Technology 'Golden Age'

Hi everyone,

As some may have picked up on, I have recently gotten into pawn brokerage reality television shows. One thing that is often a requirement to start talking about a deal is to test the equipment to ensure it is in good operational condition.

I've found myself appraising items around my home. It is fun because I have realistically valued things that I have held onto that are worth nothing and I have no use for, nor would anyone want it.

An example of what I'm talking about is a pair of DELL desktop PC's. They are from 2001 and have had parts (i.e. RAM, HDD) taken out for other projects...they are obsolete...cheap Netbooks are cheap, they are more power efficient, have displays built in and can outperform these desktops. What can I do with these things? Well I believe I'll deconstruct them and take photos during the process. Who knows someone might want to know how they were put together one day.

Moving on...

One thing I did come across today was my brothers old SONY Walkman (WM-F2015 Google it ;) ), Made in Japan...with belt clip :D

I plugged it into my personal stereo and fired it up...it even had a cassette tape in it! Worked like a treat. I couldn't help but think the thing is close to the size of massive personal Hard Disk Drives on the market today. My brother used the thing a fair bit at one stage, before he eventually got a portable CD player and  a 30GB iPod after that.

A guy that closed a web forum he operated stated (in 2009) that his purpose for the forum had been soaked up by cheap web hosting, internet speed and social networking sites.

I was upset that forum was closed and scoffed that NOW (then) was the so called "golden age of technology".

Increasingly people are saying how 'Millennials' already don't understand what technology like cassette tapes and VHS are like. Below is a picture I took of old school VHS, DVD and blu-ray. As you will see the VHS tape was an ex-rental and asked for $4 to rent it for 7 days, the DVD I bought cheap, the blu-ray I believe even cheaper years later. As you can see the tapes we big and bulky, you had to fast forward and rewind and well looking back now it looks like a total pain in the ass. The DVD comes with 'extra' bonus material and the blu-ray with even more. So you can own forever movies now in High Definition bundled with all sorts of extra footage and material and it's CHEAPER?!? I think I'll reconsider my stance on the whole golden age thing now...

Also, the amount of resources saved from the upgrades is really a good thing. I suppose digital downloads on lightening fast internet's coming soon with a solid grounding already occurring.

Thanks for reading :)