Rememer the good ole days -- when modern technology worked?

I miss my show recording VCR.
And businesses that advertised in the Yellow Pages. Not the Impact Directory, not the Yellow Book. Nor any other Yellow Pages wannabe.
I miss my ‘56 Pontiac that had the heater under the driver’s seat.
I miss shoes that last longer than 3 months.
I miss car A/C systems that used R-12 refrigerant.
I miss the smell of leaded gasoline.
I miss car engines that you could see when you opened the hood.
I miss not having a trash, a recycling and a compost cart in my driveway. With the city’s trash collection company’s logo emblazoned on them in large, easy-to-read print, like there was another trash company in town that you might hire…

I miss floppy discs and computers that could read them and I miss tuning my transistor radio.

Remember when mobile phones had buttons and they stayed out of other gadgets’ business? Now they are taking control of everything.

I guess Jump Drives are as good as floppies. Then again, I have a lot on those floppies which I haven’t seen for almost sixteen years.

Corel Word Perfect is still in production and should work… or do you mean trying to use a 20-year-old version set to print to the LPT1 port your current computer doesn’t have?

I’ve got some 35mm film cameras if you’d like to buy one off me.

I also have some blank floppy disks, and even a few unused blank cassette tapes.

Civilized places still have libraries with books, and book stores.

I agree I’d rather have a knob than a line of buttons and an annoying UI to adjust color with.

Computers can still play CDs but some annoying OS’es stupidly don’t make it entirely easy, such as Windows 10, which I despise.

CD players are certainly still available if you want one.

I do dislike many modern devices or at least the user interfaces. Not only are they often complex, they also manage to be hard to use by trying to be simple in ways that make them almost unusable. I had to add three apps to my smartass phone to regain some ability to tell whether it’s connected to wifi and possibly influence which networks it tries to connect to, because they dumbed the bastard wifi UI down to one icon you can toggle and MAYBE it sometimes gives you a list of networks to pick between – note that means you need to disconnect just to see whether it’s connected or not. No doubt the added cell data charges this causes had nothing to do with that UI change…

The new tech I dread the most is the threat of robot-driven cars. It’s not here yet, but as I keep posting, as a programmer and AI developer, that really scares me, yes more than drunk incompetent crazy drivers.

I also miss not having a cell phone (even though I also appreciate some of it), and actually I kind of wish computers were about 30 years in the past but I still had the programming skills I have now – I’d rather develop games for people’s imagination and low graphics expectations on limited-technology machines, then have to deal with modern machines and customers who will think it sucks if it doesn’t compete with multi-million-dollar efforts with 3D graphics and motion-capture animations done by actors and bla bla bla.

Oh and yes I’d rather have a reliable version of an older car with a nice stylish design and an engine my mechanic can easily repair himself without needing the manufacturer’s computer rig or sending back entire computerized modules for things that shouldn’t need to be computerized.

And I liked it better when politicians and news anchors were at least acting like people were adult educated people who cared about integrity and making sense and public service and had some intention span and some intelligence.

Oh and I miss the absence of traffic cameras and license-plate readers and Homeland Security etc.

I was thinking about that when I read a comment from someone who stated she survived no seat belts, drinking water out of the hose, riding her bicycle without a helmet and a long list of other things. Cars used to be made of steel, not plastic, with real bumpers. Hoses were made out of real rubber and our water did not come from “treatment plants”. Streets were wider, with fewer cars, and there safer for bicycles, and so on.

Yeah, I totally miss the jumbled up tape when you pulled out a vhs or audio cassette, the scratched and jumpy CDs, the CD players that shattered your discs, the records where you could hear the dust being scratched by the needle, the 4kb/s internet that inflated your phone bill and was not compatible with the actual calls, the installation from 20 floppy disks that sent you into a fit because the last disk was unreadable, the hardware that did not work because it wanted the same interrupt as other hardware and

Technology works better now. You just have to know WTF you are doing. Anyone remember what it was like to configure a hard disk before PNP? How fun was that jog with a big godamned brick attached to your hip that had about a 30 min battery life from six AA batteries that were not rechargeable. I remember an entire room filled with index cards that you had to sort through to find the book that contained an answer to a question google or the little cup sized device in my kitchen can simply roll off the answer to. Cars now are designed to fail without ejecting the passengers organs out through every orafice in an accident. Most will go 200,000 miles or more without too many issues. Programming apps in assembly, yeah that was fun~ Oh and that single T1 carrying internet for a whole building complex was screaming fast back in the day, it only took like thirty seconds to load a single .jpg

I miss cameras that did not require memory cards and batteries and did not need to be recharged

Until you needed a flash. Those cubes were expensive

Unless you live in a postapocalyptic wasteland, there are no “good old days”.

With only 3 channels on TV there was always something to watch. Now you have a thousand to choose from but there’s nothing worth watching. If you wanted to call long distance, you had to get the operator. That was kinda fun. Radio and TV were free, now they bill you monthly. Telephones were for talking and they kept the calls short by tying you to the wall. If you wanted to travel you bought a map and it didn’t talk to you.

I remember 20 years ago, I’d call my best friend once a week on a Sunday so the bill was cheaper. I remember one hour on the phone might add $8 to the phone bill. She lived about an hour away. If I did that once a week, the bill would be an extra 30 bucks, roughly. Not fun. Now it’s unlimited calls anywhere in the country, one price.

I remember having to be in the library researching for a term paper. Very labor intensive writing down citations for the bibliography and finding books and looking things up.

I often think about the days before cell phones, when we would meet friends or visit people and not be able to call and say we were running late or to say “text me when you’re outside” or something like that. If the car broke down, you’d have to walk to find a phone booth and make a call, then walk back to your car to stand there and wait for help.

I remember the excitement of going to the record store to buy a new record or CD and taking it home to play it. Even though it was exciting, I still don’t want to go back to that era. I like the ease of listening and streaming now.

I remember TVs from long ago having fucked up color and scrolling pictures. I think it’s so much better now. The color is pretty true to what it should be and the picture is crystal clear.

And to add to that, I remember going places without GPS, in the days before GPS, when you’d better have maps and atlases with you and be prepared to pull over and look at them or stop and ask for directions and hope the person knew where you were going. Now with GPS it’s so wonderful.

No, I don’t usually wish for the days before we had technology we have now.