There have been so many technologies in the last couple of decades that have made their way from “needed” to completely and totally defunct. Do you remember the Sony Walkman, perhaps? Or even CDs and CD Players have become obsolete in this day and age. Movie DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are becoming more and more rare, as well as technologies like the PDA, which has been replaced with the huge variety of smart phones on the market.
The website AmongTech has covered much of the research done by My Voucher Codes on this topic. My Voucher Codes traced back some of the most popular technologies of the last couple of decades. Amazingly enough, though these technologies are defunct, they are still taking much a lot of e-waste. Down below are three of them, and you can read about more here at this infographic created by My Voucher Codes. Everything I talk about below has been replaced by smartphones in one way or another.
That Sony Walkman
Back in the 80s, everyone had a Sony Walkman — or so it seemed. This technology was one of the first ways to transport music portably, something we do all the time today with our iPhones and other smart devices. This player took audio cassette tapes, but the Sony Walkman technology line also included a CD player, and a couple of other portable devices. Of course, these are now defunct as most everyone keeps their music on their smartphones.
Floppy Disks
Who remembers when Floppy Disks used to actually be floppy? I’m too young to remember that myself, but I do remember using the stiff Floppy Disks in my computer classes back in elementary school. Floppy disks could hold up to 80kB of data back in 1969, and that was it. Now the floppy disk has been replaced with hard drives, flash drives, and even just Cloud storage, which doesn’t require a little device to carry your data around in at all.
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)
Personal Digital Assistants were somewhat of the parents that came before the smartphones that everyone uses today. They were used to send emails, keep up on calendar events, send messages to others, and to conduct other forms of business. Now, everyone just uses their smartphone to do all of that and much, much more. PDAs are something that probably won’t ever come back into use as a result.
