Bill

My daughter is 2.5 and my son is 6 months old and I often sit and think they are growing up in a pretty amazing time for technology. As a Gen X’er I had a pretty wild ride myself. I got to witness and be part of the first generation of personal computers, the rise of the internet and cell phones. It is fun to think about what tomorrows tech will bring but it is also fun to look back at all the tech we have left behind. With that in mind 10 technologies my kids will never have to use:

1. Magnetic Tape - My Vic-20 had a cassette tape I loaded and saved games to. It was slow but as a bonus you got some creepy techno music if you put in in your cassette player. Likewise tape for even large data backups is pretty much dead.

2. Film - Unless schools continue to insist that people learn on a film camera (why oh why??) Film will be relegated to snoby artsy types and be totally dead for all commercial and personal photography.

3. DVD - With the advent of things like Apple TV, Netflix/Roku and DVR’s this is media that will die fairly soon. My daughter knows what a DVD is now (Dora!!) but she will soon forget.

4. Modems - I had a 300 baud coupler modem, my last modem was a USR HST. I still know some of the ATA command set. I am thankfully my children won’t have to deal with yelling at me for picking up the phone while they are trying to download the latest crack for DigiPaint on the Amiga like I did.

5. BBS - Kinda goes with the modem, but at least I won’t have to worry about Jack dialing long distance for hours on end to get the latest warez.

6. Land Lines - We currently do not have a phone line. We got a dry pair with DSL from Speakeasy (no PacHell yeah!) and use VOIP. That plus cell phones for everything else spell the end of POTS. My kids will only have cell service I am sure.

7. Gas Engines - By the time I have to buy Lily’s first car traditional gas engines will no longer be available. Everything will be at least hybrid, I am holding out hope for all electric. With great new tech from Tesla, GM and Toyota I am going to predict that this will come true.

8. Servers - At least as we know them, the cloud is coming baby. It is a bit like back to the future for me, I grew up dialing into big powerful Machines from my little ole TRS-80. Everything ran on those Machines I was dialing in. It is no too much unlike firing up an instance on the Amazon Compute cloud, just a heck of a lot faster.

9. TV schedules - The days of prime time are numbered. They already our at our house, we DVR everything. Just about the only thing I watch semi live is sports, but even that is on about a 30-45 minute delay. Now imagine not having broadcast TV at all. New releases every wee, downloaded to your Apple TV, Netflix box or Tivo. You would find new shows based on your current viewing habits and searches through giant archives of movies and TV.

10. Email - With SMS, Chat, Facebook and Twitter kids increasingly are not using email. Even current teens look at you funny when you want to email them. By the time Lily starts computing email will be pretty much dead, left to the spammers.

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