I think the best example is the PlayStation 2 being discontinued in 2013, as well the PlayStation 1 in 2006
Slavery being legal in the US.
Ooops, sorry, I forgot that it’s still perfectly legal in the US.
The last cathode-ray tube televisions were made in 2015.
Being interested in CRT TVs, that’s intresting to know
The human race went extinct about 17 years ago. We’re all secretly something else, but we don’t tell you about it until you’re 45.
HEY! SHHH! You know the rule, and you know the consequences. I’ve said too much.
Rosa Parks lived until 2005
(Legal) Segregation in America was until pretty damn recently. Though loophole segregation is arguably still going on.
And Emmett Till could still be very much alive, had he not been lynched.
As brutal as that verb is, it’s an understatement as to what he went through.
Going out on a limb guessing kids aren’t learning this anymore.
I agree, I’m in the military so I end up working with a lot of 18-19 year olds. One day a few years back, a bunch of us were sitting around the table talking, and I don’t remember what the conversation was about but this kid lookes at the black guy and says “that’s how you get lynched”
There was a collective gasp and we then had to explain to him what that meant. He just though it was something offensive to say to someone.
My sister actually saw her in elementary school! Even in her old age she was trying to educate us, and teach us better.
It can be argued that the Roman empire didn’t truly end until WWI in 1918, 106 years ago.
The fall of the Byzantine Empire (aka the Eastern Roman Empire) resulted in a number of subdivided but diplomatically aligned states. By the end of the 19th century a number of European powers were still vying for some claim to the lineage of the Roman Empire (and the Emperor title). But as consequence of the war, the German/Prussian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires we’re all dismantled (and France was out or the running because of the revolution) so every entity with a claim was dead or out of power for the first time since the 11th century.
I’m not a historian but can there still be an empire if there’s no emperor or empress? The Eastern Roman empire is a misnomer for the Byzantine Empire, which started when the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in the 400s by some Germanic warlord whose name I forget. How is that not the end of the Roman Empire? Seems like deciding to call Ukraine Western Russia.
What you call Byzantine empire didn’t exist as such, they actually referred to themselves Romans. Byzantine Empire is a later term https://byzantinemporia.com/why-is-byzantium-called-byzantine/.
The reference of Eastern Roman Empire is correct, everyone else who claimed to be a continuation is just a stretch though.
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman empire - we really on refer to them differently for temporal convenience. The west were the Latin speakers and the east were the Greek speakers (as least for the first half-millennium). And many people still called themselves Emperor of Rome, in a continuous succession, after the fall of the west. For quite a while one of the Pope’s titles was (legitimately) Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
By the 20th century it was down to 3 rightful heirs, all trying to make Europe recognize them as THE Emperor. But in the mean time their empires still recognized them as such.
Which claimants are you thinking of? I know the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire both claimed to be continuations of the Roman Empire. I don’t think Italy ever claimed to be the new Rome, somewhat ironically, and I think Germany and France had stopped claiming to be Rome as well.
The House of Hohenzollern in Germany. The Habsburgs formally gave up their claim in order to create the Austro-Hungarian alliance/Empire, but they had asserted it less than a generation prior and also claimed their Empire status on that back of it. And in the Ottoman Empire the lineage of Mehmed, including Mehmed V during WWI, claimed to be the continuation of the Byzantine / Eastern Roman Empire.
At the point the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed they were using a system with two emperors due to the massive amount of territory being impractical for one man to govern, senate or no. Only one of the imperial titles imploded, with the other going along just fine for centuries before that part of the empire also started to collapse.
A mainframe computer is probably still processing your paycheck in either your company or the bank.
…and doing at least part of it in COBOL. Random fact: there are about 10,000 mainframe computers still in use around the world.
Nixie tubes - those vacuum tubes that display a single digit or character on glowing wires - were commonplace in the 1950s and 60s but were superseded by LEDs. They’re still made in the Czech Republic, bought mostly by hobbyists to build retro gadgets. I have a few myself that I haven’t gotten around to using.
Tangentially related Technology Connections video: The Numitron: An obvious idea that wasn’t very bright
There’s a mod for Factorio that adds these in for use in our circuit spaghetti
Weren’t they superceded by LCDs not LEDs? The whole big thing with Nixies was that you could display digits but if one filament burned out (which it relatively quickly did) the whole bulb was bad and even then you had to pump power into them and use these complicated plugs.
Enter LCDs, they take ages to burn in, you can run them off a coin battery for literal years, and they’re a dozen times cheaper to make.
Nixie tubes were replaced by the multi-segment LED displays for numbers for many of those use cases where the numerals needed to glow. Think the last four decades of clock radios, TV channel number displays after mechanical channel knobs but before they removed the bezel stuff and put it all on the screen itself, etc.
The iPod was discontinued in 2022. I’m guessing there’s already a lot of kids who have no idea where the term “podcast” comes from.
The Famicom Disk System, which uses a kind of floppy disk for the Japanese market NES, had kiosks where you could copy games onto disks. The last of those kiosks were removed in 2003 It overlapped the Game Cube.
I’m old enough to remember when iPods first came out but somehow I didn’t realise podcast came from the word iPod. TIL!
Apple didn’t invent the concept of podcasts, but they sure popularized them. They used to be called syndicated audio, and were pretty niche. Then Apple added it as a feature of iTunes. The idea was that because your iPod didn’t have any wifi or data connection, you couldn’t listen to new content while out and about. So you would plug your iPod into your computer with iTunes to sync down all the latest content before you leave for the day. Then they needed feeds of new content to provide to the users, so lots of new episodicals were started, and Apple grouped them under the umbrella of “podcasts”.
Wasn’t it just not fancy rss?
Yeah, it was (and still is) a feature that was added to the RSS protocol.
Is the iTouch still around? I remember my beige got one and it was essentially an iPhone without sim card.
Adult content could still be accessed, so Apple were to bring out the iTouch kids.
Never happened. :/
Apple never made a product called iTouch. You’re thinking of a product called “iPod Touch”. It was the touchscreen version of the iPod (without the iconic clickwheel). The first one was essentially a slimmer iPhone 3G without a cellular modem.
I worked in an electronics repair store just after they came out. We replaced hundreds of broken screens on them. The sheer number of people who called them “iTouch” was surprising, considering Apple never called it that.
Many state legislatures in the Southern US (e.g. Alabama) had Democratic majorities until 2010.
Whaaa? No way! 🤯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Alabama
Both houses were all-Democratic from 1975 to 1978, then more and more Republicans were elected to them, only from 2011 do they have a majority.
Slavery. People always talk about slavery like it’s something that only existed in 19th century America as if it wasn’t happening right now everywhere.
Lexus sold cars with cassette players until 2010
That isn’t as crazy as it may seem. My main audio source well after graduation which was 2005, was a portable cd player that could play cd’s burned with compressed mp3 libraries and connected to the car’s stereo system via aux to cassette adapter.
Idk about the portable cd player with mp3 library being common but most blunt cruises in those days were done in vehicles using portable cd player with cassette adapter. I know this is super anecdotal and specifically about the car owner class that isn’t buying new Lexus’ but I still wanted to point out the cassette deck saw extended use long after people stopped listening to actual cassettes.
Insert relevant Technology Connections video here.
Omg fuckin yes. It was so awesome. It was during a brief period when mp3 hit the stage but before ipod was God, there were mp3 players that would just pop up like a memory stick in windows and you could limewire whatever you wanted for music onto the players.
IDK if the software was Sony but the player was and you could put your whole limewire library in a small single CD per page zip up binder things. The mp3 saved on the cd was nothing special. The special was no audio players could play mp3 files at that time. Exceptions being: gaming consoles, pc’s and maybe your surround sound if it was new. Cars were still nobs and buttons.
My 2006 RX factory radio unit had cassette and cd decks. Sometime around 2012, I remember feeling like I had unlocked a secret backdoor because an audiobook that I wanted from the library had a crazy long waitlist for the cd edition. I hadnt used cassettes in decades, but somehow I had the idea to check to see if they offered that audiobook on cassette. They did! And it was available to check out immediately!
I replaced the radio in that car shortly after that because I needed a bluetooth connection and handsfree capability.
Ruby Bridges is alive and well.
Jim Crow.
The south still has similar voting restrictions, it’s just the supreme court stopped caring and said ‘sure, whatevs’.
I’m a CD collector, they’re definitely underrated
One of the only things I’ve encountered in life that provides greater joy than sex is the feeling of finding an awesome super underground CD in a $1 garbage bin at the local record shop.
Favorite findings:
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, Sad Tropics
Sunswimmer, New Madrid
New Moon Daughter, Cassandra Wilson
Who thought they weren’t around?
On that note, vinyls have overtaken CDs in sales again
The fact that high end music streaming platforms are only just now starting to offer super high bitrate lossless “CD Quality” audio as an option, gives you an indication of how good CDs actually are as a physical medium.
A cheap old CD player connected via SPDIF to a modern mid-range DAC with decent speakers will give you better quality audio than the latest Sonos system streaming from Spotify.
Do people really think audio CDs aren’t around anymore? I bought several audio CDs in the last few years, I prefer to have local copies of music I like rather than depending on a streaming service.
Leaded fuel. Avgas is 100-octane leaded gasoline that is still being used by most small aircraft piston engines. Lead-free alternatives exist, but production and supply infrastructure is nonexistent.
The same kind as being used by the hyper-rich to nip down the shops for a ham sandwich?
Less likely, as those aren’t piston engines. This is the kind of fuel used by single engine Cessnas and the like. Nearly all propeller/turboprop planes, as opposed to jets.
Jet fuel never had lead
That’s why it can’t melt steel beams!
Those use Jet-A which is just diesel/kerosene without the additives
