BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: kendall
Date: 02 May 12 - 07:52 AM

frog, I'm older than I look.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: gnu
Date: 02 May 12 - 02:08 PM

sIx... FORTRAN IV with WATBOL FIV?

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Gurney
Date: 02 May 12 - 04:15 PM

Like someone up there, I needed some carbon paper to trace something. 'Office' shops didn't even know what I was talking about!
While we were looking, we added blotting paper to the list, as Her Indoors does calligraphy. They'd never heard of that either. (Kitchen towels work.)
Does anyone need a set of cartridges for a Lexmark printer? 1970/80/90 I think. New and refilled. Where did Lexmark go?

Somewhere in the shed I have a piston-ring compressor and a glazebuster. Glad I don't need them any longer.
Motorbikes as your main transport, thankfully.
Shortly after my 60th birthday , I was lying under a rear-drive car, doing a clutch, gearbox on my chest. Like others have said, ME!

Oh, unlittered streets that are safe to walk along.
Cigarettes, nearly. All smokers.
Asbestos products. Sometimes unfortunately.
Minidisk recorders. S

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bill D
Date: 02 May 12 - 04:29 PM

In about 1963-64 I worked in a business school which still taught Comptometer. Even then I never saw one used in an actual business.

How about Syquest drives for computer storage? I have a working set of two...set up for Windows 3.1. I 'think' I still have the drivers for Win 95. (It is a skuzzy (SCSI) setup...lots of cables and 'stops' for ends of cables. Yes, I still have a working 3.1 machine... but with a non-working mouse)

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Greg F.
Date: 02 May 12 - 05:59 PM

Any software or computer older than three weeks - produced to be obsolete as a matter odf course.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bert
Date: 02 May 12 - 06:52 PM

Tuning forks.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Ed T
Date: 02 May 12 - 07:42 PM

Window putty is getting hard to find.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 02 May 12 - 08:24 PM

Integrity, honesty and representation of the electorate, by our branches of government!

GFS

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Ed T
Date: 02 May 12 - 09:10 PM

The KODAK Instamatic camera

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Ed T
Date: 02 May 12 - 09:11 PM

""My tiny blue transistor radio""

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,Guest from Sanity
Date: 03 May 12 - 12:57 AM

Pull up window shades, flapping against the wood sash windows, while you're napping.

GfS

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,PeterC
Date: 03 May 12 - 07:53 AM

I agree with Janie about film, I have lost quite a few pictures through computer crashes now. I no longer wipe and reuse the cards in my camera, when one is full I file it and buy another.

TVs and DVD players with accessible buttons giving access to all functions. (With my DVD player you can only use menu options with the remote)

Second hand bookshops - charity shops have pretty well wiped out the trade in most UK towns.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 03 May 12 - 08:07 AM

I used to wear a liberty bodice, long, thick fleecy knickers and a woollen 'Chilpruf' vest as a small girl. Then a suspender belt and stockings as a teenager. I don't miss any of these obsolete garments!

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 03 May 12 - 11:37 AM

In our kitchen we used to have an electric meat-and-salad
grinder. Also good for grinding up ice cubes.

No more. My Beautiful Wife, a classical pianist, had a little mishap, and out it went. We refer to that long-gone equipment as "the finger-grinder."

Happy ending: The tip of her right index finger was ALMOST severed, hanging on by a little flap mainly of skin. She plunged the finger and flap into a bowl of ice water. The fingertip was successfully reattached--no scar, no sensory impairment. The ambulance technician told her the ice bath was the smartest thing she could have done.

I understand the absence of the appliance thereafter, but I really regret the loss of the function.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,Eliza (guest)
Date: 03 May 12 - 12:37 PM

My old dad had a hand-turned mincer clamped to his kitchen table. He was a very good cook, and often minced bacon to make ham-and-egg pies. After he died, I got rid of it, but I regret that now. A mincer is so good at using up uneaten food. You just grind it up and stick it in pastry. Maybe I'll get one! (But I'll mind my fingers, Uncle Dave! Hope your wife could continue to play her piano by the way)

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: gnu
Date: 03 May 12 - 02:12 PM

Dave... thank goodness!

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bert
Date: 03 May 12 - 02:14 PM

We use the meat grinder on Mum-in-law's Kitchen Aid. It has a long wooden plunger to push down the meat. It has the added advantage of her getting some free ground beef.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 03 May 12 - 04:32 PM

As I say, the finger has no scar, and no sensory loss, so (much to her our relief), no detriment to her ability to play. After the healing period, of course.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 03 May 12 - 06:39 PM

Several have mentioned Fortran IV.

When I first went to work for EAC, they had a young lady who made regular visits to pick up punch cards and deliver printouts for the Watkins Glen Fortran Four (WATIV) computer.

The particular young lady was universally called the "WATFOR" girl, and was a definite "work stopper" whose visits were eagerly anticipated by the DOM in the office.

When that computer was taken down, the company DID NOT ANNOUNCE its demise, for fear of "work disruptions."

We held a brief "Grief Ceremony" anyway, when we realized she was gone.

(The things may be gone, but the memories linger - even when you never knew her name.)

John

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: G-Force
Date: 04 May 12 - 09:09 AM

Grammar.   Spelling.   Punctuation.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 04 May 12 - 10:33 AM

LOL G-Force, you mean grammer speling punctation (innit?)

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: DMcG
Date: 04 May 12 - 02:44 PM

FORTRAN IV with WATFIV? That's pretty new-fangled. I started with FORTRAN II D. The 'D' meant it had special extra instructions to be able to work with disks.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: DMcG
Date: 04 May 12 - 02:50 PM

Actually, I should say that the FORTRAN IID was for an IBM 1620, which didn't even work in binary arithmetic, and has part of the memory dedicated to look up the answers for adding and multiplication. But it was the supercomputer in The Forbin Project as it had a lot of buttons and flashing lights and a hunky dial on the control panel.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Ebbie
Date: 04 May 12 - 03:09 PM

I suspect that scarcity of something often depends upon where one lives. For instance, pull up window shades, Lexmark printers and second hand bookshops are alive and well in Alaska.

How about girdles? Anyone remember the rubber one made by - hmmmmm, I don't remember. I know it started with P. Not Panasonic or Playgirl - anyone remember?

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bettynh
Date: 04 May 12 - 03:23 PM

Playtex

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bert
Date: 04 May 12 - 03:31 PM

Early computers seem to feature a lot here. Does anyone remember the Olivetti Programma? A machine the size of a large typewriter that could just about handle a third order determinant.

Then there was the Microdata computer that the bean counters bought for an engineering company I once worked for. The trig functions were only accurate to four decimal places so I had to write functions
doubling that accuracy using Newton's method of approximation.

That was back in the days when programming was fun.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 04 May 12 - 04:44 PM

Punched cards and hand operated card punches - we had ICL readers and UNIVAC interpreters, and a load of programmers who insisted on the interpretation being the same as what they's written on their coding sheets (remember them?). Most of us got to know card-punch code by heart in those days - 0,3,8 was a comma if I remember rightly.

PLAN, GEORGE 3.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 04 May 12 - 04:55 PM

Big computers. Even a genius like Asimov conceived of his great Multivac, controlling computer of the future, as the size of NYC. The idea that, 50 years later, we would all be walking round with a computer more powerful than that one to the power of whatever in our top pocket or handbag, fell quite outside his conceptual framework ~~

& then came the microchip...

~M~

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: DMcG
Date: 04 May 12 - 05:23 PM

The mention of GEORGE reminded of some of the jokes built into the software of the time. The ICL 1900 system had a BASIC-like language called 'JOSS Extended and Adapted for Nineteen hundred' or JEAN. A built in joke that was iffy at the time but is much more dubious now is that it started with a half-dozen lines of status messages one of which announced that it was Jean under George.

A much better one was during the installation of the RSX11 operating system on PDP11 machines. Many RSX commands were of the form

SET /option=value

When the build got to a point where a long step took place the machine issued the fictitious command

SET /COFFEEBREAK=ON

(And in the UK it SET /TEABREAK=ON instead)

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Ebbie
Date: 04 May 12 - 06:36 PM

Rubber girdle- Playtex it was.

I have no idea why I wore girdles- I was skinny at the time - other than in the Virginia of the day, all 'ladies' did.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Les from Hull
Date: 04 May 12 - 07:03 PM

Not much use for my SLRs and lenses these days. There may be some Letraset hanging about as well. But my 35mm slides are now jpegs and most of my vinyl and cassette tapes are now mp3s.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Gurney
Date: 05 May 12 - 01:51 AM

Les, I bought a Pentax digital SLR so that I could use my 'old' Pentax lenses. Even the pre-autofocus ones fit.

The local charity shop has a large bucket of lovely old SLRs lying jumbled together, and spare lenses, including a 60-300mm.
Not Pentax, unfortunately, but I'll keep watching.

Only about 1/6 of my records and tapes are digitised, and none of my film pictures, but I do have the gear. Just wondering if I'll live long enough to do it. Lots of them!

CRT televisions are due for the chop here in the next few months.

I remember roll-on girdles. About as sexy as bloomers. Suspender belts, however.....

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 05 May 12 - 02:29 AM

Ah, now ~~ a pretty bare bottom framed by suspender-belt, suspenders, stocking-tops ~~~~~ ɷɷɷɷɷɷɷ

Oops! Sorry! Forgot I wasn't on that sort of forum at the moment!....

〠☺〠~M~〠☺〠

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 05 May 12 - 03:11 AM

The old REAL Wembley Stadium. What did they mean by pulling down my beloved Twin Towers, established under George V for the 1920s British Empire Exhibition! What happy hours I spend there watching football in my early teens; sometimes even almost empty - they must have been hiring it out for a song on late spring evenings during WWii. I remember a great wartime match once in front of only a few hundred, between the Services and the Police & Civilian Services. Arsenal's great left wing Clifford Bastin, by then a stone-deaf 39-year-old, played one of the most blinding games I've ever seen.

Ah, nostalgia. Whatever did they have to replace it with the present hideous monstrosity for?

~M~

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Mr Happy
Date: 05 May 12 - 06:56 AM

........even some foods have disappeared or renamed.

Roast mutton was one've our favourites for childhood Sunday dinners, only 'lamb' available now.

Also, being able to buy loose stuff, that is unpackaged.

At the greengrocers, you took your own bags & got loose spuds, carrots, cabbage etc by whatever weight or quantity you chose.

You could get 2 ounces, a quarter etc of sweets & at the ironmongers loose nails or screws either singly or by the 1/2 pound, 1/4 lb etc.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Mr Happy
Date: 05 May 12 - 07:12 AM

& at an off licence, you could take your own jug or bottle for beer or cider.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 05 May 12 - 07:13 AM

Oddly enough, it is at the supermarkets that they still sell vegetables loose as an alternative to wrapped, provide bags to put them in & scales to check, & weigh for price at the checkout. I bought half-a-dozen beautiful big carrots, loose, at Ely Tesco yesterday.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: HuwG
Date: 05 May 12 - 07:54 AM

In my grumpy old man mode, I miss the demise of the typewriter, and grammar, spelling and punctuation, which seem to have coincided. Of course, this may be a post hoc, ergo procter hoc fallacy.

My mother was a secretary for several charities. She would type correspondence after my brother and I had gone to bed. Could we sleep? Could we heck! My mother would put the typewriter on a table which acted as a sounding board, and the resulting "tat-tat-tat-boom, tat-tat-ting-zip-tat-tat-tat" could sound like the sound track to a war film (though I don't know what might go "ting" on a battlefield).

There would be not a single mis-spelling, punctuation error or slip of grammar. Very occasionally, the Canon manual typewriter would be unable to keep up, and two keys would get tangled, resulting in the need for a dab of Tippex.

Bear it in mind that my mother left school at fifteen.

I now have to put up with managers and directors with degrees, who communicate in writing using the sort of shorthand normally used by pre-pubescents to exchange banalities with their closest friends (sorry, did I say "their" friends? I meant "there" friends, of course) and verbally using strings of obscenities and references to "You know, kind of like a sort of thing".

In 1983, I started work programming on PDP-11s and the Rair Black Box. The Rair had 64Kb of memory, of which about 16Kb was taken up by the CP/M operating system. (You could cheat by assuming that the command processor could be dispensed with by an executing process and overwritten, but this would make things very slow when chaining the next process.) Programmers could also cheat by e.g. putting initialisation code in data buffers not used until later in execution, but even so, we learned to make very tight code indeed.

What happens nowadays? The latest version of Micro$haft Office demands that any machine over six or seven years old be discarded as hopelessly antiquated and inadequate. I mean only 2Gb of memory and 1.73GHz processor speed? You really need better hardware to write letters and send and receive emails, even if you have been doing OK for the last three decades.

</grumpyoldman>

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 05 May 12 - 08:04 AM

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc", Huw. Not 'procter'. No good being grumpy if don't get things right!

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: olddude
Date: 05 May 12 - 08:14 AM

Lots of pocket watches but I still use them but very very obsolete

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 05 May 12 - 08:42 AM

Fifths of whiskey. Yeah, I know 750 ML is roughly the same size, but it just doesn't lend itself to country song lyrics quite as easily.

"She left me on the Fourth, so I went and bought a 750 ML" just doesn't work.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: frogprince
Date: 05 May 12 - 09:17 AM

MtheGM, all is not lost. Today's fashions allow for the possibility of a nice pair of thigh-high stockings, combined with a nice dressy feminine blouse that extends just a wee bit below the waist. A summery straw hat makes a nice touch, too. Should you be picnicing together, sitting on a blanket, in some well-secluded spot, even a very short skirt doesn't spoil the effect too badly.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 05 May 12 - 10:01 AM

Oh Ebbie, those ghastly Playtex rubber girdles. They had holes all over (to let the sweat out, I assume) And one rolled them down to get out of them at night. I used to put talcum powder in mine to kill the pong and to make it easier to roll on again in the morning. And, in my thirties, I was so thin I was almost skin and bone! Why ever did we accept such things? Thank goodness the lassies nowadays don't have those to contend with!

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: mayomick
Date: 05 May 12 - 10:10 AM

Yes Huw and while we're at it , if you really liked your typewriter ,you would be missing its presence and not its demise, surely. I wouldn't mind finding a new use for my old thing btw - especially after reading that post about the short skirts .

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 05 May 12 - 02:15 PM

Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue, current, offers a portable manual typewriter for sale.

My old slide rule, in its leather belt case, resides in a desk drawer, as do several sets of drafting tools. On a shelf is my string bell (a glass holder with a small hole on top, for a ball of string).

Just had my cassette player reconditioned so that I can continue playing the little tapes. Haven't got the device that converts them to cds yet. I do have facilities for turning lps into cds, and convert vcr to dvd although I keep my turntable and vcr player hooked together with the rest of my sound and dvd set-up.

Olddude, still collecting wind-up watches. And a doctor has no bona fides more obvious than his/her Rolex. My son, married to a physician, bought her a new one last year as she retired her old one (her father's).

In my kitchen cupboards, I still have a hand-crank meat grinder and a similar type nut grinder. A hand crank coffee bean grinder is in the basement now that I have an electric bean machine.
A push lawnmower is in the shed, but I have a yard and lawn man with those gas marvels who takes care of the lawn now.

I use my complete (last update 1987) OED frequently. Thesaurus and other aids in use by my crossword-adicted wife.

Canada still issues (as do most countries) stamps that have to be moistened as well as the peelable kind.
Canada stops coining pennies late this year, but they will still be accepted as money in transactions.

Found in an old trunk- stocking holders for attachment to a girdle, the decoration a container with celluloid window for a postage stamp for the Columbian exhibition of 1892. Hot stuff at the time.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: gnu
Date: 05 May 12 - 02:27 PM

Q... I had to send my draughting board to the dump... could NOT sell it! I paid over $15,000 for my full size HP printer and that went to the dump too. Can't sell my digitizing board that I paid over $1000 for. Cadkey was made "obsolete" by the government adoption of AutoCadd (piece of crap in comparison but, apparently, some engineers and techs don't understand mathematics).

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bettynh
Date: 05 May 12 - 03:42 PM

I bought a hand-crank coffee grinder for my son last Christmas. He's a coffee snob, and using a French press. Standard spinning coffee grinders make the coffee grounds too fine, and electric burr grinders cost a fortune.

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 05 May 12 - 03:50 PM

frogprince ~~ yes, nice top & bottom [no pun meant]; but the side-framing suspenders used to add just that little — as they say; but in fact I do sais quoi at that!

~M~

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 05 May 12 - 03:53 PM

Sorry about hiartus in middle of last post ~~ it read originally "that little je ne sais quoi". Don't know why that bit should have vanished into the ewigkeit!

Subject: RE: BS: Obsolete in your lifetime?
From: Bert
Date: 05 May 12 - 05:03 PM

Gnu, I'm gonna beat the crap outta you;-) I've been looking everywhere for a drafting table and a wide carriage printer at an affordable price.