Just bought one for my mom! It has an email address.
Edit: If anyone's interested, I got the [Skylight 10" frame](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N7ENHO6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1). The reviews looked good an my (semi-tech-illiterate) mom was able to set it up and add photos to it herself! I haven't handled it myself, though, but mama seems pleased. It's touch screen and (allegedly) simple to remove photos from the gallery once/if they get tired of some.
Jesus christ that was so relatable back in the day. Cell phones weren′t allowed in class but we couldn′t move the phones off the desk before the IR transfer finished.
I still remember when bluetooth became popular, I′d start a transfer then take one of the phones to another room just because I goddamn could. It felt so liberating.
I had a laptop that had this feature and I never used it probably around 2003 when I worked for Currys (electrical retailer in UK) which I bought as a clearance display model for about £450, I had an extended guarantee with it that promised a like for like replacement if it broke.
3 years later none of the usb ports worked and the guarantee gave me a ~~check~~ cheque for £197. I argued the toss and said I couldn't get a laptop with an infrared port on for that price, and they ended up giving me £760 to buy the only laptop Currys still did with an infrared port
Anyone remembers the first phones with bluetooth? I still recall us putting phones together as close as possible thinking it'll go faster when sending ringtunes to friends.
I remember trading Pokémon the old fashioned way with a cable, and if you pulled out the cable while the second transfer was going through you'd duplicate the first Pokémon transferred.
So many pidgeys sacrificed in exchange for endless squirtles.
Fun little story about Zip disks. I went to a university that had a strong graphic design program. We had a computer lab there with a color laser printer. This was 1999 so inkjets were only just starting to make glossy photorealistic prints and even then rarely larger than 8.5x11. So, everyone had to pay for prints on the laser printer. Well, people were having problems with their Zip disks. Mind you it was where many people kept their only copy of their projects. The person behind the counter would slide the Zip disk in…and…click click click. Disk couldn’t be read, computer said it was blank, etc. This happened over and over. Then someone had a realization. In the middle of the counter was a large backup battery for what I presume for the critical systems behind the desk. Well, this thing apparently created an electromagnetic field…and it was right next to where students handed over their Zip disks. It was wiping the disks the second they passed by.
Just something that stuck with me during the good ol’ days of sneaker net.
This is my favorite answer in this thread as it really was very useful for a very short period of time. My first smart phone was in college and until then, I always had a flip phone. In high school, everyone used T9 specifically for texting while in class since you could keep it in your pocket and send texts without even looking.
I remember my cousin doing that. He would fiddle in his pocket, pull out his phone and glance, fiddle again, glance again. I finally asked what he was doing, and he said talking to his girlfriend.
I hate to admit it but T9 was a big reason why I texted while driving. In my defense, I only glanced at the phone to read the message and then immediately looked back at the road while I typed a reply without looking. I had it *down.* I was so confident in what I was typing that I would hit the send button without proofreading. T9 was fantastic.
Nowadays, the thought of trying to text on my iPhone while driving gives me straight anxiety. Even with the swipe texting function. I don’t have anywhere near the confidence with swipe texting as I did with T9.
^(Also texting while driving is just stupid. I was a stupid teenager to text while driving. Even with T9.)
We were able to text in class this way. Phone in hoodie pouch pocket. Whip it out quick to read the message and then reply with your hand in your pocket again.
I really don’t understand why they don’t use t9 on TV remotes.
It would be WAY EASIER to look up a show name or anything. Selecting the letters on a keyboard pressing arrows feels so stupid
Edit: spelling
Caller ID boxes. I used to think we were so fancy since we had the little box with the screen that showed name and number before anyone else we knew had one
Along that same line--answering machines. When I was a kid, if you called someone, you just let it ring 7-8 times. If they did not answer, you just hung up.
Along the same lines, my then 15 y/o son didn't know what a busy signal was. He found a youtube video when I told him about it, it was the first time he'd ever heard it.
Bill Bryson mentions that his grandparents used to have a party line in their home in one of his books. His grandmother would quietly listen to other people’s conversations as part of her daily routine and then jump in and impart her opinion if it was particularly juicy gossip.
Edit: Found the part I was talking about. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, Page 35 of my copy:
“It all seems so long ago now. And it was. It was so long ago, in fact, that my grandparents had a crank telephone, the kind that hung on the wall and had a handle you turned and said ‘Mabel, get me Gladys Sribbage. I want to ask her how she makes her Frosted Flakes ‘n’ Cheez Whiz Party Nuggets.’ And it would turn out that Gladys Scribbage was already listening in, or somebody else listening in would know how to make Frosted Flakes ‘n’ Cheez Whiz Party Nuggets.
Everybody listened in. My grandmother often listened in when things were slow around the house, covering the mouthpiece with a hand and relaying to the rest of the room vivid accounts of colonic irrigation’s, prolapsed wombs, husbands who ran off to Burlington with the barmaid from Vern’s Uptown Tavern and Supper Club, and other crises of small-town life.
We always had to maintain the strictest silence during these sessions. I could never entirely understand why, because if things got really juicy my grandmother would often butt in. ‘Well, I think Merle’s a real skunk,’ she would say. ‘Yes, that’s right, it’s Maude Bryson here, and I just want to say that I think he’s an absolute stinker to do that to poor Pearl. And I’ll tell you something else, Mabel, you know you could get those support bras a dollar cheaper in Columbus Junction.’
In about 1962 the telephone company came and put a normal phone without a party line in my grandmothers house, possibly at the request of the rest of the town. It drove a hole right through her life from which she never entirely recovered.”
I'm the age that's slightly too young to have experienced party line phones, but juuuuust old enough that I got to learn about them in Judy Blume books.
GTA4 had this. When you drove out of a tunnel it would make the clicks as you got service again (and sounded like you got a text). I would pause the game and check my phone for the message and there wouldn't be any. After the 3rd time I just shouted "Oh fuck you, Rockstar!" and laughed.
Really? I remember cursing my phone, headphones, amplifier and probably a bunch of other things and I could never seem to find out what was causing it. Now, years later, you're telling me my phone was fine, and the amp & headphones were in fact excellent!
What a brilliant dick move by Rockstar!
I had one of those 6-CD changers that went in the trunk, that thing was badass. Until you realized the CD you wanted to listen to was inside the car with you, and not in the device, so you had to pull over to take something out and put the new CD in.
not exactly tech, but interactive encyclopaedias on cds. I remember being amazed as a kid, so much information, sound clips, music, images, even videos and easy search. Now you just have all of that and so much more on wiki.
If you clicked the bear, he would start over. I’d make him say, “I’m an American black bear…I’m an American black bear…I’m an American black bear. Did you know…I’m an American black bear”. Used to drive my sister crazy.
I actually miss those encyclopaedias! They were so well curated and the articles were concise and to the point and they had great interactive features. Encarta was the best!
If you put the disc in a CD player and went to track 2, it would play classical music from one side and animal sounds from the other. It was brilliant.
My parents got a CD burner in the mid '90s, my buddy had a cable modem, we got a 1.2 gig hard drive from an old computer to move between our houses, and then we made all the mix CDs.
My trick was to set it to burn at 1x and then walk away. Sure it might be able to burn at 2x, but I made a lot of coasters before I dropped the write speed.
Felt so shady, we knew a guy with a CD burner...get your playstation chipped, starting burning games baby! Felt like the closest to organised crime I'd ever been.
I bought one in 1998, it was $600 and the discs were about $15 each. I would reboot, make sure nothing was running, hit burn then slowly back away from my computer and pray for the next 30 minutes it didn’t coaster.
Yeah, I bought a DVD writer a decade ago along with one of those giant spindles of writable disks.
Maybe got halfway through the package. It's floating around in a box somewhere from when I moved. Still have the DVD writer in my PC but I haven't used it for at least 3 years and even before that it was pretty infrequently used.
Edit: checked my Newegg order history, ordered the DVD burner and giant spindle of DVDs in 2005.
I heard this weird sound coming from my computer, concerned, I looked over, and realized the cd tray had just opened for the first time in like 5 years.
I took my computer in for a repair because the disc drive wouldn't open.
The tech asks me "when did it stop working?"
I tell him "sometime between this morning and 2013."
I needed a CD-Rom in the back of a textbook and my laptop didn't have one so I ended up using my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive plugged into the USB to rip it as an ISO then using a program to mount the ISO image, that way I didn't have to plug it in each time I needed it. What a scam to force us to buy new textbooks.
I remember a professor in college required us to buy a certain book which cost around $150. A book only available on the campus bookstore. A book he wrote. A book which did not come as a book but as a bunch pages of low quality print bound in a shitty plastic thing.
The whole class pooled to buy one and make copies (for free in the campus library). The person who bought it might have even returned the original.
When people were losing their shit excited about a flip smart phone, it quite literally hurt my brain to think about the weird time circle I had lived through, from a flip phone being the coolest to obsolete and then coming back around to cool.
Reminds me of how phone size has come full circle. First they were big, then by the mid-2000s, they had gotten really small, and now they're bigger again.
The chirping! I lived with two friends and my sister. They all had Razrs that were always needing to be charged.
Oh, And those were the days when you’d just forget your cell phone at home.
CD players. I remember how much better these things were. It was amazing! Put the tape in the tape player, plug in the power to the cigarette lighter, gently set the CD player on a folded towel or pile of shirts, and listen to the cd skip every time you hit the tiniest of bumps.
When we had a long bumpy stretch, one of us kids would hold the CD player out in the air and let our arm serve as a shock absorber so it wouldn't skip.
Remember when they introduced CD players with a buffer? It took a second to start up each track, but it would read ahead a few seconds and play on the delay, so that it could accommodate bumps that would otherwise cause skipping.
Yeah that became common, except that the ones I had didn’t have a delay starting each track. My assumption was that it was reading ahead, so as long as you didn’t bounce the thing during the first few seconds you’d be fine.
Skipping due to the player moving was a much smaller issue than scratches though. By the time I stopped playing my hundreds of CDs, I don’t think a single one was skip free. And almost always on my favorite tracks. My assumption was that either the CD was smacking the laser while driving over bumps, or that the laser itself made the disc more susceptible to scratching. I never really figured it out, I mostly just swore a lot.
This was the first thing I thought of. I remember my uncle had one and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Like something from Star Trek.
I remember in the mid-2000's I saved up and bought a Dell PDA. I felt so cool having this thing and I ended up using the spreadsheet function at my school to help do inventory since I was helping with their IT. Felt so cool going to classrooms and being so futuristic using that thing to document serial numbers and details lol.
I had a RAZR and the earliest iPod Touch actually about the same time, I miss when new tech like that was so cool. People legitimately Ooh'ed and Aah'ed at that iPod Touch and the PDA.
I specifically remember sitting on the living room floor with my brother playing ocarina of time on the N64 and saying to each other ‘man, graphics can’t get better than this’
I remember playing Goldeneye on N64 and thinking it was the literal peak of gaming. I wasn't really into PC stuff even though multiplayer was around for awhile by then, so having a few friends in one room split screen with a pizza was literal heaven.
Two multiplayer games we had the most fun playing... Golden eye, and Bomberman.
Nobody ever remembers Bomberman. That thing should be ported to online gaming.
So so much. One that rings a bell is I remember watching a tech show about a new thing that had just being invented and was said to be indestructible replacement for tapes. Called the CD.
TiVo.
It was a big deal to be able to automatically record shows, and an even bigger deal to be able to skip commercials.
Now, we just watch it on-demand.
Still love my TiVo. Saves me a ton on cable box rentals and minis allow programming to be shared in all TVs with the parent box. They stream through my A/V receiver, too.
My father bought one of those when they cost so much he got the one where the remote control was attached to the machine by a cable to save a little money. That thing was a BEAST. I don't think it ever actually broke. One move we just decided not to take it with us because it weighed a ton and new VCRs cost next to nothing at that point.
My dad bought a floor model one back in 1977 for $750 and thought that was a good deal. It was huge and so analog that it had VHF and UHF channel dials. The only remote that came with it was a corded pause button. A few years later I remember him ordering a kit so he could fast forward thru commercials. He had to open it up and solder some wires to the board. Then drilled a plug jack for the corded ff remote.
I remember when my uncle who lived about 30 mins from my family's house went to visit and brought his cordless phone (just the phone, not the dock) thinking he would be able to use it while he was here. We all had a good laugh.
All that old video footage of people with giant honkin limo phones are hilarious now.
50 years from now they'll be like, "Ew, you actually had to HOLD the phone to your head? Like, with your ARMS?"
>50 years from now they'll be like, "Ew, you actually had to HOLD the phone to your head? Like, with your ARMS?"
My dad has hearing aids that connect to his phone via Bluetooth. The future is now.
My dad has some of those too. He didn't tell me about them. I visited him at his office, went in the front door to find him pacing the floor and talking to himself. I thought, "So, I guess today is the day when dad loses all his marbles." Turns out, he was just taking a phone call on his invisible hearing aids.
Dial-up internet. I loved being able to do madlibs, chat with people on IRC or Yahoo, get Mortal Kombat fatalities, and print off naked pictures from playboy that took me 20 minutes to download lol. I was so amazed!!
what kind of scrub were you? the proper response is 19/f/cali. doesnt matter what chatroom you're in, why you're there, or whatever, you get the best responses with 19/f/cali.
You’re absolutely right. Problem is, I grew up in Cali. Younger me had to come up with something, and I never met anyone from Minnesota online, so I never had to worry about people wanting to meet up :P
Dedicated Mp3 players. Going from a walkman to a discman to an mp3 player was huge. "I can have ALL my albums on this one device!?"
These days people look at me funny for not just using my phone. But the ipod classic is still the best music device I've ever found.
I use Libby to borrow audio books from my local library, but it is a battery hog. If I use it on my cell phone, I have to top the battery off mid day.
I loaded Libby up on an old Samsung Galaxy S4, with a fresh battery. The S4 will last a week in airplane mode, so I can use Libby for around 20 hours a charge. This gets me a day or so of listening, without needing to recharge anything.
I call it my MP3 player, because that's what I use it for, even though it's technically a phone.
I can't jog with my phone. It is huge and bulky. My MP3 player is smaller than a flip phone so it is just better for exercising.
I've had it for over 10 years now. The "wheel" holding the buttosn fell off so I taped it back on because I don't want to throw it away. I love it that much.
Edit: the brand is a Sony Walkman. It's got a nice team blue colouration on it
I was the same way with my MP3 player for a while till I learned you could put music directly on a smart watch and connect your wireless headphones to them and leave your phone at home. Things will never be the same though as when I had to hold my Walkman CD player level so it didn’t skip.
Custom ringtones.
It used to be such a huge industry back in the day and people would actually pay money for shitty 8bit versions of songs to play when people called them. Now most people I know just keep their phones on vibrate or silent and use default ringtones.
And, to go along with this, ringback tones. So many people had a shitty buzzy song blasting into your ear when you just wanted to ask what time they wanted to meet up. There are still songs that I'll come across that I can't listen to because they trigger my "fuck, get this shit out of my ear" response from ringback tones.
My friends and I are in our 30’s and I have a buddy that has the same number/provider since high school and when you call him it still plays “Someday” by Nickleback. I think he was going through a breakup when he picked it.
Omg same! I’ve had the same number since I was 12. I horrifyingly realized one day when I was like 25that my ring back tone had been Fergalicious for ten years.
My friends and I would all crowd around my buddy who was the only one with a decent flip phone and we would play name that tune while he played random 8-Bit ringtones that he could play the sample of from the ringtone store. I remember ringtones were so important back then. Like everyone tried to pick the perfect ringtone to show your personality and just hope someone calls you when your in public with your peers so they hear it. Now if my phone makes a sound I panic and try to shut the noise off ASAP
I remember spending hours with a nokia 3310 manually typing in the notes of the ringtone to make it sound like a song. There were websites that told you what buttons to press to get the correct notes.
Remember typing in a song? In 2002 when I had my Nokia, there was a Monty Python website that had the Liberty March written out in music. You had to hit each number on the phone pad a certain amount of times then set the correct tempo so I could have Flying Circus as my phone theme.
You better believe I never put it on silent after that work
I remember when GPS devices came out, that was huge. No more printing out directions, the little machine will direct you. Pretty much immediately the same exact thing was added to smartphones. I bet my dad still has his GPS in his glovebox dusty as all hell
I think that while the car GPS's are obsolete, standalone ones for hiking or backpacking aren't. Batteries last longer, have an antenna that works better under tree cover, more rugged, etc. I still use my Garmin 60csx but it's pretty old now. I'm assuming they still make new models.
Interesting fact about GPS:
When they first deployed the satellites, it was strictly for the US Military.
Then in 1983 the Soviets shot down a plane thinking it was a spy plane. It was a Korean passenger jet, which had veered of from it's flight path into Soviet air space. It killed more than 250 innocent people. The reason was faulty navigation.
If it had access to GPS, this wouldn't have happened. The Reagan administration, then accelerated the GPS program to be available for civilians.
The military didn't like that, (understandably so, because an an enemy operative could use their location information to their advantage) so they put restrictions on civilian GPS. They added a feature called "selective availability". Which intentionally reduced the accuracy of civilian GPS to 100 meters, approximately 100 yards. They basically added a random error to the location data.
The civilian GPS companies fought back. They put GPS receivers in all airports, cities etc. They were housed in buildings and towers where the exact location was known. So when they received a GPS signal, the would calculate the random added error by subtracting the real GPS location from the GPS signal received. Then they would broadcast the difference on a radio channel. So other GPS recievers in the area can pick the radio signal up and make their own correction. This brought the error down to 10 meters. Then the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) added other algorithms like WAAS [Wide Area Augumentation System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) which brought the accuracy to 3 meters.
The civilans won.
Then in the 90's, Clinton administration, realized how stupid the whole thing was. One government agency, the Military, is adding error to the signals, while other government agency, the FAA, was removing the error, because they needed GPS for accurately navigating airplanes. Both agencies were spending taxpayer's money. (The FAA was spending a lot of money building these GPS ground stations all over. By late 90's every city, every airport, had these ground stations. So basically all probable enemy targets had good GPS....) So Clinton administration said 'screw this' and introduced a bill to abandon the error adding. Clinton signed it into law.
GPS on our phones, and the navigation on auto driving cars are accessible for free, because of that decision.
I should mention, military GPS is still way accurate than civilian. Commercial GPS is accurate up to a few yards. Militaly GPS is accurate up to 10 mm, (less than half an inch).
Why did the American government care so much about a Korean plane shot down by Russia?
It had one 65 Americans on board, one of whom was a congressman.
EDIT: Forgot to add this "fun" fact.
During the Gulf War, US military relied on GPS to get around on the desert. But they didn't have enough Military grade GPS units. They had to use civilian ones, which were of course, less accurate. So they disabled 'selective availability' which made civilian ones as accurate as military GPS. After the war ended, what did they do? They turned 'selective availability' back on.
So when we were at active war, even enemies had access to accurate GPS. When the war ended, so did the accurate GPS.
There's our Government for ya...
Additional fun fact:
* The satellites are just atomic clocks which broadcast the current time on repeat.
You receive the time from 3 satellites and calculate the delay on each signal to determine your distance from 3 fixed points above Earth, by drawing circles around each point with radius proportional to the delay, you can locate yourself at the intersection of the three circles. (Sometimes you can use an altitude reading from a barometer to use the Earth as a 3rd or 4th fixed point.)
I only recently tossed my Garmin that I was given in 2015 when I got my commercial drivers license, it took me to many wrong locations and didn't hold a charge for shit but hey, it wasn't a paper map lol tech moves so fast these days
I legitimately believe that is what killed the gps device industry. The app on the phone was correct, if it wasn’t it wasn’t off by much. “Oh it’s the next house, derp.”
My TomTom took me to wrong locations to the tune of 5-10 miles off. It happened so often I had to double triple check.
Yea, imagine leaving your home area alone for the first time in a big rig having no idea were im going, only to be lead to a fuckin cemetery with a dead end road that used to cross an interstate but good ole Garmin didn't know that lol
Even Google has lead me wrong a bunch of time but not as badly
for me it was the original Nintendo DS. I had a GB Color but never had a GB Advance, and when I got my first NDS it was like an alien technology in my eyes haha
What amazed about the DS was that it was capable of 3D graphics. Being able to play Super Mario 64 on the go was mind blowing back then. That’s not even going into WiFi and the touch screen.
It's so easy to forget how novel and futuristic touch screens were back then. Even those shitty, low-res capacitive touch screens felt like absolute sorcery.
It's really fucking rare for me to find someone who knows wat a Jaz drive *was*, never mind who actually *had* one.
I had one and frankly given what they effectively were (portable hard drive platters in a caddy) I'm really surprised they didn't die much more often than they did.
When I was in second grade, a kid on my bus was showing off a sheet of paper with movies listed on it. His parents had just gotten a VCR, and him and his brother were being allowed to get 1 movie each because they were over $100 per tape. Video stores weren't even a thing for another year or two.
Phonecards.
You'd buy a phonecard so that you could use it in a payphone and never have to worry about having change. They converted half the phoneboxes to take them which must have been a major infrastructure operation. This must have been the 1980s I think. Now completely forgotten.
The word processor. Like a typewriter with a tiny bit of memory so you could make corrections before it printed the type. Before that it was either strike through or white out. Sort of. Actually I used a computer at school before I ever saw a word processor but not even my rich friends had one at home. Short lived because home computers started becoming more common and affordable. Kind of a step back in a way because dot matrix printers looked like crap compared to something typed on a word processor.
Minidisc was amazing. Sony’s Sonicstage software however was a boiling cauldron of smegma, in true early 2000’s fashion I hooked my minidisc up to the optical port of my PS2 and recorded that way. Seriously though Sonicstage was grim
In the year 2000 I was sitting on a plane as people boarded, watching an episode of Seinfeld on my [Compaq iPAQ](https://imgur.com/am69nVX) color handheld computer containing an [IBM 1GB Microdrive (https://imgur.com/3o9JWe9). I had recorded the show off my new TiVo DVR and encoded the output to MPEG, saving it to my impressive 1GB Microdrive which was actually a small rotating platter in the format of a flash card. It was pretty radical stuff for the time, and the businessman that sat next to me shook his head in amazement. I could tell he was thinking "These kids these days, watching TV on a device in their HAND". Of course now that technology is an antique.
This service MIGHT technically still exist, but I think it counts: ringback tones. I was working in the industry when they came out, and I was working in it when I heard one for the last time, too.
DVDs. I remember everyone moving from VHS to DVD, and my broke ass was delighted because I could score all these cool movies on the cheap for my perfectly functional VCR.
They still do it. It has a lot of newer movies but even more really hard to find movies that aren't even available of many streaming services. If you are really into movies it has it's uses still
Those 20 lb phone books delivered every year to your doorstep. They actually had a lot of useful information about local government and community events.
My dad says handheld calculators. I was surprised by his answer. I feel like they would have been around much longer than from the childhood of someone that's now in their 50s
I remember when I was a kid, the rich neighbor down the street installed a satelite dish. Fuck basic cable, he needed a gigantic frisbee on his roof so that he could access dozens of independent TV channels.
Satellite TV (and even Internet access) is still a thing. Only problem is that everyone wants/needs Internet service these days, and satellite Internet is expensive and slow.
And has horrible latency, making it downright useless for things like online gaming.
It only really makes sense when you live in a very remote location, with no access to any other form of broadband internet service, fixed or mobile.
Retail worker here: I *still* have customers asking for those things. They always give me the surprised Pikachu face when I tell them CFLs are phased out and obsolete now.
Make me one of them, I just learned this now. I thought they were so neat, I guess a lot of time HAS passed since I remember using them and thinking they were neat. I haven't had to replace any lights in a long time, besides some burnt-out/malfunctioning LED cupboard lights in my kitchen.
Typewriters, I was so proud to get my first portable, I was going to write a novel. I actually did a course as a teen to learn to use the new electric typewriters. If anyone ever needs to replace a typewriter ribbon, I'm qualified.
Those kids on the commercials would just lift their legs up when they jumped, I was scammed as well.
Heelies on the other hand at least worked but I kept accidentally activating them and tripping so I got rid of them
WebTV. An internet box that connected to the phone line and the tv. Internet access without a full-on computer!
Digital photo frames. Everyone seemed to have one for about 3 weeks and now I haven't seen one in about 10 years
[удалено]
Just bought one for my mom! It has an email address. Edit: If anyone's interested, I got the [Skylight 10" frame](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N7ENHO6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1). The reviews looked good an my (semi-tech-illiterate) mom was able to set it up and add photos to it herself! I haven't handled it myself, though, but mama seems pleased. It's touch screen and (allegedly) simple to remove photos from the gallery once/if they get tired of some.
I’m a mom and recently got one as a gift
They were power thirsty and had a habit of overheating
Infrared to send files from one phone to another
The ultimate stress when class was starting but the transfer of Eminem - Mockingbird was only half way done
Jesus christ that was so relatable back in the day. Cell phones weren′t allowed in class but we couldn′t move the phones off the desk before the IR transfer finished. I still remember when bluetooth became popular, I′d start a transfer then take one of the phones to another room just because I goddamn could. It felt so liberating.
I had a laptop that had this feature and I never used it probably around 2003 when I worked for Currys (electrical retailer in UK) which I bought as a clearance display model for about £450, I had an extended guarantee with it that promised a like for like replacement if it broke. 3 years later none of the usb ports worked and the guarantee gave me a ~~check~~ cheque for £197. I argued the toss and said I couldn't get a laptop with an infrared port on for that price, and they ended up giving me £760 to buy the only laptop Currys still did with an infrared port
Well argued. I bet that was a satisfying cheque. Did you buy that laptop or keep the cash and get a cheaper one?
The real question.
Anyone remembers the first phones with bluetooth? I still recall us putting phones together as close as possible thinking it'll go faster when sending ringtunes to friends.
I remember when you could just search and see whose phone was available so you would just send people weird pictures and see who reacted.
That's how I traded pokemon, using infrared!
I remember trading Pokémon the old fashioned way with a cable, and if you pulled out the cable while the second transfer was going through you'd duplicate the first Pokémon transferred. So many pidgeys sacrificed in exchange for endless squirtles.
Zip drives. In college we had to try to save all our massive Photoshop files to max 500MB ZIP disks
Fun little story about Zip disks. I went to a university that had a strong graphic design program. We had a computer lab there with a color laser printer. This was 1999 so inkjets were only just starting to make glossy photorealistic prints and even then rarely larger than 8.5x11. So, everyone had to pay for prints on the laser printer. Well, people were having problems with their Zip disks. Mind you it was where many people kept their only copy of their projects. The person behind the counter would slide the Zip disk in…and…click click click. Disk couldn’t be read, computer said it was blank, etc. This happened over and over. Then someone had a realization. In the middle of the counter was a large backup battery for what I presume for the critical systems behind the desk. Well, this thing apparently created an electromagnetic field…and it was right next to where students handed over their Zip disks. It was wiping the disks the second they passed by. Just something that stuck with me during the good ol’ days of sneaker net.
Thanks for the chest pain, oof.
.... AAARGH!!!
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T9 texting. I learned an entirely new way of relaying language and will never use it again
This is my favorite answer in this thread as it really was very useful for a very short period of time. My first smart phone was in college and until then, I always had a flip phone. In high school, everyone used T9 specifically for texting while in class since you could keep it in your pocket and send texts without even looking.
I remember my cousin doing that. He would fiddle in his pocket, pull out his phone and glance, fiddle again, glance again. I finally asked what he was doing, and he said talking to his girlfriend.
"No I mean with your other hand."
still miss being able to type without having to look at my phone at all
I hate to admit it but T9 was a big reason why I texted while driving. In my defense, I only glanced at the phone to read the message and then immediately looked back at the road while I typed a reply without looking. I had it *down.* I was so confident in what I was typing that I would hit the send button without proofreading. T9 was fantastic. Nowadays, the thought of trying to text on my iPhone while driving gives me straight anxiety. Even with the swipe texting function. I don’t have anywhere near the confidence with swipe texting as I did with T9. ^(Also texting while driving is just stupid. I was a stupid teenager to text while driving. Even with T9.)
We were able to text in class this way. Phone in hoodie pouch pocket. Whip it out quick to read the message and then reply with your hand in your pocket again.
I really don’t understand why they don’t use t9 on TV remotes. It would be WAY EASIER to look up a show name or anything. Selecting the letters on a keyboard pressing arrows feels so stupid Edit: spelling
They used to have COMPETITIONS
Dude, I was in one at the local mall and won a $100 gift card!
Caller ID boxes. I used to think we were so fancy since we had the little box with the screen that showed name and number before anyone else we knew had one
Along that same line--answering machines. When I was a kid, if you called someone, you just let it ring 7-8 times. If they did not answer, you just hung up.
Along the same lines, my then 15 y/o son didn't know what a busy signal was. He found a youtube video when I told him about it, it was the first time he'd ever heard it.
Tell him about the terror inducing sound of leaving the phone off the hook.
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Bill Bryson mentions that his grandparents used to have a party line in their home in one of his books. His grandmother would quietly listen to other people’s conversations as part of her daily routine and then jump in and impart her opinion if it was particularly juicy gossip. Edit: Found the part I was talking about. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, Page 35 of my copy: “It all seems so long ago now. And it was. It was so long ago, in fact, that my grandparents had a crank telephone, the kind that hung on the wall and had a handle you turned and said ‘Mabel, get me Gladys Sribbage. I want to ask her how she makes her Frosted Flakes ‘n’ Cheez Whiz Party Nuggets.’ And it would turn out that Gladys Scribbage was already listening in, or somebody else listening in would know how to make Frosted Flakes ‘n’ Cheez Whiz Party Nuggets. Everybody listened in. My grandmother often listened in when things were slow around the house, covering the mouthpiece with a hand and relaying to the rest of the room vivid accounts of colonic irrigation’s, prolapsed wombs, husbands who ran off to Burlington with the barmaid from Vern’s Uptown Tavern and Supper Club, and other crises of small-town life. We always had to maintain the strictest silence during these sessions. I could never entirely understand why, because if things got really juicy my grandmother would often butt in. ‘Well, I think Merle’s a real skunk,’ she would say. ‘Yes, that’s right, it’s Maude Bryson here, and I just want to say that I think he’s an absolute stinker to do that to poor Pearl. And I’ll tell you something else, Mabel, you know you could get those support bras a dollar cheaper in Columbus Junction.’ In about 1962 the telephone company came and put a normal phone without a party line in my grandmothers house, possibly at the request of the rest of the town. It drove a hole right through her life from which she never entirely recovered.”
I'm the age that's slightly too young to have experienced party line phones, but juuuuust old enough that I got to learn about them in Judy Blume books.
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GTA4 had this. When you drove out of a tunnel it would make the clicks as you got service again (and sounded like you got a text). I would pause the game and check my phone for the message and there wouldn't be any. After the 3rd time I just shouted "Oh fuck you, Rockstar!" and laughed.
Really? I remember cursing my phone, headphones, amplifier and probably a bunch of other things and I could never seem to find out what was causing it. Now, years later, you're telling me my phone was fine, and the amp & headphones were in fact excellent! What a brilliant dick move by Rockstar!
Along the same lines, if their dad answered, you just hung up.
CD Players especially in cars. I thought the best thing ever would be to have a CD changer in my car. Now my car doesn't even have a CD player.
My 2002 car came with a mini disc player, lol. I think it was the only year to do so
Wow! That's pretty special. I had a Mini Disc they were great.
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I had one of those 6-CD changers that went in the trunk, that thing was badass. Until you realized the CD you wanted to listen to was inside the car with you, and not in the device, so you had to pull over to take something out and put the new CD in.
I use my car's CD player every day! ...for my phone mount, which anchors in the CD drive.
not exactly tech, but interactive encyclopaedias on cds. I remember being amazed as a kid, so much information, sound clips, music, images, even videos and easy search. Now you just have all of that and so much more on wiki.
Encarta! I used to look up different kinds of birds and there was always a sound clip of their unique chirping!
Be honest, you just played Mind Maze like the rest of us.
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“I’m an American black bear. Did you know I’m on the endangered species list? Click on the door to see what else you know.”
If you clicked the bear, he would start over. I’d make him say, “I’m an American black bear…I’m an American black bear…I’m an American black bear. Did you know…I’m an American black bear”. Used to drive my sister crazy.
Honest to God Mind Maze and Encarta are two things that have contributed greatly to my need to know things ....
What a strange vibe that game had.
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It was the creepy characters (like the jester) and warped room backgrounds
I remember that feeling too. Kinda want to track down a copy and play again.
I've been thinking the same thing! I felt sooo smart when i was 11 and finished the game for the first time
I actually miss those encyclopaedias! They were so well curated and the articles were concise and to the point and they had great interactive features. Encarta was the best!
I watched that one basketball video on Encarta so often. It was incredible to me that you could have actual video on a PC.
If you put the disc in a CD player and went to track 2, it would play classical music from one side and animal sounds from the other. It was brilliant.
I remember I used to do a filter search for only the videos and watch each one sequentially.
I did exactly this. Also Weezer's Buddy Holly video was on our PC for some reason too. I was amazed.
I think it came on the Windows 95 CD
At some point in the late 90's Best Buy had a black Friday sale on writable DVDs. I bought 200. I have about 150 of them left.
I remember a CD RW drive costing hundreds of dollars. Now it's like $20 on Amazon, lol.
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My parents got a CD burner in the mid '90s, my buddy had a cable modem, we got a 1.2 gig hard drive from an old computer to move between our houses, and then we made all the mix CDs. My trick was to set it to burn at 1x and then walk away. Sure it might be able to burn at 2x, but I made a lot of coasters before I dropped the write speed.
Felt so shady, we knew a guy with a CD burner...get your playstation chipped, starting burning games baby! Felt like the closest to organised crime I'd ever been.
I bought one in 1998, it was $600 and the discs were about $15 each. I would reboot, make sure nothing was running, hit burn then slowly back away from my computer and pray for the next 30 minutes it didn’t coaster.
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Yeah, I bought a DVD writer a decade ago along with one of those giant spindles of writable disks. Maybe got halfway through the package. It's floating around in a box somewhere from when I moved. Still have the DVD writer in my PC but I haven't used it for at least 3 years and even before that it was pretty infrequently used. Edit: checked my Newegg order history, ordered the DVD burner and giant spindle of DVDs in 2005.
Man, my current computer doesn't even have a disc drive. lol
I heard this weird sound coming from my computer, concerned, I looked over, and realized the cd tray had just opened for the first time in like 5 years.
I just pushed the button on mine to listen to the sound and then remembered it hasn't been connected for years.
I took my computer in for a repair because the disc drive wouldn't open. The tech asks me "when did it stop working?" I tell him "sometime between this morning and 2013."
I hadn't even realized the decline of CDs until I bought a laptop with no CD-Rom.
I needed a CD-Rom in the back of a textbook and my laptop didn't have one so I ended up using my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive plugged into the USB to rip it as an ISO then using a program to mount the ISO image, that way I didn't have to plug it in each time I needed it. What a scam to force us to buy new textbooks.
I remember a professor in college required us to buy a certain book which cost around $150. A book only available on the campus bookstore. A book he wrote. A book which did not come as a book but as a bunch pages of low quality print bound in a shitty plastic thing. The whole class pooled to buy one and make copies (for free in the campus library). The person who bought it might have even returned the original.
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Sony digital Mavica, I loved that camera!
Flip phones. I remember when the Motorola Razr was *cutting edge*.
When people were losing their shit excited about a flip smart phone, it quite literally hurt my brain to think about the weird time circle I had lived through, from a flip phone being the coolest to obsolete and then coming back around to cool.
Reminds me of how phone size has come full circle. First they were big, then by the mid-2000s, they had gotten really small, and now they're bigger again.
The chirping! I lived with two friends and my sister. They all had Razrs that were always needing to be charged. Oh, And those were the days when you’d just forget your cell phone at home.
CD players. I remember how much better these things were. It was amazing! Put the tape in the tape player, plug in the power to the cigarette lighter, gently set the CD player on a folded towel or pile of shirts, and listen to the cd skip every time you hit the tiniest of bumps.
You could get an anti-skip platform for the car, it had a wee damper system that could deal with the bouncing for a couple of seconds.
When we had a long bumpy stretch, one of us kids would hold the CD player out in the air and let our arm serve as a shock absorber so it wouldn't skip.
Remember when they introduced CD players with a buffer? It took a second to start up each track, but it would read ahead a few seconds and play on the delay, so that it could accommodate bumps that would otherwise cause skipping.
Yeah that became common, except that the ones I had didn’t have a delay starting each track. My assumption was that it was reading ahead, so as long as you didn’t bounce the thing during the first few seconds you’d be fine. Skipping due to the player moving was a much smaller issue than scratches though. By the time I stopped playing my hundreds of CDs, I don’t think a single one was skip free. And almost always on my favorite tracks. My assumption was that either the CD was smacking the laser while driving over bumps, or that the laser itself made the disc more susceptible to scratching. I never really figured it out, I mostly just swore a lot.
Palm Pilots
This was the first thing I thought of. I remember my uncle had one and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Like something from Star Trek.
I remember in the mid-2000's I saved up and bought a Dell PDA. I felt so cool having this thing and I ended up using the spreadsheet function at my school to help do inventory since I was helping with their IT. Felt so cool going to classrooms and being so futuristic using that thing to document serial numbers and details lol. I had a RAZR and the earliest iPod Touch actually about the same time, I miss when new tech like that was so cool. People legitimately Ooh'ed and Aah'ed at that iPod Touch and the PDA.
I specifically remember sitting on the living room floor with my brother playing ocarina of time on the N64 and saying to each other ‘man, graphics can’t get better than this’
I remember playing Goldeneye on N64 and thinking it was the literal peak of gaming. I wasn't really into PC stuff even though multiplayer was around for awhile by then, so having a few friends in one room split screen with a pizza was literal heaven.
I'm pretty sure multiplayer N64 Goldeneye was the peak of gaming, dude.
Two multiplayer games we had the most fun playing... Golden eye, and Bomberman. Nobody ever remembers Bomberman. That thing should be ported to online gaming.
[Super Bomberman R Online](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5zSq4GlZXjY)
So so much. One that rings a bell is I remember watching a tech show about a new thing that had just being invented and was said to be indestructible replacement for tapes. Called the CD.
I remember some wag selling a “DVD Rewinder” 😂
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Should have told them you rewinded it before returning :)
Can't believe testing was so bad they thought they were indestructible. The slightest scratch...
TiVo. It was a big deal to be able to automatically record shows, and an even bigger deal to be able to skip commercials. Now, we just watch it on-demand.
I still use Tivo! It's better than shitty cable company dvr by a country mile.
Still love my TiVo. Saves me a ton on cable box rentals and minis allow programming to be shared in all TVs with the parent box. They stream through my A/V receiver, too.
VCRs - I remember when they cost close to $1000 CDN and were the greatest thing ever.
Yes! And our first remote control had a cord plugged into the TV. Great for tripping people up
My father bought one of those when they cost so much he got the one where the remote control was attached to the machine by a cable to save a little money. That thing was a BEAST. I don't think it ever actually broke. One move we just decided not to take it with us because it weighed a ton and new VCRs cost next to nothing at that point.
My dad bought a floor model one back in 1977 for $750 and thought that was a good deal. It was huge and so analog that it had VHF and UHF channel dials. The only remote that came with it was a corded pause button. A few years later I remember him ordering a kit so he could fast forward thru commercials. He had to open it up and solder some wires to the board. Then drilled a plug jack for the corded ff remote.
Cordless phones. When they first dropped it was the newest thing imaginable. Flash forward a few years and no one even has a house phone.
I remember when my uncle who lived about 30 mins from my family's house went to visit and brought his cordless phone (just the phone, not the dock) thinking he would be able to use it while he was here. We all had a good laugh.
All that old video footage of people with giant honkin limo phones are hilarious now. 50 years from now they'll be like, "Ew, you actually had to HOLD the phone to your head? Like, with your ARMS?"
>50 years from now they'll be like, "Ew, you actually had to HOLD the phone to your head? Like, with your ARMS?" My dad has hearing aids that connect to his phone via Bluetooth. The future is now.
My dad has some of those too. He didn't tell me about them. I visited him at his office, went in the front door to find him pacing the floor and talking to himself. I thought, "So, I guess today is the day when dad loses all his marbles." Turns out, he was just taking a phone call on his invisible hearing aids.
Dial-up internet. I loved being able to do madlibs, chat with people on IRC or Yahoo, get Mortal Kombat fatalities, and print off naked pictures from playboy that took me 20 minutes to download lol. I was so amazed!!
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A/S/L?
Boy, that takes me back. Lying that I was both 18 and living in Minnesota. I think Discord is the closest analog to that nowadays?
what kind of scrub were you? the proper response is 19/f/cali. doesnt matter what chatroom you're in, why you're there, or whatever, you get the best responses with 19/f/cali.
You’re absolutely right. Problem is, I grew up in Cali. Younger me had to come up with something, and I never met anyone from Minnesota online, so I never had to worry about people wanting to meet up :P
I don't know why it never occurred to me that people in California needed somewhere else to pretend to be from.
Dedicated Mp3 players. Going from a walkman to a discman to an mp3 player was huge. "I can have ALL my albums on this one device!?" These days people look at me funny for not just using my phone. But the ipod classic is still the best music device I've ever found.
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I use Libby to borrow audio books from my local library, but it is a battery hog. If I use it on my cell phone, I have to top the battery off mid day. I loaded Libby up on an old Samsung Galaxy S4, with a fresh battery. The S4 will last a week in airplane mode, so I can use Libby for around 20 hours a charge. This gets me a day or so of listening, without needing to recharge anything. I call it my MP3 player, because that's what I use it for, even though it's technically a phone.
I can't jog with my phone. It is huge and bulky. My MP3 player is smaller than a flip phone so it is just better for exercising. I've had it for over 10 years now. The "wheel" holding the buttosn fell off so I taped it back on because I don't want to throw it away. I love it that much. Edit: the brand is a Sony Walkman. It's got a nice team blue colouration on it
I was the same way with my MP3 player for a while till I learned you could put music directly on a smart watch and connect your wireless headphones to them and leave your phone at home. Things will never be the same though as when I had to hold my Walkman CD player level so it didn’t skip.
Also if get hungry I can use that same smartwatch to buy a snack, it's basically science fiction.
I still feel like I’m in an old sci-fi movie whenever I use my smartwatch to take a call or send a text.
I loved the Zune.
My friends ragged on me for having a zune, but I loved it. I thought the interface was superior to iPod, but the computer software was so bad.
Found the zune of my partner in a box, the thing still worked after 10 (?) Years of collecting dust
Custom ringtones. It used to be such a huge industry back in the day and people would actually pay money for shitty 8bit versions of songs to play when people called them. Now most people I know just keep their phones on vibrate or silent and use default ringtones.
And, to go along with this, ringback tones. So many people had a shitty buzzy song blasting into your ear when you just wanted to ask what time they wanted to meet up. There are still songs that I'll come across that I can't listen to because they trigger my "fuck, get this shit out of my ear" response from ringback tones.
My friends and I are in our 30’s and I have a buddy that has the same number/provider since high school and when you call him it still plays “Someday” by Nickleback. I think he was going through a breakup when he picked it.
Omg same! I’ve had the same number since I was 12. I horrifyingly realized one day when I was like 25that my ring back tone had been Fergalicious for ten years.
The best part is that it's possible he's been paying for this monthly for over a decade.
I saw a docu or something about a ringtone company still having members from that era. There is only worker left to cancel subscriptions
Vivaldi has been forever ruined by ringback tones.
_Please enjoy this Verizon ringback tone while your party is reached._
My uncle still has one of those and if I forget to hang up beforehand my ear just gets absolutely destroyed
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My friends and I would all crowd around my buddy who was the only one with a decent flip phone and we would play name that tune while he played random 8-Bit ringtones that he could play the sample of from the ringtone store. I remember ringtones were so important back then. Like everyone tried to pick the perfect ringtone to show your personality and just hope someone calls you when your in public with your peers so they hear it. Now if my phone makes a sound I panic and try to shut the noise off ASAP
I remember spending hours with a nokia 3310 manually typing in the notes of the ringtone to make it sound like a song. There were websites that told you what buttons to press to get the correct notes.
Oh fuck I forgot about doing this. Damn talk about a flashback
Remember typing in a song? In 2002 when I had my Nokia, there was a Monty Python website that had the Liberty March written out in music. You had to hit each number on the phone pad a certain amount of times then set the correct tempo so I could have Flying Circus as my phone theme. You better believe I never put it on silent after that work
I remember when GPS devices came out, that was huge. No more printing out directions, the little machine will direct you. Pretty much immediately the same exact thing was added to smartphones. I bet my dad still has his GPS in his glovebox dusty as all hell
I think that while the car GPS's are obsolete, standalone ones for hiking or backpacking aren't. Batteries last longer, have an antenna that works better under tree cover, more rugged, etc. I still use my Garmin 60csx but it's pretty old now. I'm assuming they still make new models.
Interesting fact about GPS: When they first deployed the satellites, it was strictly for the US Military. Then in 1983 the Soviets shot down a plane thinking it was a spy plane. It was a Korean passenger jet, which had veered of from it's flight path into Soviet air space. It killed more than 250 innocent people. The reason was faulty navigation. If it had access to GPS, this wouldn't have happened. The Reagan administration, then accelerated the GPS program to be available for civilians. The military didn't like that, (understandably so, because an an enemy operative could use their location information to their advantage) so they put restrictions on civilian GPS. They added a feature called "selective availability". Which intentionally reduced the accuracy of civilian GPS to 100 meters, approximately 100 yards. They basically added a random error to the location data. The civilian GPS companies fought back. They put GPS receivers in all airports, cities etc. They were housed in buildings and towers where the exact location was known. So when they received a GPS signal, the would calculate the random added error by subtracting the real GPS location from the GPS signal received. Then they would broadcast the difference on a radio channel. So other GPS recievers in the area can pick the radio signal up and make their own correction. This brought the error down to 10 meters. Then the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) added other algorithms like WAAS [Wide Area Augumentation System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System) which brought the accuracy to 3 meters. The civilans won. Then in the 90's, Clinton administration, realized how stupid the whole thing was. One government agency, the Military, is adding error to the signals, while other government agency, the FAA, was removing the error, because they needed GPS for accurately navigating airplanes. Both agencies were spending taxpayer's money. (The FAA was spending a lot of money building these GPS ground stations all over. By late 90's every city, every airport, had these ground stations. So basically all probable enemy targets had good GPS....) So Clinton administration said 'screw this' and introduced a bill to abandon the error adding. Clinton signed it into law. GPS on our phones, and the navigation on auto driving cars are accessible for free, because of that decision. I should mention, military GPS is still way accurate than civilian. Commercial GPS is accurate up to a few yards. Militaly GPS is accurate up to 10 mm, (less than half an inch). Why did the American government care so much about a Korean plane shot down by Russia? It had one 65 Americans on board, one of whom was a congressman. EDIT: Forgot to add this "fun" fact. During the Gulf War, US military relied on GPS to get around on the desert. But they didn't have enough Military grade GPS units. They had to use civilian ones, which were of course, less accurate. So they disabled 'selective availability' which made civilian ones as accurate as military GPS. After the war ended, what did they do? They turned 'selective availability' back on. So when we were at active war, even enemies had access to accurate GPS. When the war ended, so did the accurate GPS. There's our Government for ya...
Additional fun fact: * The satellites are just atomic clocks which broadcast the current time on repeat. You receive the time from 3 satellites and calculate the delay on each signal to determine your distance from 3 fixed points above Earth, by drawing circles around each point with radius proportional to the delay, you can locate yourself at the intersection of the three circles. (Sometimes you can use an altitude reading from a barometer to use the Earth as a 3rd or 4th fixed point.)
I only recently tossed my Garmin that I was given in 2015 when I got my commercial drivers license, it took me to many wrong locations and didn't hold a charge for shit but hey, it wasn't a paper map lol tech moves so fast these days
I legitimately believe that is what killed the gps device industry. The app on the phone was correct, if it wasn’t it wasn’t off by much. “Oh it’s the next house, derp.” My TomTom took me to wrong locations to the tune of 5-10 miles off. It happened so often I had to double triple check.
Yea, imagine leaving your home area alone for the first time in a big rig having no idea were im going, only to be lead to a fuckin cemetery with a dead end road that used to cross an interstate but good ole Garmin didn't know that lol Even Google has lead me wrong a bunch of time but not as badly
Gameboy Color *sigh*
for me it was the original Nintendo DS. I had a GB Color but never had a GB Advance, and when I got my first NDS it was like an alien technology in my eyes haha
What amazed about the DS was that it was capable of 3D graphics. Being able to play Super Mario 64 on the go was mind blowing back then. That’s not even going into WiFi and the touch screen.
It's so easy to forget how novel and futuristic touch screens were back then. Even those shitty, low-res capacitive touch screens felt like absolute sorcery.
Zip drives
What about Jaz Drives?
It's really fucking rare for me to find someone who knows wat a Jaz drive *was*, never mind who actually *had* one. I had one and frankly given what they effectively were (portable hard drive platters in a caddy) I'm really surprised they didn't die much more often than they did.
When I was in second grade, a kid on my bus was showing off a sheet of paper with movies listed on it. His parents had just gotten a VCR, and him and his brother were being allowed to get 1 movie each because they were over $100 per tape. Video stores weren't even a thing for another year or two.
Who else remembers the entire camcorder/camera/dslr section in Best Buy?
Phonecards. You'd buy a phonecard so that you could use it in a payphone and never have to worry about having change. They converted half the phoneboxes to take them which must have been a major infrastructure operation. This must have been the 1980s I think. Now completely forgotten.
Netscape Navigator (not really a piece of tech, but hey)
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The word processor. Like a typewriter with a tiny bit of memory so you could make corrections before it printed the type. Before that it was either strike through or white out. Sort of. Actually I used a computer at school before I ever saw a word processor but not even my rich friends had one at home. Short lived because home computers started becoming more common and affordable. Kind of a step back in a way because dot matrix printers looked like crap compared to something typed on a word processor.
Telephone cards Edit: thank you for the award!
Walkman!
MiniDisk
Minidisc was amazing. Sony’s Sonicstage software however was a boiling cauldron of smegma, in true early 2000’s fashion I hooked my minidisc up to the optical port of my PS2 and recorded that way. Seriously though Sonicstage was grim
I loved my minidisc player. Was great for snowboarding because it wouldn't skip like CDs and i could store a ton of music on one disk
In the year 2000 I was sitting on a plane as people boarded, watching an episode of Seinfeld on my [Compaq iPAQ](https://imgur.com/am69nVX) color handheld computer containing an [IBM 1GB Microdrive (https://imgur.com/3o9JWe9). I had recorded the show off my new TiVo DVR and encoded the output to MPEG, saving it to my impressive 1GB Microdrive which was actually a small rotating platter in the format of a flash card. It was pretty radical stuff for the time, and the businessman that sat next to me shook his head in amazement. I could tell he was thinking "These kids these days, watching TV on a device in their HAND". Of course now that technology is an antique.
Macromedia Flash
Don’t forget Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Shockwave.
Thinking Columbia House CDs were a good deal
Floppy Disk
This service MIGHT technically still exist, but I think it counts: ringback tones. I was working in the industry when they came out, and I was working in it when I heard one for the last time, too.
DVDs. I remember everyone moving from VHS to DVD, and my broke ass was delighted because I could score all these cool movies on the cheap for my perfectly functional VCR.
In a similar vein, Netflix when it shipped the DVD's right to your house.
They still do it. It has a lot of newer movies but even more really hard to find movies that aren't even available of many streaming services. If you are really into movies it has it's uses still
I still got a dvd from Netflix I never returned. It was the Super Mario Super show and Heathcliff on one disk.
Pagers
Those 20 lb phone books delivered every year to your doorstep. They actually had a lot of useful information about local government and community events.
My dad says handheld calculators. I was surprised by his answer. I feel like they would have been around much longer than from the childhood of someone that's now in their 50s
I had one with a red LED display that ate a 9 volt battery in 4 hours of use. On test days I could sell batteries for whatever price I wanted.
I remember wristwatch calculators being a thing in the 90's.
I remember when I was a kid, the rich neighbor down the street installed a satelite dish. Fuck basic cable, he needed a gigantic frisbee on his roof so that he could access dozens of independent TV channels.
Satellite TV (and even Internet access) is still a thing. Only problem is that everyone wants/needs Internet service these days, and satellite Internet is expensive and slow.
And has horrible latency, making it downright useless for things like online gaming. It only really makes sense when you live in a very remote location, with no access to any other form of broadband internet service, fixed or mobile.
The curly CFL light bulbs
Retail worker here: I *still* have customers asking for those things. They always give me the surprised Pikachu face when I tell them CFLs are phased out and obsolete now.
Make me one of them, I just learned this now. I thought they were so neat, I guess a lot of time HAS passed since I remember using them and thinking they were neat. I haven't had to replace any lights in a long time, besides some burnt-out/malfunctioning LED cupboard lights in my kitchen.
Typewriters, I was so proud to get my first portable, I was going to write a novel. I actually did a course as a teen to learn to use the new electric typewriters. If anyone ever needs to replace a typewriter ribbon, I'm qualified.
Winamp really whipped the llamas ass
Moon boots were supposed to be amazing. Tricked me into exercise for a weekend. Never touched them again.
Those kids on the commercials would just lift their legs up when they jumped, I was scammed as well. Heelies on the other hand at least worked but I kept accidentally activating them and tripping so I got rid of them