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So what is being sold today that will be hard to find in working condition in 30 yrs?

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Unknown_K

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I think most of the gaming video cards will be dead in a decade (run very hot, rely on cheap fans to keep cool, BGA tend to crack with age).

Older stuff seems to have capacitor rot, but with new polymer capacitors that don't leak that might go away.

Then again with recycling we might start seeing everything ground up after it gets 5 years old leaving nothing down the road.
 
Palm Pilots, the first generation of XBOX360 (hard to find a working one now!) and netbooks. And the original XBOX may be hard to find in working condition soon, the hard drives are non-standard.
 
30 years is a long time. 30 years ago was 1981, but floppies were in constant use since they became available to the hobbyist. Core memory began to fade around the mid 1970s, but probably was still in use in mission-critical devices, such as nuclear reactors. Punched cards were disappearing in 1981. One of the reasons we have so much today is because recycling this stuff was hard; now the subsidized outfits and the metal scrappers are chewing stuff up at a terrific rate because there's a strong demand for scrap metals.

Floppies and tape, most consumer desktop computers, mechanical hard disks, iPods, analog TVs, calculators, digital watches...I can see all of those being phased out pretty rapidly. Heck, Apple barely selling any iPods.

I really think the desktop is doomed. Servers will be around in some form. High-end workstations will be around also. Wired telephones, except for some rare cases, will be gone. Mice and keyboards, history.

Newspapers in print will probably be history, as will cursive handwriting.
 
Personally, I've replaced most of my video cards through upgrades before they burned out, so I imagine there'll be tons of working ones around. They get stuck in a box and forgotten about.
 
Tiberian Fiend said:
Personally, I've replaced most of my video cards through upgrades before they burned out, so I imagine there'll be tons of working ones around. They get stuck in a box and forgotten about.
Click to expand...

There will always be people who pack stuff away in their attic, basement, garage, shed, storage facility, trailer, schoolbus and so on. So I am not concerned stuff will no longer be available (at a price). The only question is whether there will be any demand for nostalgic items 30 years down the road. I personally doubt it.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Floppies and tape, most consumer desktop computers, mechanical hard disks, iPods, analog TVs, calculators, digital watches...I can see all of those being phased out pretty rapidly. Heck, Apple barely selling any iPods.

I really think the desktop is doomed. Servers will be around in some form. High-end workstations will be around also. Wired telephones, except for some rare cases, will be gone. Mice and keyboards, history.

Newspapers in print will probably be history, as will cursive handwriting.
Click to expand...
My local Office Dpot recently ran out of floppy disks and no longer sells zip disks. Radioshack is the only place I can find them and I fear that they are going to run out soon. SSDs are going to replace the hard drive (goodbye platters:(). I have one of the original iPods, but it has an internal problem.

Used to be, you could go into Walmart, or about any electronics store and buy a good tube TV (that's my name for it) for about 70-150 dollards. Now, you have to spend at least 180 dollars to get a low end TV. Oh well, I think perfer my B&W RCA New Vista TV and my 1867 Waterbury clock over digital TV. Heck, records sound better than CDs.:)

More and more people are going to start buying tablets, because they are easier to carry around than a laptop. They'll say, "Desktops were sooooo 2009." That's before tablets really took off. Wireless keyboards and mice are the new thing, and in 3 to 7 years, everything will be touchscreen.

Another thing that bugs me is I see on more and more business cards is the company name and other writing is in all lowercase. "compaq portable 1" makes it look like a low end cheapo computer, but Compaq Portable 1 looks like a robust and sturdy computer, ready to take on anything. I just hope spelling everything lowercase doesn't get into our classrooms.

About the only place you find cursive writing is on letters written by senior citizens.
 
One last thing,

I hope this doesn't come true, but I can picture that in the near fututre, computers won't have hard drives, like that "New Internet Computer" back near 2001. Why?? Because of cloud computing. Since you can just open, work on, and save things in the cloud, why have a hard drive? You can just turn on the computer, it'll take you to a login site, log in, and do everything from the cloud.

Cloud computing is a privacy issue, because you're storing your own personal documents and other things on someone elses server.
 
I wish I was more sanguine about the issue of cloud computing. To make it practical, you need penetration of reliable high-speed internet service. There are whole swaths of this country that either do not have anything but POTS or the term "broadband" is a joke.

I've had 1.5Mbps DSL here for almost the last 10 years (I'll have to check the exact figure). There are no plans to offer anything faster from my telco. The price has not declined. In 2001, we were all supposed to get 40Mbps service because of the settlement agreement for the $200 billion in Bellcore fees illegally collected by the telcos after Bell Labs was sold.

Cloud, of course, means eventually not owning the software that runs on your system, but renting it and being subject to what the vendors say you ought to have. While this is a wet dream to carriers, a lot of infrastructure needs to be built and I don't see any coherent plan to do it.

Let's be honest about the internet. If we were stuck today with the 1200/2400 bps that was "high speed" in 1981, there would be no World Wide Web--it just wouldn't be practical. What made it practical was initially the advent of cheap high-speed modems. Although I never saw anything close to 56K, 28.8K made the web tolerable.

It's data communications that will precipitate a revolution in the way we do things--and that will take serious investment.
 
This is horribly generic however what will be hard to find are boxed items. Even knowing that I'm still hard pressed to keep a box myself. So in 30 years it will be boxed things that were historical hits. I can't recall if I tossed the box to Rock Band yet but I think that would almost be one. Xbox original I don't think has a proprietary hard drive.. from the ones I've modified recently they're pretty replaceable with any IDE drive that supports locking.

I think technologies that have been replaced will be interesting to look back on. So PDAs are a huge one that had their day and who knows if that's the future still. Wearable computers never took off because I think they look too awkward for the normal citizen to desire, although glasses with a display interface I think it still may take off.

Interfaces to read current media trends will be desirable to have. That's one thing that's been repeated on multiple sites is losing the ability to read the formats we've all backed our stuff up on today. In 30 years will you be able to interface with an IDE drive, CDROM, SD card, CF, USB, etc flash media.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
I hope this doesn't come true, but I can picture that in the near fututre, computers won't have hard drives, like that "New Internet Computer" back near 2001. Why?? Because of cloud computing. Since you can just open, work on, and save things in the cloud, why have a hard drive? You can just turn on the computer, it'll take you to a login site, log in, and do everything from the cloud.
Click to expand...
Nah, this won't happen (in a few years at least), because the "cloud" has a long way to go before everybody will think of it as reliable, and always available. Look at cell phones - once we started trusting them, we had a network-wide outage. Now we have had those for all mobile network operators here in Norway.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
Since you can just open, work on, and save things in the cloud, why have a hard drive? You can just turn on the computer, it'll take you to a login site, log in, and do everything from the cloud.
Click to expand...

This makes sense for business use, but not for home use. Chuck(G)'s comment is one factor that will stop it, the other is that home user's simply won't want to pay a monthly fee to use a computer. Plus the majority of home use is driven by the gaming market, and few high end games will actually run in the cloud. So I highly doubt that a cloud based OS will be used in the consumer space, certainly not any time soon.

As too which devices will last 30 years. I think a fair number will, but the majority just won't. For too long the computer and electronics industries have been working with the disposable mentality, things are just not designed for much more than 5 or so years of use.
 
In a twist on the thread has anyone who was around the industry 30 years ago able to predict a collector piece? In 1981 did someone here think "there will be a large group of people wanting this in 30 years.."?
 
Not me.

In 1981, mainframes were still very much around and the industry was still trying to find some solid applications beyond terminal emulation and word processing. Nobody really put much stock in games, other than set-top consoles like Pong. Spreadsheet programs were very new (I did some coding for Sorcim on SuperCalc--and still have the code). Nobody really knew where the PC business was going to go.

The smart people knew it was going to be matter of time before microprocessors would eclipse single-CPU mainframes (the "speed of light" thing) Remember that the Cray-1 was still the reigning supercomputer, with the Cray X-MP not coming out until 1983. But mainframes reigned supreme in business then. The VAX 11/780 was still fairly new.

1979-81 were also stinky years economically, with US double-digit inflation taking a big byte out of the economy.
 
"Plus the majority of home use is driven by the gaming market, and few high end games will actually run in the cloud."

I think that will change soon, buying expensive game consoles and $500 video cards every year just to play the newest games is about to run it's course. Too many reviews are of the "great graphics, crappy game" type for it to last. I think there will be a fusion of casual Facebook-type games and World of Warcraft-type MMOs before long, and they will run on a $200 Walmart laptop. The rest of us will still be playing Quake. Or Zork :)
 
Things that will be hard to find will be modems (still sold!), dot matrix printers (businesses still need 'em), PATA hard drives, thumb flash drives (they do wear out), computer input devices (mice, joysticks, rudder pedals) and zip drives/disks.
 
Ever since gaming on the PC started there were crappy games out with nice graphics and no gameplay, that is nothing new. While people still spend some cash to game on the PC, gaming on consoles has got good enough to where it is more economical to just do that (not much difference between a huge LCD TV and a LCD computer monitor anyway). Home use was driven by gaming, these days it is more internet/movies driven.
 
Things that will be hard to find:

2 GB or Less Thumb Flash Drives for Fat16 users.

if there is any fat16 user in 30 years
 
Last edited:
lxx5101 said:
2 GB or Less Thumb Flash Drives for Fat16 users.

if there is any fat16 user in 30 years
Click to expand...
Looking at how fast new versions of Windows are coming out, FAT will be gone and NTFS will be phased out. WinFS was cancelled and I wonder where that new exFAT file system will go from here.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
Looking at how fast new versions of Windows are coming out, FAT will be gone and NTFS will be phased out. WinFS was cancelled and I wonder where that new exFAT file system will go from here.
Click to expand...
And then there's the PROTOGON filesystem in the leaked Windows 8 betas...
 
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