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Critical thinking skills.
I found an old road atlas a few weeks ago and showed it to my son, explaining that back in the day before Waze or smart phones we had to keep things like that in our cars if we wanted to go on trips to places we'd never been before. He was shocked.How about paper maps?
The other day I was driving to a local park for a hike. Although it's in the area, it's kind of out of the way and it was a bit of a backroad adventure to get there. I was having a hard time imagining how I would have gotten there in the days before GPS navigation. I guess I would have studied the maps beforehand and tried to remember all the turns? Or gone halfway and then pulled over and refreshed my memory on the rest of the route? How the heck did we survive?I found an old road atlas a few weeks ago and showed it to my son, explaining that back in the day before Waze or smart phones we had to keep things like that in our cars if we wanted to go on trips to places we'd never been before. He was shocked.
Always used these for long trips. As with any other form of paper map, though, best handled by a co-pilot.Did anyone ever go to AAA to get a Trip Tiks?
Anyone else remember these?View attachment 490557
Oh, yeah, cameras and similer tech. I've got an HP digital camera from the mid '90's. It uses Compact Flash. I made sure to get plenty of "carts". Now they're useless because I have no interface to read them with. And I don't miss using the POS camera - you press the shutter button, and IT decides when to take the picture on its own schedule.
Speaking of tech, computer drives, both hard and floppy. I've got an old boat anchor, a Seagate 25MB full height RLL hard drive that's actually worth something. It's huge and heavy, and came from a time when computers also did double duty in winter as space heaters. At the other end of the spectrum, I have a 20MB HP "Kittyhawk" microdrive.
View attachment 490549
I've got 8", 5 1/4", 3.5" floppy drives, Iomega Zip and Jazz drives, and a cute little "floppy" drive that is IDE-based and can read/write normal 3.5 floppies as well as the 120MB "super disks".
All worthless junk - until you find it's critical to have one! (and, nope! not win11 compatable!)
I had an 8 track Recorder; that was rare.Bill Lear of Learjet developed the 8-track.
Again, 8-track tapes.What about things that are obsolete, gone and you'll never miss them? Like Iomega Zip drives.
Okidata 320 (standard width) and 321 (extra wide) are still in use today for multi-part printing such as checks, loan papers, etc. They'll continue to work near forever as long as there is a supply of the stupid nylon gear that gets stripped every 5 years or so.In the 80s there were dot-matrix printers---which still exist in concept, except we call them "inkjet".
My very first PC
an IBM Model 30 286 that cost me around $2500
Twelve inch or so VGA monitor
... Cassettes in general.
There's another one. My sister in law's husband is an EMT, and I've learned that ambulance drivers all keep paper maps, because they can mark the maps up. "Use the service entrance on the east side of the building", for example.
[snip]
[edit]Paper mapsDarn near all old methods [/edit] have their place,but technology is often better. (As long as you have a backup for when tech fails.) We also cannot replace general knowledge about your response area.
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