MetaFilter posts tagged with obsolete

103: Having a lawn you could tell kids to get off

wendell — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:51:11 -0800

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About a rather comprehensive list, ranging from the gone-and-forgotten (22: Using jumpers to set IRQs) to the not-yet-extinct-but going-there (41: Phone books and Yellow Pages). But missing a few like 101: wired.com not being a nostalgia site and 102: getting punished for calling your dad a geek.

It Came From the Stacks

wendell — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:41:18 -0800

Awful Library Books Volumes that are so outdated or so outmoded that they no longer belong in a public library. Your grandfather's Computer Science. Your grandfather's Rocket Science. Your grandmother's Feminism. Your great-grandmother's Pre-Feminism. (And your great-grandfather's.) Your grandparents' parents! World Powers that no longer exist! Old predictions that didn't happen! Bios of people when they were famous for something else! Roller Disco! Books considered crackpot when they were new! Stuff even the Politically Incorrect would think are Just Plain Wrong! And more! Are any of these books hiding in YOUR library? (If so, mail them to me.) P.S.: I can't believe no one in the MetaFilter Library Squad posted this before me. I did work in a Library in college, and my mother the teacher did do two years as a school librarian, but I'm probably the 17,000th most-librarianish MeFite. And I found it at Neatorama.

Memory lights the corners of my mind

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:47:33 -0800

Computer data storage through the ages. From the punch card to the cassette drive to the Jaz, and much more.

Tromba marina

unknowncommand — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:24:35 -0800

The tromba marina, also known as the marine trumpet or nun’s fiddle, is an obsolete, 4-7 foot tall, single-stringed instrument in the viol family. Played with a bow, the tromba marina sounds strangely trumpet-like (for mp3's, scroll down to the bottom of the first link), hence the name . Buy one here or make your own. You can also see one up-close in the Musical Instrument Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they don’t bother putting an image on their webpage, and the gallery’s carpet smells intensely of mildew.

Old And In The Way

VeGiTo — Tue, 11 Mar 2003 18:24:43 -0800

Old And In The Way. Their economy has lost any resemblance of dynamism, their military might has shrunk to the point of irrelevance, and their society is regressing towards a centrally planned socialist political system. Now with their standard of living dipping below even the poorest sub-group of Americans, is Europe a dying continent, with all its glory days already way behind it? [more inside]

chandy72 — Wed, 30 Oct 2002 11:20:16 -0800

Obsolecence and adolescence I came of musical age during the beginning of the tectonic shift between cassette/vinyl/CD (vinyl on the way out, cassette taking precedence and CD waiting in the wings). Crushes, science and lots of bad music I still love (yeah, too much Anglophilian pop) was spooled on those tapes. This story about the demise of the cassette has it all! And it's a great bit of writing, too...

Blake — Wed, 16 Oct 2002 06:48:10 -0800

The DMCA isn't the only Dumb Law. So may Strange Laws, even Sex Laws. There's many fun Obsolete Laws still on the books. The list Goes On and On.
Not sure what laws to follow, try A Law Librarian, or, better yet, WWJD?

poopy — Fri, 06 Sep 2002 06:51:07 -0800

99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete An excerpt from an upcoming book by Mr. Zeldman in which he continues to argue the practice of standards compliance - "Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, backward compatibility sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie." I enjoy his writing but he seems to be repeating himself as usual. Still, it is a good argument: where do we focus our priorities for future development - pure standards compliant CSS models, backwards compatibility, or somewhere in between? I know this has been discussed before but thought it postworthy due to the new book and all.

Steven Den Beste — Tue, 12 Dec 2000 19:48:34 -0800

The end of Edison's greatest invention. All good things must come to an end, I suppose. This one lasted longer than most of the 19th century's great inventions -- like the steam locomotive.