Museum of Obsolete Objects

https://www.youtube.com/user/MoooJvM

by bookofjoe • 3 years ago

16 36 3 years ago

gumby• 3 years ago

I’m not going to watch a video but the idea from the title is great.

We casually discard obsolete devices and practices, but learning about them isn’t just a fun glance into the past but is a kind of Chesterton’s fence too.

ghaff2• 3 years ago

I like the idea but I watched the morse code one and the speech was almost certainly computer-generated but it hardly had any content anyway.

Aloha9• 3 years ago

Many of these are not even close to obsolete:

* The Computer Mouse is an essential part of every day life.

* Radio Receivers are both common and still in daily use by a huge percentage of the planet.

* Electric Lightbulbs still have many specialty applications that cannot be replaced by other forms of technology (same with the neon lamp).

* Morse Code is still used in the radio and aviation world to identify radio transmitters

* Pocket Calculators are still fairly common, particularly in specialized fields, and are still developed and sold new.

jiggawatts2• 3 years ago

My kid is three years old, and has never seen an incandescent light bulb.

We don’t own a calculator either. One of the only reasons they’re still around is their simplicity, which is desirable in an educational setting. If it wasn’t for that, nobody[1] would use them any more. Excel and computer algebra systems are superior for all practical purposes.

[1] For some values of “nobody”. There’s always the elderly, purists, luddites, or just those slow to adopt.

Aloha9• 3 years ago

The light in your oven is almost certainly incandescent, possibly your fridge too. You can't really use a non-incandescent bulb in high heat applications.

There are other applications too, where the resistance of the bulb itself, and how it changes with the amount of current going thru the device is also important.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

There’s always the elderly, purists, luddites, or just those slow to adopt.

Calculators are still sold in many shops. I can literally cross the street and go buy one at the supermarket. It's not about being "slow to adopt": they're superior to using a computer's calculator or, even worse, a smartphone's calculator app. A smartphone has shitty input controls compared to a calculator and it's not "one button to press" to get it ready. First unlock the phone, then open the calculator, then use the shitty input method.

Also many calculators, since decades, are solar-powered. It makes lots of sense: you're not going to use them in the dark. And they use so little power that a tiny solar panel incorporated into the calculator is sufficient. No need for USB-C crap cables.

You know where you see a lot of these, next to computers, used by people spending their entire the day at the computer and with their phone in reach and used by people doing computation at all times? In accounting offices.

Accountants are neither luddites nor old nor purists nor slow adopters. It just happens that for some kind of computation, a pocket calculator is simply the very top of the chain.

The following picture shows what survival of the fittest looks like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator#/media/File:Casio_c...

flybrand• 3 years ago

Have they been under the bulbs at the dentist?

shard• 2 years ago

I still see calculators being used by salesmen to show numbers and results of simple calculations. The most recent at a car dealership two days ago.

stevebmark• 3 years ago

Faxing is alive and well in medicine, since it's still the "secure" way to transfer documents. There are encrypted email solutions now, secure file transfer, and digital faxing, but I'm sure plenty of doctor's offices still use fax machines.

Aloha9• 3 years ago

Yeah, but I left it off, because its clearly an application with no real future, its dying as the networks required for it to work well also die (faxing over VoIP is a special form of hell to support).

ghaff2• 3 years ago

Though FINALLY phasing out in a lot of places. My major hospital system (through consolidation) now seems to be on a largely electronic heath data system. But, yeah, manually faxing lab work requests to the hospital lab was still a thing just a few years ago.

Stratoscope2• 3 years ago

Morse code even shows up in some surprising places. The Hyundai Ioniq 5/6 steering wheel doesn't have the usual Hyundai logo. Instead, it has four dots:

• • • •

And that is the letter "H" in Morse code!

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/hyundai/ioniq-5/2023/pho...

Animats4• 3 years ago

The video is so clickbait-oriented. Long intro (skip the first 25 seconds), long outro, crappy text to speech voice over.

Here's a good video of an obsolete technology - a punched card reader.[1] No voice over. No intro. No outro. No clickbait. Just a beautifully clear demonstration of what it is and how it works.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu55b0GpgE8

Aloha9• 3 years ago

Agreed.

Wanna know what another obsolete object is, a real one, no longer made and with no functional use anymore?

An lubricant oil can spout.

We stopped selling lubricating oil in cans like at least 35 years ago.

I have vague memories from my childhood of seeing cans of oil stacked in a store, but I can't tell if its a hallucination or memory, or something I actually saw, it would have been when I was very young based on the perspective I can recall them at.

(edited to add the word lubricant)

cannonpr2• 3 years ago

I might be confused, but cooking oil is still quite commonly sold in cans in many countries ? I bet there must be some in the US too if you are there ?

https://www.odysea.com/product/odysea-greek-extra-vrigin-oli...

Animats4• 3 years ago

We stopped selling lubricating oil in cans like at least 35 years ago.

No, it's still common, but used more in industrial settings. Most machine shops and auto shops will have such a can in easy reach.

dtgriscom• 3 years ago

Wow: that was nice.

Interesting that the nameplate clearly documented its current draw at startup and while running (1/3 the startup).

Animats4• 3 years ago

current draw at startup and while running

That tells you that the device needs to be on a circuit with a slow-blow fuse or circuit breaker. Motors draw more current during startup. Look up "inrush current" and "motor protection circuit breaker".

(Starting AC electric motors is surprisingly difficult. Tesla's big contribution to electrical technology was figuring out how to start AC motors simply, cheaply, and reliably.)

Stratoscope2• 3 years ago

Oh, that is great.

For anyone wondering why the card deck has the diagonal stripes on the edge, those are for when you drop the deck and have to put the cards back in order.

And don't get me started on TTS voice-overs! The first time I heard one, I actually thought for a few moments, "There is something wrong with this guy's voice." Then I figured it out.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh• 3 years ago

Whoa, that was delightful to watch, especially after learning about the diagonal stripes from your comment.

But do the diagonal stripes actually work? If you dropped the deck and then re-assembled it with a single pair of cards swapped, would you really be able to catch that based on the stripe?

Listening to the machine work was incredibly interesting, too. I wonder how much stress it puts on the cards to be run through the machine each time. Did they have to make "fresh" copies once the cards got worn down by going through the machine too many times?

kjfarm• 3 years ago

One question, how do I join? which exhibit will I be after?

joshuamcginnis• 3 years ago

If you're ever in the Los Angeles area, I recommend a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology: https://mjt.org/

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

A heads up: the picture on the main page is a button to most of the website. I was on my way out and almost missed it.

tdeck• 3 years ago

This seems like something I would love, but I hate it. The choices are mostly boring and the execution is awful. Did they have to use the most bargain basement synthesized voice?

resters• 3 years ago

This appears to be ai-generated and low-quality

rsaarsoo• 3 years ago

I get a feeling that it's more of an art project. The voice-over is over-the-top artificial, reminding Stephen Hawking. The demonstrations of the objects are well executed, but content/education-wise on the level of it's so bad that it might actually be good. And of course, the obsolescence of several of these things is very questionable, let alone being able to accurately identify a year since something became obsolete.

Museum of Obsolete Objects

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