ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Voice - Data - Video Discussion OT: Have we gone too far?.

I don't think it's a secret around here that I like old equipment, so sign me up for the Luddite Club as well!

There have been wonderful advances in technology. I've just been sorting out some old computer parts, and I have in front of me a 10MB full-height hard disk and a 128KB full-length expansion board from an old AT. It's almost incredible to think that a little more than 20 years later we can cram 200GB+ onto a disk a fraction of the size and at least a thousand times as much RAM onto a tiny strip about 4 inches long, not to mention that 128MB of RAM today costs a fraction of what 128KB cost 20+ years ago.

Yet I can't help feeling that so much of these advances are either being abused, or at best not being made the possible use of. Computers are certainly a prime example.

I'll see somebody using a fancy Windows word processor to write a simple letter. It won't run with anything less than 50MB of disk space and 2MB of RAM. Does it reformat a paragraph any faster than you could do with a 30-year-old version of Wordstar on a CP/M system? Quite often the answer is no. And Wordstar could be run from a single floppy with a mere 64KB of RAM. What's more, it was a darn sight easier to use too.

I don't have objections to making something as complex as it needs to be to do the job, but I don't see the point in introducing unnecessary complexities just for the sake of it.



The system that I maintain for the local taxi company is running DOS 4.01. It was a deliberate decision on my part when I set them up about 6 years ago, along with the custom software that I wrote under Borland's Turbo Pascal 5.



Same here. I have a few Western Electric 500 sets, and GPO 700-series which were the nearest British equivalent of the same era. The newest (POTS) phone I have is a 1980s ITT 2500 TouchTone set.

Some (most) of the modern phones are junk. It's all about supposed style -- Weird shaped buttons arranged in odd ways, horrible handsets that are uncomfortable to use, etc., not to mention the overall poor construction quality.



I'm an avid record collector: LPs, 45s, and 78s. I probably have more turntables around than would be considered normal, including a number of Garrard and Goldring-Lenco units from the 1960s (Garrard is a favorite -- See my post in the nostalgia area). In fact the newest deck I have is a Pioneer unit from the mid-1970s.

As most of my records are 1950s/1960s though, it somehow wouldn't be appropriate to use anything newer.

Tell you what: I'd just about gotten use to younger people having never seen a 78rpm record before. But it still came as something of a shock the other day when I was chatting with a kid about 45s and the response was "What's that?"