• it/its

// the deer!
// plural deer therian θΔ, trans demigirl
// stray pet with a keyboard
// i'm 20 & account is 18+!
name-color: #ebe41e
// yeah



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
1-811005161
@1-811005161 asked:

dear mr gravis technology:

here is a question. whats the oldest tech you own that would still be useful today. not "useful if you cant find anything better" but "useful even if you have more modern options". bonus points if its not a camera

sincerly,
me

don't take this the wrong way, because this is me talking about "us", not you, but "tech" is such an interesting word in this context. A lot of the time we can infer what it means from context, and it almost always means "shit with transistors, probably made after the walkman." but here you've deliberately given me an unlimited lower bound on how old it can be and that makes it complicated.

I have a 1969 Sears mechanical calculator sitting on top of a cabinet upstairs. Would I prefer to use it over an electronic one - no, absolutely not, it's slow and the interface is awkward and it's hard to read. But is it useful? Sure. It still does basically what an adding-machine type calculator does, and those are still sold in stores and still quite useful. Given that your input rate to those devices is usually limited by the time it takes to refer to other printed materials, the low speed doesn't really matter that much. And it's still "tech." Hell, it even runs on electricity.

I was going to follow this up by trying to actually answer the question but... honestly, I don't know that I have an answer. You know what the dirty secret is about me? I hate all this old shit, and a lot of it I hated when it was new, because it wasn't perfect, wasn't ideal.

Every piece of technology has an intent behind it, a vision of a utopian future where Problem X is Solved, where our receipts get added up just by us thinking about them, and UI and UX and input speed and output format don't matter. Every adding machine, every abacus, every tally stick was made with this vision in mind. The Chinese guy 1000 years ago, carefully chiseling filigree into a hunk of ivory that'll later be used to authenticate a military order - the whole time he was thinking, "if only we could do this without all the chiseling." And eventually it came true, and now nobody wants to use the fu; even if it's still notionally as useful as it was when new. everyone would prefer to send an encrypted email.

It bugs me that Windows 95's notepad doesn't have a keybinding for Ctrl+S; they added that in 2000 or XP. I depend on it so deeply that editing text files on Windows 95 is a miserable process for me, I'm constantly tripping over my own shoelaces using that thing. The point being, I could pick stuff that one could, arguably, use - but I can't easily think of anything that's just as good, let alone better, than something we make now. The exceptions are things we don't make anymore, which... I guess that topic frustrates me so much that I can't even come up with a list at the moment.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

ok real comment: aside from kitchen appliances, i think the oldest tech that can keep pace with modern stuff that everyone uses is probably cell phones. there was a period around 2018-2020 where phones had literally all the capabilities you need in 2024. im writing this on a galaxy s9 right now

adding to this: i dont know anybody who needs a phone made in the last four years unless their old phone broke and their carrier store wasnt selling replacements anymore. pc's can also last forever, but theyre more modular on average. laptops actually are pretty similar tho.

its frustrating cause this feature completeness happened riiiight after nonremovable batteries became standard but riiight before removing the headphone jack also became a thing. i could have had it all :c

seriously still using my galaxy s7 edge in 2024, swapped the battery, oled showing some burn in but it's still chugging along. mostly just struggling because the android is outdated but i haven't even bothered looking into rooting or anything. it really does everything i need why throw it out. all apps that don't work with it are purely because the os is old, not because the phone cant actually run them.

at the moment i have two bicycles. One of them was designed, or rather, ceased to be meaningfully iterated upon, around 1928. It has a gear system which itself stopped being iterated upon entirely in 1936, and over the years they have experimented with different colour schemes and sticker sets, but none of this makes the slightest bit of difference.

it is better for the job of riding on a road in traffic than anything that is currently for sale in the country where I live, because everything that's for sale is actually either high maintainance sports equipment, or some cheap sludge meant to look like high maintainance sports equipment.

I know of exactly two other bikes that are actually better commuter vehicles, both designed in the 1960s. One is called the Moulton. It has dissapeared up the ass of boutique hand built nonsense for rich dickheads. The other is called the Raleigh Shopper, which they stopped making approximately 35 years ago because public sentiment was that riding it makes you look gay. That is the second bike I have.

The problem of "I want to ride to work in the rain" has become unsolved over the course of fifty years. We solved it, but then unsolved it again.

Sewing machines. The old mechanical Singers (and usually their clones) produce fantastic stitches and sew through nearly everything, and the variety of stitches will suit all but the most baroque-happy decorator. Those machines would have cost about $500-$600 in today's dollars, and to get that kind of versatility today you have to spend at least twice that, and sometimes you end up with multiple machines that do just one or two things well to get it all covered. Ease of repair is also a factor; vintage machines were meant to be serviced and repaired nearly indefinitely, and modern ones are essentially disposable until you get up in spending. Even then you're often limited by the march of time: how long will that motherboard be manufactured? (And I've seen 3D printer people make new stitch cams for old machines, so even if the factory is gone, they can still be repaired.)

The only time I'd say a modern computerized machine beats an old one without question is in convenience features (stitch-by-stitch sewing, stitch selection and even ability to sew alphabets, thread cutter, lighting, start/stop buttons, speed dials, etc), even at similar price points. Modern machines often have more features to help sew knits, which were only beginning to come into vogue for the home sewists at the end of the "good" vintage era, too.

On sewing forums you'll find plenty of people who prefer one or the other, but it's surprising the amount of people who staunchly prefer their older mechanical sewing machines.

Me-- I like mechanicals a lot, but as I get older the "convenience" features become "accessibility" features in these newer machines. Both styles have their places and I hope to see those vintage machines restored & used by the community for a long time!

As someone who deals with sewing machines new and old daily, I appreciate how easy machines of a certain vintage are to maintain, but I wouldn't swap out my bottom-rung, mostly-plastic modern Brother machine for one of those. The weight is a concern when I don't have specific furniture for it, and the convenience features like an autothreader and drop-in bobbin are sorely missed when I'm trying to thread an 80s Singer to give it a test run.

That said anything with a motherboard is probably worse than the equivalent non-computerized machine. They perfected the -core function- decades ago and can't iterate on it, only move functions to servos and secondary motors and computer memory.

p.s. I just looked through Joann and they sell a Brother machine for a hundred dollars, new, which is incredible to me. I want to see how bad it is, but I can't shake the feeling that it's probably a pretty good option to keep in my back pocket when someone asks me about a cheap sewing machine and I don't want to suggest something that'd require refurbishing.

I still use fire sometimes for useful purposese, which is a pretty old technology.

But my non-snarky answer is probably the 2009 Samsung plasma tv that I'm still using because I really really do not want a "smart" tv. Up to a couple of years ago I was using a Microsoft optical mouse from 2004.

imo my hp50g falls into this category, it was made through 2015 but introduced in 2006 and i still think that family of calculators is the best that were ever made and do use it on a reasonably frequent basis.