Good Riddance: Technology Items Nobody Misses

[Porthos]

https://www.neweggbusiness.com/smartbuyer/awesome/good-riddance-technology-items-nobody-misses/

 

[backwoodsman]

The writer looks like he's probably too young to appreciate the fact that everything he lists was a huge improvement over the alternatives available at the time.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

The writer looks like he's probably too young to appreciate the fact that everything he lists was a huge improvement over the alternatives available at the time.

I'm familiar with all but token ring from a support instance, but I'm too young to appreciate the improvement these items brought.

 

[nerd2u]

How did the floppy disk not make the list?

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[sapphirescales]

How did the floppy disk not make the list?

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

Because this is a list of products that were crap when they were invented. Floppy disks weren't unreliable pieces of garbage. They worked great at the time. This isn't a list of obsolete technology. It's a list of technology that everybody hated but tolerated because there was nothing better at the time. NOBODY liked lugging around a CRT monitor, or getting onto the internet with Dial-Up (the sound alone gave most people headaches). Unless you cleaned your desk meticulously, ball mice SUCKED. Even then you'd have to constantly take the ball out and clean it.

I would add CD's and DVD's to the list personally. They constantly got scratched, were a pain in the a$$ to burn, and modifying information on a CD-RW drive sucked balls. From a usability standpoint, VHS tapes and floppy disks were much better technologies. Who actually liked scene selection on DVD's or forced previews you couldn't skip? Those didn't exist with VHS. Modifying information on a floppy disk was easy as pie. You didn't have to re-master the entire disk.

If they just increased the resolution of VHS and increased the capacity of floppy disks (Iomega attempted this with the ZIP drive), the technology would have been superior to CD/DVD. But CD's and DVD's were CHEAP to produce. That's the ONLY reason why they won. Thankfully nowadays we have flash drives and streaming media, which are a TRUE upgrade to VHS tapes and floppy disks.

I hated CD's and DVD's from the moment they came out. I thought they were a really stupid technology, akin to removing the protective plastic around a floppy disk and just letting it get ruined. I knew that eventually a technology would come to replace them, and I incorrectly assumed that an SD card type of technology would replace DVD's. Unfortunately Blu-Ray's came out because they were cheaper than a high capacity flash drive or SD card.

Thankfully I never had to buy a Blu-Ray. I've actually never even watched a Blu-Ray before. I went straight from DVD's to pirated downloaded movies. Then I went from the downloaded movies to a mix of downloaded movies and streaming services. I still prefer to download my movies, though I also use PlayOn to record streaming from Netflix and other streaming services. You never know when those a$$holes are going to remove a movie/TV series because they won't pay the money to keep them.

 

[lan101]

Because this is a list of products that were crap when they were invented. Floppy disks weren't unreliable pieces of garbage. They worked great at the time. This isn't a list of obsolete technology. It's a list of technology that everybody hated but tolerated because there was nothing better at the time. NOBODY liked lugging around a CRT monitor, or getting onto the internet with Dial-Up (the sound alone gave most people headaches). Unless you cleaned your desk meticulously, ball mice SUCKED. Even then you'd have to constantly take the ball out and clean it.

I would add CD's and DVD's to the list personally. They constantly got scratched, were a pain in the a$$ to burn, and modifying information on a CD-RW drive sucked balls. From a usability standpoint, VHS tapes and floppy disks were much better technologies. Who actually liked scene selection on DVD's or forced previews you couldn't skip? Those didn't exist with VHS. Modifying information on a floppy disk was easy as pie. You didn't have to re-master the entire disk.

If they just increased the resolution of VHS and increased the capacity of floppy disks (Iomega attempted this with the ZIP drive), the technology would have been superior to CD/DVD. But CD's and DVD's were CHEAP to produce. That's the ONLY reason why they won. Thankfully nowadays we have flash drives and streaming media, which are a TRUE upgrade to VHS tapes and floppy disks.

I hated CD's and DVD's from the moment they came out. I thought they were a really stupid technology, akin to removing the protective plastic around a floppy disk and just letting it get ruined. I knew that eventually a technology would come to replace them, and I incorrectly assumed that an SD card type of technology would replace DVD's. Unfortunately Blu-Ray's came out because they were cheaper than a high capacity flash drive or SD card.

Thankfully I never had to buy a Blu-Ray. I've actually never even watched a Blu-Ray before. I went straight from DVD's to pirated downloaded movies. Then I went from the downloaded movies to a mix of downloaded movies and streaming services. I still prefer to download my movies, though I also use PlayOn to record streaming from Netflix and other streaming services. You never know when those a$$holes are going to remove a movie/TV series because they won't pay the money to keep them.

I remember in high school days I could make anywhere from 5-10 bucks a piece making people mixed cd's of their favorite songs they wanted.
Memorex cd's were more durable than most others and worked good most of the time lol.

I remember I bought a 100 pack of duraband cd-r's for like 30 bucks and they were complete garbage. Half of them would fail during a cd burning session and a bunch would skip. I ended up just throwing them out. I always used Memorex ones for my good paying customers though lol.

Ahhh the good ole days of a 4x speed cd burner.

 

[sapphirescales]

I remember in high school days I could make anywhere from 5-10 bucks a piece making people mixed cd's of their favorite songs they wanted.
Memorex cd's were more durable than most others and worked good most of the time lol.

I remember I bought a 100 pack of duraband cd-r's for like 30 bucks and they were complete garbage. Half of them would fail during a cd burning session and a bunch would skip. I ended up just throwing them out. I always used Memorex ones for my good paying customers though lol.

Ahhh the good ole days of a 4x speed cd burner.

LOL. When I was in high school I sold porn burned onto CD's and DVD's. $20 to $50 a pop. Kids didn't want to get caught downloading it, and downloading video was way too slow on Dial-Up. If it was on a CD, it was never stored on the computer and they could hide it easily. If they had a DVD player, I encoded the movies to play on standard DVD players and the pictures would work as a slideshow too.

I think I released about 50 or 60 "editions" of my porn CD's. I made an absolute fortune, close to $50,000 by the time I graduated. I also sold internal and external CD drives. Kids would bring their computers to school and pay me to install CD/DVD drives in them just so they could use the porn disks I made.

I also sold soda. Made about $400/month doing that. Small potatoes compared to my porn business, but much less risky. I also modified report cards and other stuff for students so they wouldn't get in trouble with their parents. LOL. Teachers at my school would keep track of who did their homework by stamping student's books. Then they'd grade them based on how many stamps they had at the end of the quarter/semester. I used a pirated version of Photoshop CS2 to cut out the stamp and I charged $1/day to kids that didn't want to do their homework and printed them out a new sheet with stamps on them. Good times.

When you're a poor kid, you have to hustle. That's how I made money back then. I helped my single mother afford a new car using this money, and I helped her with the down payment on a house. If she only knew the way I got the money. She thought it was all from selling pop. LOL. I'm not THAT good of a hustler, Mom! Yeah, fresh, cold soda for only $50 a bottle! Come and get it! LOL.

 

[lan101]

LOL. When I was in high school I sold porn burned onto CD's and DVD's. $20 to $50 a pop. Kids didn't want to get caught downloading it, and downloading video was way too slow on Dial-Up. If it was on a CD, it was never stored on the computer and they could hide it easily. If they had a DVD player, I encoded the movies to play on standard DVD players and the pictures would work as a slideshow too.

I think I released about 50 or 60 "editions" of my porn CD's. I made an absolute fortune, close to $50,000 by the time I graduated. I also sold internal and external CD drives. Kids would bring their computers to school and pay me to install CD/DVD drives in them just so they could use the porn disks I made.

I also sold soda. Made about $400/month doing that. Small potatoes compared to my porn business, but much less risky. I also modified report cards and other stuff for students so they wouldn't get in trouble with their parents. LOL. Teachers at my school would keep track of who did their homework by stamping student's books. Then they'd grade them based on how many stamps they had at the end of the quarter/semester. I used a pirated version of Photoshop CS2 to cut out the stamp and I charged $1/day to kids that didn't want to do their homework and printed them out a new sheet with stamps on them. Good times.

When you're a poor kid, you have to hustle. That's how I made money back then. I helped my single mother afford a new car using this money, and I helped her with the down payment on a house. If she only knew the way I got the money. She thought it was all from selling pop. LOL. I'm not THAT good of a hustler, Mom! Yeah, fresh, cold soda for only $50 a bottle! Come and get it! LOL.

I never even thought of trying to sell any porn in those days but never was asked to download and burn that to disc either lol. Those were some great margins of profit too you were making. The photoshop editing thing is brilliant too. I may have to start selling "soda" to supplement my income now lol. Yeah good days indeed.

 

[sapphirescales]

I never even thought of trying to sell any porn in those days but never was asked to download and burn that to disc either lol. Those were some great margins of profit too you were making. The photoshop editing thing is brilliant too. I may have to start selling "soda" to supplement my income now lol. Yeah good days indeed.

Yeah, no one wants to get in trouble about porn and such, so people don't talk about it in casual conversation. I sold them to the popular kids for cheap to get the word out. They blab and talk to everybody so within two weeks, pretty much everybody knew I was selling porn CD's (except the teachers of course!).

I almost got caught on several occasions, but I encrypted the data on the CD's so the few times they were confiscated there was no way to prove what was on them. I had a different password for each "edition" I released. Anyone that told on me for selling porn didn't know the password, and no one that had bought porn from me wanted to give up the password for fear of me getting caught and no longer releasing new editions.

I bought Mt. Dew, Coke, and Sprite for $0.50 from Walmart and sold it for $2. $1.50 profit per pop. I sold about 12 to 16 a day to get to the $400/month mark.

I must have modified 100 different report cards over the years. I charged $100 per report card. I had a portable USB scanner that I'd carry around with my laptop so I could scan stuff into it, edit it in Photoshop, then print it out on the school's printers. I also used the scanner to scan in anything else I wanted to modify, like the homework calendars that the teachers would stamp every day for having completed the homework. I'd charge $1 per stamped day.

I'd never do more than 1/2 of the calendar month though so the teachers wouldn't get suspicious. I also wouldn't change F's to A's on report cards, because that's suspicious too. At most I'd go up two letter grades. Most failing kids were happy to get those F's changed to D's. Some weren't smart enough to realize that if I changed them to A's when they've always gotten F's that it would be suspicious and their parents would call in.

I did get into the school's computer network and change some things, but I was too terrified of getting caught back then. Someone paid me to change all the screensavers on all the computers on the network. The screensaver was originally "XXXXXXX High School" and I changed it to "XXXXXXXX High School Sucks Balls." LOL. It took them all day to change it back. Total incompetence is the only way to describe the IT staff at my high school.

I also changed their website so that when you went to it, it played fart noises. LOL. It didn't take them long to change it back with that though. I never got caught, but it just wasn't worth the risk to me. I'm sure I would have been expelled had they found out it was me. LOL. I've never been more glad that I remain anonymous online. I'd hate for my teachers (some of whom I'm still in contact with to this day) to know I did these things. LOL.

EDIT: Oh, I'm just now thinking back to how LONG it took for Photoshop to come up on that old laptop of mine. It was a 233Mhz Pentium II with Windows XP and 256MB of RAM. It took several MINUTES to open Photoshop, and it was the portable "lite" edition! I'm sure the hard drive was failing, as it took about 10 minutes just for the thing to boot. I didn't know how to run a SMART test back then so I have no idea. All I know that even on a fresh install of Windows XP it ran like dog sh*t.

I was deep into Windows skin modding back then and I had all these types of themes I'd use to make it look all cool and stuff. Custom login/lock screen, custom shut down panel, custom start menu and taskbar, custom sounds, etc. I should have bought something better seeing how much money I was making, but I always put that money into my desktop instead. I had a b*tching desktop, but a crappy laptop. LOL. It was an original Micron laptop that came with Windows 98 originally.

It's so old, I can't even find a picture of it online. Sometimes when you started it, it made the WORST high-pitched squealing noise like a BIOS beep. But if you turned it off and then on again it worked fine. LOL. I had that sucker for so long. I finally upgraded to a Gateway Solo 2550 laptop with a 600Mhz Pentium III processor, which I bought from a kid at school for $50. This was in like 2006 mind you.

Then I splurged and got a Pentium 4 laptop in 2007 with a whopping 768MB of RAM! LOL. Got it at a thrift store for $25. A Toshiba Tecra...I don't know the model. Then in 2008 I upgraded to a Dell Inspiron 1000 for free. It had a 2.2Ghz Celeron processor and again, 768MB of RAM. Then in 2009 I finally splurged and bought a brand new Toshiba laptop. I have no idea what model it was, but it had a 1.86Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 3GB of DDR2 RAM, and a 250GB hard drive and...Windows Vista.

Ironically I didn't upgrade to a brand new computer because I wanted to burn porn CD's faster, or scan report cards faster. I got it so I could edit videos using MY computer instead of the schools super slow eMac's in my video editing class. My Pentium 4 Toshiba wasn't much better than the eMac's, so I decided to upgrade. My teacher in my video editing class was CLUELESS. He assigned me tasks that couldn't be done on those old eMac's if I spent 8 hours a day in class, so I had no choice but to upgrade my laptop or fail the class.

Unlike simple things like math or science that could be faked, video editing class actually produced USEFUL content that was NEEDED by the school's news team. I couldn't cheat my way out of that class. The school didn't want to pay to upgrade the computers (remember, incompetent IT staff) so they were putting pressure on my video editing teacher, and he then put the pressure on our class to produce the desperately needed content.

My class wouldn't have been able to produce anything if it weren't for my laptop and pirated copy of Adobe Premiere (which my video editing teacher had never used so I had to teach myself how to use it). Sh*t really hit the fan when I passed that class and the news program was then canceled. Looking back, I should have just let it fail and not used my own laptop to produce the school's news content. Imagine video editing on a poorly cracked copy of Adobe Premiere...using a laptop with Windows Vista. It wasn't fun, but at least it was POSSIBLE. Who the f*ck edits video on an eMac??? We should have had dual CPU Power Mac G5's if they really wanted to produce and edit video, not Apple's cheapest POS "education" Mac's.

 

[frase]

HAA - I used to do a paper run as a kid 80's kid here, stole pron mags from newsagent - added them to my run papers and sold them at High School. I made a nice lil fence profit then..

 

[Alexey]

I suddently find myself surrounded by retired pron tycoons

 

[sapphirescales]

Oh my gosh! I just found an old ad for my Micron laptop I had back in the day. Wow. I thought BS battery estimates were something manufacturers only did nowadays. 11 hour battery life. LOL. With all 3 batteries, I was lucky to get 3 hours out of the thing.



Damn I loved this thing. I got it for $10 from a garage sale. One of the best darned computers I've ever owned. Yeah, it was slow. But that thing was one heck of a reliable workhorse. And 3 hours of battery life was UNHEARD of in the 90's! Most laptops you were lucky to get 45 minutes out of. And this laptop was so freaking THIN compared to the other options out there. Too bad I no longer have it. I'm pretty sure that I sold it on Craigslist in 2007. I just looked for it and I can't find it anywhere, but I kind of remember selling it.

Aaaand they're still at it! My current laptop claims to get up to 14 hours on a single charge. The most I've ever gotten is about 5 hours.

 

[Markverhyden]

The writer looks like he's probably too young to appreciate the fact that everything he lists was a huge improvement over the alternatives available at the time.

Yep. SCSI is one. What a huge improvement over other mass storage technologies.

 

[johnrobert]

I was so excited when I bought my first recordable CD not much change from $1,000 I think max speed was 2X I was the only person in the group that had one.

it was SCSI Pinnacle Micro CD-R every other cd was a coaster and they cost $10 each when it was recording I did not move a thing as any vibrations it would be a coaster
I could never make one later in the night it would keep me awake cursing the thing

 

[frase]

Yea I remember paying around $700 for my first burner, got it at a swap meet back in the day.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Because this is a list of products that were crap when they were invented. Floppy disks weren't unreliable pieces of garbage

Floppy disks were not that reliable, most of my floppies are unreadable, really really cheap CD's wherent reliable either but there were sites dedicated to keeping up with media quality at the time.

 

[sapphirescales]

Floppy disks were not that reliable, most of my floppies are unreadable,

I don't know where you got your floppies from, but I still use floppy disks on a near daily basis and I've only had a couple of problems with them over the years. I also use ZIP disks and ZIP drives. Now THOSE things are unreliable. I still prefer them to CD's though.

I have an entire room in my house dedicated to 90's technology and vintage computer games. I still prefer to type things in Word 97 on an old 90's keyboard. The best way to transfer those documents after I've typed them all up is via floppy disk to a modern computer using a USB floppy drive. Then I convert the files to .docx format. I also use AppleWorks sometimes. I transfer the files to a newer eMac, then use the file sharing on the eMac to transfer the files to a modern computer.

Part of it is nostalgia. Part of it is because it just plain WORKS. And there's something special about seeing your document on a CRT display. I'm an avid fiction writer. If my readers only knew what I type most of my stories on. LOL.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

I don't know where you got your floppies from, but I still use floppy disks on a near daily basis and I've only had a couple of problems with them over the years. I also use ZIP disks and ZIP drives. Now THOSE things are unreliable. I still prefer them to CD's though.

I have an entire room in my house dedicated to 90's technology and vintage computer games. I still prefer to type things in Word 97 on an old 90's keyboard. The best way to transfer those documents after I've typed them all up is via floppy disk to a modern computer using a USB floppy drive. Then I convert the files to .docx format. I also use AppleWorks sometimes. I transfer the files to a newer eMac, then use the file sharing on the eMac to transfer the files to a modern computer.

Part of it is nostalgia. Part of it is because it just plain WORKS. And there's something special about seeing your document on a CRT display. I'm an avid fiction writer. If my readers only knew what I type most of my stories on. LOL.

Where did you get yours? Perhaps the only floppies remaining in your household are old reliables and all the crap ones have been thrown out? I dunno I stopped using regularly in like 1998 or something around there.

I kept my aperture grill CRT monitor for a very long time, its a shame they wherent more popular so I can tell younger folk about the good ole days when we had 2 horizontal lines going across the screen and they are complaining about a dead pixel xD.

 

[sapphirescales]

Where did you get yours? Perhaps the only floppies remaining in your household are old reliables and all the crap ones have been thrown out? I dunno I stopped using regularly in like 1998 or something around there.

I kept my aperture grill CRT monitor for a very long time, its a shame they wherent more popular so I can tell younger folk about the good ole days when we had 2 horizontal lines going across the screen and they are complaining about a dead pixel xD.

I got my floppies from everywhere. Thrift stores, garage sales, hand-me-downs from family members, K-Mart, and the newest package I got brand new from Walmart about 10 years ago.

I only have a couple floppy disks with plastic slide covers but most of mine are metal. I think the ones with the plastic slider are the newer, crappier quality ones? I don't know. I probably have close to 500 floppy disks in my house and close to 100 ZIP disks.

 

[fencepost]

The amazing thing about CD-R is when you compare it to the available HD capacities at the time. 700MB on a single disc? Great! That means I can dump a bunch of stuff off the 1.6-3.2GB HD in my laptop!

And as far as Token Ring goes, I never dealt with it but bear in mind that its competition wasn't modern star-topology Ethernet over 4-pair cables like we use today - its competition was thin-wire or thick-wire coax-based Ethernet with BNC connectors for each workstation running in a chain - and don't forget to put the terminator at the end of that chain.