Not mentioned on the list: personal tape recorders, hand calculators. In my lifetime, first they didn’t exist as consumer products, then they were important, then they were obsolete.
Many inventions have not only become obsolete, but their non-existence has made many old TV shows and movies incomprehensible to kids today.
In old shows:
People are unable to communicate with the police or sources of rescue. People frequently need to knock on somebody’s door to use a phone. People need to find a pay phone. Photographs need to be developed. People need elaborate ruses and/or bulky devices to record conversations. People communicate through messages in the newspaper. Teachers can’t be fact-checked in real time. Teens have to steal Playboys from their dads, because it is impossible for kids to see naked bodies. Tanks cannot be defeated by silly-looking devices no larger than a medium-sized bird.
It wasn’t just inventions:
- There were nine Radio Shacks in 1960, and there are six Radio Shacks today. In between those years, there were as many as 8,000.
- There were no giant toy stores; then they were in every city, then they disappeared. Toys R Us once had more than 1000 stores and 25% of the toy market. Walmart took over as the top toy retailer when Toys R Us failed, but that’s temporary. Barring a miracle, the long-term winner will be Amazon.
- Kodak was a massive company. At its peak, Kodak had 145,000 employees. Today, there are 4,000. Rochester was basically a company town, with more than 60,000 Kodak jobs.
- Book Stores? Their ranks diminished for twenty years, but surprisingly, Barnes & Noble is making a comeback. Can that last? I love book stores, but now buy 100% of my books on Amazon.
First PCs, then the internet, then the hand-held phone/camera/computer, then sophisticated drones, have totally transformed our lives.
Usually for the better, but not always.
Heh… at one point or another I’ve worked at Waldenbooks, Radioshack, and GTE. All gone. Well, GTE turned into Verizon, but I worked on the landline side.
I worked at a video store and bought several hundred blank tapes to copy all of the movies on to
I have something like 1300 DVDs collecting dust.
I have like 900 but I stand by my decision to own them. How much longer will we be able to stream “Blazing Saddles” before some SJW gets it banned?
Scoops, quick question. Given all the needless and constant changes to technology, how odd do you find it that we don’t yet have wireless TVs?
We have Wifi connected fridges, washing machines and beds, yet no wireless TVs. That baffles me.
What do you mean by a wireless TV? Do you mean a TV that doesn’t need to be plugged in? Otherwise, just about every smart TV is a wireless TV. Most people connect their TVs to WiFi. I don’t like the apps on my TV so I have a Roku, a 4K Bluray Player, a PC, and an antenna connected. However, I could use the apps on my TV to watch a Live TV service like YouTube TV, Netflix, and a hundred other services if I wanted to. If you do mean a TV that doesn’t need to be plugged in, then iPads and laptops, or a phone, can each function as a completely wireless TV.
We’re built on a world of technological abstractions that have their roots in mediums that were clunkier, less scalable, and less portable. I think things have become more efficient, but the efficiencies of scale end up going to centralized corporations which then run alternatives out as an option making you rely upon them for service because not only is the obsolete method fallen out of use, it’s not even available as an option anymore. No pay phones = no options except to borrow a phone if you’re in a stranded away from civilization without a cell phone. No POTS copper lines = no method of communication if electricity goes out without a redundant system, because VOIP can’t supply voltage like old lines could to wired phones.
Also, one thing with the video stores and the mediums out there is you could at least ‘own’ what you buy, or at least do a short term specific rental. Now that streaming has taken over, everything is a perpetual subscription, an eternal cost to be paid over and over and that applies to tech licensing as well these days.
Just this week we’ve had AWS and Azure outages (one still recovering from) because of this centralization of technologies for efficiencies of scale. Is this better than having web servers everywhere in a decentralized fashion? Not exactly – and you’re essentially locking yourself more into vendors and being more reliant upon the service which allows them to raise prices.
There is no free lunch here, just a series of balances that give one benefit and takes away another. People should be concerned, because the one thing that isn’t becoming obsolete is having shelter, water, food, and electricity. Until we have zero point energy generators in every house, molecular H20 and protein/fat/carb generators, along with all land, materials, and robotics to create shelter the same old things needed to live exist. All with less jobs to afford them because processes have been made redundant along with the people that support them, as wealth continues to consolidate.
While young people may have a hard time understanding old movies, the reverse is not necessarily true. Other than drone technology, none of these inventions are really new. They’re just improvements or, in the case of smart phones, a fairly revolutionary combination of already existing technologies. (Which certainly did spark significant new inventions like QR codes and Apps.)
Compare that from around 1880-1950 (yes, 70 years and not 50 but a bunch of new inventions were delayed due to the Great Depression and then World War II for up to 20 years.) Over that time was the telephone, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, television and the first computers.
The fun thing for me is how much the Nobel Prize in economics kind of mirrors this. Economic theory is that long run economic growth comes from two things: brand new revolutionary innovation, economist Joseph Schumpeter termed this ‘creative destruction’ and incremental improvements in existing technology. Most consumer technology since 1950 has been this second form. The winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics didn’t come up with any new theory, but the revolution in economics in the last 15 years or so has been with the ‘quats’ through big data and analytics. And,, this Nobel Prize was handed out to people who analyzed these two types of economic growth through big data and analytics.
And electricity!
Both of these forms of economic growth seem to be going on, with business to business technology seeing more creative destruction and the consumer market seeing mostly incremental improvements of already existing technologies (even drone technology started off as business to business.)
The main reason on the consumer side seems to be the increasing cost of going from basic research to product development. One of the reasons is based on a downside of specialization There is a line in academia commenting that all new knowledge is increasingly specialized so that ‘we know more and more about less and less so that one day we’ll know everything about nothing.’ And so that even people in the same broad fields like psychology can have a hard time understanding each other. This is also true in engineering. This is from a post on reddit:
“I’m a computer engineer who recently entered the industry, and the vast majority of people I’m working with are electrical engineers. One of my assignments is to recreate an existing web system for a new working group, and when I talked to the EE who created the original system, he kept referring to JavaScript as Java, and when I asked whether he meant Java or JavaScript, he thought they were the same thing. The miscommunication isn’t an isolated incident with one coworker, and I’m afraid that there may be larger communication barriers ahead of me as I work on bigger projects.”
This increasing cost of development has likely meant that businesses aren’t as interested in developing innovative new products for consumers (except for the fidget spinner!) as consumers, unlike businesses, often have no idea what they want. So, new product development on the business side is far more likely to be successful.
One hope for reducing the problems of communications through increasingly specialized fields has been Generative A.I, but while I wouldn’t say that Generative A.I has been nothing but hype, the promise has so far greatly outweighed anything actually achieved.
This is far from the first time this has been the case either. This is from a now five year old article in the U.K Independent Newspaper. Generative A.I wasn’t on this list because it’s only been announced in the past 2-3 years. The person who wrote the article (John Rentoul) in commenting on his list on the five year anniversary said that there have been major improvements in autonomous vehicles, but nothing else has shown any real advancement.
The Top 10: Technologies that are just about to solve big problems but probably won’t ever work
1.Carbon capture and storage
2.Self-driving cars
3.Hydrogen power
4.Nuclear fusion
5.Blockchain
6.Graphene
7.Quantum computing
8.Rockets or scramjets on commercial airliners
9.Virtual reality
10.VAR
There was a story here in British Columbia of a graphene research and manufacturing facility that was relocating to Texas for a number of reasons (high taxes, regulations…) that I think says more about self inflicted structural problems in the British Columbia/Canadian economy than about graphene. Graphene is a nano technology that I believe was first promoted over 20 years ago for its ability to make materials that were lighter and stronger than spider silk, but it hasn’t really materialized in any major way.
Faster than speed of sound air technology already exists (the Supersonic) but it was banned due to it causing a sonic boom. Apparently whether the technology mentioned (scramjets) is the one out there or not, the ability to lower the noise levels caused Supersonics has existed for a while now, but regulations haven’t been changed. I’ve read that because Trump is so anti regulation that he’s encouraging new supersonic planes. If it works, I think that would be one of the food good things Trump would do.
Virtual reality as a consumer product has been a dud for over 30 years now (the movie Strange Days was based on virtual reality) with the exception of some niche computer graphics, but as a business application it has had some success. Surgeons in big city hospitals operate remotely on patients in rural areas using virtual reality.
VAR is video assistant referee, a significantly hyped new technology innovation mainly for soccer. It’s still pretty failed five years later.
On the economists that should say ‘quants’ and not ‘quats.’
And that should say “one of the few good things Trump would do.”
I hope nobody minds me breaking up these posts or commenting so much. This is the fourth of whatever something with four things is, kind of like a trilogy.
Similar to what Indy wrote, is the problem with getting the data on older technology. A number of older departments often prefer older technology because they’re not easy to hack, but there have been cases where information has been stored on old software that have no hardware to retreive them.
One of the less appreciated problems with this, is that it isn’t simply a matter of making new hardware machines to play old software or VHS or similar technology, because often the manufacturing technology that makes these machines doesn’t exist anymore either.
There definitely is something lost with a society that likes things to be disposable.
The issues are the abstractions put into place cause increasing complexity in which laypeople don’t know how anything works, and corporations led by the wealth C-suite and major investors consolidate power and wealth and take away all other options.
Simple example: currency was created centuries ago as an abstraction for bartering. Of course this brought an entire field of economics, monetary policy, and departments like US Mint to create the currency so there was overhead cost to utilize it.
Now today, most people typically don’t use currency in transactions and we’re even moving away from minting pennies because they’re more expensive to make than their value. We use payment cards as the abstraction of currency, or even now smartphones with Apple Pay as an abstraction of that. There’s obvious benefits of speed, transaction protection, accounting, etc – but what are the trade off costs to the business? In person transactions now have card transaction fees going to the card holder, a point of sale system with payment processing that needs both hardware and a subscription to utilize, and an internet service provider to provide the internet connection.
Making things better is more subjective. These costs are now embedded in any business, and as corporate consolidation through M&A and stock buybacks occur these corporations become embedded and replace other processes such as currency exchange. The C-suite and rich investors, venture capitalists, and so on then own control of the entire function instead of just the abstraction without alternatives, and then the complexity increases exponentially underneath it all (a payment card holder doesn’t ‘hold’ your data, a Cloud service provider like AWS or Azure does, and then a contractor overseas manages code creation, etc.)
So you end up in a situation where both no one understands anything and creates things like Trumpism where brute force emotional reactions to things are the only thing that resonate – but meanwhile he’s giving more control over the functions to corporations. And you try to fight back? Well, the C-suite and rich investors take what they’ve leeched away unless you give them more. And now since they own the functions themselves now, there’s no alternative.
I still own books, CDs (only for a few artists/bands that I love), and Blu-Rays (which I still get from Criterion and Arrow). That will never change.
Same, Same. I do, however, rip * EVERYTHING * now, after going through both Laserdisc laserrot and DVD lamination failure(s). There are also less reputable BluRay replication houses that are seeing failures as quickly as 2 years (Amazon’s MoD stuff is particularly bad….) I don’t love the expense of keeping all of it secure (backed up, RAID, etc) but I love the convenience of *never* dealing with menu’s, forced ads, etc.
When I bought my first iPod 20+ years ago, I ripped all my CDs to my computer and then gave all my CDs to my mom. She passed away in 2019, and I don’t know what happened to them. I haven’t bought a paper book in at least 15 years. As my eyesight has deteriorated in my middle age, I like being able to adjust the font size. I have a Kindle, but mostly read books on my iPad. I still buy DVDs and Blu-rays. I buy 4K Blu-rays of films I want to watch with the best possible picture, like the recent Dune movies. I usually only buy DVDs these days if that is the only way to watch a movie or TV show I want to watch. While I haven’t encountered DVD rot yet, I have been thinking I might want to look into getting some Blu-ray/DVD ripping software and an external Blu-ray drive so I can back up my collection to my PC, which is automatically backed up to Backblaze. It’s actually much more convenient to play movies off a NAS than to get off the couch and put in a disc. The amazing thing is that when I was a kid, our TV didn’t even have a remote!
I fondly remember the Iomega Zip Drive because the headquarters was in my state….the “super floppy” (500 megs) came and went in about 6 years
Ackshually, they were around for much longer than that! The original Iomega “Bernoulli Box” was introduced in 1982(!)
I never owned one, but a friend of my dad’s swore by his. When the ZIP was introduced in the mid ’90s, I bought one and used it quite a bit but was disappointed that it never really caught on. I couldn’t use them at any college campus I was ever at, for instance, so ended up storfing any project larger than 1.44MB on my VAX account and downloading in the labs as necessary.
The thing about real books, CDs, DVDs is that your digital copies can be deleted at a whim of Amazon etc and then where are you? The other thing is that Amazon and other digital media dispensers ususally heavily edit their output, i’ve seen films on Amazon with 30 min+ cut out of them – I know they’ve cut the bits I want to watch so my best move is to look for the DvD or pirate a copy.
Just another thought, Project 2035 has a paragraph about dealing with “pornography” – i.e. LGBT+ material, so no more ‘Desert Hearts’ or ‘Brokeback mountain’, expect “Mrs Doubtfire” to be near the top of the banned list. Expect Glee to be deleted from online offerings, along with “Will and Grace” and other gay-friendly media. The UK government is already playing Nanny to block access to what they consider “porn”.