10 Things That Will Soon Disappear Forever (And 7 That Refuse to Die)

[ls99]

Bye, four wheel drive's manual front locking hubs. My 79 Chevy K20 pick up had it. The 98, and 06 GMCs are push button. The 06 eve has an auto 4wd. Never used it, not sure it is fast enough to lock when needed. Prefer engaging before I need it.

[CaptTom]

I have yet to see an automatic transmission that can rock a car out of a snow drift.

Now, about those kids on my lawn...

[Texas Proud]

As to the collection mail boxes... there are none up here north of Houston.... except at the local post office...


I have never thought about it, but I guess I could just put mine in the neighborhood box in the subdivision next door (I have to drive through it to get out of mine)... but we do not mail that much so it is not a big deal...

[JoeWras]

Blackouts: How will you stop the college kids from chugging the cheap liquor?

Clutch: loved the manual, until my knee rebelled on me.

Penny: please. Remove it already. We don't have bits and half pennies. It is time.

Imperial units: For fasteners, please do it. All mechanics find themselves reaching for metric most of the time anyway. Let's end it. But if you force degrees C down my throat, then you better give the temperature to the tenth of a degree.

Finally, just to bug my DW, I set our new scale to Stone and Pounds. She was not happy thinking it was broken, and then laughed. I admit, for us Americans, it is a nice mental exercise to measure weight this way.

[aja8888]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Texas Proud As to the collection mail boxes... there are none up here north of Houston.... except at the local post office...

The Woodlands has a few at drive thru bank locations.

[meierlde]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JoeWras Blackouts: How will you stop the college kids from chugging the cheap liquor? Clutch: loved the manual, until my knee rebelled on me. Penny: please. Remove it already. We don't have bits and half pennies. It is time. Imperial units: For fasteners, please do it. All mechanics find themselves reaching for metric most of the time anyway. Let's end it. But if you force degrees C down my throat, then you better give the temperature to the tenth of a degree. Finally, just to bug my DW, I set our new scale to Stone and Pounds. She was not happy thinking it was broken, and then laughed. I admit, for us Americans, it is a nice mental exercise to measure weight this way.

Quite often when the bill comes to x.99 I tell the cashier to keep the penny, just not worth the hassle for a penny.

[Winemaker]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Music Lover Yeah...when are you folks gonna finally join the modern system of measurement that almost all of the rest of the world uses??

Because politicians are afraid of people getting ripped off.

They're the same ones who police wine labels for the percentage of a particular grape in a bottle. They only recently allowed wineries to change the vintage year on a bottle of wine without the usual 6 month $$$ label approval proce$$.

[meierlde]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Music Lover Yeah...when are you folks gonna finally join the modern system of measurement that almost all of the rest of the world uses??

The us tried in in 1975-1982 and going metric in general was a smash flop for the consuming public. All be it booze comes in metric sizes such as 1l and 1.75l. many devices use metric screws and threads Regan killed the effort off as a way to save money Note that new cars all have metric fasteners for example. If you have an english socket set you can buy metric sockets for it, but you would have to buy new wrenches.

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by exnavynuke Cassettes aren't dead? I can't recall the last time I saw one. ... .

Really. It's been a long time since I saw them in use. A few years ago, I went through mine and digitized the few that had some (mostly sentimental) value to me. Had a tough time finding a cassette player in the house that still worked, broken belts, etc.

A few years before that, a very-low-tech relative brought an old cassette to me, some (similarly low-tech) friend of his used the songs for a Bible class or something. She couldn't count on having a cassette player available, and wanted it recorded to a CD (regular audio red-book format). I was able to do that, but when I asked about making an mp3 or wav and putting it on a USB stick for them, they had deer-in-the-headlights look, so audio CD, stick in CD player worked for them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Texas Proud I still have some!!! But have not listened to one in more than 10 years... and I even had a car that would play them up to a couple of years ago... (and it was a 2004!!)...

Yep, They are dead!

And the sound quality of the prerecorded ones was terrible. But a good quality home deck and good tape did a pretty nice job. The mass production process used cheap tape, and dubbed at high speed, cutting the freq response even worse than that poor little 1/8", 4-track (stereo in 2 directions) running at 1 7/8 IPS could handle. Studio tape was much wider per track, and ran at 30 IPS. The first tape recorders like that used actual razor thin (and sharp!) metal tape, and it could kill somebody if it spun off the reel. The sound engineer was actually in another room! Yikes!

Oh, and manual shift cars - like so many other things, these will be around for a long time, but only to serious hobbyists. Heck, I follow a forum of music box and player piano enthusiasts - those are still around!

-ERD50

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by JoeWras ... Finally, just to bug my DW, I set our new scale to Stone and Pounds. She was not happy thinking it was broken, and then laughed. I admit, for us Americans, it is a nice mental exercise to measure weight this way.

I was in a training class for work in the early 80's, and there were people attending from all over the world. Some of us got together to ski over the w/e, and when getting the rental skis, the guy from Scotland and his wife were trying to convert their weight in stones to our pounds. I thought stones was some old archaic measurement system from medieval times, I didn't know it was in use still (well, this was the 1980's).

-ERD50

[GalaxyBoy]

After my recent retirement ( btw) I had to actually fax paperwork to the 401(k) company. Dropped by the local UPS store who wanted $1.50 per page as if it actually cost them anywhere close to that. So I went by the old office and used the multifunction machine (we used to call them copy machines). Last time I intend to go in there. Thought about making rounds to say "hi" but immediately thought better of it.

[ejman]

Refuse to die: Long playing records - LP's - "Vinyls" in current parlance. Not only refuse to die but are enjoying a resurgence.

[meierlde]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ejman Refuse to die: Long playing records - LP's - "Vinyls" in current parlance. Not only refuse to die but are enjoying a resurgence.

As indeed are tube type amplifiers. It appears that because they handle distortion differently than transistors some like the sound better.

[ejman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by meierlde As indeed are tube type amplifiers. It appears that because they handle distortion differently than transistors some like the sound better.

Guilty as charged listening to one as I type this...

[Major Tom]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Midpack The article is about these, "collection" boxes.

Aah yes, that makes sense. My mistake.

[NW-Bound]

Some earlier posts talk of cassette tapes. Yes, I still have two functioning stereo cassette decks, and they still worked as of a few years ago when I digitized all of my cassette tape collections to convert them to MP3.

I still have these decks, but do these decks still work or their belts and rubber wheels all dried up? I do not know. But I will admit that I have not listened again to the resultant MP3's, but know where they are stored in my Buffalo NAS.

Here's something curious. I recently discovered that people are still trading open reel-to-reel tape decks, the rigor of the 70s. And they were not going for cheap. We are talking thousands of dollars for a good high-quality deck.

What the heck? How do they get blank tapes for them? And to use them for what? There's no way these old expensive decks, as nice as they are, can match the specs of modern digital high-quality sound recording equipment.

[38Chevy454]

Along with cassette tapes, any type of tape video or electronic storage is essentially dead.

[garyt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sojourner All the ones on the Disappear Soon list seem reasonable to me... except #2: blackouts. I guess it depends on what the definition of "soon" is in this context, but I have serious doubts that occasional power outages here in my neighborhood will stop happening anytime soon. For that to happen, the price of whole-home batteries would have to drop substantially and/or the power lines running to my neighborhood would have to be replaced and re-installed underground. We have, on average, around two long-ish (1+ hour) power outages per year in my neighborhood. While inconvenient and annoying, I don't see enough incentive for the power company or individual homeowners to invest a lot of money to completely eradicate this problem.

That's the one I thought was a bit off, also. I've often read how bad are energy grid is and how huge blackouts are likely. The massive expense makes fixing it difficult.

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NW-Bound ... Here's something curious. I recently discovered that people are still trading open reel-to-reel tape decks, the rigor of the 70s. And they were not going for cheap. We are talking thousands of dollars for a good high-quality deck. What the heck? How do they get blank tapes for them? And to use them for what? There's no way these old expensive decks, as nice as they are, can match the specs of modern digital high-quality sound recording equipment.

Maybe just nostalgia/hobbyist level interest. People collect much odder things.

But like the 'special' distortion that a tube amp provides, magnetic tape has its own unique distortion properties. Magnetic saturation and other non-linearity is different from tube/transistor. I have heard of audio engineers running a track, or entire final recording, through a magnetic tape recorder, recording the playback, just to gain that distortion. There are tape simulators built into audio editing software. For some ears, or some applications, digtal is just too 'pristine'.

There is plenty of tape available. Radio shows would record/archive stuff, I think collectors can find boxes and boxes of once used tape cheap.

Cassettes just don't make sense for this, they are too limiting, unless you were going for the special effect, like they change a film segment to B&W and add grain and scratches to make it look old.

-ERD50

[Sojourner]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GalaxyBoy After my recent retirement ( btw) I had to actually fax paperwork to the 401(k) company. Dropped by the local UPS store who wanted $1.50 per page as if it actually cost them anywhere close to that. So I went by the old office and used the multifunction machine (we used to call them copy machines).

There are a handful of free faxing websites you can use if you just need to send a few pages. I had to fax two pages to my local DMV tag office recently, so I used FaxZero. It seems there are still quite a few places that will only accept signed documents via fax or originals by mail. Sometimes I wonder if the people working there are still using Windows 98 and 56 kilobaud modems...