The word typewriter came up not long ago. I happen to still have a typewriter, sitting on the closet shelf. Of course I have not used it for a very long time. And it's actually one of the last generation of typewriters, an electronic one that can store documents for subsequent editing or printing.
And if you see a typewriter nowadays, you comment on it. It's quaint, a curiosity. I did remark when I saw a typewriter at my doctor's office. Yes, we still use it occasionally, they said. Nearly everyone who has something to write, these days, does it on a computer—though there are quite a few people who don't use a computer or at least don't own their own.
Besides typewriters now being antiques, I've got some movie film stored away somewhere, most of which I took on my first European trip, many years ago. Now there's no way to view those films. When I was a kid I actually owned a movie projector, but a silent one. It was a simple machine, probably not much more than a toy, and it cost probably in today's money say $300 or $400. A sound movie projector would have been a much more elaborate and expensive affair. You'd find sound 16mm projectors in schools.
Nowadays it's so easy to watch movies in your home. You don't need a projector, you don't need to set up a projection screen. In the early '80s, home video recorders came in. They initially were expensive, and they used tape. The tape cartridges were pretty bulky. With tape, if you wanted to advance or go back in the program (movie), you had to patiently rewind or fast-forward the tape. The DVD discs we use nowadays are more compact, and the disc format has the advantage of "random access": it's relatively easy to move to any spot on the disc.
Besides typewriters and movie projectors and even VHS tape machines being things of the past, I also own some reel-to-reel audio tapes! And it's been many years since I've had a machine that would play them. (Okay, I guess that my confessing to having the films and tapes still around means I'm a hoarder, and I need help!) Reel-to-reel audio tapes, which were bulky themselves and required bulky machines to record and play them, have been obsolete for quite a while. Then we had cassette tapes. Now we have CDs, which we can record or "burn" ourselves, and iPods and other MP3 players. I guess we don't even carry around physical media for these things: we just use electronic files of 1s and 0s that we can't even see. That's the ultimate in size reduction!
It's actually a problem for libraries and other archives that own documents on movie film, audio tape, and so forth. They have to invest time and money to convert these documents to more modern formats or risk having them be totally useless because there are no more machines around for viewing or playing them. Such is the price of progress.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
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