Obsolete Things You're Glad You Don't See Anymore

[BP]

Sometimes it surprises me how many of these I can think of. It's alarming to have "When I was your age, we had [thing] and it sucked" stories and to have told them. I can't be that old...

-Tags on T-shirts. These aren't actually completely gone, I guess, but I haven't owned a T-shirt with a tag for a long time and I am eternally grateful to whoever decided to start printing the shirt info on the inside of the shirt.

-VHS. Rewinding, the amount of space a tape took, the fragility of the things, my god. If all VHS tapes and VCRs vanished suddenly, they would not be missed.

-Disposable cameras. I seem to remember dozens of these things lying around my house when I was little, used up, and never being taken to the 1-hour photo.

[Suffix]

- All manner of floppy magnetic storage devices, and to an extent, removable optical storage devices. Goodness knows how many 3.5 inch floppies I had as a kid (I recall finding one under a desk a few years ago labeled "World Domination Plans"), but today? We just email stuff to ourselves, or toss it in "the cloud."

- Speaking of email and clouds and whatnot, DIAL-UP. Takes up the phone line, makes a racket, and slow as molasses. Not that America's "broadband" is that much better. Six times as fast as not fast can hardly be thought of as fast.

[PaperLuigi]

What can I say, everyone hated dial-up. The fact that you couldn't browse the internet and use a landline phone at the same time was so irritating and inconvenient.

...oh wait, those are kind of going the way of the dodo too, eh?

[BriGuy92]

If all VHS tapes and VCRs vanished suddenly, they would not be missed.

I was over a friend's house not too long ago, and we decided to explore his basement. In the basement, we found a whole ton of old anime VHS tapes that looked spectacularly awful. We decided that we're going to take a day during Christmas break and watch all of them. So, we're a small set of people who actually would miss VHS tapes if they vanished.

As for a thing that I don't miss, I'm gonna actually go with something similar to that: cassette tapes. Difficult to pick the song you want to hear, act funny if the weather's too hot, and they degrade in quality astonishingly quickly.

[ShadowBrain]

Does HD-DVD count? I laugh in the face of every chump who bought either a Blu-Ray or an HD-DVD player before that little war was over. Then again, if nobody bought either, they'd never have found out which was most popular....

[Bigluigifan1.0]

I remember that, we stayed out of it because it was so expensive, and knew at least one was going to die out completely.

And still, the only real Blu-Ray player we own is a PS3, because a guy gave it to us as collateral for borrowing/buying something from my dad; guess who's still got it? Pretty happy that we basically got that thing for free.

[Suffix]

Selling the PS3 at a loss really helped advance the cause of Blu-ray, it seems. On Facebook, I once bemoaned the fact I would never own the HD version of Shadow of the Colossus as I did not own a PS3, and to my astonishment, a relative of mine came out and pointed out that she purchased a PS3 because it was cheaper than similar Blu-ray, and indeed, HD-DVD players. An isolated incident to be sure, but it's easy to imagine it occurring.

- Chalkboards. Messy, noisy, usually only one color.

[Weegee]

Threads like these.

I kid, I kid.

Do non-laptop computers count? The only people I know who still use them are old and/or poor.

EDIT: Since when have spoilers been disabled?

[WarpRattler]

I guess I'm old and/or poor, then, because I use a desktop.

I also currently have about a hundred and fifty Firefox tabs open, am watching some friends play Dota 2 through the standard game client, am running KVIrc with connections to five networks, and have MAME and Procaster running in the background so I can stream Fantasy Zone after the Dota 2 match is over.

[Toad]

If I may point out: disposable cameras still exist. We usually buy some around special event times (birthdays, holidays, memorable such things..) It's a hassle to have seven different people take pictures with their own cameras, and then attempt to get them all to give up all the pictures they took.. but anyway..

- Giant sized cell phones: imagine walking down the street, talking into something the size of a brick (and possibly weighs just as much). I am glad for the down-sizing of cell phones (I hate the fact that people on their phones ignore the rest of the world, but that's for a different topic..)

[Luigison]

I wish I could remember the title of the Ted Talk where the presenter showed that everything we think of as obsolete is still made and used somewhere. 

[MEGAߥTE]

And every sports team who lost a championship actually won in third world countries.

[Ym9iYnlzcTEzMzc equalsign]

Threads like these.

I kid, I kid.

Do non-laptop computers count? The only people I know who still use them are old and/or poor.

EDIT: Since when have spoilers been disabled?

I think it's your browser.
they work for me

[Luigison]

Spoilers didn't work for me in Chrome, but it was due to an extension.  I don't recall which one though. 

[Luigison]

I just noticed the following attached image in my Microsoft Outlook 2010.