Tech They Miss
- By Matt Stephens
- August 8, 2005
CNET’s editors have compiled a list of the top 10 technologies that they miss.
The first few are pretty good: space travel beyond Earth’s close orbit; Concorde; good, heavyweight clackity-clack IBM-style keyboards that could really take a pounding, and so on.
But after that their lamentations start to have “luddite” written all over them. The CNET editors appear to be missing the good old days before certain things were invented, rather than specific inventions that have disappeared.
For example, they miss wires because nowadays everything’s hooked up by Bluetooth. The wired option is still there of course, but wireless gadgets are the best thing since, well, wired gadgets. Truth is, I hate all those tangled cables creating a criss-crossed lattice over my desk or a series of tripwires under the desk. Conversely, my WiFi laptop is just the biz. True, Bluetooth isn’t perfect yet, but its inconveniences are trivial when you compare them with the problems that coiled-up wires, male/female connectors and broken pins have traditionally caused.
They also miss LPs, and lament the rise of CDs and MP3s. Purleeze... Remember how big LPs were? CDs are lovely and tiny in comparison, and MP3s don’t even exist. It doesn’t get much more convenient than that. True, the resilience of CDs hasn’t lived up to its early promises, and in some ways it’s easier to damage a CD than an LP. But if you roll a CD and an LP down a steep hill into a fast-flowing river, I wonder which one would survive. (Actually, probably neither come to think of it...)