Sic Transit...

At the weekend I was at Auchengillan Outdoor Centre, operating an amateur radio station for the Scouts under our club's callsign. We had quite a lot of interest from Scouts and Cubs who were keen to do their communications badges, and from the various leaders too. At some point over the weekend it occurred to me that all the Cubs who had come in and many of the younger Scouts had been born since 1998 which was when I bought my first mobile phone, as I posted on twitter. This evening Elwell started thinking about technologies that have died out in our lifetime, and discussing it on IRC. It occurred to me that there are a lot of things I haven't seen since I left school about 20 years ago. So, here's the list of things that occurred to me that have died out in my lifetime (with Wikipedia links for those who don't know what I'm talking about):

• Analogue Mobile phones although some networks survive in the developing world, where they have bought old systems in.
• Minidiscs - not strictly speaking gone yet, since they are still used in theatres for sound cues. They're being replaced by...
• Samplers - but hardware samplers are being replaced by software instruments.
• D-MAC video which was mostly used for satellite TV, including the now-defunct BSB. Of course with the looming Digital Switchover, we're going to lose...
• PAL video for broadcast as well. Games consoles and media players will still use it, where they don't use HDMI. It's not just video, though, because in the 1980s television broadcasts began to supplement their FM sound subcarrier with...
• NICAM, giving high-quality stereo sound. If you had a TV that supported it, and it was broadcast in your area.
• Prestel was a kind of bulletin board system run by British Telecom. Pages were assigned numbers, with each digit being a layer in the page tree. You could get Prestel adaptors that plugged into televisions, and used your touch-tone phone to select pages.
• Telex machines have mostly now been replaced by email. There was something a bit more engaging about watching the big clunky teleprinter rattle out messages that email doesn't have.
• Covox Speech Thing used to be how we did sound with our PCs! Early PCs only had a little beeper, which you could use to go "beep". You could change the pitch and duration of the beep, and that was about it. If you were really slick you could use very fast sequences of beeps (really just little clicks) to play back crude samples. The Covox Speech Thing was a simple digital-to-analogue converter that hung off the parallel printer port (another dead technology) and gave you a single channel of 8-bit sound. I still have tapes of tunes that I made using modplayers through a home-made printer port DAC.
• Ultrasonic TV remotes - no link, since Wikipedia barely mentions them. These used a 40kHz piezoelectric beeper with a matching sensor in the TV, and often had only two or four buttons. Typically you could step through the channels - (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and then five more with no signal) and mute the sound, or with more sophisticated ones you could change channel up and down and turn the volume up and down. Some even let you turn the TV off - but not on, because turning it off from the remote fired a solenoid that clicked the power switch out!

I came up with some more, like supersonic passenger aircraft, loading computer data from cassette tape and games consoles that use cartridges, but we still have supersonic aircraft and someone might build another supersonic passenger one. Some handheld consoles use cartridges (and SD cards don't count). Loading computer data from cassettes is very much gone now though.

I wonder what will be gone in the next 20 years?

Posted by gordonjcp on May 30, 2011