How Old is Your Tech?

 

Certain Boomer basements are little shrines to obsolescence, untidy stockrooms of the one-time cutting-edge: VCRs, corded telephones, immense beige PC monitors, etc. Way fewer Millennials will have basements to store trash in (‘home ownership’ itself quickly verging on obsolete), but presumably, once climate change really hits and they’re all renting cots in corporatized storm shelters, they’ll have little lockers to put stuff in. And it’s worth wondering: what worthless old technology will they be inexplicably hoarding? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of historians of technology for their takes on what tech will become obsolete in the next fifty years.