While I agree with the article's premise that nobody today misses the technologies listed, the author quite overlooks the impact that most of them had when they became mass market.
SCSI was crap but it was rather wonderful crap at the time - allowing you to daisy-chain hard disks; scanners; other types of drives; and more - and do primitive video and audio editing. All supposing you could afford it and also get your head around termination issues; and innumerable types of cable and connectors. It was also necessary to have plenty of desk space. It got blown away, for a short while, by FireWire (more accurately IEEE1394) and that got pushed into the background by USB2; later by USB3. But no way would I want to go back.
As for "ATA", well let's call it what it really was, PATA. And look
on Wikipedia for how the technology progressed through different iterations . And don't forget, it made possible some amazing things, such as affordable and faster video editing on computers (I said "possible", not easy! And "affordable" is of course a relative term). Would I swap it for SATA? No - though having two drives on one cable was rather nice. In its day, though it, too, was kind of crappy it was very welcome compared to any alternative, including SCSI.
Dial-up was crap but, compared to what you had before - nothing - it was wonderful.. And, far from giving me a headache, the warblinig of a dial-up modem was the sound of a new world opening up. Here's a
recording of a dial-up modem on YouTube for those feeling nostalgic or who are too young to remember. Would I swap it for my 220Mbit broadband? Of course not. And the same goes for my first 128kbit broadband.
Fax is very easy to deride, not least because in the first few iterations, it was terrible slow and a real pain both to send and receive. But it was also transfomative.
One example. When I first started working full-time as a journalist in 1980, the production process for many magazines was very tortuous. We relied on messengers coming at least twice a day (some times more frequently as deadline-day loomed). They'd take away to the type-setters (who could be 150 miles away!), the top copies of the words we typed on sheets of A4 paper (we kept a carbon copy of each piece) and would come back with galley - A3 paper with strips of 42mm-wide typesetting of our words. Our production people would cut these up, stick them on the layout pages and draw in where the pics were to go. Sub-editors, sections editors and journos would handwrite headlines and sub-heads on thoses pages and make corrections to the galley strips, and these would be faxed over to the type-setters.
Couriers were very little involved after that (except to take the pics - we had no scanners at that time - but the scanners that the type-setters had were SCSI; as were those we got a few years later) and the process was rather immediate. Of course, within a few years, we'd switched to computers and word processors, so our electronic copy was sent by dial-up modem. A few years later, virtually all of the production was done in house - using page make-up software. Quark Xpress was biggie back then for most magazines.
One little useless fact - Fax is still widely used in France - for sending legal documents around. Why? Haven't a clue.
The ball mouse? Well, it wasn't perfect (but it wasn't actually that hard to keep clean if you had the right make and model) but when the alternative was keyboard-only and no graphical interace, it was a totally wonderous thing. But I wouldn't swap it for my optical mouse, of course.
As for CRT monitors - in their day they, too, were revolutionary. And it took quite a while for flatscreens to develop into something that a serious user of computers could have confidence in when colour accuracy and responsiveness were critical. Heavy? Not half (mind you, as someone who delivered CRT-based TV sets in a different life, I never really noticed their weight). And do I love my 24in flatscreen monitor more than any other monitor I've ever used? Of course, because it's hugely better - but it wasn't around when I bought my first (17in) CRT colour monitor for business in 1983.
Token Ring LAN, I can't comment upon - it had been and gone before our editorial office was computerised.
lol.
