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Quick rant, downvote away but I thought I'd share something that's really going to be important to the future of tech: Obsolescence in technology is a completel

Quick rant, downvote away but I thought I'd share something that's really going to be important to the future of tech: Obsolescence in technology is a completely broken mental model. As a communications tool it mainly serves the purpose of justifying new development and economic growth. The obsolescence model is based on a breadth-first estimation of technology (what's out there, what's going on, how have things changed out in the tech world, what else is available) rather than a depth-first estimation (what's in here, what can this baby do, wow what a miracle in this way or that one). By using the word "obsolete," the communicator is being--intentionally or unintentionally--intellectually shallow. Even if the word serves their purpose, they are also wrong in a big way. The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least. The best way to communicate obsolescence with accuracy, precision, and rationality is with a reference point, like a market: "This tool no longer serves its original target market with the efficacy that it once did." This is much more precise. However, it opens the door to another depth question: Which markets or sub-markets might it _still_ serve, and even speak to rather loudly? IMO the discourse of obsolescence is a curse on modern civilization. We are missing out on some huge _qualitative growth_ lessons until we learn to think in a more nuanced way about how technology serves us all.

msla 8y ago
OK, is a mercury delay line memory obsolete?
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  As a commercial technology? Sure, read my post again. The obsolescence model works only with a "normalized market" reference point. But this also creates a huge blind spot: There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model. Is it useful to the average Joe off the street--that's the shallow part of the estimation.
  - msla 8y ago
    > There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model. Except mercury delay line memory is completely uninteresting except as a footnote to computer history, which doesn't change the fact they're heavy, expensive to run, and quite fragile. And I don't consider "It's a museum piece!" to mean something isn't obsolete.
    - themodelplumber 8y ago
      Keep in mind that this is completely subjective/qualitative and that's the point. Disqualifying a substantially qualitative theory because you found an edge or corner case would in the first place be really silly, as every model is known to be broken in some way, and the point is that in the trade-off you generate value. But in the second--I'll bet if you really got into mercury delay line memory, you'd find some qualitative research gems. You are still referencing your comfortable normalized market, and that's a major point of departure for the thinking I'm describing.
teddyh 8y ago
No machine is an island. You can’t send anybody an Atari 800 floppy disk, or bring that floppy somewhere, and expect it to be read. An Atari 800 does not have a USB port. You can’t browse the modern web on an Atari 800. And all of those things are what people do now. The computer did not, by itself, become worse, but the world around it changed, and the computer did not change with the times. The computer is therefore unusable for any normal activity which people want to do, and the normal term for that is, indeed, “obsolete”.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Edited: Duplicate
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Again, if your reference point is the "normalized" market, that's the only way obsolescence really works as a model. This requires little effort to understand. What I'm saying is, think about the long tail and the extraction of value from this technology. It's far from incapable. I don't know about you, but I could plan a global economic takeover on an 800; still can. I can also teach someone else to do so. In fact, it's easier to stay focused. There's no malware and comparatively little practical need for encryption. We waste a lot of qualitative profit as we march forward in search of breadth. Here we are robbed blind by the obsolescence model, which imparts heavy bias to our thinking.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    It's obsolete in the way a horse is obsolete. If you have a specific job - getting to the next town, or maybe crossing the continental USA - it will do that job, or at least attempt to. But it will be painfully slow, unreliable, and potentially expensive compared to more modern alternatives. No one is really being robbed here - because there's a point where incremental changes in technology mean that a product becomes qualitatively different. Not just faster, but able to do things that an older product can't. In this example the qualitative differences are obvious. You can't make calls, watch videos, browse the web, develop modern software, play modern games, write modern documents, or print them with a modern printer. You can still do some very simple programming on it, but you can't share the code without hard-to-find extras. So - obsolete. It's capable of some extremely limited applications, none of which are particularly useful. And it's quite useless for anything else.
sneakernets 8y ago
While I wish I could agree (and being from the demoscene, pushing hardware to the breaking point is just what we do), there comes a time when you really do need a new machine. Many iterations of home computers (VIC-20 to C64 to C128 and so on) were mostly including what was once an expansion card or device as a stock feature. enough iterations and you'll have something nowhere close to the original. Of course it's technically the same computer, but no average Joe could tell unless you pointed it out. Apple ][ evolved into the ][GS, which was so far away from the original computer it might as well been called something else entirely. This iterative evolution continues to this day on PC with the existence of Bluetooth being on motherboards now instead of being a PCI card or USB dongle you would install. And there is a great example of going too far in the console gaming space: the Sega MD at the end of its lifespan, with the 32X and CD modules, was a hulking beast with a tangled mess of cables and power cords. I love making old hardware do new tricks, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it to watch YouTube or debug software on. Not even 'sceners do that.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Can you edit text on it? If so you can win a war with it, you can make a million bucks with it. Comparisons to YouTube while amusing are more like a smoke screen. Obscures value, sure. But also there's not much to it. It's not a substantially deep commentary on the Atari; it's a commentary on the market reference point. And my point is that you've got to understand the Atari first; the unique market part comes after. I wouldn't recommend watching YouTube on an Atari either. :-)
liveoneggs 8y ago
If an old computer can be 100% emulated by a new computer using 1/1000th of the electricity then the old computer should be archived as software and physically recycled/eliminated.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  If. That makes sense only when comparing very old hardware to new, and only because the new hardware is much more power-efficient. But it's not a good argument for perpetuating absurdly short hardware cycles like we have with phones (1-2 years).
  - liveoneggs 8y ago
    I'm specifically talking about things like VAX and old sun and DEC etc
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I do tabletop gaming with a group of friends, and have an ongoing debate with one that seem relevant to this. The debate is that he is of the opinion that tabletop games (particularly ones with complex scoring or recordkeeping) should be computerized. I am of the opinion that they should not, because when you change the form factor, you are changing the game even if all the rules remain the same. We are humans, and as humans, physicality matters to us. I think that the same thing comes into play with old-school hardware. The hardware itself is important, and no amount of emulation can really replace it. My friend and I will never agree on this with tabletop games, and that's OK. You and I may equally never agree about old-school hardware, and that's also OK.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  At 100% you necessarily include sensory equivalence. Otherwise you still change the experience drastically. Emulators are a fundamental shift in the sensory aspect. Even moving the F-keys around a tiny bit can be enough to drive a user crazy or break a great word processor.
  - 8y ago
ken 8y ago
> An Atari 800 is no longer useful? Machines wear out. If I can't get service manuals or replacement parts, then it's no longer useful, even for its original purpose. I've thrown out more than a couple pieces of computer hardware, over the years, which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable. On ebay right now, I see 6 "Atari 800" machines. 1 is advertised as "working".
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable Repairability is dependent on your skillset and interest, though. Aside from machines that used custom chips and those chips failing (and even then, you can usually replace those with modern tech combined with effort and ingenuity), I can't think of any old-school machines (and very few modern machines) that are actually unrepairable.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  The model I'm presenting is not a "go buy an Atari 800" model. It's a counter-model to displace the shallow concept of normalized-market obsolescence. The best way to understand this thinking is to look at people who already employ it. Look at the people using fountain pens and Gregg shorthand in 2019. And did you hear about the Polish auto shop that was using a C64 well into the 21st century? We junk really, really good standalone ideas because human psychology determines that they don't fit into an emerging network of systems. This creates literal tons of waste at a personal and individual-business level and forces humans to think in unsustainable ways about what technology is and how it's used. We need new models to help us address the qualitative problems within the tech world.
  - ken 8y ago
    My point was that, for a complex product like a computer, an individual consumer can't decide this. A shop still using a C64 is lucky that it didn't break -- or that there's plenty of other C64's for sale which broke in different ways, so they could be cannibalized for parts! I was happy with my C64, but the 1541 drive kept failing (even 25 years ago). As a user, I'm able to ignore network effects for the device's use. That's merely an inconvenience. I can't ignore network effects for repair and maintenance. That will turn it into a fancy paperweight. It's not like a pen and shorthand. Those I can use even if no company wants to support me. I could even make my own pen, without too much trouble, if somehow all pen companies went out of business next week.
jdietrich 8y ago
>The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least. Obsolete (Adj.): no longer used or needed, usually because something newer and better has replaced it. It doesn't matter whether the Atari 800 still does something. It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. We live in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller costs about the same as a banana. $10 buys you a single-board computer with roughly the same performance as a mid-00s desktop. Human effort is worth something. So is energy, so are raw materials. Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. Melt down the old stuff for scrap metal, burn the plastics for fuel and use that material and energy to do something more useful.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. I'm not sure this is true. At the very least, it's not hard to imagine circumstances where it's the best available option for recreational use (hacking on, programming for, etc.) > Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. It isn't a good use of your resources. But it can be a perfectly fine use of resources for someone else. It all depends on what turns your gears.
rdiddly 8y ago
"No longer useful" is not a very good definition. I declare that dictionary obsolete! I would tend to define obsolescence based on the task. (Arguably this is just the "micro" definition corresponding to your market-based "macro" version.) Obsolescence is when another alternative exists for doing the task, that improves on the previous alternative to a sufficient degree that you prefer it, and don't see yourself ever willingly going back to the previous alternative. Just to pick some random domain, from outside computers: Steelmaking/metallurgical technology at the turn of the 20th century tended to produce a relatively high carbon-content steel, which was more brittle, especially at low temperatures, and could cause a ship to crack, take on water, and sink. As steel tech improved, and new ships were built with the newer steels, those failures started happening less often. Steels that were less "hard" but more "tough" made navigation safer. On the other hand, and maybe to your point, most of those older ships of the higher-carbon steel, that didn't sink, were still able to serve out their service lives. Maybe if you found a way to put them on routes in warmer waters, you could've extended their lives even more. Which, translating to your conception, would be adapting to the new market or sub-market. So hey, at least for shipbuilding, your model seems to fit! The idea of obsolescence reflects an often unquestioned bias toward, or belief in, progress. If that which is newer or came later is always better, and if we're always (or mostly) moving forward in a more-or-less unbroken arc of steady unalloyed progress, then of course older things are obsolete. When in fact it's usually more complex than that. For example when moving to a newer technology, there's often something else desirable that has to be sacrificed, or that gets ruined, in order to get the improvement. So progress is rarely unalloyed (no pun intended given the steel talk above), and obsolescence is also, rarely unalloyed.

msla 8y ago

OK, is a mercury delay line memory obsolete?

themodelplumber 8y ago
As a commercial technology? Sure, read my post again. The obsolescence model works only with a "normalized market" reference point. But this also creates a huge blind spot: There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model. Is it useful to the average Joe off the street--that's the shallow part of the estimation.
- msla 8y ago
  > There is more value to be extracted. Think even of a simple teaching model. Except mercury delay line memory is completely uninteresting except as a footnote to computer history, which doesn't change the fact they're heavy, expensive to run, and quite fragile. And I don't consider "It's a museum piece!" to mean something isn't obsolete.
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    Keep in mind that this is completely subjective/qualitative and that's the point. Disqualifying a substantially qualitative theory because you found an edge or corner case would in the first place be really silly, as every model is known to be broken in some way, and the point is that in the trade-off you generate value. But in the second--I'll bet if you really got into mercury delay line memory, you'd find some qualitative research gems. You are still referencing your comfortable normalized market, and that's a major point of departure for the thinking I'm describing.

teddyh 8y ago

No machine is an island. You can’t send anybody an Atari 800 floppy disk, or bring that floppy somewhere, and expect it to be read. An Atari 800 does not have a USB port. You can’t browse the modern web on an Atari 800. And all of those things are what people do now. The computer did not, by itself, become worse, but the world around it changed, and the computer did not change with the times. The computer is therefore unusable for any normal activity which people want to do, and the normal term for that is, indeed, “obsolete”.

themodelplumber 8y ago
Edited: Duplicate
themodelplumber 8y ago
Again, if your reference point is the "normalized" market, that's the only way obsolescence really works as a model. This requires little effort to understand. What I'm saying is, think about the long tail and the extraction of value from this technology. It's far from incapable. I don't know about you, but I could plan a global economic takeover on an 800; still can. I can also teach someone else to do so. In fact, it's easier to stay focused. There's no malware and comparatively little practical need for encryption. We waste a lot of qualitative profit as we march forward in search of breadth. Here we are robbed blind by the obsolescence model, which imparts heavy bias to our thinking.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  It's obsolete in the way a horse is obsolete. If you have a specific job - getting to the next town, or maybe crossing the continental USA - it will do that job, or at least attempt to. But it will be painfully slow, unreliable, and potentially expensive compared to more modern alternatives. No one is really being robbed here - because there's a point where incremental changes in technology mean that a product becomes qualitatively different. Not just faster, but able to do things that an older product can't. In this example the qualitative differences are obvious. You can't make calls, watch videos, browse the web, develop modern software, play modern games, write modern documents, or print them with a modern printer. You can still do some very simple programming on it, but you can't share the code without hard-to-find extras. So - obsolete. It's capable of some extremely limited applications, none of which are particularly useful. And it's quite useless for anything else.

sneakernets 8y ago

While I wish I could agree (and being from the demoscene, pushing hardware to the breaking point is just what we do), there comes a time when you really do need a new machine. Many iterations of home computers (VIC-20 to C64 to C128 and so on) were mostly including what was once an expansion card or device as a stock feature. enough iterations and you'll have something nowhere close to the original. Of course it's technically the same computer, but no average Joe could tell unless you pointed it out. Apple ][ evolved into the ][GS, which was so far away from the original computer it might as well been called something else entirely. This iterative evolution continues to this day on PC with the existence of Bluetooth being on motherboards now instead of being a PCI card or USB dongle you would install. And there is a great example of going too far in the console gaming space: the Sega MD at the end of its lifespan, with the 32X and CD modules, was a hulking beast with a tangled mess of cables and power cords. I love making old hardware do new tricks, but I sure as hell wouldn't use it to watch YouTube or debug software on. Not even 'sceners do that.

themodelplumber 8y ago
Can you edit text on it? If so you can win a war with it, you can make a million bucks with it. Comparisons to YouTube while amusing are more like a smoke screen. Obscures value, sure. But also there's not much to it. It's not a substantially deep commentary on the Atari; it's a commentary on the market reference point. And my point is that you've got to understand the Atari first; the unique market part comes after. I wouldn't recommend watching YouTube on an Atari either. :-)

liveoneggs 8y ago

If an old computer can be 100% emulated by a new computer using 1/1000th of the electricity then the old computer should be archived as software and physically recycled/eliminated.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
If. That makes sense only when comparing very old hardware to new, and only because the new hardware is much more power-efficient. But it's not a good argument for perpetuating absurdly short hardware cycles like we have with phones (1-2 years).
- liveoneggs 8y ago
  I'm specifically talking about things like VAX and old sun and DEC etc
JohnFen 8y ago
I do tabletop gaming with a group of friends, and have an ongoing debate with one that seem relevant to this. The debate is that he is of the opinion that tabletop games (particularly ones with complex scoring or recordkeeping) should be computerized. I am of the opinion that they should not, because when you change the form factor, you are changing the game even if all the rules remain the same. We are humans, and as humans, physicality matters to us. I think that the same thing comes into play with old-school hardware. The hardware itself is important, and no amount of emulation can really replace it. My friend and I will never agree on this with tabletop games, and that's OK. You and I may equally never agree about old-school hardware, and that's also OK.
themodelplumber 8y ago
At 100% you necessarily include sensory equivalence. Otherwise you still change the experience drastically. Emulators are a fundamental shift in the sensory aspect. Even moving the F-keys around a tiny bit can be enough to drive a user crazy or break a great word processor.
- 8y ago

ken 8y ago

> An Atari 800 is no longer useful? Machines wear out. If I can't get service manuals or replacement parts, then it's no longer useful, even for its original purpose. I've thrown out more than a couple pieces of computer hardware, over the years, which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable. On ebay right now, I see 6 "Atari 800" machines. 1 is advertised as "working".

JohnFen 8y ago
> which were almost certainly 99% fine, but unrepairable Repairability is dependent on your skillset and interest, though. Aside from machines that used custom chips and those chips failing (and even then, you can usually replace those with modern tech combined with effort and ingenuity), I can't think of any old-school machines (and very few modern machines) that are actually unrepairable.
themodelplumber 8y ago
The model I'm presenting is not a "go buy an Atari 800" model. It's a counter-model to displace the shallow concept of normalized-market obsolescence. The best way to understand this thinking is to look at people who already employ it. Look at the people using fountain pens and Gregg shorthand in 2019. And did you hear about the Polish auto shop that was using a C64 well into the 21st century? We junk really, really good standalone ideas because human psychology determines that they don't fit into an emerging network of systems. This creates literal tons of waste at a personal and individual-business level and forces humans to think in unsustainable ways about what technology is and how it's used. We need new models to help us address the qualitative problems within the tech world.
- ken 8y ago
  My point was that, for a complex product like a computer, an individual consumer can't decide this. A shop still using a C64 is lucky that it didn't break -- or that there's plenty of other C64's for sale which broke in different ways, so they could be cannibalized for parts! I was happy with my C64, but the 1541 drive kept failing (even 25 years ago). As a user, I'm able to ignore network effects for the device's use. That's merely an inconvenience. I can't ignore network effects for repair and maintenance. That will turn it into a fancy paperweight. It's not like a pen and shorthand. Those I can use even if no company wants to support me. I could even make my own pen, without too much trouble, if somehow all pen companies went out of business next week.

jdietrich 8y ago

>The fact is, this machine still does what it started out to do, technically speaking. If you look up the dictionary definition of obsolescence though, you'll find some really terrible news: "no longer useful." An Atari 800 is no longer useful? That's arguable, to say the very least. Obsolete (Adj.): no longer used or needed, usually because something newer and better has replaced it. It doesn't matter whether the Atari 800 still does something. It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. We live in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller costs about the same as a banana. $10 buys you a single-board computer with roughly the same performance as a mid-00s desktop. Human effort is worth something. So is energy, so are raw materials. Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. Melt down the old stuff for scrap metal, burn the plastics for fuel and use that material and energy to do something more useful.

JohnFen 8y ago
> It's so bad compared to newer options that there is no circumstance where it's the best available option. I'm not sure this is true. At the very least, it's not hard to imagine circumstances where it's the best available option for recreational use (hacking on, programming for, etc.) > Keeping old, crappy stuff just isn't a good use of resources when new stuff is immeasurably better and ludicrously cheap. It isn't a good use of your resources. But it can be a perfectly fine use of resources for someone else. It all depends on what turns your gears.

rdiddly 8y ago

"No longer useful" is not a very good definition. I declare that dictionary obsolete! I would tend to define obsolescence based on the task. (Arguably this is just the "micro" definition corresponding to your market-based "macro" version.) Obsolescence is when another alternative exists for doing the task, that improves on the previous alternative to a sufficient degree that you prefer it, and don't see yourself ever willingly going back to the previous alternative. Just to pick some random domain, from outside computers: Steelmaking/metallurgical technology at the turn of the 20th century tended to produce a relatively high carbon-content steel, which was more brittle, especially at low temperatures, and could cause a ship to crack, take on water, and sink. As steel tech improved, and new ships were built with the newer steels, those failures started happening less often. Steels that were less "hard" but more "tough" made navigation safer. On the other hand, and maybe to your point, most of those older ships of the higher-carbon steel, that didn't sink, were still able to serve out their service lives. Maybe if you found a way to put them on routes in warmer waters, you could've extended their lives even more. Which, translating to your conception, would be adapting to the new market or sub-market. So hey, at least for shipbuilding, your model seems to fit! The idea of obsolescence reflects an often unquestioned bias toward, or belief in, progress. If that which is newer or came later is always better, and if we're always (or mostly) moving forward in a more-or-less unbroken arc of steady unalloyed progress, then of course older things are obsolete. When in fact it's usually more complex than that. For example when moving to a newer technology, there's often something else desirable that has to be sacrificed, or that gets ruined, in order to get the improvement. So progress is rarely unalloyed (no pun intended given the steel talk above), and obsolescence is also, rarely unalloyed.