It sure is

It may sound crazy, but in the old days a guy had to be 18 years old to get his hands on prurient materials — either that or have an easily bribable older brother. Or a friend with such a brother. Or a dad with an obvious stash. Not that I know anything about such matters.

Up until the early 90’s, the only place to obtain pornographic material, whether it was print or video, was at a local adult store. Of course this required you to be at least 18 years old.

Then came along the internet and its vast collection of pictorials and videos created with every taste and niche you could imagine. While most adult sites open up to a disclaimer and state that all visitors must be 18, I’m not so sure that this qualifies as an obstacle for curious young minds.

Parents may not like it and politicians might complain about it but the truth of the matter is that teenagers have free access to all the porn they want and the days of needing to be of age to watch porn are long gone.

No More Getting Lost

In an era where “MapQuest” is a verb, having no sense of direction or ability to read a map have become excusable flaws. You can almost count on having a GPS nearby. The technology-focused market research company Forward Concepts reports that 171 million units were shipped last year and more than three times as many will ship in 2011. Though most of the devices are embedded in cars and phones, they’re also helping people keep track of meandering pets, kids and impaired adults.

But, if life truly is about the journey and not the destination, losing “lost” could be a real loss. Consider the ramifications on Western culture had the technology popped up sooner. Would there be The Odyssey? Columbus might’ve actually found the Orient (“Make the next legal U-turn”).

Losing sight of our meandering ways and the connections made with people during unexpected sojourns may be the biggest loss of all. What happened to directions scribbled on cocktail napkins? Or, for that matter, spontaneity? It used to be half the joy of a family trip to spread out the map on the dash, strap the dog to the roof and admit that you had no way to answer the age-old question: “Are we there yet?”

On the flip side, depending on what GPS voice features your device offers, today you may be able to avoid familial conflict by letting Mr. T tell the kids exactly how far there is to go. Getting lost has become an obsolete “problem”.

AOL CD

AOL sent out “free month” offers to any mailing list they could find and had displays stocked with discs in stores across the country. The supply of AOL marketing material appeared endless, right up until the mailings stopped a few years back. People who devoted their time to collecting or shunning the discs haven’t figured out what to do with themselves since (nor have I figured out what I’m supposed to use for coasters now).

With AOL, I mean Aol (their odd new branding), changing their focus and no longer offering their original dial up services, the free offer discs have become obsolete. Anyone still using Aol?

Classic Arcade

It’s easy to see why: The advent of advanced gaming systems allows you to experience the same action at home, minus the dungeon-like lighting, the deafening game noise, and the premature exhaustion of your lunch money for the week.

Systems such as the Playstation 3 and XBox360 offer gamers the same great gameplay experience as they would find at an arcade, while being in the comfort of their mom’s basement, er… I mean their own home.

Old Answering Machine

Like today’s voicemail, there was a greeting message from the person you had called before you got to leave them a message.

Back in the day, you could tell who ran the household by who got to leave the recorded message on the answering machine.  In most families it was the mom or dad.  Some let the kids record, but a select few did something extra special.

For every idea, there’s a consumer. The answering machine greeting message was a marketplace waiting to be tapped, and tapped it was!

Companies began selling cassette tapes that contained different pre-recorded greetings that would play for your callers.  From song parodies to the fancy British butler greeting, Americans snapped these up and laughed themselves straight into the nineties until voicemail became popular and eventually replaced the tapes.

Laser disc Player

Philips. The first consumer player wore the Magnavox logo, though Pioneer eventually became the format’s champion, giving it the proprietary name LaserDisc, which became the generic format name laserdisc.

Laserdisc output an analog NTSC signal, and is therefore as obsolete as the doomed analog broadcast standard. It was never a high-def format. There were two subformats, the higher-quality CAV, which held 30 minutes per side, and the more capacious and prevalent CLV, which held an hour per side. Two-hour, two-sided discs in CLV became the norm. Most discs were released with audio in a pretty decent two-channel FM-carrier format, which carried matrixed Dolby Surround, and was eventually upgraded to PCM digital. This allowed LD/CD combi players to be marketed. In the format’s waning years, Dolby Digital and DTS were added.

The laserdisc won a three-way format war with two other major disc formats, both of which, incredibly, were stylus-read like an LP. CED was invented and promoted by RCA, then an independent company, and the loss of the format war—along with tens of millions of dollars—was a major factor in turning RCA from an independent company to a TV brand that got passed around like a shopping bag. There was also a VHD format from JVC, which also went nowhere, but did so less expensively. Laserdisc won because consumers perceived greater performance and value in an optical-disc format.

There was a time when having a laserdisc player and library was synonymous with being a videophile. Considering the alternatives, it was the best choice. Its more than 400 lines of horizontal resolution were better than either VHS or

Laserdisc vs DVD

Beta, at 250 each, and also beat the 300 lines of broadcast TV. There was a Super VHS format boasting more than 400 lines, but it recorded only the brightness signal at that resolution,
smeary compared to laserdisc.

Laserdisc was doomed when DVD made its debut. The smaller disc was—well, smaller, and it offered better resolution (even though standard-def) and accommodated Dolby Digital and DTS from day one. Even now, the DVD shows signs of holding on in the face of competition from the genuinely superior Blu-ray, which supports HD, lossless surround, and other good stuff. But no one knows how long it will take for DVD to go the way of laserdisc.

Old Clothes Dryer

I’m sure that appliance manufacturers are a bit uneasy thes days. What if people get the idea they might not need a clothes dryer? Or perhaps by using it less, their current unit lasts 15 years instead of 8? Sure a new dryer might be more energy efficient than an older one, but is there anything that manufacturers can do to make dryers even more energy effective? The answer came decades ago from Wagner in the form of the Personal Clothes Dryer.

When I first saw this, I seriously thought it was a homemade toy dryer for doll’s clothes. It’s only about a foot high by a foot and a half long. The tiny door hinges open so you can throw in a few – and I do mean a few – pieces of wet laundry. If you can’t tell from the photos, it’s small. Really small. Possibly too small for even a single T-shirt. You can dry a couple pairs of underwear… or one really great big set of underpants if you’re so equipped.

There are no details on the dryer revealing how much wattage the mini-beast uses, so I gathered my courage to plug it in. The 1960’s-ish (I’m guessig here…) Wagner is very simple – choose from three temperatures of buffeting, and a clockwork timer halts the heat & spin. I put it on the lowest setting, and the streetlights went dim. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but besides the ancient electronic stink coming from a motor that probably hasn’t stirred in decades, turning up the juice did seem to affect the rest of the household. Best to dry my bandana over the shower rail.

I could find no reference to this dryer on the internet. So for what it’s worth, this is another Retro Thing scoop! Who was this marketed to? Taking along on road trips to dry small articles washed in the motel sink? Perhaps it’s gentler on ladies’ unmentionables than a regular dryer? Whatever it is, the Wagner definitely dries clothes – just it dos so a little at a time.

People really used these?

Today I could see a manufacturer making a lot of noise about a dryer that fits under your arm. At this size, it almost doesn’t matter how efficient the motor is. You’re only going to run it for a short session with only a few pieces of laundry, so it could leave a consumer with the illusion of being energy efficient. Will a unit like this hit the market today in shiny green plastic sold under the name “Porta Active Dry N’ Ready”? When it happens (and you know it will), you saw it here first.

Steam Powered Lawnmower

The boiler is a liquid fuel fired vertical-firetube type jacketed in copper with a copper smoke cone and chimney, which supplies a small vertical double simple-expansion steam engine, (visible at far left) approximately 2″ bore x 4″ stroke, with two bar guides, link reverse and crosshead driven boiler feed pumps.

The engine and boiler are mounted between steel arched frames which also carry a copper twin tank for water and fuel, with the driver’s seat on top. Roller chains (missing in this picture) drive a jackshaft and separate drives go to the mowing reel and the large under-roll; a small outrigger roll is provided at the engine end of the frame. Forward movement is to the right of the picture. Steering is by tiller in this version. The steam engine has a copper steam-jacket, and ball-bearing big-ends, and is of steam automobile style. The mowing reel cuts a 40″ swath. At one time Coldwell steam mowers were in use on the White House lawns.

Obviously these things have long since been replaced by gasoline powered engines and have rendered steam powered lawn mowers completely obsolete.

Old Boombox

Your iPod may look cool, but can you balance it on your shoulder and blast your new Jay-Z album at obnoxiously high volumes? Didn’t think so. The boombox — also known as the jambox, the ghetto blaster or the jerkface apparatus — reached its peak popularity during the 1980s, when big hair, stone-washed jeans and bad dancing enjoyed similarly unaccountable heydays. Though updated editions of the boombox may be on the market today, the era of not being able to ride in peace on a randomly selected public conveyance on a randomly selected day is, thankfully, behind us.

Obsolete Dot Matrix Printer

Developed in the 1970s, the dot matrix printer delivered low-quality printouts for nearly two whole decades before inkjet printers offered an alternative that was slightly less hard on the eyes. The dot matrix printer will be remembered for its frequent paper jams; for its slow, noisy operation; and for the thin strips of perforated paper that you had to tear (carefully, so you didn’t end up with a document that looked as though it had come too close to a paper shredder) off the left and right sides of a printout once their work of keeping the paper properly aligned in the printer was done.