If you ever have kids like this....

no u

Can't expect parents to introduce stuff that is outdated. My parents never told me about how to operate a VHS machine. I don't know what that is until high school, where they had one.

I don't see why parents should go have a lecture about old technologies that people don't use anymore. It's good to know, but come on, it's a walkman.

Still got some lying around in the closet.

Something like this probably.

Sounds a bit niche, just like modern vinyl players it's only going to sell to music aficionados. Some phones are already capable of playing .flac files, and just like the phones with a greater emphasis on cameras, it's not impossible to phones with similar audio components.

I still yet to buy a ipod. My phone is way better... less hd.

I'm 24 and I recently got my first smart phone. Using touch to do everything makes me feel like a tool. Fuck touch controls. That's one future I don't want to be a part of.

I still use my Walkman, not often though, since i barely listen to music.

I also have a DOS emulator on my laptop that i use for running old shit, like my favorite computer games from the 90's that i use to play as a kid, and i have windows 95 on a separate computer for similar reasons. Love it.


As for smartphones... well, i have one (samsung galaxy note), and i use the actual useful stuff on it rather than playing games on it (i only have 1 game on it) or visiting social networks such as tumblr and facepalm.

I've never touched a walkman before but I did operate a cd player once..

I do think something's lost when you remove the tactile, mechanical elements of interacting with things.

Touchscreens and cloud computing replacing buttons and gears seems to me something similar to abandoning sex for cybering.


Hell- it already affects how people interact with each other and socialising.


It's always me and one of my buddies who have to- basically pressgang- the rest of our social circle into actual activities like bowling or shooting and barbecues.

Left up to them, it'd be sitting around and drinking whilst only half paying attention to one another whilst texting away.

Cloud computing would be more like paying a group of people to bang your wife or significant other instead.

Don't see why gears are being the ones compared though.

Topic opened with walkmans. So Walkmans/CD players vs. pocket computers (I'm not calling them phones, since they're rarely used as such).

Yeah but you compared them(gears) to touch screens and cloud computing, two things that already aren't similar.

It was more of a past/present comparison rather than literal counterparts.

But if we go back far enough, early computing mechanisms did use gears- so I guess I could salvage my analogy that way.

Sure, but they weren't exactly an interface like touchscreens.

Also computers with gears were things before digital logic(therefore not really comparable) even existed. Get your head out of Steampunk world.

Whilst not an interface, the early systems of which I speak (the Enigma machine, for example) did have mechanical systems to generate their information. The principles are the same- a machine to process/generate information.

Early calculators or the Antikythera machine are other examples.

So while they don't fit the modern definition of a computer as we are familiar with, they are computers in the purest sense.

And even so- hard drives are partially mechanical systems.

Analog punchcard and magnetic tapes are way way way old. Dat tape is still useful as a back up to a back up.