A new survey has taken a look at things from the past that have been replaced as technology evolves. It's sad to look at this list in some cases, but we will.

  • Mixtapes.  Nowadays you can just whip up a link to a few songs, send it off in an e-mail or text and call it a "playlist". Doesn't have the same ring to it or require near as much effort as what we used to do, which was to scour our brains and CD collections (which by the way we will get to later) to create the perfect collection of songs to convey our feelings to that person we had eyes for. These were especially prevalent at Valentine's Day. The ones I made included a lot of Meat Loaf and Bon Jovi ballads, just for the record. I wonder if any of the girls I made them for, still have them?
  • VCRs. We didn't have "Netflix" back in the day. We had to "record" our shows on a "videotape" in a "VCR", this big ole contraption of a machine that only held up to 6 hours worth of programming and was just one of about 10 machines that separately had to do what your phone, tablet and "smart TV" can do by themselves now.
  • Waiting more than two seconds to see your pictures. Once again, this used to require a separate piece of equipment that you had to load with something called "film" and wait up to a week to get back. The excitement or disappointment when that day finally arrived was torture because they didn't always turn out. Waste of time, waste of money but when they were good, they were good, and we put them in a big old book called a "photo" album. Ask your parents or grandparents to show you one, I'm sure they still have them. They later got the wait time down to an hour but it was still a crapshoot compared to the two seconds and multiple opportunities to take, retake and re-retake instant "selfies" that we have now.
  • CDs. Music used to come on these round discs, and before that, rectangular cassette tapes, and before that vinyl discs and before that...you get the idea. With the recent announcement from Best Buy as the latest retailer to discontinue compact disc sales, because everyone just downloads now, a big piece of a lot of our childhoods is dying by the wayside. Don't get rid of that collection of CDs that you have painstakingly spent dozens of years and hundreds if not thousands of dollars to accumulate, though, because just like vinyl records are doing now, you never know when they might come back in style.

You can read an "e-book" now, but physical books haven't quite disappeared..yet. Board games are apparently dying as well, as are, supposedly, phone books, which we used to need to look up phone numbers. Although, I just had a new one delivered this week, and I won't lie, it warmed my heart.

Possibly the most heartbreaking thing being lost to technology according to the survey, though, is handwritten letters. This includes love letters, which people still send, just via text.  Ah, romance!

I'm not that old, although I may sound like it after this post.

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