News-Letter

Media Credit: Matt Hansen [Click to enlarge]

Horse and buggy, phonograph, abacus ... It's now officially time to add the floppy disk to the List of Obsolete Things. And also CDs and cell phones. And apparently, the light bulb.

Within the lifetime of the average Hopkins student, analog tapes -- both for sound and video -- have been banished to the Smithsonian.

Nine versions of Microsoft Windows have come and gone since 1985, and only the last couple are usable at all with today's computers and software programs.

I remember booting up my dad's computer in second or third grade -- it took about a week to start up -- and playing Tetris on Windows 3.1. (Remember Tetris? That was the computer game right after Pac-Man and immediately before Doom 3.) Today Tetris would look fairly pathetic on a TI-83 calculator, let alone on my new laptop.

Even the space shuttle, once called the most impressive technological achievement of human civilization, is a relic of the disco years. Now engineers are developing its replacement, which ironically is based on the even older Apollo capsule.

There's even talk of something called "Web 2.0." Apparently the Internet, which launched way back in the Stone Age, when we were all in elementary school, is already outdated. A little depressing, no?

Obsolescence is a natural, even healthy, part of the lifetime of every invention. Technologies might become obsolescent because a new and better way of doing something comes along, or because an older technology no longer fits into the modern world. (Imagine driving a horse-drawn carriage on I-95.)

The fact that technologies grow old and die, to be replaced with something newer and faster and shinier, ensures that we can continue progressing, from fire to electricity to fluorescent glow. Aside from the cancer risks, that's probably a good thing.

It's just that the process of progress seems to be speeding up lately.

Two weeks ago, PC World, a major British computer supplies retailer, announced that it will stop selling floppy disks as soon as the ones it has on hand run out. Other retailers have made similar announcements recently.

It's not like anyone was really using floppies anymore. Since 1998, computer companies have been phasing out floppy disk readers in favor of CD drives and then USB ports, both of which read information at much higher volume, speed, and accuracy. The magnetic technology of floppies has gone the way of bronze shields.

But there is still a bit of nostalgia: the floppy disk was probably the last relic of the first computers. It's much more similar to cardboard punch cards than to your new flash drive. Vacuum tubes that could fill up a decent-sized lecture hall were high tech back when floppies were considered the Next Big Thing.

Here's another one: does anyone remember Michael Douglas's cell phone in Wall Street? In case you haven't seen the movie, which was filmed in 1987 (the year I was born), Douglas is walking down a beach when he pulls out something the size of a small cell-biology textbook and starts talking into it. Kind of dates the movie a bit.

Today's cell phones are the size of a credit card, and probably have more computing power than that entire room full of vacuum tubes. They keep track of phone numbers and addresses, they have GPS locators and video games (Uncle Worm, not Tetris), they play music and record videos -- and you can also use them to call home.

Even that remarkable gadget is on its way out. When Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone last month, he unofficially marked the end of the cell phone as we know it.

The iPhone doesn't do that many more things than your average high-end cell phone, but it's designed more like a computer than a phone, and it's got a whole lot more memory. And it sure looks a lot cooler.

Apple hopes that the iPhone will eventually replace everything from the television to the laptop to the refrigerator, if it can figure out how to get a can of Coke in there. By relentlessly miniaturizing and combining and throwing everything under a shiny touch screen, Jobs has made an all-purpose Technology Machine.

Of course, the iPhone will also make the iPod obsolete, if everything goes according to plan. (Sounds like a winning business strategy.) Why would you buy an iPod when you can do 42 other things, all while listening to your music, all on the same little device?!

The kicker, though, isn't some fancy visual-musical-telephonic puppy-locating device that makes everything else obsolete: it's the light bulb. A California assemblyman has just introduced a bill in the state legislature to ban them.

The market was probably going to phase out Thomas Edison's design over the next decade because fluorescent lights are so much more efficient and cheaper to run. But that day might come much sooner than anyone had thought.

I guess we won't need the lightbulbs anyway; our iPhone screens should provide enough glow.

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