Why are stores still selling outdated technology?

YOU don’t have to hunt the depths of eBay to find old technology for sale. Simply head to your local shopping centre, where a lot of the stuff on the shelves will take you back to the 1980s.

WITH a new iPhone and a new Xbox console about to hit the shelves, tech fans are once again getting excited about shiny, modern gear.

But there’s plenty of tech that’s been with us for a long time and is still readily available to buy brand new — despite being thoroughly obsolete.

Here are a few examples we’ve dug up:

35MM CAMERA FILM

You don’t have to be that old to remember a time when taking photos meant you had 24 or 36 shots before going to the chemist and waiting a week to get blurry photos of what was, presumably, part of the dog.

The arrival of digital cameras — and more recently, smartphones — killed 35mm film cameras off pretty comprehensively in the early 2000s, but you can still buy the film from major Australian retailers including Kmart and Big W, along with disposable 35mm cameras.

Our big discount department stores are still all making space on their shelves for film. Picture: Royce Wilson

BLANK VHS CASSETTES

Long before movies and TV shows came on shiny discs or were streamed over the internet, they were recorded on to magnetic tape VHS cassettes.

Untold millions of Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) units were sold in Australia between 1980 and the early 2000s, which signalled the format’s eventual death helped by its ability to record shows off TV for watching later.

Even though production of new blank cassettes ended a few years ago now, there were so many made over the life of the VHS platform it’s still possible to get them brand new and unopened in their original packaging from online sellers, specialist retailers and eBay.

Hands up who had over 200 tapes they proudly displayed on their shelves? Picture: Carl Court/Getty Images

BLANK AUDIO CASSETTES

Much like VHS cassettes, audio cassettes were a staple of Australian life from the late 1960s until the late 1990s before being supplanted by CDs, particularly recordable CD-Rs which could hold hundreds of songs.

While blank audio cassettes haven’t been available in regular stores for a few years, there are still five decades of cassette playing audio equipment about so like VHS tapes, it’s still possible to get unopened “New Old Stock” from specialist Australian online stores and eBay.

MANUALLY WINDING WATCHES

Until everyone got battery or automatic watches, wrist timepieces had to be wound every day by hand or they’d stop working. This was incredibly inconvenient and explains why you don’t see them around much anymore — unless you’re into expensive watches or Soviet-era technology.

High-end manufacturer Omega still makes its celebrated Speedmaster Professional watch, known as the “Moon Watch” after it was famously worn by the Apollo 11 crew in 1969, which still needs to be wound every day despite costing as much as a second-hand car.

At the other end of the price scale, the Vostok Watch Factory in Russia are still manufacturing their Komandirskie watch today, 52 years after it was first introduced for the Soviet military. Rugged, reliable, surprisingly cheap and still manually wound, the watches are available online.

SHORT WAVE RADIOS

Before the internet, if you wanted to listen to news or music from a foreign country, you needed a short-wave radio, which would allow you to pick up things like the BBC World Service, The Voice of America, and Radio Moscow.

While the internet has rendered short-wave radios obsolete in the first world, there are still plenty of stations broadcasting on the band, including the BBC World Service, All India Radio, and China Radio International.

Radios capable of picking up the transmissions are available from Australian bricks-and-mortar stores including Jaycar, while you can (of course) find others for sale online. You can also listen to many short-wave stations on the internet, but that’s nowhere near trying to pick up a transmission from the other side of the planet on a radio in your lounge.

Have some retro fun tuning in this baby, still on sale at Jaycar. Picture: Royce Wilson

DOT MATRIX PRINTERS

Back in the day, printers were slow, clunky, noisy and printed in a series of dots to create text or images on a page, known as “dot matrix” printing.

The system was generally discarded by lunchtime the day after inkjet printers came on the market, and dot matrix printer ribbons haven’t been available in mainstream retail stores since the turn of the century, but astoundingly, the printers are still being made new today by well-known companies including Epson, Lexmark and Fujitsu, for corporate and legacy system use — notably printing off invoices and sales reports.

STREET DIRECTORY BOOKS

Paper maps seem like something so quaint to us nowadays they should have mythical creatures embroidering them, but despite everyone having a mobile phone with maps of the entire planet in them for free, you can still buy road map books.

UBD Gregory’s print them every year or so for the major parts of Australia. While street directories might be obsolete, they do have the advantage of still working even when you’ve got no phone coverage or battery.

A street directory — for 2018! Must be for all those times you’re lost without mobile signal. Picture: Royce Wilson