Not fade away....

I saw something the other day that made me think about things that used to be commonplace that are either on their way out or practically gone. Some I thought about in no particular order:

Home newspaper boxes. You know what they used to put your newspaper in instead of throwing it willy-nilly in the driveway, front yard, etc. You can still see them in some areas, just not like you used to.

Newspaper vending boxes. The victim of newspaper cutbacks. I also never got the whole concept that some newspapers did by having an empty vending box outside of a store with a sign in it saying that newspapers were sold inside the store. Did these "signs" really generate sales, or would they have made more money selling the boxes for scrap?

Pay phones. Two words: cell phones. What probably was the ultimate blow to the pay phone was the prepaid cell phone.

VCRs. I'm actually surprised you can still buy them in stores (usually packaged as a DVD/VCR combo), seeing that DVDs have supplanted them in stores and in retail sales.

Pagers. Yes there are folks who still have pagers. In fact, the company I work for actually used them up until a few years ago (they didn't want to have to pay a termination fee). With cell phones and plans being so inexpensive (especially with a prepaid plan), owning a pager makes no sense at all.

Portable CD players. Thank goodness for MP3 players, as you can fit that CD collection you used to lug around with you into a device smaller than a deck of playing cards. The portable CD player is definitely a 90s thing, like the Walkman/portable cassette player was in the 80s.

That's just a few that come to mind. I wonder if in the next 5-10+ years, folks will be talking about when the Ipod was the size of a deck of cards and only had 160 GB of space on it. Or when folks actually had to go get a newspaper/magazine/book instead of merely downloading the latest edition (We're almost to that point anyway, but it really wouldn't surprise me if eventually the days of washing the newsprint off of our hands are in the past.). I can actually remember when vinyl became a niche item, when record stores quit carrying cassette tapes, and even going as far back as 8-track tapes. I remember both VHS and Betamax, the various early generation video game systems that competed with the Atari 2600. We've already had this decade's versions with the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, and PS3 vs. XBox360 vs. Wii battle. 15-20 years from now, they'll be folks in their 30s and 40s reminiscing about those being the "good old days". By then, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et. al, will probably be something looked at as a fad of the late 00s.......