There is always going to be a new piece of technology that we will be convinced we can’t live without, but is soon obsolete after the masses have bought into it. Told that it’s something which would make your life easier and there is nothing like it out there, only for it to be nothing more than a flash in the pan.
It’s pretty frustrating to look back at the money we have wasted on old technologies that we never really got the use out of. With this in mind My Voucher Codes has tracked once famous and necessary technologies of the past which are now defunct. They have been replaced by better, faster, smaller and more convenient devices.
Check out this infographic for more information.
TVs went from CRT TVs and later HD CRT TVs between the 1960s and 1990s before the introduction of flat screen TVs and HD TVs. Now we get flat and curved screen 4K TVs to view on there was even a temporary dalliance with 3D TV’s.
Recording was simple in the 1970 and 1980’s all you had to do was choose between Betamax and VHS. VHS won, but wasn’t long before something new came along when after DVDs were introduced in the mid to late 1990s. After that we got Blue-rays, and now these disk formats are becoming extinct thanks to streaming service.
Music has always had many different formats and these do have some staying power, from gramophone record and vinyl records over the last 100 years, to the eight-track tape and Compact Cassette. In the early 1990’s most people were moving onto CD’s, vaguely mini disks and now mainly MP3 downloads and streaming service.
Portable Tunes have always been popular, Sony came out with the Walkman in the 1970’s followed by their CD version when cassettes became obsolete. Now however MP3 music players are king despite a dalliance with Minidisk players, many people using mobile phones to listen to their music.
Messaging has always been a quick way to get in touch with someone, in the 1960’s we got pagers or bleepers as they were also know. Then with mobile technology this moved to text messages, and now people use social media to get in touch with each other.
Organisers, the electronic Filofax, in the early days of mobile technology PDA’s reigned supreme for Personal Digital Assistants, no need to carry around a heavy laptop. Lasting through the late 1990s and much of the 2000s until smartphones came out with organisational apps and even larger tablet devices became more convenient.
Data has always needed to be stored somewhere, initially in the early days on small floppy disks, however as technology improved, floppy disks became obsolete for home PCs, replaced by the CD drive. But now people look to use flash drives and portable hard drives for mass storage and back-up and even cloud storage.
In the last few years we have seen stuff that was once confined to the scrap heap brought back to mainstream popularity, despite alternative technologies being available. With thanks to the likes of hipsters, we see have the rise again of vinyl records, Polaroid cameras and even digital watches.
