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5 Things to Say Goodbye to in 2010

January 11th, 2010 · gadgets, lists

The 2000s was a wonderful decade for technology. It gave us Wikipedia, the iPod, and social networking. It made flat screens flatter and mobile devices more mobile. It fed us the Internet until we became addicted to it, and now it’s a pivotal part of our daily lives. And it taught us that as a world digitally connected, we strive to be heard, and we yearn for information fast and at our fingertips.

While the first decade of the new millennium has quite a bit to be remembered for, we may be quick to forget the things we’ll leave behind. As we enter this new decade, let’s give our goodbyes to some of the things that didn’t make it.

1. Old Hardware. Floppy disks. Cassette tapes. CRT monitors. VCRs. VHS tapes. Remember all these things? You may have some trouble finding any of these in stores in the new decade. They served us well in the past, but in 2010, these remnants of technology’s past are the large, bulky ancestors of the technology we use today.

Floppy disks were the storage medium of choice for almost two decades. The square flimsy piece of metal and plastic has been replaced by something much smaller: USB flash drives, SD cards, and the like, which hold tons more storage and fit in a fraction of the space of a floppy.

Cassette tapes and VHS tapes have of course been replaced by CDs and DVDs. But even CDs and DVDs are last decade. Thanks to the iPod, storing music on CDs is becoming old hat. DVDs are still prevalent today, but its replacement format is already out in the wild: Blu-Ray.

I bet we’ll still be seeing a few CRT monitors in offices here and there, but for the most part, they’ve been replaced by slimmer and brighter flat screen LCD and plasma monitors. We even have a thinner choice of LCD out there these days: LED TVs. LED TVs are LCD TVs that use LED backlighting, which means LED TVs can be even thinner!

2. Encarta. Remember Encarta? Back when I was still in high school, Encarta was an awesome digital encyclopedia that had lots of cool visual elements. In its time, it was one of the best digital multimedia encyclopedias available. However, in October of 2009, Microsoft decided to put Encarta to an end. Poor Encarta.

Encarta was nice back in the day, but now that it’s gone, what do people use now? Why, Wikipedia, of course! It may not be as flashy as Encarta was, but it’s more accessible, and it harnesses the power of its own users for keeping its content up-to-date.

Just to be ironic, if you’d like to learn more about what Encarta was, check out its Wikipedia article.

3. Circuit City (the store). Best Buy didn’t used to be the only major electronics store in the U.S. It used to have a competitor called Circuit City. Founded in 1949, Circuit City was the place to go for all your consumer electronics and appliance needs. Unfortunately, this retail chain didn’t survive long enough to see the new decade. The company filed bankruptcy in 2008, and by the following year, all of its stores closed down. Its name lives on, however, in the form of CircuitCity.com. After the company went bankrupt, it sold its brand to Systemax, who now controls the Circuit City website.

At least there’s Best Buy, right? And of course, in the day and age of couch surfing, many of us would rather do our electronics shopping online, via retailers such as Newegg and TigerDirect. Oh, and let’s not forget the biggest retailer of them all: Amazon.

4. Geocities. Back in the 90s, Geocities was a popular way of making a free website. Geocities began in 1995 and was acquired by Yahoo in early 1999. It helped pollute the Web with sparkly backgrounds, scrolling text, and cheesy background music. However, if it weren’t for the geeky embarrassing teenage years that Geocities gave us, the Internet wouldn’t have matured into the versatile medium that it is today. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like Yahoo did anything with Geocities to keep it up with the times, and instead of giving it a makeover, Yahoo decided to pull the plug on Geocities in October of 2009.

But don’t worry; there are better options for making websites these days. Try Google Sites, for instance. Although, while the trend back in the 90s was to make your own website, the new trend is to make your own space on a social networking site. Or a blog. Or a video site. You most likely already know what options are out there, but just in case you don’t, you may want to check out my previous article.

5. The RAZR (and other non-smartphones). I remember when the RAZR was the hip new phone to have. It epitomized everything we wanted in a phone back then: it was thin, it flipped, and it was sleek, so it made us look cool. We could call our friends from anywhere we wanted to—well, at least anywhere we had signal—and we could send text messages, too. Motorola stopped selling the RAZR in 2007, as its luster had faded due to the emergence of smartphones.

Back then, we wanted thin phones that could flip, and we were satisfied with making phone calls and texting. These days, we want thin phones we can touch, and phone calls and text messages just don’t cut it anymore. Our phones have to play music, take pictures, surf the net, and practically do everything we expect a mobile computer to do. Sorry RAZR, 2010 isn’t your decade. Instead of RAZRs, we have our iPhones and Androids and other smartphone cousins.

Final Goodbyes

From floppies to flash drives and RAZRs to iPhones, technology has changed in the past decade. The next time you listen to an MP3 or swipe your finger across a touchscreen, consider taking a moment to appreciate just how far technology has come. What’s even more awe-inspiring is this: it’s no secret that the technology we hold in the palm of our hands today will be obsolete in ten or twenty years. When touchscreens and super thin TVs become an obsolete thing of the past, what gadgets and technology do you think will be there to replace them?