Technology that has died since the year 2000

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What technology was ubiquitous in the year 2000 but is now extinct apart from a few legacy applications?

I will start off with:

Cathode ray tubes
VHS video recorders
1" reel to reel video recorders
Betacam camcorders
PAL and NTSC television
Teletext and NICAM sound
Floppy drives
ZIP drives
The PCI bus
Parallel ports
Parallel ATA
Fax machines
Dot matrix printers
Thin ethernet
Credit / debit cards with magnetic strips and card swipes in POS terminals
Incandescent light bulbs

We still have these in the US and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

A game console with a SEGA badge on it.

Walkman, ghetto blaster

All of these are alive and well.

Digital may be better than VHS, but a VHS tape is more durable in many applications and is still widely used.

Fax machines are everywhere. In the end, digital receipt and storage of faxes is not catching on in many places because the fax machine is so much cheaper and people still want those hard copies when it comes through.

Long live the magnetic strip. Embedded chips are still quite new.

Incandescent is still current technology. Government mandate to stop using them is unpopular and inconvenient for many applications where CF technology can't provide a comparable service.

My dad actually STILL has a CRT monitor on his computer.

oh yeah, add flip-phones to that list.

a carburetor on a car. points ignition systems. mechanical advance mechanisms. mechanical fuel injection. fluid, and vacume (pressure differential) operated valve bodies for automatic transmissions. it is fun to see what happens to solid state devices when you drive an old v8 car at wide open throttle with a points ignition system, solid copper wires for your spark plugs, and non resistor plugs. it can even interfere with your neighbors tv. can you say RF interference. weeeeeeeeeeeeee!! !

those little portable video players for kids...like in 2003 or somethig
umm...the Game Boy
flipcams...pda...damn convergence is a cruel b!tch.

Eight-track audio tapes

That died out long before 2000 (like mid eighties).

Nah. Anything that needs to work wherever it goes will not go all electronic. If you can't fix it in the field and you'd be in trouble, they'd want something you can actually fix.

Were there any volume production cars manufactured in the year 2000 with carburetors and mechanical ignition systems?

Carburetors stopped being installed in new cars sold in western Europe some time around 1994 apart from some hand built examples by tiny manufacturers.

That is true, but the military still uses them, and any government vehicle that has to work in any condition will still have them.

Electronics are nice, but unless the whole electrical system is hardened against EMP attack or all the components are easily replaceable, a "mission critical" vehicle can't trust electronics to hold up.

Old school tech may not have all the benefits of the digital age, but it is more reliable and can be readily repaired in the field. Most car mechanics today are just part-swappers...no real diagnostic know how. As most parts can't be opened up and repaired, they are more often trained to just unplug/unbolt a part and swap it with a new one.

Discman too (portable CD player).



I bought a flip phone about 3 years ago. I miss them, and I prefer buttons on a phone.

Slam-door trains - where passengers have to open and close the doors manually because they are not power operated - have vanished from the railway network in Britain apart from a few heritage lines.

I had to open a train door going from Reading to Paddington the other day. Is that the sort of thing you meant by "heritage lines"?

I think your list is a good one though. I don't quite understand why the USA doesn't move to chip and PIN, it's just so much more secure. However, even in the UK, many gift cards use magnetic strips, and they can be used if the chip isn't working or the customer is from a country that doesn't use chip and PIN.