Dead Technology Walking....

[Buffy]

In the "Do you remember..." thread, Jay-qu just wrote:

I can imagine someone finding this thread in 10-15 years and listing DVD, LCD, petrol fueled cars..

....sooooo, what extremely popular technologies today are just about ready to jump the shark?

21st Century Nostradamus,
Buffy

[Boerseun]

Hard drives!

Okay, they won't disappear tomorrow, but advances in solid-state memory might make access time due to head movement and platter rotation an issue.

We now have plenty of Gigs stored on a 2D surface the size of a postage stamp. I predict that pretty soon the matrix it consists of will be accessible in 3D, in other words, instead of a 2D XY-addressable memory module, we'll have 3D XYZ-addressable memory 'cubes'.

Say a 1cm square can hold 1Gig.

If we make a 1cm cube with the same density, we'll have the cube of the square root of 1Gig available, which is around 31Gigs. And that's one cubic centimeter. How many cubic centimeters fits into an average hard drive?

Platters are limited due to their two-dimensional nature.

Seeing the future,
Marty McFly

[Buffy]

This one's dangerous because its been predicted many times before: cans for canned food.

Have you seen these packets that tuna has been coming in for the past couple of years? I love them because they store easier on the shelf in the kitchen, and if the designers could standardize their size, they'd be great for all kinds of things including soups and such....

Efficient pantry space,
Buffy

[Buffy]

Over the air TV and radio (FM and AM) broadcasting.

All Sat or broadband wi-fi transmission is here and better, but the greedy folks who own it are too stupid to realize that if they made it dirt cheap they'd kill the competition....

Dish on my forehead,
Buffy

[InfiniteNow]

Automobiles powered by combustion engines.
Cable boxes.
Hard line telephones.
Treadmills.



Some other fun ideas here:
NBC.com > Late Night with Conan O'Brien > In The Year 2000

[freeztar]

Telephone Utility Lines (TULs).
For pretty much the same reasons mentioned by Buffy in the post above.
Of course, the mobile phone industry has not helped the over-land-based phone industry one bit (not to mention fiber optics).

Hyperterra Telephone Utility Lines still exist because of businesses and rural residents, but they are on the way out, imo. The improved road safety and aesthetic value of removing ubiquitous telephone poles and lines is already a good incentive to do away with this relatively ancient (yet quite ambitious) technology.

Goodbye answering machines,
Freezy

[Jay-qu]

mp3 players. The tech wont disappear, it will be integrated. Most phones come with mp3 capabilities already. Soon, I think, there would be no point in buying a device that can only play mp3's

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

mp3 players. The tech wont disappear, it will be integrated. Most phones come with mp3 capabilities already. Soon, I think, there would be no point in buying a device that can only play mp3's

I agree and think that this forms a good correlation with Boerseun's idea.

[Boerseun]

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

mp3 players. The tech wont disappear, it will be integrated. Most phones come with mp3 capabilities already. Soon, I think, there would be no point in buying a device that can only play mp3's

Seems like you were on to something here, Jay - went to a store and saw a silly 512MB MP3 player on the shelf, and asked the salesman why anybody would buy such a small MP3 player. Salesman told me that it was old stock, but they weren't gonna stock them anymore, cause nobody's buying them.

[CraigD]

I’ve a superstition that any tech prediction I make is through some mysterious mechanism prohibited from occurring, so won’t make any here.

In the early 1980s, I predicted pretty much what Boerseun is in post #2 - that disk drives would be obsolete within a decade, replaced by huge static memories – SRAM - the sort nowadays found in the Caches of most CPUs, and the main memories of high-end beasts like true supercomputer. I predicted that SRAM cost would drop dramatically (has happened), size would shrink to less than DRAM (hasn’t happened), and that magnetic disks would hit a feature-size and manufacturing quality wall (didn’t even come close to happening).

Conceding that magnetic disks have reached awesome densities and low costs, I remain amazed that SRAM has not altogether displaced DRAM – it’s faster, now only slightly more expensive, tremendously power efficient, does’t clog up buses and CPUs with computationally valueless refreshes, can be scaled to ridiculous capacities, and architecturally aesthetic. DRAM is … entrenched in computer architecture and manufacturing.

Well, OK, I can’t resist declaring a Dead Tech Walking: DRAMs.