What obsolete or dying technology do you still own/use?

MadsL wrote: »

Old school is generally got-it-right school.

In quite a number of things yea I'd agree M. Quality was often higher. The beauty of today is with ebay and the net and many if not most wanting the latest greatest you can pick up serious bargains on the old top end stuff. Stuff that was craaaaazy money back in the day.

Me I'm a terrible Luddite in a few areas. My car is 15 years old and the height of it's engine management system is a hamster in a wheel. I regularly use a 2000 mac powerbook G3(looks like batmans laptop). Why? well it runs waaaay cooler, is perfectly fine for most everyday stuff and with two (13 year old original)batteries on board will run for nigh on 8 hours off a charge. Built in wifi, firewire, USB, trackpad of course. Stuck a gig of ram in it(which it can take. IIRC it only came with 6 mbs from the factory) and a 120gb hard drive. Even modded a more up to date CD/DVD writer to work in it. Nice keyboard too. Damned impressive for a PC made at the turn of the century. Runs the later MacOS 10.4 slick as you like. Back in those far off days when Apple though pricey actually made a superior and scalable product for that price. TBH if I could update the piss poor by todays standards video card/ram I'd likely use it near exclusively.

My pocket calculator should I need one I bought in 1982. My watches modernise out at late 60's and one I wear regularly first started ticking in 1916. Furniture wise I got one going back to the late 17th century.

Actually on that score I had a kinda surreal and "modern" moment years back. I was looking for a chest of drawers and happened to be meeting an ex near a salubrious shop that sold modern stuff. She was late. Well... anyway I went in and looked around and this salesguy put the pitch on me on a repro Georgian chest of drawers. Looked old, handmade apparently, but with modern tools etc. OK sez I how much. Well the figure that came out was about a third more than I could have bought an original Georgian one. I pointed this out and his reply with a straight face was "oh well it wouldn't be as well made as this one and it wouldn't come with a two year warranty". Eh a real one has been doing it's thing for two centuries plus, so I doubt it's gonna suddenly fall asunder Ted.

When I used to fly fish I used an old style silk line(and often a bamboo cane rod), rather than the modern synthetics. Basically because it was superior in near every respect, but required more care. And the oldest tech -and I think I have ye all beat on this one - when I fished I used to use a Irish neolithic flint blade I had found to cut my line when needed. I do have a couple of Neandertal and earlier handaxes, but haven't found a use for them yet. The fcukers are still sharp enough so you never know... :pac:

I reckon the coolest thing about today is you can if you want mix the best of old and new in any set of flavours you want. In the past that was a lot more difficult. We have all got so many cool choices that folks of even 20 years ago didn't have, or they'd have to really look for it.

PS my tumble dryer which works like a fcuking boss was bought in 1977. IT may kill polar bears, but it really dries clothes.

princess-lala wrote: »

Only you Wibbsy

True LaLa. So True. :D

Has it ever given you trouble?

Once or twice, but a quick breakout of spanners, strong tea and ciggies and within the hour it was running again. I've replaced the belts back in the early 90's and the motor brushes about the same time. Then in the mid noughties the setting wheel went pete tong, but a quick fooster and it was good to go again.

Thats the thing, before the era of integrated circuits and stuff, often where they really weren't needed, many items were repairable and much more modular. Now we tend to think of replacement, rather than repair. We're all hippies dutifully separating our waste into green, black and brown bins, while fcuking away items that cost way more environmentally, cos they can only be replaced, not repaired and all us greenies want the newest stuff.

IMHO For all the BS, it's more about business economics than personal economics and the environment. We could easily build driers and tellies and cars and PCs and whatever that were scalable, upgradable and repairable and would last decades, rather than 3 year product cycles, but the economics of the modern world really don't want that in the majority of cases.

In fairness I'm more a Luddite and cheap arsed bastid than a greenie. Though, again IMHO the former mindset is more "green" than the latter.

IvaBigWun wrote: »

:eek:

Yep it's a disco dryer.