Slightly over the top subject line I know, but I was curious to see what day to day experiences have changed significantly or possibly obliterated as a result of apps, subscriptions or services. More importantly what was the result or outcome?
Reading magazines and newspapers (was daily) - Should have been replaced with Apple New+ subs, press reader from library (free), however it’s resulted in me not reading anything in magazine / newspaper format.
Listening to full albums with deep immersion - Should have been far simpler and easier with first MP3 files, then music subscription services. Now I have a few fractured playlists (and whatever my kids let me listen to)…this outcome might be more about family life than tech mind you.
Building computer hardware - I loved this, from my very first 286 custom build, however I’m now on the computer hardware as a subscription model (ie purchase built and lifecycle every 5 years). Understand this is still a thing that many folks do, especially for gaming, but I do miss (oddly) the frustration of it all.
Wandering around a book store is one experience that was something I loved when I was younger. Talking face to face with other bookstore browsers to hear about their new favorite author or a book they discovered. Nowadays it’s GoodReads or Amazon.
I also miss going to a newly-found friend’s house to see what was in their record or cd collection and taking a spin with my friend telling me what they love about certain albums or highlight tracks. We could spend days in front of the stereo and immerse ourselves in expanding our music horizons.
Making a mixtape for a high school crush was a thing. I knew a radio DJ who worked the midnight hours. My friends and I would spend hours trying to perfect a mix tape that was the length of one side of a cassette tape (usually 30 or 45 minutes). The DJ would start at 1 am and crossfade the songs beautifully with no commercial breaks. We would hit the record button on our boombox and record one side of the cassette tape. Then do the same for the other side. It was an interesting way to express our emotions to a high school crush. Nowadays someone just makes a streaming playlist for someone. So much easier nowadays.
There was a Canadian guy who advertised in rock magazines that he had bootleg concert tapes. He would send out a catalog which was a hand typed booklet of his current selection with musician, date, source or recording (audience or soundboard), and the audio quality grade of the recording (A to F). I’d send a money order to him and then wait a month for him to copy the cassette tape and mail it back to me. I had an awesome collection of my favorite rock bands’ live concert recording. I also found quite a lot of demo tapes when these rock bands were still young. Nowadays you can find them everywhere in deluxe anniversary editions or in other illicit sources.
I haven’t listen to an out of state rock & roll station on AM radio or bought a “High Fidelity Monaural” album at a drug store in decades. And I haven’t duped cartridges on an 8 track recorder since Nixon was in office.
Some that come to mind:
Don’t wait for film slides to come in the mail
Don’t listen to a hardware radio
Don’t use a paper dictionary
Don’t use paper maps
Don’t use a vacuum cleaner(Roborock)
Don’t manually operate shades or curtains(Serena)
Don’t use a key to start car
I love how some people think of things they miss, and others think of things they don’t miss…
I kinda miss tinkering with cars. Was never that great of a mechanic, but replacing my own head gaskets or water pumps or alternators or spark plugs was rather satisfying. Now it’s damn near impossible to get to most such things, nor do I have the patience left when it is.
I miss soldering things together (or apart) and replacing vacuum tubes in radios.
Things I do NOT miss:
Paper maps
Calculators
Typewriters
Telephones
Cellular phones (non-smart version)
Television sets (not the current thing we call a Smart TV, which is just a special-purpose computer w/ wifi and an enormous screen)
This thread is a trip down nostalgia lane for most points (I just missed punch cards, they were still around in limited places when I started as a cadet programmer back in the day).
A common thread that really hit home was sharing stuff, going to a friends house to check out their Music/Books/Gaming Console/Computer…magazines () etc. Recording mix tapes off the radio onto cassette tapes and doing crappy voiceovers, must find where some of those are (however have nothing to play them on).
@dixonge good counter point, things I don’t miss is your list (my Motorola brick when on call wasn’t my fav thing), rewinding video tapes to take back, spending 3 hours at the video shop because everything you wanted is out and you can’t make up your mind, carrying coins for phonebox, having no way of syncing with friends when you have already left to meet up, sharing 1 phone in the house, sharing 1 screen in the house, black and white tvs.
I miss weekly visits to the record store. There was a guy in the classical music section who had a deep knowledge of all the latest recordings and what was on the horizon. We’d talk for a half hour or so and I could depend on his recommendations to buy a few CDs. He usually didn’t steer me wrong.
This has now been replaced by a digital subscription to Gramophone magazine and a subscription to Apple Music. I can read reviews and listen immediately to the album and not waste money on albums I don’t like.
Which is better? I definitely spend less money on albums every year, but I do miss those conversations with a person who had an in-depth knowledge of recorded classical music.
So, far this has been great, and has been quite a nostalgia trip for me, too. I won’t repeat anything that was posted before, save for three items, but I +1 almost all of it. The three that I will repeat are (1) whiling away hours at the bookstore; (2) whiling away hours at the record store; (3) working on cars and other repairable things.
I miss reading encyclopedias. I know we have online equivalents. But I used to love having five volumes of the encyclopedia down while I traced a discussion through a series of cross-references. I swear I spent my whole childhood doing that.
I know someone mentioned not missing paper maps. Generally, I agree. But here in Southern California, we had our Thomas Guide. It was a ritual to update your Thomas Guide every year (or at least every other year), and you could tell people where you lived by a Thomas Guide grid.
I was looking for the page for Century City, where my office is, but I couldn’t find one. Here is the best I could do.
What’s weird to me about the Thomas Guide is that I don’t even remember buying whatever last one I bought. It just all of a sudden wasn’t a thing any more.
This may not apply to many of you, but one thing that has changed so significantly is the whole process of legal research. Law books are essentially finding tools, not like expository works or monographs (those exist, of course). There was a class in first year law school where we had to learn how all the different books worked. They also taught us a very structured method of designing a research strategy to zero in on a point of law. Lexis and Westlaw existed when I was in law school, but the schools wouldn’t let students touch those services until our second semester. Some of those book-based finding tools were great but were truly a pain to use. (You had to find something in the main volume, check whether there were any updates in supplemental volumes, and always check the “pocket part.”) Law firms still had physical libraries. Now, almost all day-to-day legal research is done digitally.
Before the internet there were many instances where people would say shit which sounds wrong very confidently. Easier now just to open Google and call their bullshit.
A few I don’t miss: waiting days for prescriptions. Avoiding unfamiliar addresses and cities when time was limited. Missing a whole social event due to crossed wires.
One I miss is people looking at each other in moments of boredom. My family is so often the only ones not pulling out phones and looking downward.
Given the incidences of GPS spoofing in Europe related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I decided to purchase the 100 Anniversary edition of the 2024 Road Atlas as a fall back should it ever be needed. I will probably never need it but if I do ….
I remember my constitutional law professor passing out a large, and I do mean a large, stack of Supreme Court legal decisions for our doctoral cohort to read, absorb, and respond to in writing regarding various issues in school law. This case law included three days of written exams and a full day of verbal exams with the dissertation committee. While it was a worthwhile experience, I would not want to do it again!
OTOH now there are plenty of people very confidently saying stuff on the internet that’s bullshit, and there are plenty of people who believe it because they saw or read it on the internet.
HAHAHA! When I was a kid, I used to suspect that my parents were wrong about many things, but had no way to “fact check“ them. Now, my kids demand I google a disputed assertion on the spot. This ineffable expression of satisfaction grows on their faces, if they don’t otherwise express it in gleeful or gloating words, when the Google search confirms their suspicion that mom or dad is wrong.
It’s rare, of course, as you would expect. But it happens
On that topic, have you considered soldering your own keyboard? Or some arduino Pi Project? These are some ways to bring more physicality to this tech world.
Personally, I loved the experience of building my own keyboard and even replacing some components because I wanted to upgrade them. That’s something probably not worth for many people, but I can’t help but appreciate the so called IKEA effect I get from this piece of electronics.
) etc. Recording mix tapes off the radio onto cassette tapes and doing crappy voiceovers, must find where some of those are (however have nothing to play them on).
