"Obsolete" Technologies ? FAX ? Cassettes ? Floppies ?

[26C.Z968]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11380905/From-floppy-disks-cassette-tapes-obsolete-technologies-baffle-modern-generations.html

From floppy disks to cassette tapes: MailOnline reveals the
obsolete technologies that will baffle modern generations -
as the fax machine reaches the end of its road

Regulator Ofcom has set out plans to kill off the fax machine
by no longer requiring telecom firms to use them

. . .

Yes, it's much easier to steal/spy on info sent by
more modern techniques :-)

Given widely-available tech these days, a fax might
be considered a more trustworthy copy. Sure, you
can fake a fax - but you need a compatible MODEM you
can plug into a phone jack. You don't seen those
around much anymore except at garage sales of stuff
found at garage sales - and a lot of those were ISA
bus ... ie old original IBM-PC plug-in cards.

Fax works, fax is cheap, fax is easy, lots and lots
of fax machines out there, fax can serve useful
purposes ... therefore there's no reason for it to
go away. I fax stuff, and/or receive faxes two or
three times a month.

The article also goes on about things like pagers ...
basically the original SMS/'text me' exercise. Those
are probably past their time - mostly you only got
the phone number of who sent you the page, maybe
a line of caller ID, and you could not return a
message with the device. One-way communication.

Cassette tapes - work just fine and there are a zillion
players still out there from ultra-cheepos to expensive
console units. Not the best sound, but pretty good and
the slight fuzziness and spectrum tilt kinda makes hard
rock sound better. Try "When The Levee Breaks" on
70s hardware ... you'll see. CDs are clearer, better for
more 'delicate' music. MP4s on a thumb drive can exceed
either in terms of both quality and especially capacity.
So, cassettes aren't exactly "obsolete", but you can
usually do better. Of note, cassette recorders do NOT
respect DRM restrictions ... copy all you want.

Floppy disks ... yea, obsolete. However I still have
loads of the things with backups of various things
the MUST be kept for various, sometimes legal, reasons.
SO, I keep an older PC running XP, with all the
necessary plug-ins on the motherboard - it's got
5-1/4 and 3-1/2 floppy units in it AND a CD burner
plus 10/100 network card. If it HAS to be recovered
you can do it with that box. Also have a few 8-inch
floppies (those were REALLY 'floppy') but nobody
has made compatible equipment since the late 70s -
I think they were made with Shugart drives using
MFM, maybe just plain FM, encoding and on PDP-11
or LSI-11 boxes.

Data-format obsolescence has become a MAJOR thing.
The National Archives is freaking and other historians
and even corporations with still-relevant data made
on machines (sometimes pne-off units). Older NASA
data was most likely to be in weird formats on
one-off machines. Paper tape, reel magnetic tape,
those big old hard drive units with maybe a dozen
reddish disks in a big pack you could pull out of
the drive (which was about the size of a dish-washer
(DO make sure they've completely spun-down before
removing them however :-) Floppies of all sizes
and formats, ZIP-disks.... the MEDIA may still be ok,
but now you can't find anything to READ it on and/or
it may be encoded in some mysterious fashion no-one
living remembers.

Yea, you could crack the code, but that takes TIME and
MONEY. Well MAYBE you could crack it ... low capacity
in the past often meant VERY compacted data. Look up
"bit-fields" in the 'C' language ... why waste bits in
a byte when you can pack two or three different readings
into one ? I've used those myself for the same reasons.
I did one data-logger where the various 1,2,3 and 4 bit
fields smoothly overlapped across three bytes - not a
single bit wasted - and then sent to a serial EEPROM.
Problem ... ya know how DOCUMENTATION tends to disappear
or quick fixes/revisions get made and NEVER documented ?
Oh yea, good 'ole Fred knows - except that Fred retired,
went senile and died 20 years ago ......

A LOT of the stuff from the early space program was done
like that. I remember taking the tour as a youngster,
custom (large) hard drives where the head fingers moved
in and out independently to reduce access time for
multiple users/devices. Probably made JUST for NASA,
maybe only one or two of them for ungodly amounts
of money .......

And finally, VHS tapes ! I have tons of them. Lots and
lots of people have tons of them. Like with audio cassettes
there are zillions of players still out there and you CAN
watch the things or even record new stuff. At the higher
speed the quality really ain't so bad. So, by sheer volume,
they ain't obsolete.

Now todays kiddies ... I've seen humorous vids of them
trying to figure out rotary-dial telephones and such.
I don't know how to work a cotton-ginn or hand-loom
either. I *do* remember the trick of tapping the
hang-up button several times quick to get an actual HUMAN
phone OPERATOR though. A little LIGHT flashed at their
big plug-wire consoles when you did that :-)

(that trick goes back to the 1920s/30s when phones
didn't HAVE dials ... clickety clickety clickety ...
"Hello, Operator ? Give me Uptown 274 !" Something
delightfully HUMAN about that ...)

I also remember the big dialing machines at the phone
exchange - BEAUTIFUL machines. The rotary dial would
trigger big disks to rotate, platters of said disks to
move up and down, PHYSICAL connections between zillions
of wires were made ...

I guess that's obsolete - but the beauty and skill is
lost as well.