double-header and came packaged in plastic that was so hard to remove that you would almost give up and try to break open the entire case or chip your teeth trying to take it off. The best CDs were those that had a nifty pamphlet that would tell you the words to the songs you were listening to because, for some reason, our ears didn't work correctly, and we needed to see the words as well as listen to the song so that we could go, "Ohhh, it's 'all my instincts' and not 'oh my end stinks.'" CDs grew into MP3s, which do not come with pamphlets of lyrics and force you to have to know all the words to the song or look it up on the internet.
Did your house have a Rolodex or handwritten phone book that your mom usually kept up that had all of the numbers you could ever need in it? Complete with little notes like, "Don't call after 8 p.m.," or "Bill's doctor," "Grandma's number," and address, which were crossed out and changed so many times that you needed to start putting grandma on the last 'Notes' page of the book. Ours did, and I can only imagine that most houses also did, or at least something similar written on sticky notes all over the place near the home phone. How else were you supposed to remember anyone's phone number? That's actually a funny thing, too. You used to remember phone numbers. Do you know why? Because the next generation did not want the responsibility of having to handwrite all of their friends' phone numbers in a book. No one wants to inherit that. The family phone book has since been entirely replaced by cell phones. Your grandma's number and address (if you put that in there, too) are now neatly typed once into your phone. Unless you're like me, and forget you had them in there, so you have five grandmas in there...and the most recently updated one has "(NEW)" at the end of their name.
Dial-up is still a thing out in the sticks. Why? Because 1% of America is completely forgotten about by communication technology for some reason. Dial-up internet was the absolute worst. You had to unplug the home phone, first making sure to check and make sure no one was using it. You'd get screamed at if they were; the same goes for someone online. It was a constant back-and-forth tug of war. And whoever won access—either to the phone or the internet—was considered king or queen of the house for the duration they were using it. Anyway, you would unplug the phone, plug in the internet cord (super technical here), and hear your computer make a lot of weird noises that made you wonder if something was breaking. You could always tell if you were going to have a good connection or not based on the noises made and the time it took to connect. 14 Kbps a second was lightning speed. Yet, you would still have to wait 5 minutes for a webpage to load if there was any animation on it. That, coupled with "bad connections," made the internet a slog. A damn slog. So, there wasn't really much use for it with us kids back in the day. I'd rather bang my head on the wall trying to get my CD not to skip. But being on the net made you king or queen, so I'd sit my ass down and stay on there as long as I could prove a point and put ridiculous themes on the family computer that would slow it down to a snail's pace.
Your grandma probably still owns The Clapper device in one of her rooms. This nifty invention made it so that turning off a light was as simple as “1, 2, 3, clap-clap". You had to make sure to clap fairly loudly; otherwise, the light would continue shining. Who doesn't want to surprise their housemates by clapping their lights off in the middle of the night? The Clapper has since been replaced with smart technology, like smart lights. So, no need to clap your way to a sound sleep any longer.
A few notable mentions I did not place on this small list; please queue The Battle Hymn of the Republic for the following:
Betamax, floppy disks, portable DVD players, portable TVs, the boombox, corded phones, phone booths, CRT TVs, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Walkmans/Discmans/minidisc players, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video (be kind-rewind, folks), dumb phones.
This is only a sampling of now obsolete pieces of technology. There are so many other useless items from back in the day that now only exist in the recesses of your mind when you walk into a school, and déjà vu hits. Eraser pen, anyone?
Hannah One Cup is currently figuring out a way to downgrade back to a Razr phone she found on eBay while whipping out her box of VHS tapes and finding a working VCR at Goodwill. She likes to stay in the air-conditioned, dark room in her house, smelling her old Crayola smelly markers and thinking of simpler times while listening to Chumbuwamba’s only good song.
