Products you're glad are extinct.

[eugenenine]

Modern engine management systems, usually do a very good job, of keeping a car running smoothly, almost all the time, and help keeping them running reliably. But it can cost a small fortune, when it does, eventually (or sooner) break. E.g. O2 (Oxygen sensor failure).

O2 sensor is a $30 part and took less time to swap than to check the price.

Maybe that was not the best of examples then. I've never needed an O2 sensor myself, so was just partially guessing at the price of getting it fixed (I assumed if fitted at a dealership, it would cost a fair bit to get it done. But DIY can be a lot cheaper, of course). But some things can cost a lot of money to get sorted out on a car.
Especially when you don't do the stuff yourself, it is an expensive type of car and you end up going to the main dealer to get it sorted out.

E.g. If the automatic transmission goes, and you want it sorted out properly and can't/won't do it yourself. It can be uneconomically viable, to get it fixed. Especially for older cars.

Unless its one of the front wheel drive disposable cars you just swap the transmission with a rebuilt from your favorite auto parts store and move on.
Now if you one of those who has to have the iMercedes where you pay the dealer $500 for an oil change, well then you have the $ to pay to fix it anyway.

[MK14]

Unless its one of the front wheel drive disposable cars you just swap the transmission with a rebuilt from your favorite auto parts store and move on.
Now if you one of those who has to have the iMercedes where you pay the dealer $500 for an oil change, well then you have the $ to pay to fix it anyway.

You can do, but I've heard that if the replacement rebuilt automatic transmission (in the UK), is cheap, it usually won't last very long. E.g. It fails after 10,000 miles. (Because it was poorly repared, so breaks again, relatively quickly).
If you go for a recommended, high quality, rebuilt one, it can easily cost a lot more than the car is worth, on the used market.

I'm NOT familiar with the prices, so take my example with a pinch of salt.
E.g. £2,000 for a quality (UK) rebuilt automatic transmission. But the second hand used vehicle, is still only worth £1,500. So it is not really economically viable.


Fan-fold computer paper (printers), especially very noisy dot-matrix ones, with short life ink ribbons
Mechanical wound watches, relatively unreliable, easily broken, very poor time accuracy, and you have to remember to keep on winding them, each day
Cheaply made, mechanical wind up toys, which would break extremely easily
Mechanical balled mice, the optical equivalents, are much, much better in general

[Gyro]

Having been kind of a wild child, I tried many times to get the impressive implosion from a broken CRT.  I can't say that it is impossible, but never got anything impressive.  No worse than breaking a mirror or a window.  The most impressive result came from just breaking off the fill nipple and listening to it suck for a long time.

If you wan't to hear one suck for a long time then run a fine PCB drill through the EHT connector socket on the side of the bulb! I suspect that you could use it pull a decent vacuum on a small volume test subject with the right setup. Still the safest way I know to make an old CRT safe - no glass breakage involved.

[CatalinaWOW]

Unless its one of the front wheel drive disposable cars you just swap the transmission with a rebuilt from your favorite auto parts store and move on.
Now if you one of those who has to have the iMercedes where you pay the dealer $500 for an oil change, well then you have the $ to pay to fix it anyway.

You can do, but I've heard that if the replacement rebuilt automatic transmission (in the UK), is cheap, it usually won't last very long. E.g. It fails after 10,000 miles. (Because it was poorly repared, so breaks again, relatively quickly).
If you go for a recommended, high quality, rebuilt one, it can easily cost a lot more than the car is worth, on the used market.

I'm NOT familiar with the prices, so take my example with a pinch of salt.
E.g. £2,000 for a quality (UK) rebuilt automatic transmission. But the second hand used vehicle, is still only worth £1,500. So it is not really economically viable.


Fan-fold computer paper (printers), especially very noisy dot-matrix ones, with short life ink ribbons
Mechanical wound watches, relatively unreliable, easily broken, very poor time accuracy, and you have to remember to keep on winding them, each day
Cheaply made, mechanical wind up toys, which would break extremely easily
Mechanical balled mice, the optical equivalents, are much, much better in general

Wrong economic analysis.  Try comparing the £2,000 replacement cost with the cost of a replacement vehicle which will have comparable service life.  That £1,500 one you get isn't likely to last. 

The only time your analysis makes sense is if you are still insuring the car against loss, and total it in an accident shortly after the repair.  Since it rarely makes sense to insure an older car like that against loss it just doesn't apply.

[TheBay]

Distributors and Points
Manual Chokes (on cars)
Feu Orange air freshener's
Video cassettes
Compact cassettes
Floppy Disks
Dos
Tab Clear
Shell Suits
Analogue cordless phones
Anything made out of Asbestos
Fax Machines
Bumbags
The list goes on, hope it's not long before that Cult called Apple end up on a list like this.

[Gyro]

...
Fax Machines
...

Telex 

(My first job was working on Telex data management systems!)

[TheBay]

...
Fax Machines
...

Telex 

Telex is far from extinct though. 

[Gyro]

Damn!  Baudot still lives! 

[free_electron]

any kind of combustion engine ( apart from airplane or rocket )   

[denelec]

Phillips and Pozidriv screw heads are (too slowly) being replaced by Torx/hexalobe/Star heads.
At least for wood screws.
I hate with a passion cruciform screwheads.
Even if you have the perfect screwdriver bit you end messing up the screw or the bit.
Only thinking about those makes me shaking in anger. *punches wall*

Robertson (square) screws are by far the best. 
No slippage and the screw stays by itself on the screwdriver at almost any angle.
In Canada, "Robertson" screws are very common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson

[Vgkid]

Robertson (square) screws are by far the best. 

Square drives are quite nice, we built our fence using them, though around here torx are getting popular.

[Quarlo Klobrigney]

Hissettes (yes even the chrome ones) and 8-Track tapes respectively..
Open coil electric ranges.
Kerosene... And whale oil....

[eugenenine]

Robertson (square) screws are by far the best. 

Until they have been in a few years and you need to take them out, then they slip.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Vinyl records and audio compact cassettes. That was a terrible period for hifi enthousiast..

[MK14]

Wrong economic analysis.  Try comparing the £2,000 replacement cost with the cost of a replacement vehicle which will have comparable service life.  That £1,500 one you get isn't likely to last. 

The only time your analysis makes sense is if you are still insuring the car against loss, and total it in an accident shortly after the repair.  Since it rarely makes sense to insure an older car like that against loss it just doesn't apply.

Let's assume that the car still drives, but the automatic box, is beginning to play up. Hence the £2,000 quote for a professional/decent repair.

You can take the £2,000
and add to that the sale or part exchange value of your existing (faulty) vehicle, which might be £750, i.e. about half of the £1,500 if it was fully working.

So you have £2,750 if you sell (or part exchange it) it now and keep the money you could have spent on having the car repaired.

So if you can put another £1000 towards your next one.

You can start looking at cars for £3,750 and maybe more. Which can then be considerably newer, lower mileage on the clock and maybe better. This should be economically better (in the longer term). Than struggling on with your old, high mileage, only worth at best £1,500 existing car.

tl;dr
You are better off with a £3,000 or more replacement car (£2000 repair and £750 for the old faulty one), than struggling with a £1,500 old one, with a replacement automatic gearbox, which even from a decent/professional supplier, may still give some trouble, especially in the longer term.

But anyway, I fully accept that opinions about cars, and which ones to get. Also when/if to repair rather than replace, can vary a lot. So I'm happy if we disagree.

If there was a perfect/agreed solution. We would all probably be driving around in it. Which might get rather tedious and boring.

You can have any colour you like as long as it is Black.
You can have any type or shape, as long as it is identical to the Ford Model T (in Black).

[CatalinaWOW]

Wrong economic analysis.  Try comparing the £2,000 replacement cost with the cost of a replacement vehicle which will have comparable service life.  That £1,500 one you get isn't likely to last. 

The only time your analysis makes sense is if you are still insuring the car against loss, and total it in an accident shortly after the repair.  Since it rarely makes sense to insure an older car like that against loss it just doesn't apply.

Let's assume that the car still drives, but the automatic box, is beginning to play up. Hence the £2,000 quote for a professional/decent repair.

You can take the £2,000
and add to that the sale or part exchange value of your existing (faulty) vehicle, which might be £750, i.e. about half of the £1,500 if it was fully working.

So you have £2,750 if you sell (or part exchange it) it now and keep the money you could have spent on having the car repaired.

So if you can put another £1000 towards your next one.

You can start looking at cars for £3,750 and maybe more. Which can then be considerably newer, lower mileage on the clock and maybe better. This should be economically better (in the longer term). Than struggling on with your old, high mileage, only worth at best £1,500 existing car.

tl;dr
You are better off with a £3,000 or more replacement car (£2000 repair and £750 for the old faulty one), than struggling with a £1,500 old one, with a replacement automatic gearbox, which even from a decent/professional supplier, may still give some trouble, especially in the longer term.

But anyway, I fully accept that opinions about cars, and which ones to get. Also when/if to repair rather than replace, can vary a lot. So I'm happy if we disagree.

If there was a perfect/agreed solution. We would all probably be driving around in it. Which might get rather tedious and boring.

You can have any colour you like as long as it is Black.
You can have any type or shape, as long as it is identical to the Ford Model T (in Black).

Actually I can agree with the analysis above, which is different than your original statement.  And given the proviso that the numbers work as you state for the model and year car that you are talking about, which is often true, but not generally true.  I also agree that answers vary widely based on many, many factors including the time, equipment and skills available to do repairs yourself, the availability of desired features in newer model cars, and the local market among others.

Same thing applies in the world of those on this forum.  A piece of electronics gear which is worthless junk to the general public is often an easily repairable treasure to those on this forum.

[Quarlo Klobrigney]

Floppies??
CRTs?
ZIP Disks??
Vinyl LPs
Cassettes?
SCSI??
IDE?
PS/2 keyboards/mice??
firewire
Bernoulli disk drive
SSAVI pay TV
C band satellite
Digicipher I, II
No bloody A, B, C, or D
I could go on further...

[German_EE]

VHS, anything to do with VHS
RS-232. which isn't 100% dead yet
Centronics
SCSI
Carbon resistors
74xx series TTL
Germanium transistors
Databooks
Tube based ham radio rigs, except for the P.A.
Analog modems
Ticking clocks, I still can't sleep in a room with one

Finally, one that I miss, computer dating before the Internet. Waiting for that printout to arrive by mail with up to half a dozen names on it was a fun time, you never got a picture but you might get an address and/or a phone number, after that it was up to you. The modern sites take all of the excitement out of it.

[madires]

Not quite:
- SCSI -> SAS
- POTS modem -> fax machine

[Cerebus]

Punch cards for data and program entry.

No, no. In the days of 80 column punch cards I always had a near infinite supply of bookmarks and conveniently sized writing surfaces for shopping lists and 'back of cig packet' calculations. (In practice, the back of a cigarette packet is one of the hardest places to comfortably scribble down calculations.)

[CatalinaWOW]

Punch cards for data and program entry.

No, no. In the days of 80 column punch cards I always had a near infinite supply of bookmarks and conveniently sized writing surfaces for shopping lists and 'back of cig packet' calculations. (In practice, the back of a cigarette packet is one of the hardest places to comfortably scribble down calculations.)

Yeah, they had lots of secondary uses.  Including some of the nicest Christmas star ornaments I have seen.  A pretty decent board separator.  And a perfect adjustable shim stack for a wobbly desk or table.  But I am still glad their primary purpose is gone.  Retyping lines until you don't make a mistake since there is no way to backspace or erase.  (That is why you had so many cards.   )  Carting boxes of cards around to get your program to the computer.  Dropping said box if you hadn't printed a new and correctly sequence numbered set recently, or didn't have access to an autocollimator. 

[rrinker]

 I'm glad I just missed punchcards for any serious work - they year I took the advanced computer class in HS, which taught FORTRAN, was the first year they used Apple II's instead of writing programs on punchcards and sending them to the district mainframe. In college, everything was CRT terminals or PCs, there were a few card readers left for legacy use. On one of the systems I regularly used, the OS was a little late in being updated for CRT - a syntax error on a line resulted in the error message "Error in input card"    It was my senior year when the computer operations department released a final warning - all card stacks had to be converted to tape by a certain date as the last card reader was being removed from the data center. I recall the other three they had sitting in a hallway prior to that date.

[helius]

Unix still contains the error message "Not a typewriter", even though teletypewriters have been obsolete for 40 years.

[rrinker]

 Had one of those at my first post-college job, a DECWriter. Hooked to a PDP11/23.
Oh heck, we actually had a genuine Teletype (more modern style though) in the computer lab in HS, hooked to one of the Apple II's as a second printing station, They also had an acoustic coupler and a phone - I had nearly a full box of wide green bar paper from connecting to a local BBS. I also played a hell of a trick on a substitute teacher ones. Since it was a Teletype, it had an honest to goodness mechanical bell in it. So I wrote up a quick program to send Control-G to it in the pattern of a ringing telephone. With a nice time delay, and also a cut off after so many rings. Fired it up, and moved my stuff to a different station. A minute later - ring, ring.....ring,ring...  sub walks in to the lab, spies the phone on the desk next to the ringing Teletype - picks it up, just as the ring program cuts out. "Hello?"  "Hello?" - puts the phone down, goes back out to the desk and sits down. Few minutes later - ring,ring...  I was such a little devil 

[djos]

I did work experience for Bull HN (now Honeywell Iirc) and helped service teletype machines but by the time I joined the workforce as a computer systems tech they were all but gone.