Tech has come a long way, changing the way we live and the way we interact with other people. Change is a very big part of technology, what is exciting today, is being phased out tomorrow. Some changes were never anticipated, but this is tech, don’t blink or you won’t recognize your world anymore. Below is a list of 10 technologies that people used so much and could not imagine a world without them.
MP3 Players
Remember the Sony Walkman? Actually that is too recent. Remember the MiniDisc players? Those portable music players that would open up for you to insert a CD, some even accepted a cassette. Anyway, all those are now dead and gone. The birth of the smartphone spelled doom for such devices since music players are now in-built into our phones. I cannot remember the day I last saw anyone with any brand of an MP3 player, let alone a Sony Walkman. Heck, when is the last time you saw an iPod? I think Apple actually gave up on those.
Public Pay Phones
Yeah, where did these go? Also, what happened to “Simu ya Jamii”? Best answer, almost everybody has a mobile phone now. Someone should probably set up a public charging booth, to help in those dire situations when you really need to call someone and your phone has ran out of power.
Modems
Internet has become so good, easily accessible and affordable we no longer need these and to imagine that they were the most prefered method of accessing the internet since we didn’t have wi-fi in our homes or even in public spaces. These things didn’t come cheap either.
Film-Based Cameras
Take a photo sitting “on top” of KICC today and come for the picture next week. That was the norm some time back. These are the days when the your photos had to be developed in a dark room, then came the digital camera, which changed the game, but still kept camera men around. Nowadays, I hardly see those camera men around, smartphone cameras hit their market hard.
Calculator Watch
This was a must-have back in school. It made life easier, looked cool – for those days, and even gave you bragging rights. Until the mathematics teacher catches you trying to press those tiny buttons to get some calculations done.
Video tapes and cassettes
These were fun to manually rewind, until the film inside came out and you had a disaster in hand. I actually still have a dozen of these back at home, if anyone knows how to properly dispose them, hit me up.
Fax Machines
I actually never got to use this one, no, I’m not that young, I just didn’t get the opportunity to fax anything before they went off the plank. It was fascinating however to know that you could send a document from Nairobi, and with the right fax machine number, the other person in Mombasa would receive it in a somewhat short while. Now we have emails and scanners, actually you don’t even need a scanner if you have a smartphone and one particular app, but that is a story for another day.
Rotary Dials
Before touchscreens, we had buttons, before buttons there were rotary dials. Remember this one? I know most of you didn’t know they were known as Rotary Dial telephones. One would place a finger one one digit-hole at a time and then rotated the dial. You would then have to wait for the dial to reset between each digit. This technology essentially counted the number of pulses made by each movement of the dial, encoding it into a number.
Gameboy
The Game Boy was the console to have, if we can even refer to it as a console. It accepted different games on cartridges and offered portable 8-bit gaming. This was the brick game of the rich. If you had one of these, major respect, I never got to save up enough to afford one.
Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screens
Oldern days TVs and monitors were much thicker due to the CRT technology. We all had one of these, and we loved it. Especially when colored screens showed up, no one seemed to notice (or rather mind) how big that behind was (get your head out of the gutter).
Bonus: Using Proper Grammar and Punctuation
u know urslf. u dnt cmplte wrds, u dnt punctuate anythng. txtng is gd, bt it hs cme @ the expense of grammar. u shld c wt kids txt 2day. bt anywy lets hpe sanity will return n we wunt b seeing emails wth wrds written lke this.
