Rants and Chants

After reading Gadget Graveyard: 10 Technologies About to Go Extinct at FoxNews, I had the following thoughts:

1. Landline phones: The highly unlikely scenario leaves me to wonder… but what happens when you dial 911 and can’t speak? Unless your cell can provide your location, going without a landline seems somehow riskier. Moreover, you will always have to keep your cell charged — and remember where you left the damnably small thing.
2. Floppy disks: I migrated off these almost a decade ago, burning every one of them to CD-Rs. I’ve been trying to migrate off of CD-Rs and onto a large external hard drive, with backup to DVD-Rs. All that said, I still have every e-mail, every Word doc, PDF, spreadsheet, photo, mp3, video, or any other files I’ve generated going all the way back to 1991. In addition, I have archives of most of the Web sites I’ve worked on.
3. Wristwatches:: I miss my Casio G-Shock. A glance at my wrist is still faster than fumbling for my cell phone in its holster. Moreover, my G-Shock had a 7-year battery life, while my cell has only 3 days in stand-by mode. I do still own a wind-up watch in an emergency bag, in case the eschatologists are right.
4. VHS tape and VCRs: Ah, fond memories of trekking down to South Broadway, in the snow, to rent a VCR and some tapes and then trek back, in the snow. I have fond memories of discovering unusual tapes to rent — and not so fond memories of 6 weeks working at a horrible video store. Arduous memories of having to buy scores of DVDs to replace the scores of VHS tapes I bought. Now I am left with a small pile of aging VHS tapes I need to digitize at some point.
5. Beepers: The prelude of the obnoxious cell phone era. A minister in Saratoga had one and seemed like the most pompous ass I had ever met when he had to cut short visiting my grandmother when it beeped right when he arrived at her hospital bedside. Maybe it was God?
6. Film cameras: While I am blown away by the thought of someday replacing my Nikon n8008 with a Nikon D700 or D3, I find this loss the second-most-painful. To really learn and internalize photographic principles, you had to keep track of how you took each photo, so that you could remember when you saw the developed result hours or days later. Moreover, I am still awed by the color, clarity, and tone of Kodachrome. Paul Simon will never sing a song about SD memory cards or ink jet printers. In addition, I loved the smell of the chemicals and the feel of the developing prints as they moved from tray to tray. Digital is so much cleaner, easier, and reliable, but film was magic.
7. Typewriters: This is the first-most-painful loss from this list. No, I do not lament the painful fingers I got from learning to type on a manual typewriter. However, I do miss the hum and warmth of my two Smith-Coronas. As with film photography, you had to know how to spell and had to know your grammar to get it right the first time on a typewriter. Moreover, seeing the pages of my first novel stack up on my desk was a better visceral measure of my progress than Microsoft Word’s status bar reporting some number of pages. Moreover, the freaking Internet wasn’t an omnipresent distraction from my writing. I had to budget my research time for library trips. Now, I go to look up one thing and find myself drawn into grazing through links into tangential topics.
8. The Walkman, Discman and MiniDisc player: I owned a knock-off called a Kasuga, from DAK Industries’ mail order catalog. It had AM/FM and cassette — and could record! It lasted until just a few days off warranty. I still prefer CDs to MP3s — because CDs do offer uncompressed sound quality and we’ve forgotten all about the quality of our music listening in our hectic, ever portable lives. I’d rather sit still in front of an audiophile component stereo system, really think about the lyrics, and feel the emotional contour of the melody, thank you.
9. Dial-up Internet access: Another thing I left behind almost a decade ago — and with no regrets. Well, broadband does offer that distraction of being “always on,” so you can always be sucked into the Web, instead of doing other things. Come to think of it, dial-up made you think about whether and when you went on and how long you stayed — or sometimes it forced you off, which might have been what you needed.
10. DVDs: See VHS tapes, above. Now that I have bought the entire James Bond library on VHS and then on DVD, I will now have to buy it yet again on Blu-ray — and in another 10 years, it will probably be available in Hi-Def via online streaming, anytime, anywhere, for a dollar or two per play.

To the list above, I would add:

• CRT displays, whether tube televisions or computer monitors
• Incandescent lighting
• Newspapers
• PDAs – as standalone devices without an integrated cell phone
• Paper checks
• Audio cassettes
• Snail mail, especially letters and greeting cards
• And quite probably Humans someday — maybe soon, if we don’t get our act together

I just hope books are never obsolete.