Do You Ever Know These 10 Once-Famous Tech Products?

Once-Famous Tech Products

How many once-famous tech products have you known? MiniDisks? Or a mechanical mouse? Or pagers? If you can list at least five of such products, you may be little old.

Along with the powerful development of technology, a countless number of new tech products have been created and the previous ones rapidly become obsolete. However, that doesn’t mean they are useless. In fact, many can still work well, or at least, they have their own prices, for example, to demonstrate the stages of technological maturity.

Here is the list of the 10 once-famous tech products for those who fall in love with technologies and desire to add some into their private collection.

1. Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)

Those who were born before the Millenium may be familiar with Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) TVs and monitors. However, the first name in this top 10 out-of-date tech products now becomes the past after LED and plasma screens appear in the market.

First introduced in the 1920s, cathode ray tubes contributed to changing the world of entertainment and technology. However, this kind of technology, in fact, was said to appear at the end of the 19th century. More exactly, in 1897, Ferdinand Braun, a renowned physicist in German, invented a tube called “Braun Tube.”

2. Typewriter

Among many first tech products, the typewriter must be one of the most prominent ones. At present, it is just considered as an ornament or a favorite item of collectors.

However, since the appearance of computers, this product has been no longer widely used like before. Until now, only writers with old souls have fallen in love with it.

The typewriter allegedly originated from some old typing instruments like the scrittura tattile in 1575. Its inventor was Francesco Rampazetto, a printmaker from Italia. His typing instruments was known for its ability to impress letters in papers.

3. Pagers

Pagers or beepers were one of the prominent wireless telecoms devices which could display voice messages or alphanumeric messages. In the past, tech products were mainly used by those who worked in emergency services.

When it came to their most glorious period, it must be during the 1980s. In fact, they were first introduced in the 1950s.

Along with the appearance of smartphones in the 2000s, pagers have gradually become redundant. At the time when first smartphones were manufactured, these classical devices sometimes gained more attention than the smart devices.

4. Dot Matrix Printers

You may be unable to see these tech products anywhere because dot matrix printers almost disappear completely. It is not difficult at all to explain about their extinction: inkjet and laserjet printers which have been more and more popular with a lot of advantages rapidly took on these out-of-date printers.

Dot Matrix Printers couldn’t work as well as modern printers. Besides, they were extremely slow, as well as made too much noise.

5. Dumb Phones

Long before we have known the concept of push-notifications, mobile phones just supported some basic features such as receiving or making calls and composing texts. Some more powerful dumb phones could allow their owners to play classical games including Snake.

However, the era of dumb phones didn’t last long because of the advent of smartphones. Our daily life is covered by countless information from useless to helpful.

The early tech products have no longer been something all of us desire to hold in hand. At least, they also marked the development of the technology industry.

6. Fax Machines

Before cloud storage and emails have been developing, sending documents via the phone used to be the most modern and fastest method. Young generations may feel unbelievable but that is completely true. People leveraged audio-frequency tones via a phone line whenever they needed to transfer any document.

The receiver’s machine would handle the information and create a copy from the original document of the sender. It comes as no surprise that this technology also has the same destiny as many other technologies. Now, it has been replaced by many more ideal alternatives. Anyway, many have been still faithful to it.

7. Floppy Disks

The floppy disk used to be the most important storage system of the majority of users in the world. As of now, it is just known as a save icon of software applications. This product first came to the global market in the 1970s, and after tens of years, it has had a lot of significant improvements, such as bigger storage capacity and smaller size.

The appearance of CDs and then, the demand for larger storage capacity, the floppy disk become out of date in the middle of 2000s.

8. Cassette Tapes

When mentioning the 1980s, many may first think about cassette tapes. The tech products, in fact, was available in the late 1960s. Until the middle of the 2000s, the Compact Disk was released, leading to the disappearance of cassette tapes.

Back to years ago, owning blank cassette tapes was not an odd story. However, as users have a greater demand for storage capacity to save many music albums, they obviously prefer choosing other more ideal mediums.

9. Betamax – Once-Famous Format Of Magnetic Tape

The UK reviews website pocket-lint.com says, "Betamax was the earliest version of consumer-level video cassette tape format, originally released in 1975. Developed by Sony, Betamax was the standard for magnetic videotape until it became obsolete as the VHS format appeared and dominated in the 1980s."

Although Betamax was beaten by the standard videocassette format named VHS, it was still manufactured in the early 200s. Even until 2016, you could purchase blank Betamax cassettes.

10. MiniDisk Players

MiniDisk players once reached the peak as one of the most-loved tech products. At that time, they were known for its impressive storage capacity of 1GB, which allowed users to store 45h of audio playback. MiniDisk players had a tough battle with the incumbent king CD.

It’s a pity that in 2011, MP3 players were first released and immediately knocked down both of the above products.