Ten Technologies That Shouldn't Have Died?

Ant wrote to us with an article that's sure to provoke some discussion. The feature highlights some of the technologies that have more or less died off and perhaps shouldn't have.

Re:Philadelphia and Electric Trolleys

[-Harlequin-]

What I was responding to was the attitude that the automobile is solely an implement of destruction, people's living and travel preferences are irrelevant, and we must all be forced to conform to a utopian vision of "community".

Fair enough, but you ironically seem to be overlooking that said people's living and travel preferences forces itself on others who have differing preferences, such as to not have people dumping their air pollution all over your property (and everyone elses).

IMHO, the argument that things should not be forced on people cannot easily be used in defense of the automobile, because the choice to use it so extensively by a lot of people has forced considerable and unwanted changes onto a lot of other people.

If anything, I'd argue that the right to choose (extensive car usage) is a lesser right than the right to not to have other people's choices (said extensive car usage) forced upon you.

(And of course, as is usually the case with these things, there are people who quite clearly want to have their cake and eat it too :-)

RFC-20010: A Tube Based Network Protocol (TBNP)

[Peter H.S.]

Imagine a network based on pneumatic tube technologi;
You would pack 150 cdroms into a tubeshaped cannister, and then send the round, screaming down the Tube. Sure, latency would be a bitch, but what bandwith!

Pneumatic devices would not only drive the cannisters, but help them deaccelerate, while regaining some of the energy.
Of course, such a tubenetwork could not be based on a optimistisc protocol, like TCP/IP, since 'packet' collisions would be rather messy. So some kind of Token Ring (Broken Ring /or Token Tube) based protocol would rule.
Such a Token Tube system, should be implemented with reliable old style, electrical relays (and preferable valves/tubes too). One could of course place an automatic watch on each cannister, as a primitive form of network time protocol replacement; their self-winding nature, would fit
perfectly with a rugged tube ride.

Packet, or rather, cannister sniffing would be hard to do, but experienced network admins, could
press their ears to the tube, listen to the 'clickety-clicks', and muffled 'whoooumphhh's, and say "Thar she blows. I know that sound; thats the spring edition of Dead Rat 2010, being rolled out."

New breathtaking TLA's like T2T(Tube-to-Tube) technologi, would emerge. Users would send wax-cylinders to each other, on private tubes.
Wax-tubes would be easy to reuse (RWT= Rewriteable Wax Tubes): smother the wax, and cut a new track on it, by using their Amigas (Which, would probably rule as a sound wax-cutter too). Buissness men could use the the RWT as dictation systems (preferably using a ribbon mic), and send it by tube to the secretary, who could type the memo, using Wordstar 2000.

Zeppelins? Well, there would probably be problems sending cannisters across the atlantic. So Zeppelins would be an obvious long distance carrier choice; just haul some tons of DLT tapes in it, and send it away.
Trans atlantic network propagandation would be like some extremely slow, extremely high bandwith version of UUCP. (The Zeppelin navigators, would of course use slide-rulers)

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[alienmole]

After being cooped up in an apartment through the depression and the war, with no money and rationing, and nothing getting maintained and nothing new getting built for 30 years, a nice shiny Chevrolet and your own federally subsidized 1/2 acre probably sounded pretty good!)

It still does, to me. I grew up in apartments, not during any wars or depressions. I hated it - playing in streets, or on rooftops, surrounded by dirty grey concrete and black asphalt, like some kind of Dickensian or Doctorowian urchins. We later moved into the suburbs, and by comparison that little 1/8th acre seemed like heaven on earth.

AM Stereo!!

[Rahoule]

A technology that shouldn't have died? AM STEREO!!

I surprised no one has mentioned this yet. I hope I get some responses. (Hey, Taco, how about setting the default view to "newest first"?)

(What follows is a brief synopsis. You can find all sorts of information and everything you ever wanted to know about AM stereo by going here [amstereoradio.com].)

Back in the early '80s, there were a lot of AM music stations. AM radio sounded tinny and mono, while FM was crisp, clear, and stereophonic. There was legislation in many countries requiring FM stations to water down their content to help the AM stations compete, but the AM stations couldn't count on that legislation to be around forever. And with so much music on AM, there was a desire from both listeners and broadcasters to have better sound quality.

In 1982, four competing methods for broadcasting higher-quality stereophonic sound on AM while maintaining backward compatibility with existing AM radios were proposed. But the FCC, instead of quickly deciding on one as the standard, decided to try a "free market" approach. They would allow broadcasters to use which ever stereo-encoding method they wanted, and allow electronics manufacturers to support which every method they wanted. It was felt that after a few years one method would dominate and could be approved as the standard.

However, with no encoding method approved as the official standard, very few AM stereo radios were built. What if a company spent loads of time and money building a radio for one stereo-encoding method, only to have another emerge as the standard?

So, throughout the 1980s and into the '90s, many AM stations pumped out clearer, FM-like sound, but the listeners could only hear the familiar, tinny, monaural squawking they were used to, and probably wondered what the DJs were talking about when they ID'd their station as "The new WQZX, 1530 AM stereo!"

In 1993, the FCC finally approved a standard, but by then it was too late.

I can remember listening, as a kid and a teenager, to my town's top 40 station, which was AM. I always wished I could hear them in stereo. I knew that a handful of car radios supported AM stereo, but I never knew why no home receiver did. Eventually, the FM content restrictions were relaxed, and a top 40 FM station went on the air and quickly replaced my local AM top 40 station as my station of choice.

Eventually, the top 40 AM station switched to an all-sports format, but not before having one last try at keeping their music format: During their last year, they switched to an all dance-music format. They also played a lot of very new music. I always heard the newest stuff first on the AM station. But I always wished they would move to FM so I could hear them in stereo. Why they didn't, I'll probably never know.

Recently, I started working at a radio station, so a lot of my questions about AM stereo, this "phantom technology", were answered. I recently bought an AM stereo radio from eBay. You must realize that AM stereo isn't just tinny, squawking sound in stereo -- normal AM stations have a frequency cutoff at 2.5 kHz. AM stereo stations cut off at 7.5 kHz. It's still not quite as good as FM, but it's a lot better than regular AM. I'm not sure why regular AM radios don't pick up the extended frequency range. Perhaps they filter out anything above 2.5 kHz as if it were noise.

Anyway, there's only four AM stations left in my town, and only one plays music -- oldies. Only one of the four stations (not the oldies one) still transmits in stereo, the others having given up on it due to the lack of support.

The one remaining AM stereo has a news/talk format. It's kind of cool to hear their station IDs in stereo. Every Sunday, though, they send a few DJs to a local record store to play samples of new CDs on the radio for half an hour. This is the one time I ever get to hear AM stereo music, and let me tell you, it's heavenly. If only I had known about all this when I had a top 40 AM station!

It's not quite like listening to a CD, but it's a nice taste of a wonderful technology from the past that just wasn't given a chance...

Once again, go here to learn more about AM stereo radio [amstereoradio.com].

-- Rahoule

God DAMN there's a lot of misinformation here!

[Trevor Goodchild]

Look, you want to know why streetcars died off? Want to know why the US is dominated by suburban growth? Do you want facts?

• Buy this book. [amazon.com]
  

Re:A better automatic clock

[burris]

The future is solar powered watches. The face is a solar cell... Junghans [junghans.de] makes watches that are both solar powered and have a radio receiver to pick up the time broadcast from the standards beureu. The watches set themselves every night so they are always exactly right (synchronized with UTC).

Unfortunately, the watches that are both solar and radio controlled are not available in the US yet. (Europe and the US and Japan all have different frequences/standards for time broadcast and each watch has an antenna that is tuned for one or the other.)

burris

Crappy list...

[Kris_J]

As has already been stated in other posts, this list sucks, here's why.

• Electric Trolly - See the London Underground, and any electric train operating in the world.
• Pneumatic Post - I know they're still being installed in "Target" stores in in Australia.
• Amiga - Isn't a technology, it's a product.
• Ribbon Mic - Only cool entry in there, but other posters say it's still used.
• Wordstar - Again, product, not technology. Also it sucked.
• Wax Cylinder - Please, the music in the middle of a record isn't worse, the music on the outside is better.
• Slide Rule - Cute, but slow and of limited use. A decend electronic calculator runs rings around it. It was a nice peice of tech, but has legitmately had it's day.
• Reel Mower - You can still buy these. I have one. Starts first time, every time.
• Automatic Watch - See Seiko Kinetic, Swatch Autoquatz (or previously the purely mechanical Automatic). I have about a dozen Autoquatz watches -- they don't work so well when you have a heap.
• Airship - The airship is coming back. Go watch the Discovery channel.

Two words. Microsoft Bob.

[SirStanley]

Bring Bob Back!

Wordstar deserved it.

[plover]

Sorry, but there's a word processor that stuck in your fingers and didn't let go for years.

The rest, I miss.

John

They Might Be Giants

[nharmon]

Although the last cylinders were manufactured in 1929, the year Edison's company closed, the band They Might Be Giants went to the Edison National Historic Site in New Jersey to record "I Can Hear You," a track of their 1996 album Factory Showroom, on wax cylinder.

Does anyone else find this as cool as I do?

Re:Airships didn't deserve it.

[mr]

Perhaps Hydrogen wasn't as dumb an idea as it seems.

We drive about in cars filled with nasty exploding or burnable gasoline. You take a risk with any form of energy, or transport, and you try to pick the best you can. Go back to 1960 detroit and say "plastics are the future, or and so are carbon" and you'd get laughed out by the engineers. Or, how about the concept that the lowest voltage you can effectivly switch a transistor for computers was 5 volts. We today may think hydrogen is a dumb idea, but it MAY be the way we'll move about in the future.

points out [airmail.net] how hydrogen is not what was the inital problem, but how it was the 'skin'.

Re:Swordmaking

[Nyckname]

Yes, they're still made with alternating layers of clay and metal.

what?!

clay in a sword? no.

damascus type blades are made by either alternating layers of high and low carbon steel, or layers of steel and some other metal, which are then hammered and folded repeatedly. (this isn't taking into account wire damascus, which is made by hammering wire rope).

japanese blades are typiclly folded more than damascus, to create more layers.

the clay used when making a japanese blade coats it during heat treating as insulation to create a differential temper. the edge is hard and will stay sharp. the back of the blade is softer and will flex to keep the blade from breaking.

Looks a tad America centric

[CaptainZapp]

Streetcars are still in wide use in Europe (Amsterdam, Zurich, Frankfurt, Vienna and a lot of other cities). Strasbourg, home of hearty food and the European parliament, introduced them not two decades ago.

As a matter of fact cities not giving in to the rise of the subway system are real happy campers today, since it's sorta nice not being damned to a filthy, smelly underground when using public transport and it's also good for tourism. Problems such as clogged streets where solved with dedicated tracks and clever traffic flow control systems. Zurich, despite the fact that it relies mostly on street cars, is considered the most punctual and reliable public transport system in Europe (yes they really do run according to time tables).

The automatic watch has'nt and quite certainly will not go away. Especially in the medium to high price sector buyers scoff on quartz watches. This makes sense when you consider coughing up 2'000$ to finally get the same $1.75 watch mechansism as you have in a Swatch.

A few of the most reputed Swiss watch manufaturers (i.e. Vecheron Constantin) never did and (according to their marketing spiel) never will manufacture a quartz watch.

Re:Airships didn't deserve it.

[homebru]

The Germans were pretty stupid to insist on Hydrogen rather than Helium, I agree.

Nope. At the time, the only source for helium was the United States and the US government wouldn't sell it to Germany. Thus, the Germans had no other choice but hydrogen.

Hmm

[Mike Hicks]

Well, trollies were definitely pushed out of a few cities by force from GM and others. Minneapolis is one example. I guess I don't know how loud the trollies were, but I'd bet they were quieter than the diesel junkers that rumble past my apartment at all hours of the day.. Hopefully, more buses will run off of `quieter' fuels or electricity in the coming years..

Pneumatic systems are pretty neat, but e-mail and alphanumeric pagers are wonderful things..

I understand that the Amiga was pretty good, though I don't really understand the idea of hooking a computer up to a TV as the primary display..

The ribbon mic sounds pretty cool..

Wax cylinder? Hah! You couldn't even stamp them out, could you?

Slide rules should probably be a little more common. Heck, with all of the calculators these days where you can store notes within them, slide rules are a good way to make sure that nobody is cheating..

The reel mower sure looks cool, but I have my doubts about it.. My family just got an electric mulching mower, which is quite a bit quieter than a gas-powered one (though not exactly whisper-quiet..), and it seems to do the job. (I haven't tried yet, but I think it's actually quiet enough to listen to a walkman while mowing..)

The automatic watch is not a bad idea, and there are new designs that use the same technique to charge a battery which runs a quartz movement. Still, most watches will last a few years on just one battery..

Lastly, the airship is coming back, last I heard.. However, they're using modern materials like carbon fiber. Maybe hydrogen should come back too, but perhaps not in the US (where gun nuts are happy to shoot at anything.. NASA has to cover their parts, including stuff for the shuttle, with bullet-proof cowlings whenever they are transported by train..)
--

Re:Bah, none of those are dead. ;)

[Jeffrey Baker]

Electric buses (which the Municipal Railroad calls trolleys) are used extensively. There are 173 miles of overhead lines for these busses (source [sf.ca.us]). In addition, there is an under- and above-ground light rail system which serves many parts of the city. The system is underground along market street, and above ground everywhere else. Finally, surface street cars are operated on Market street. This is known as the "F" line, which employs many historic street cars retired from other cities' transit systems.

Re:Manufacturing and tolerances...

[bluGill]

Tools (like pliers and such). With cheap manufacturing, tools in the last 50 years are more disposable than they used to be. There seem to be more tools left from before WWII than after, which shouldn't be so.

BUZZ, try again. Tools are of higher quality today then they were 50 years ago. Do not compare the junk of today (Which won't last long before being thrown out) with the quality stuff of yesterday. Rest assured they made junk before WWII just as much as they do today. The junk didn't last and so you don't see it. The quality stuff did last and you can see it today.

Compare a modern Snap-On or Chraftsman wrench with one from 75 years ago and you will be ahrd pressed to find any difference. This is one however: the old tool has sustained some wear which could be measured. (The new tool will do the same them over 75 years)

Likewise for the rest. Modern manufactureing has brought down the price of junk significantly, but the cost of quality hasn't been impacted much. Thus the old Crafdtsmen table saws were expensive but affordable quality compared to junk, but todays chraftsmen table saws are affordable junk while todays much higher quality table saws are expensive but affordable.

There is a saying in third world countries that product most of this junk: Only amercians can afford to buyn junk. Thus the person in those countries who needs a tool is more likely to buy the quality tool (Often made in the US, but not always) or do without.

Re:Apple Newton!!!!!

[TheInternet]

I agree. The Newton was too big and too expensive, but it was way ahead of its time. The first time I used a Palm Pilot, I was floored to find out that you couldn't just write anywhere on the screen, but rather had to write in one little box and only one letter at a time. This is probably why I still haven't bought a Palm. There's no way to take notes on it, as far as I can tell.

With the Newton, you could just start writing and the thing would do handwriting recognition for whole words or sentences at a time. The original model (MessagePad 100) didn't do this version well, but the model I had, MessagePad 120, did a quite amazing job of it. And you wrote normal letters, not Graffitti-speak.

- Scott


------
Scott Stevenson

Re:Several Thoughts

[Jeffrey Baker]

Ahh i see your idea: replace overhead electrical distribution with fuel cells or whatever in each individual vehicle. Sounds like a good plan :)

Re:Manufacturing and tolerances...

[bluGill]

* Horse carriages - well I'm not a big expert here, but I would bet that you can't get as nice ones today as you could 100 years ago.

I'm not an expert either, but I'd be willing to bet that you are wrong. There are currently many people who have taken up horsemanship as a hobby. These are rich folks, who instead of spending weekends in their yacht spend weekends on the horse, many own the horse, and take care of it themselves. (100 years ago a rich person wouldn't think about touching manure if there was a way around it, most of these folks take care of it themselves). They have money, they have an expensive hobby, and they are willing to spend whatever it takes to get the best.

When the carriage was the dominate means of transport I'm willing to bet that most folks had a long lasting carraige. Today carriages are still long lasting, but the people who buy them are rich. 100 years ago cheep was the norm beccause poor people were buying carriages. Today rich people buy them and expensive quality carriages are the norm.

Money is what it comes down to. Mechanical watches are expensive today because the only people who buy them are rich (since the quartz watch is cheaper to make in quanity. Thus the cheap watches of yesterday are not made, and so the only ones made (not many) are the works of art. IF the person buying a mechanical watch cares about accuracy, an accurate watch could be made today, since they mostly care looks, the looks are what is made. (Very few people need to know time to withing more then a minute, and 5 mintues off is okay in most cases, those who need better pay for modern clocks with better accuracty then a watch)

Modern lens can be high quality, just ask any astronomer, who pays for it. When I buy a cammera I care about cost, and in most cases the lens on a disposable cammera is plenty good. A quality camera was more expensive in the '70s then it is today. Of course in the '70s you got SLR, and now you get who knows what autofocus with large zooms. Turns out that the cheaper lens takes better pictures for all but experts since few people knew how to focus a cammera properly. In this case need for quality is key.

So if you want qualtiy you can get it, you just pay for it. We can do everything the Romans could, but we have colors they didn't as well so it goes both ways.

Re:MiniDisc is not crap.

[Stephen Samuel]

Please don't bash a product because it is proprietary, but judge it on it's merits.

For some people {,non}proprietary IS an issue. (If you haven't noticed, this is a pro-open-source [linux.org] site.)
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

Re:Slide rules live on!

[Bob Uhl]

Years ago when I was in high school I took the SAT most semesters, at least once a year. After awhile I got bored of it, so my junior year spring I brought along a slide rule--this was just after they legalised calculators. I ended up scoring better with the rule than I would the next year with a calculator; it was the best I ever scored on the SAT.

Slide rules are better & faster than calculators for many things, but they take training to use. They're laid out in such a fashion that the common sequence of actions just rattles off--calculators do not have this advantage. Calculators are exact to significantly more places, though.

What about steam engines?

[PhilHibbs]

They went out of fashion, like the hindenburg, after an "explosion". A steam car was being used to attempt to break the world land speed record, but the beach was slightly uneven, it had ribs in the sand that set up a vibration that cracked a steam pipe. The damage was minimal and not dangerous, but it let out a great cloud of steam, and was reported in the press as having exploded, and that was that for steam-powered cars. Petrol engines are more practical nowadays only because they've had most of a century of development, and steam has been largely ignored. There's a swiss company that's making steam engines for locomotives, they've got ultra-efficient gas burners, and are 99% insulated, so they stay hot overnight and don't need 2 hours of warm-up in the morning, it's more like 10 minutes. Here's some info I just found: http://www.steam.demon.co.uk/trains/modern10.htm [demon.co.uk]

Re:My point was that other alternatives are better

[q000921]

Well, I agree that methanol would bet better than gasoline. However, I don't think methanol is nearly as attractive as hydrogen.

One of the promises of hydrogen is that it can be produced in large quantities in regions that are otherwise unproductive. All you need is sun or another source of energy and water (even salt water will do). Methanol, on the other hand, needs to be produced from coal (resulting in a net release of greenhouse gasses), or various forms of agriculture (taking up arable land).

Re:Wax cylinder records...

[cr0sh]

I guess that is one way to get longer playing records on wax cylinders. I imagine that for home machines (which I think the one I saw was, since it use cylinders about the diameter of a soup can, and about twice as "tall"), bigger diameter cylinders might cause "fit" problems, as in the cylinder wouldn't fit the machine.

I was thinking "taller"/"longer" cylinders, of the same diameter, or (as regular LPs do), a slower RPM (at the expense of music quality).

When you mention up/down motion - my history teacher never mentioned that, but I am sure I read it somewhere - it is nice to be reminded. Maybe this was also a problem - maybe the needle could "pop" out of the track, causing scratches and such?

Very interesting devices, at that - if only for their simplicity...

Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[q000921]

Ah, The Onion is now a reputable source of statistics? :-)

In any case, really, I prefer riding in a comfortable train for an hour to driving a car for an hour. Most Americans would probably feel the same way if they ever had the experience. Instead, they get a rundown, dirty, and messy public transit system, and it is no surprise that they don't want more of it.

gas mower just doesn't make sense!

[mr.ska]

Hear, hear! I'm with you all the way. I'm a new (town)homeowner myself, and believe it or not, I think I'm the ONLY one on the crescent to have a human-powered mower. It's the only mower that makes sense with a townhouse!

First off, I don't have acres of grass. And I'll be losing grass eventually to gardens, so I'll have even less to mow.

Secondly, I'm in a middle unit, which means the "side" of my house is the side of my next-door-neighbour's house as well. I can't just wheel a mower around the side, I have to go through the gravel laneway and through my garage. That would really SUCK with a Briggs and Straton.

And of course, I really, REALLY like the fact that when I mow the lawn, I'm not spewing out pollutants, spilling gas, or leaking oil. (Well, I may be emitting gas, but that has nothing to do with mowing.) And as a HUGE bonus, I don't wake up the entire neighbourhoor, or let them even know I'm out there. I wish the dude down the street with the horrendously gnashy-sounding electric mower would take a page from the book of Reel Mowers. Eeek.

Technologies that should have died but haven't

[JohnFred]

What about the flip side?

QWERTY keyboard: 90% of my bugs are typoes due to the existence of this horrible unergonmic, wrist -smashing, finger - biting monster.

Intel CPU architecture : Well, do you really think 8 registers is enough, and how long is
it before the 4GB address limit begins to suck
as bad as the 640Kb limit did? The Motorola 68k
chips were so much nicer..

Pascal, Basic, C# : Please somebody, put these out of our misery.

Pylons & overhead cables for power delivery : Blots on the landscape, and Telsa's wireless power transmission would have worked.

Space Shuttle : Still a disaster waiting to happen, an ablative shield around a bomb with 1,000s of tiles to stick on..only one tile has to fall off.

Gopher : Didn't we have this one disinterred recently ?

Re:Turbine Indy Cars

[radja]

turbine can't speed up.. no problem.. use CVT (continuous variable transmission). No need to change the turbine speed. You can just keep the turbine at its optimal speed.

//rdj

Re:Hovercraft

[radja]

not dead... yet.. Cuba bought some of the old super-4's, and they're still in military use because of their amphibic capabilities.

//rdj

Hey... Unix isn't dead!

[GauteL]

All the people here seem to respond to the "remote GUI login" with the fact that Windows 2000 terminal server has it.
What about Unix and Linux?
As far as I know neither is dead, there are even plenty of companies and people around trying to achieve "Total World Domination" for Linux ;-).

Besides, an operating system achieving something 20 years after another is sort of like the comment the author of the article had about "preemptive multitasking".

Re:Magic Cap: Bob to the next level

[STratoHAKster]

I doubt if any of you ever used a General Magic operating system. I believe their OS was called Magic Cap. It was the OS of early, pre-Pilot PDAs such as the Sony MagicLink and I believe the Motorola Envoy. Very similar to Bob,

I owned a Sony Magic Link (still have it) as well as many of the few accessories and software packages for it. It was a pretty cool device for it's time, but there was a good reason that it failed. Magic Cap was unbearably slow and, for all it's icons-up-the-ass cutesiness and so-called simplicity, it was a pain in the ass to use. It also made the assumption that all users are complete morons who shouldn't have any control over how their files are stored.

Often times, you'd be sitting waiting for minutes while Magic Crap performs garbage collection, eating up valuable battery time, not to mention the fact that getting to some particular tool or app often required jumping to different scenes, then maneuvering left/right to find a particular building or door.

I was looking forward to an update that would fix many of the significant problems with the OS, but it never came. They originally had planned to include an app building tool, but that never came either. Instead, they tried to market Magic Crap for Windows (Why???).

Now Hertzfeld and Co. want to do the same thing for Linux [ http://www.eazel.com/ ]. From what I've seen of it, it looks like they may actually have some good ideas about how to make Linux accessible to general users. Personally, I think KDE 2.0 is just fine.

STratoHAKster

Re:Manufacturing and tolerances...

[lizrd]

And what kind of crack were you smoking when you decided to give up your 500 series printer? I'm still using my Deskjet 500 and will continue to do so until I can no longer get replacement cartridges for it. Yeah, it's only 300x300dpi but that's pretty good quality for B&W text and it never jams, prints fast. That was just a great product.
_____________

Re:Reel mowers are great!

[apsmith]

We have a Ralley (sp? light, made in Sweden) self-sharpening reel mower we've used the last 5 years on our 1/4 acre lot: works wonderfully, and gives us a good work-out while we're at it. And the neighbor kids love to come over and try their hand - it takes a certain level of strength to actually get it to cut, so it's a bit of a test for them. And it seems to compare favorably to their dad's riding mower that he is usually cursing at because it got stuck in the mud on his front slope, or something of the sort. Everybody should own one of these things!

Sliderules are still used by a surprising group

[RomulusNR]

Slide rules are still manufactured, and although they don't know it, probably every journalism student has used one. Except in that field, the device is called a "photo wheel."

I recall in my early college days taking a class in which the photo wheel was used. All students had to buy one (available in the arts section of the student store, and normally made of cardboard or plastic). The professor spent the better part of a three hour class repeatedly explaining how to use it, prefacing each time with "It's a little complicated, but you get the hang of it." This scene was remarkably disturbing for me (as was the computer-aided design & layout class), because it took me less time to do the necessary math in my head in less time than it took these media lackeys to do it with a tool specifically designed for the problem. (Which of course is why I soon changed majors.)

But I guess it just wouldn't do to have a scientific calculator in the newsroom. Though it would certainly help demonstrably in the accuracy department.

Re:A nerdly walk through history

[dsplat]

None of you youngsters even know what it was like to wait for a radio to warm up. (Which reminds me, why weren't vacuum tubes on that list?)

Ah. That brings back memories of my first stereo. I wonder how it would have altered our current expectations of technology, if instead of transistors we had developed a way to make ever smaller vacuum tubes, but they still took time to warm up.

Ribbon Mikes

[selectspec]

ribbon audio tech is far from dead. Check out these totally killer high-fi ribbon speakers! [redrosemusic.com]

Re:hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

[dillon_rinker]

OK, so I'm a week late; so sue me :)

Your information is accurate but incomplete.

Note that the iron oxide is merely a catalyst and controls the rate of the burn. A catalyst is a substance which is unchanged at the end of a chemical reaction.

You leave off the amounts involved, a most important factor. Note that the iron oxide is present in a relatively tiny amount.

hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

[thewrongtrousers]

actually hydrogen really isn't that flammable either.

contrary to popular belief, it wasn't hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg disaster. Rather it was the paint used on the shell of the airship, made from components very similar to what is used in today's rocket fuel. A static charge caused this paint to ignite, thus sending the airship to its end.

The impressive photos of the Hindenburg burning show massive amounts of flames. Hydrogen burns clear so what was burning (visibly) wasn't the gas.

As a result of that accident hydrogen has gotten a really bad rap when it's not all that dangerous and has a lot of benefits. Clean cars being one example.

So add the "commonplace, everyday use of hydrogen" to technologies that have been given up on.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[sulli]

They did. GM affiliate National City Lines acquired the Key System (Oakland), Pacific Electric (LA), and others, and replaced them with GM-manufactured motorcoaches. Lots of info here. [trainweb.com]

There used to be trains on the SF Bay Bridge, moving more people than cars and buses do now! Ooops, got rid of those...

Re:Two words. Microsoft Bob.

[Monte]

Bring Bob Back!

Bob never left. Where do you think that annoying little paperclip came from?

Re:Wordstar deserved it.

[plover]

Yeah, I did the same thing with the results of a probability table, and wowed the prof with little pictures of dice.

I just wish Wordstar had died BEFORE I thought to try that.

John

P.S. Col. Klink (ret.) DIED [cnn.com] the 7th of December...

Re:Bah, none of those are dead. ;) ( Reel Mowers )

[pshuman]

I still use a Craftsman Reel Mower that came from Sears a whole 3 years ago. For small yards, they are the best.

Benifits:

• Lower initial cost
• Nearly no maintence cost
• Cleaner
• Less noise
• Less storage space required
• Get some exercise!

There are good reasons ribbon mics are seldom used

[Mononoke]

I have two RCA 77DX ribbon mics.

Ribbon mics are very delicate, and the ribbon is succeptable to damage. One idiot blowing into the mic ("Hey! Is this on??") can tear the ribbon.

Sure, they sound warm, and sound much better "than carbon and early condenser microphones." But we don't use carbon microphones (professionally) either. Condenser mics have come a long long way since then also.

The biggest benefit in the ribbon mics was the internal tube pre-amp. There are better mics today using tube pre-amps that aren't nearly as fragile.

"They have this figure-eight pattern--they accept sound from the front and back, while rejecting sound from the sides." This is silly. Most modern-day large element recording mics have this capability. It was one of the first to have the capability, but certainly not the last.

--

Several Thoughts

[mellifluous]

Electric Trolley:
As the article admits, the infrastructure expense here is prohibitive, and why do this when self-contained electric vehicles are becoming more and more feasible?

Pneumatic Post:
Amiga:
Personally, I think Amiga failed for one basic reason: speed. The early Amigas had some amazing potential, but for day-to-day office use, for example, they could be very cumbersome. Unfortunately, by the time the hardware speed caught up with what they were trying to do, other manufacturers had competitive formats for graphics, sound, etc.

Ribbon Microphone:
I just don't get this one. I work in acoustics, and while I will grant that the ribbon microphone was impressive in its day, there are other many other alternatives that work just as well. This is probably a case of audiophiles glamorizing a certain sound timbre rather than a quantifiable advantage in performance. For example, it is possible to make a microphone with a flat response to the edge of human hearing on a silicon chip these days.

Wax Cylinder:
As with my comments for the ribbon mike, maybe there were some performance advantages to the Cylinder over vinyl, but in this day, there is no reason to prefer it over a digital system. Again, we may have a case of audiophiles prefering the qualitative aspects of a certain sound, even if a strict performance criteria would show it to be inferior.

Slide Rule:
I think I can agree with this one, if for no other reason than the article's point on its education value is true.

Reel Mowers:
Amen to this. I hate being woken up on a Saturday morning by area lawn mowers.

Automatic Watch:
A modern, electronic version of a self-charging watch does exist. Still, those things are amazing. Airship: This technology absolutely needs to be reinvestigated. It may, unfortunately, be caught in a Catch22: it needs more money to research new designs, but it needs better proven designs to get more money. Sort of like the problem the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle people seem to be stuck in right now.

Re:Two words. Microsoft Bob.

[Anonymous Coward]

As my short bearded and, quite frankly, grubby scottish grandfather would say "I canna be bothered being called a karma whore, so here's a hypertext link about Microsoft BOB [nyu.edu] and be off with ya before I set the set the dogs on your mangy hide you pathetic creature now come down with me to the cellar and I'll show you what schtooootish pride is all about, boy!"

Then again, he always was a odd man.

Re:Turbine Indy Cars

[PD]

If you follow the third link I provided, you will see that the one and only turbine car every to race at Indy was KILLING the competition.

After that one year with a single turbine car, they were banned from the race.

Turbines would easily win Indy because they are much smaller than a reciprocating engine and they deliver a LOT more power.

And, FYI, Indy cars are raced on an Oval. Perhaps you are thinking of Formula One?

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[IntlHarvester]

Nice recasting of history, but most streetcar systems didn't shut down, with some friendly investment from GM and various other parts suppliers, until the 1950s. So, sure it's doubtful that a 1943 investigation would have turned anything up.

San Francisco, CA still runs streetcars, including some nicely restored 1940s models, and some brand new Italian ones. Beats taking the bus.
--

hindenburg

[ywwg]

I saw a very interesting Nova documentary about the Hindenburg which claimed that the hydrogen was not the cause of the explosion. Basically, the outer skin was painted with powdered aluminium (I think), which is what we use for rocket fuel today. Hydrogen burns blue, not orange like all the eyewitnesses say the zeplin did. Also, it remained aloft quite long into the fire, which wouldn't make sense if the hydrogen was burning.

Maybe someone has some more details, but the gist of the show was that hydrogen can be made safe for airships.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[ptomblin]

As others have said, you just repeated the conspiracy theory, while getting all your facts wrong. A few seconds with Google turned up this article from Transportation Quarterly [lava.net], an article with a lot more references and facts than the conspiracy sites.

Re:Amiga A-Top the list

[Ashen]

I could announce that I have developed a time machine that bakes pizza, makes pancakes, all while allowing you to travel 2 million years back in time and that wouldn't really make a difference unless I really had one and people would actually use it.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[GianfrancoZola]

Nonsense.

Scott Bottles wrote a book called Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City which offers a good debunking of this sadly perpetuated urban legend. Coincidentally, it was published by the same university system to which you belong, judging from your email address.

This link [lava.net] also has a good article about this topic.

The upshot: we could genuinely discuss a conspiracy only if GM pursued its course of action and dismantled the nation's systems in spite of the fact that streetcars offered more benefits than buses. Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s. Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered. Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles. Streetcars do have the ability to move more people in the same amount of time with a high enough level of service, but the plain fact is that they were in decline.

The hearings to which you refer were about GM's monopolistic practices in creating the replacement bus systems. Who could blame them? They were taking advantage of the streetcars' demise--brought about by the economics of the time, I must stress--and getting in on the ground floor by supplying buses. And if I had time, I'd dig up those hearings and provide testimony from people who, DURING those hearings, debunked this conspiracy from the get-go, but were drowned out by the media's coverage of it all.

I'm not terribly surprised that your post got modded up to (Score: 4), but it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth.

MOD Music

[CritterNYC]

I'm not talking about mod as in modern... I'm talking about mod as in the file format, originally started on the trusty Amiga. Think MIDI, but with the instruments stored as digital samples within the file. And think (relatively) small file sizes. Back before we had MP3s, we had MODs (or S3M, XM, etc). Every day, new mods would be released onto Usenet. Some pop, some oldies, some just plain odd, and lots of techno. People would rip samples from popular songs and remake them. Others would get similar sounding instruments and try to recreate the original song. And everyone would eventually start making their own music for the world to hear. And you always tried to keep the files as small as you could. I remember spending a weekend modding Mortal Kombat during college, not to mention the many late nights writing my own tunes. The best part was that when you downloaded a mod to listen to, you had all the instruments and the notes to play around with, yourself.

Realistically, the MOD scene is still around, though it has been eclipsed by the plethora of MP3s, etc and the advent of more bandwidth. Now, it is mainly hobbyists and the like, whereas before, you'd get people who wanted to download their favorite song to listen to it, or check out some random DJ's remix.

In case you're curious, check out: Arts: Music: Sound Files: MOD [dmoz.org] for mod files and Computers: Multimedia: Music and Audio: Software: MOD [dmoz.org] for players and trackers on Open Directory [dmoz.org]. Oh, and if you have Winamp [winamp.com], you already have the ability to play MODs.

I have another one...

[pen]

The Wenkel (Rotary) Engine.

--

Dead??? just resting...

[hugg]

My main editor is "joe" which has WordStar bindings (^K-B, ^K-E, etc). They suck, but they're not any less hated than Emacs bindings saving throw against Emacs Magic Missile).

Also I live near the reel mower activist capital of the world (maybe?) -- Takoma Park DC (where old hippies go to die).

As for the rest of the technologies, let 'em collect dust in museums.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[IntlHarvester]

Ridership peaked in the late 1920s
Well, no shit. Cars became available to the middle class. Has nothing to do with Streetcars versus GM manufactured buses.

Ridership peaked in the late 1920s,
True, but most major cities' bus routes run exactly on the old streetcar lines. So consider this advantage theoretical.

Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way.
False. They are called *Street*cars, you know.

First of all, after the depression and the rise of autos, most of the nations private streetcar systems were in serious decline when GM moved in, with cars and tracks dating back to the 1890s. However, that forstalled the inevitable, since even after the bus conversion, almost every US mass transit system was in public recievership by the early 1970s anyway.

Second, buses were only more economical in the era of cheap 50s gas and friendly loans from General Motors. If anyone had the choice in keeping an electric system or switch to gas today, they'd stick with electric. Also, unlike those 50-year old streetcars, none of those GM busses lasted longer than 20 years before having to be replaced, by the taxpayers.

Third, GM's tactics in this business were horrible. In Minneapolis, for example, they conspired with mobsters to essentially loot the system, and left the company as a bankrupted shell after they had to rip up the lines and sell the fleet for scrap. Where once the only sigificant operational cost was labor (the system was powered by a hydroplant), they then had big loans from GM and ongoing gasoline and tire costs. These sorts of tactics from a company that a 70% marketshare at the time were disgusting. This is hardly a secret conspriciy theory either -- GM ran newspaper ads bragging about what they were doing, and knew that in an environment where 'Whats good for GM is good for America', and the faux moderinity of gasoline busses, they were politically safe.

Well, anyway, stand out on Market Street in San Francisco some time with your dollar. See if you get on the 40s streetcar or the 80s bus, and see which provides better service.
--

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[IntlHarvester]

Whether or not GM killed of trolleys, they frankly don't make a lot of sense in low-density suburban area, where most Americans seem to live.

Well, that's a different conspiricy! Suffice it to say that GM was a big real estate developer and also so home appliances in those days...

(Although the federal loan subsidy policies of the day were the real motivating factor behind the suburbs. Not that I can blame people. After being cooped up in an apartment through the depression and the war, with no money and rationing, and nothing getting maintained and nothing new getting built for 30 years, a nice shiny Chevrolet and your own federally subsidized 1/2 acre probably sounded pretty good!)
--

Reel Mowers are Great

[[e-mail]]

Indeed. And the new ones are at least as easy to push as a power mower. We got ours because I could do the lawn while our (then) baby was sleeping.

Re:hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

[ParamonKreel]

Not to mention the fact that buring hydrogen produces water, which has noted flame retardant abilities.

Magic Cap: Bob to the next level

[Chemical]

I doubt if any of you ever used a General Magic operating system. I believe their OS was called Magic Cap. It was the OS of early, pre-Pilot PDAs such as the Sony MagicLink and I believe the Motorola Envoy. Very similar to Bob, you would have a picture of a desk with various common desktop items on it like a memo pad, clock, diary, and even a Magic 8-ball. If you wanted you could go out of the "office" and into the "hall" where there were different doors leading to rooms like the "Utility Closet" where you could set up the unit, or the "Game Room". There were even pictures and plants in the "hall". From the hall you could go "outside" to "Downtown" where you would see little buildings, each representing a different piece of software. The whole thing was very graphical and actually fun to use. The social UI deal worked better on a PDA than it did on a desktop. Still, I prefer the simplicity of the PalmOS. Does anyone else remember Magic Cap?

Re:Slide Rule

[swordgeek]

Yeah, the HP calculator replaced the slide rule, and then the standard calculator replaced the HP, and now the laptop/PDA is replacing that.

I'm not convinced that it's for the better--Slide rules are blindingly fast, bombproof, and require the person to understand what results they're getting. It's the reason that pilots still almost universally use circular slide rules instead of calculators.

Re:Two words. Microsoft Bob.

[IHateEverybody]

Actually, I always thought that Bob would make a pretty cool UI for kids -- like a kind of virtual tree house. That Microsoft kept trying to sell it to adults (and still does judging by the MS Office Paperclip) made no sense to me.

Re:Just let go

[Junks Jerzey]

Reading this article I can't help but think of a grandfather sitting on his porch talking to all his grandchildren. You know, the types of stories that begin "Back in my day..." My responce to this article? "Yes grandpa... I know... 12 miles to school... uphill bothways..." These technologies all had flaws in them, hence the reason that they are seen in mainstream use. (note the use of mainstream here, search long enough and you will find anything being used) It time to just let go of the old technologies and embrace the new ones.

The point of the article is sometimes that good technologies disappear and are replaced with new ones of questionable value. Reel mowers are a good example. For a small lawn, reel mowers:

1. are quieter
2. are less expensive
3. require less maintenance
4. provide less opportunity for serious injury
5. don't need gasoline, oil or electricity
6. don't emit fumes

When I see a guy mowing his 1/8 acre with a riding mower, I can't help but laugh. Sure, he has the "technologically superior" solution, but he's also ridiculous :)

Re:Betamax?

[Mignon]

I walked onto a plane a few years ago and noticed that the in-flight movie equipment was Betamax.

Not quite dead...

[BigEd]

For the Electric Trolley I can just look outside and see the Max in Portland:

http://www.tri-met.org/max.htm [tri-met.org]

Ribbon Microphones are still used by several bands... because of their "warm sound."

I'm sure that some of the others on this list are still in wide use today. I've seen Pneumatic Posts in all sorts of banks, and some large stores. (Nike Town in Downtown portland uses them to move around shoes...)

The Amiga is not quite dead too. I'm not sure about WordStar, but I know people who still swear by WordPerfect 6.0 (the blue an white version in DOS).

My grandpa still uses a slide rule to figure out all sorts of math. I think he's just showing off, but when he's faster at it then I am with a TI-89, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Reel mowers are still in use. Not just by old farts who refuse to change either. They're waaaay cheaper, and for small lawns not all that inconvenient.

Automatic Watches... uhhh Seiko Kinetic? Anyone?

Everytime I see football I see airships. Granted they're not used for transportation, except for the crew, but they're still there, and useful.

It's interesting to see a list of things that are refered to as passed technologies, all of which are still in use somewhere today. Perhaps people need to open their eyes and see that these things are out there with their loser elegance beating out the "winners" that lack simplicity.

Re:Betamax?

[1010011010]

Professional equipment, not consumer.


________________________________________

Slide rules and airships

[Alioth]

The article is inaccurate: slide rules are still manufactured. I have one I bought a couple of years ago.

It's called an E6-B. It's a circular slide rule used to solve navigation problems and wind triangles for aviation use. It's actually faster to use than the electronic versions (that's why I've stuck with a mechanical E6-B rather than buying an electronic one). The other good thing about it as there are no batteries to fail, and you can still read it wearing polarized sunglasses.

As far as the Hindenburg, even if it were helium-filled it could have caught fire, but not quite as spectacularly. The doped fabric covering of the airship was itself highly flammable.

10 years ahead list

[gallir]

January/February 2030

Ten Passed Technologies

Not every disappearing technology deserves that fate. Sometimes the "losers" have an elegance and simplicity the "winners" lack. Here are ten examples.

MS Word

The sparse and tightfisted Word processor from the extinguished Microsoft company shaped the future of modern Speech Processors (SP) and user hyperinterface: thousand of icons and buttons in the screen, random behaviour, ill-behaviour with large document, the talking clipper. It lacks of features is considered, nowdays, more a virtue rather than a defect.

ISDN and ADSL

Copperlines, the 20th-century analog of today's quantic-optic fibers, had their own "last mile" problem. One 20th-century solution: small electron quantums pushed along expensive copper cables via porting in unhealthy high-frequencies that acted as carriers.

CDs and DVDs

Audiophiles lament the passing of digital sounds and MPEG audio, which they perceive as having a richer sound than the holographic pild. But the recorded disc was in its own day an upstart technology, elbowing out a superior medium for recording sound: the dic-shaped vinyl first manufactured by RCA in the middle of last century.

Personal Computers

In 1979, Commodore brought the Personal Computers to consumers. Two years later, the final shaped of old and bloated hardware born with the name of IBM Personal Computers, which lasted for 30 years until the quantic processor won its own position in the market.

Internet

The appeareance of this technology in the general-public market, 25 years later from its invention, was believed as the greater revolution since the Gutember invention. Nowadays, it is hard to believe that such a unreliable networks technology, still based in moving electrons along copper cables and optic fiber, and therefore anti-ecologic until its own bones, could last for 30 years with no opposition from the mithyc Greenpeace. Additionally, the primitive protocol used for reliable transmission, because networks weren't reliable at all, didn't allow for bandwidth aggregation and reservation, according to the amount of "electron packets" needed for the, already dissapeared, 2D plus sound streamed movies.

... still five more, but I don't want to put them all, just in case, to avoid a the original writer sueing to my grandchildren.

--ricardo

Re:Electric Trolly.

[K-Man]

In San Francisco we just bought a bunch of Bredas from Italy (what part I don't know). They're great.

What the author didn't mention is that SF is expanding its light rail system with as much money as it can muster. In the last decade we've added new (or restored) track on Market Street and the Embarcadero, and we're planning a major new line down Third Street and possibly up the Geary corridor. It's one of the fastest-growing parts of the SF transportation system.

There are still plenty of idiots who think we should bulldoze $500M worth of housing and put in freeways,etc., but most of them live down in San Jose or LA, where people do those kinds of things ;-)

Re:Betamax is not Betacam.

[Gordonjcp]

...the format used in commercial production is Betacam, which is an entirely different format. (Both were brought to us by Sony, both use cassettes that look about the same, however, they are entirely different animals.)
They aren't that different. Betacam is just Betamax with the tape running 6 times faster, and wider head gaps (you get 20 minutes on a tape).
Betacam SP is more akin to S-VHS, based on Betacam but with seperate luminance and chrominance signals.
It used to be possible to modify a certain UK Betamax VCR to play back (but not record) Betacam.

Re:GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[shankster]

I'm simply going off what my memory tells me from my history class at Berkeley a year or two back. I recall having read something from the '43 senate hearings as well. Not only did they buy (through a subsidiary company, National City Lines) the Bay Area's Key System and LA's Pacific Electric, but they also bought Philly's streetcars and shut them down. I believe it was this one that spurred the Senate action in 1943. More information about this can be found at this link. [trainweb.com]

Yes, SF has some of these older cars running along Market Street and the Embarcadero. I see them every few minutes from my window here. But that's not quite the same as going all over the city.

And the poster who pointed out that all this is US-centric...well of course it is. To most Americans, the idea that there's a world outside of our own country is one that is easily forgotten, if ever learned.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

technologies failing to sell?

[iso]

sounds like a job for ....

MARKETING!

guess you geeks still need us Marketroids after all :)

- j

McDLT

[The Dev]

Ok, styrafoam is bad, but McD has not yet found a suitable replacement that keeps the hot side hot and the cool side cool. Man that was a great sandwitch (compared to the regular stomach grenades).

Betamax?

[moonboy]

What about Betamax? I heard (never saw it, too young at the time) it was better than VHS and had smaller tapes as well.

"shouldn't have died"?

[TheKodiak]

I'm sorry, but this article isn't quite clear on its own concept. Many of these technologies deserved their fate, often for fatal flaws pointed out in the article. It's more of a wishlist of technologies which proved infeasible. Sure, the wax cylinder was a better recording medium, but a full orchestra in your pants would be better still. It's like the author is complaining to god that the laws of physics should have been altered to make these ideas practical.

Gameboy!!

[byronbussey]

I always thought Nintendo's Gameboy was amazing considering it's ten years old and all Nintendo has done to it is add color.(yes GBA is coming)
But not too many ten year old console game systems can still make dump truck loads of money!!!
Is it proof that game play is more important than graphics?

Automatic watch shouldn't be on the list

[joshamania]

I don't know why the author chose to include "automatic watch" on the list. As far as I know, such devices are in wide spread use. In fact, there are even a couple of variations. For instance, Seiko's kinetic watches, which, if I am not mistaken, recharge their battery through arm movement. I've owned a Tag Hauer watch with a counterweight that wound the watchspring every time it moved around. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples. In fact, many companies use the "automaticness" of their watch as a marketing gimmick...Look, here's a fancy watch with all the guts you've come to expect it to have, but guess what, you never have to wind it!

GM Actually Did Kill off Streetcars

[shankster]

The writer of the article seems to call the notion that GM bought out streetcar lines across the country and ran them into the ground so that their buses would have to be used a "corporate conspiracy theory". Well, it's not a theory, it's hard fact. The US Senate held several hearings on this in 1943 and would have taken action to stop GM, but they were inclined to leave GM alone as the company was doing so much for the war effort, going on at the time. So all streetcars, not just electric ones, went the way of the horse and buggy...until recent years.

And yes, BETA should have definitely been on the list.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one

Reel mowers are great!

[ChrisDolan]

As a new homeowner, I have become a strong advocate of reel mowers, particularly the modern ones which are quieter and MUCH easier to push. Here are some advantages, in order of importance (according to me):

• They are quiet!! You can mow whenever you like and neighbors don't have to close windows to hear themselves.
  
• They are low pollution. Just CO2 from the pusher.
  
• They are low maintenance. Sharpen once every few years and they are good to go.
  
• They are cheap (about US$100 + $0 for gas).
  
• They take up very little space (try hanging a power mower from the garage wall).
  
• You can stop and chat with the neighbor for a minute without the off/on cycle.
  
• They can get into tighter spots (good if you have an odd-shaped yard).
  

They are making a well-deserved comeback, with high appeal for environment and neighbor conscious people with yards smaller than a polo field.

Re:Bubble Memory

[MarcoAtWork]

Now, I might be going a bit off track here, but if my memory serves me right, magnetic bubble memories are still used in hostile environments (satellites, for example) where a 'conventional' RAM wouldn't last very long.

Actually a quick search on google shows that at least in Japan there is still some development going on in this field

http://www.sta.go.jp/sonota/sonota/e9908_10.html [sta.go.jp]

Engine powered reel mowers are fun!

[cr0sh]

Typically, these are sold as "tiff" mowers - tiff grass is a lightweight, oh-so-soft grass (the best damn grass to lie down on, if you ask me), that simply can't be cut by a rotary mower (rotary mowers tear and break the grass, and are thus used for hardier grasses like bermuda - tiff is soft, and a rotary mower will literally "blendo" the grass, and produce a sludge - providing you can find tiff grass that long, of course).

They are essentially a reel mower with an engine, and a wheel at the back, connected by a drop chain/lever combo. You have to push the mower, then drop the wheel to prevent a "scuff" mark on the grass (boy, was I bawled out by my boss on my first job in high-school about that!), but man - you could litterally guide them easily once going.

Now, these suckers were anything _but_ safe - the reel keeps spinning as the engine runs (of course, the model I used was old, they may be safer today, with a clutch or something) - I am sure some fingers could be chopped off by that thing (and I know more than one snail in the yard lost its life due to the mower I was using!)...

Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

Re:Bah, none of those are dead. ;)

[Hard_Code]

Yeah, I was just thinking about this very thing, while writing some email in WordStar on my Amiga, and listening to MP3s on my portable wax cylindar player, on my morning zeppelin commute to work.

Bah, none of those are dead. ;)

[Xzzy]

They're just not mainsteam. :)

You know all those subways in New York? They're powered by electricity. Sure, the metaphor is a little different, but the idea is still there: Electric powered mass transit.

Pneumatic tubes? Bah, Home Depot and Costco use these systems to this day. I worked for a company a couple years ago that maintained these systems; cashiers use them to deliver money to the vault in the back.

Amiga? HAH. I still have a functioning Amiga 2000.

Don't many studios still use some varient of the 'ribbon microphone'? Admittedly my expertise is starting to peter out, but I do know it's common for either recording artists or movie people to use older technologies because they sound (or look) a certain way.

Reel mowers, bah. I had a friend during childhood who's parents still used one.. they made him mow the lawn with it as punishment. ;)

Only commenting on the stuff I know. ;) Good technology never dies; it seems more like the really good ideas get delegated to "fans" or people who don't fall prety to marketing and/or the feeling they need the latest and greatest.

Just because you don't see a representation of it on every street corner doesn't mean something has dissappeared.

Re:hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

[dillon_rinker]

Hydrogen burns clear
EVERYTHING burns clear. Flames are superheated gasses; the air becomes so hot that it glows. Sort of like iron. When you suggest that hydrogen burns clear, you are either saying that it burns so coolly that the air 'glows' in the infrared, or it burns so hot that it 'glows' mostly in the X-Ray spectrum. Both are ridiculous propositions.

And to top it all off, I've burned hydrogen, and it DEFINITELY produces a flame...

Clean cars being one example.
Yes, hydrogen-burning cars can be safe...because the hydrogen is dissolved in metal and it can't explode, and it is bled off continuously and dispersed.

You have been reading TOO much hydrogen car propoganda. Yes, hydrogen-powered cars can be good, but it is also true that hydrogen burns.Just like gasoline. Or diesel.

Huh?

[mwalker]

The airship shouldn't have died? The slide rule? Slide rules are great, but they don't run Pac-Man anywhere near as well as my HP48sx.

Seriously, what about some of the great ones? Betamax, or Sony's 8mm wallet-sized videotapes?

What about remote GUI login? Unix had it, and Windows never caught up (no, pc anywhere doesn't count). People still don't know that they should be able to log into their home computers wherever they are.

What about guns? Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made. Today's guns suck by comparison - the tolerances are way down, machined rather than hand matched.

IBM's butterfly notebook?
actually playing music on MTV?

we should do a slashdot article and pick the 10 best abandoned technologies. these don't even come close.

Swordmaking

[rjh]

Neither do you, if you think that modern technology isn't used at any point in the process. Yes, the swords are made the same way, with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Yes, they're still made with alternating layers of clay and metal. Yes, there's still a lot of ritual that goes along with the creation of a sword.

And yes, modern metallurgical techniques are used.

Who do you think reads all those graduate theses which have been written on Japanese swords? Swordmakers, for the most part. Because once you take a good, hard look at what makes a Masamune so perfect, that gives you a big hint as to how to make your own swords better.

Your comment is about as informed as someone saying "violinmakers haven't changed their techniques in hundreds of years". Considering that some scientists come tantalizingly close to producing Stradivarius-quality instruments by careful study and analysis, violinmaking is undergoing rapid change due to modern technology.

This is the way the world works. The world wants it fast, cheap and good. The merchant says "fine, pick two", but the prosperous merchant says "fine, I'll give you all three". The second kind of merchant puts the first kind out of business.

Science is a wonderful tool with which to drive down costs of quality goods. It doesn't replace the human touch, nor can it ever replace human expertise; but people who say that science has no adjunct role to play are smoking crack.

Even when it comes to swordmaking.

amazing coincidence...

[tewwetruggur]

I had been planning on making a zeppelin, who's command center was controlled by an Amiga, and the on-flight movies were provided by Betamax tapes... and I wrote the proposal w/ Wordstar!

This article saved my life! I am now moving back to my original idea of a canvas-winged plane controlled by punch cards, and the power is generated by hamsters running in little wheels.

I'd hate to accidentally use outdated technology for such an endeavor.

Manufacturing and tolerances...

[rjh]

This applies to just about everything mechanical, not just firearms, BTW.

Colts are collectors items not because they're old but because they're the best revolvers ever made.

Which Colt revolver would this be? The Single Action Army? The Patterson? The Python? The King Cobra? All of them are remarkable weapons (I've used all of them save the Patterson). All of them were machined.

... machined rather than hand matched.

Samuel Colt didn't "hand match" his weapons. He was smarter than that. The virtue of Sam Colt's weaponry was that the parts were all interchangeable, and that's only possible with machining and mass production, not handcrafted individual objects d'art.

Today's guns suck by comparison--the tolerances are way down

My SIG-Sauer is manufactured to tolerances which are usually reserved for jet aircraft. My Kimber M1911A1, likewise.

You also seem confused about tolerances in general. Saying that "tolerances are way down" is a good thing. That's like saying "tolerances fifty years ago were 0.1mm, tolerances this year are 0.01mm." If tolerances are down, that means manufacturing techniques have improved.

Now, manufacturing tolerance isn't the same as operational tolerance. Operational tolerance ought to be very high--weapons are expected to tolerate many different kinds of ammunition without a hiccup, in the most awful conditions. A modern 9mm Glock will chamber any 9mm ammunition you want to throw at it--AET, JHP, LRN, hardball, Glaser, whatever. A 9mm Browning, built in 1935, suffers feed failures on anything other than hardball unless you've had a gunsmith do a throat and ramp-polish on it.

Modern firearms: manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.

This, by the by, is reflected in every other manufacturing field. You remember the early '80s, when people had massive air conditioners running in their computer rooms? Now, in 2000, it can be 90 degrees in the house and I don't have any qualms about firing up my dual Pentium IIIs. Manufacturing tolerances down (from point-whatever micron down to .18 or so), operational tolerances up.

Compare an F-22 against an F-14. Your average F-14 spends more than half of its operational lifetime on the ground being serviced. The average F-22 doesn't. Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.

A $10 toaster from 50 years ago is big, clunky, heavy and totally reliable. A $10 toaster today is lightweight and totally reliable (at least, mine has never failed me). Manufacturing tolerances down, operational tolerances up.

Good grief. Show me one, just one instance in which devices manufactured with modern techniques aren't as good as devices manufactured with traditional techniques. Even Japanese swordsmithing has gone modern. Four hundred years ago, smiths had to resort to crude and inexact methods to measure certain vital characteristics of metal. Today, smiths use modern metallurgical know-how and thermocouple thermometers to determine exactly what the optimal temperature for forging and tempering is.

Good grief.

Chicago's Ill-fated street cars

[joshv]

Chicago used to have a thriving street car network. It died about the same time all of the other street car systems in other big cities died.

Recently there was an attempt to revive the system, at least in the more touristy downtown areas. The system was deemed impractical, as it would have been ruinously expensive to implement, would have accentuated an already bad traffic situation, would have generated minimal revenue compared to the already existing bus system, and was not projected to draw all that many more tourists to the area ("Gee maw, let's us drive to Chicago and see them thar new fangled street cars" - not gunna happen)

-josh

Re:hydrogen, airships, & "non-flammable helium"

[GregWebb]

I think we have a misunderstanding here.

As I recall, Hydrogen burns with a very pale blue flame. Against the sky it'd be almost invisible - but it'd also rise so fast that it would burn only briefly if at all. The consensus on the programme I saw was that it couldn't have burnt in any quantity.

Eyewitness reports clearly stated the flame was yellowy-red, pointing to the doping performed on the canvas envelope. Which, as the previous poster stated, was pretty much rocket fuel and wasn't properly mounted to the chassis - so, flies through an electrical storm, builds up a charge which arcs across the body as some parts dissipate their charge through the docking rope and others don't. Result? Fire.

Philadelphia and Electric Trolleys

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the technologies listed in the article, the one that probably caused the greatest damage to our society is the loss of the electric trolley. They were once so popular in my hometown of Philadelphia, PA, that special funeral trolleys were run, by request, to take the bereaved to and from the church and the final resting place.

With the demise of the electric trolley came the use of the automobile and migration to the suburbs. When an individual is able to drive through a neighborhood without thought of the outside environment, he or she becomes removed from the situation.

It is this apathy that caused our cities to decline. If one was forced to walk or ride at a slow rate through what is your neighborhood, you take more care to notice your surroundings. People would still be involved in their neighbor's lives, thus building communities.

What we have today, however, is people living in isolated pods in suburbia, with no regard for each other. When homes are spaced 100 feet apart, and the only way to the local store is by driving, when would you ever have time to interact with your fellow man?

Although this really is spilt milk, so to speak, many of these problems came from the rapid conversion from electric trolleys to individual automobiles.

Pneumatic Tubes & Fresnel Lenses

[Chairboy]

In the interest of efficiency, I suggest the immediate implementation of pneumatic tubes to transport floppy & ZIP disks containing data from computer to computer. Use of proven pneumatic technology is superior to untested 'copper wire' and 'fiber optic' technology for the transfer of data.

Additionally, money being spent on creating larger monitors should be redirected to productive tasks such as maintaining the nationwide Pneumatic Tube Network. Those seeking larger screens for their comp-uters should simply use Fresnel lenses.

- Central Services
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.

They didn't really die

[HomeySmurf]

A lot of these ideas didn't seem to have really died, so much as to have never taken off. Many remain stuck in the same niche market of their inception. One that is a strong counterexample to to this is the slide rule. It certainly achieved great popularity in its time, but is now almost unrecognizable to most people nowadays. However, in introductory physics lab, at Brandeis, constructing one and performing calculations with it was part of our final exam. It was a very valuable experience. I don't think students in school ever really learn about logarithms like they did back before HP started popping out calculators.

Re:Wordstar deserved it.

[Col. Klink (retired)]

I remember writing papers in College for Calculus and econ using a Kaypro, a dot-matrix printer, and WordStar.

I had to create a few characters that weren't built-in (like a triangle for a delta, integrals, etc). You'd have to map out your character on a 8x8 piece of paper and then calculate the binary values for each row (or was it by column?), convert to decimal (hex?), and define the character with some obscure dot command in WordStar. You could then use Control-q and some other characters to print your own characters.

Not quite WYSIWYG, but a lot of fun.

Sometimes designs are shoddy.

[rjh]

Modern != better. Modern usually means better, but it's not an absolute.

One of the errors which people (particularly engineers) make when designing modern hardware is they think that the rest of the world is as controlled and as precise as the product itself is. If you can specify that "the turbofan in this jet engine is made of a single crystal of pure nickel and built to 0.001mm of accuracy", it's easy to think that it's only going to be used in situations that are equally controlled and controllable.

So the net effect is the engine works great, but the first time a goose gets sucked up the intake, the entire engine is going to shred. (Don't laugh; this happens with surprising frequency nowadays.)

The problem is that operational tolerance comes at a cost in performance. A Soviet-era tank is reliable as the day is long, but it's got crappy performance. When people discover "Wow! With these new manufacturing tolerances, we can make things even better than before," they rarely consider that pushing things to the limits of performance has repercussions on operational tolerances.

Look at UNIX as an example. Quake III under Linux will never have the performance of Quake III under Windows 98. The reason is that, while Linux is a technically superior platform, Linux has large operational tolerances. It's very resistant to crashes because of the way it's designed. However, this fault-tolerant design comes at a price: by separating the 3D libraries from X, by separating X from the kernel, etc., you introduce lots of hidden latencies.

Win98, in the interest of pure gaming performance, lets the machine get down close to the bare metal. But we all know what kind of operational tolerances Win98 has--the first time you get any kind of weirdness, the entire system crashes.

Does all this make sense?

What a Box of Chocolates!

[twisty]

I surely didn't expect those, but I've got to agree with at least half of them!

Trollies
I more disagree than agree here... High voltage wires, even when suspended, become a hazard with falling branches etc., and have to reach far into the suburbs for most implimentations. (Nearby Dayton, Ohio still uses 'em!)

Amiga
Right On Target there... Even as a small niche, the Amiga was the prototyper's dream. A decade ahead of the competition, you could plug in a $100US-or-less add-on to digitize video, do Max Headroom-esque video effects, process live wacked out audio effects in real time...
If it weren't for the proprietary hardware, it would have Ruled The Earth. It's most saving grace was the openness of its programming.

Slide Rules? Sure, good for visualization of functional relationships. Reel Mowers? No thanks, I've use a few. AutoWatch? An engineer's moral imperative! Airships? Works for Bladerunner!

...but then again, here in Cincinnati we're still using LED watches. "If the world were going to end, I'd go to Cincinnati... everything there happens 10 years later!" - Samuel Clemens

A better list

[Animats]

Let me suggest a few items:

• #5 Crossbar The last of the electromechanical central office telephone switches, #5 Crossbar [navyrelics.com] has an unmatched track record: No #5 switch was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster or a major fire. That level of reliability has not been matched in the electronic switching era. The distributed architecture of #5 crossbar made the switch as a whole much more reliable than its components and subsystems. When electronic switching came in, a much more centralized approach (two redundant mainframes driving a dumb switch fabric) was used, and it failed more.
• Centralized Train Control A technology from the late 1920s that made possible the safe operation of heavily travelled railroads with multiple tracks and complicated junctions. Everything was carefully engineered to follow the Golden Rule of Signalling - everything must fail to a safe condition. Even if signal lines are struck by lightning. Even if poles are knocked down. Even if ice freezes a switch or train stop device. Details here [beanpaste.com], including a simulator down to the relay contact level.
• Stainless steel The wonder material of the 1930s. It doesn't rust. It's very strong. It looks good. It lasts centuries, maybe millenia. It's expensive and hard to work, but if you want something permanent, it's the way to go. The DeLorean was made of stainless steel. Yet today, stainless steel is a niche product. Too permanent?
• Synchronous AC electric clocks. Plug it in and forget it. No batteries to change, lasts for decades, and the power company keeps it in sync. Yet hard to find today.

Re:Sometimes designs are shoddy.

[nathanh]

Quake III under Linux will never have the performance of Quake III under Windows 98.

Without page-flipping on both platforms, the performance of Quake III on Linux already exceeds Quake III on Windows 98 for several cards.

Page-flipping is being added soon. Given that without page-flipping the Mach64 is (just for an example) 10% faster on Linux than Windows, with page-flipping it will totally obliterate Windows.

The public benchmarks for the tdfx driver are showing Linux exceeding Windows in every single viewperf benchmark. On some benchmarks the ratio of Linux to Windows is better than 2:1.

I think you misunderestimate the potential of good design. The DRI allows data to be streamed faster than the hardware can cope. Windows 98 is surviving by myth (the myth that Direct3D is in some way faster than OpenGL) and myth alone.

Clarification

[-Harlequin-]

can in some cases exceed CD quality.

I thought I'd reply to myself to provide an analogy to this, as it might be counter-intuitive enough to attract flames. An uncompressed BMP (eg like CD sound) image might take, say 100kb. A compressed JPG of the same image can, (depending on the image) be simultaniously a fifth the file size (ie like MD) and at a higher resolution, such that details not clear in the uncompressed BMP image can be made out in the JPG image. Ie, the compressed data can have a better picture despite the imperfections of lossy compression. For some images (types of music), the compression artifacts will cause more damage to the image than what is gained in resolution. For some however, the artifacts can have minimal effect and the resolution gain can have great effect, and the result is unquestionably superior.

In short, my counter example to the "MP3 is like cassette" idea wasn't intended to say "MD has better sound quality than CD" (cause in all but extreme cases this just isn't the case), but rather to blur this over-simplified view that compressed=bad and uncompressed=good in an area where filesize limits are being applied (such as music reproduction).

Re:Philadelphia and Electric Trolleys

[bnenning]

well in all honesty, the availability of automobile transportation only became possible due to massive amounts of your tax dollars used to build roads. Chances are you were never given a choice as to whether that was what you wanted.

Good point, and I agree. Public roads should be funded with tolls or other user fees. People who use choose mass transit shouldn't be forced to subsidize drivers, and vice versa. What I was responding to was the attitude that the automobile is solely an implement of destruction, people's living and travel preferences are irrelevant, and we must all be forced to conform to a utopian vision of "community".