Today’s junk

This article appeared in The Times of India on 02nd Jan 2011 (Sun)

Yesterday’s gizmo is today’s junk

B Pradeep Nair | TNN

More things have changed in the last few decades than in any other period. Many commonplace utility gadgets have been dying off faster than one would have imagined. In fact, in the past few decades, a number of technologies have become so obsolete that it’s difficult to even imagine we were, once upon a time, so contended with them.
Here are five of those which have vanished without a trace:
Floppy disks | Computer CPUs had a slot where this could be inserted. Text and pictures could be copied on it and carried. It was notorious for its susceptibility to get infected by viruses that got passed on to PCs when it was inserted. The most common 3-1/2 disk had a storage capacity of 1.44MB. Now, these have been replaced by CDs, DVDs and pen-drives that have higher storage space and are easier to carry. Of course, with cloud computing catching on at a fast pace, even these face extinction.
Pager | The user had a number to which someone could send a short message via the paging company. It became very popular in the 1990s because it was the first portable communication device for the ordinary consumer. Typically the messages sent on pagers were like: “call me on (some landline number)” or “reached home” etc. Pagers soon lost out to mobile phones once they became affordable.
Valve radio | One ‘got stations’ on it by turning the tuning knobs. The concept of finetuning never existed. Like a refrigerator, a radio had its place in a house; it was too big to be portable. Often the radio used to be switched on right in the morning and switched of only when it was realized that no one was paying any attention to it. The radio also functioned as a clock — people timed their schedules with the beginning or end of popular programmes.
Gramophone plate | There was a stick-like lever that one kept over the disk so that the tiny needle at the end of that lever made contact with the invisible grooves on the disk. It then produced the favourite Mohd Rafi or Kishore Kumar numbers. There were different disks depending upon the speed of revolution (RPM for revolution per minute). The plates had their amusing offerings as well. One often heard singers mysteriously repeating the same line of a song many times, until someone realized that the needle had got stuck on the same track. So much for getting lost in a tune.
TV antennas | They were also status symbols so much so that it didn’t matter if you had a cheap black and white TV or an expensive colour one. You had graduated into the next rung of the social ladder if you had one of those antennae sticking out of your roof. It was important to get its position right. And there were no sophisticated ways to do that: there was one guy on the rooftop, and another monitoring the reception in the living room; and through a sequence of ‘yes-no’, the final position was arrived at.