"Back in my day we had xxx"

[maybee]

Those things where you walk in and hire a DVD or a VHS tape for a while and then bring it back after 3 days, or a 1 for a new release.

[FFNut]

Not just video game rental stores are gone, but Video game stores as well.
Arcades were the place to hang out at one time in my life.
Taxi's will go with the cars that drive themselves in the future.
Wind power will be gone as well soon. Just there is no payout for the turbines there. Better options still.

[krissy]

yeah back in my day we had porn too

[Madame Adequate]

Plans to hang out were either made in advance or not made at all, and you just showed up at your mate's.

Having early Internet and thus having the sounds of dial-up etched deep into your psyche.

Having early Internet and a dad happy to pirate trout, then getting told you were lying your ass off when he got a beta of Windows 98 sometime in 1997.

Pirating games meant taking your system to a dude who knew how to open it up and tinker with the insides, and then buying discs for like a fiver each. Bonus: Said tinkering also removed region encoding so you could import stuff. This led to paying £60 for an imported copy of Xenogears (Around $100 at the time).

Completely smurfing inscrutable adventure games and no Internet to help you.

[maybee]

Having early Internet and thus having the sounds of dial-up etched deep into your psyche.
.

I miss that sound so much.

That EEEEEEEEEEE BEEP BEEP BEEP EEEEEEEEEH EEEEEEEEHHHH KAAARKKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH sound, so goood.

[Colonel Angus]

Completely smurfing inscrutable adventure games and no Internet to help you.

Yep, back in the day you either had to figure it out yourself or hope that a gaming magazine would have a guide.

[Sephex]

Here. This is my only other controller.

[Chibi Youkai]

Anyone remember those jelly sandals that were popular in the 90's? I miss those.

[Mirage]

Maybe a wall interface or something. YOUR ENTIRE WALL IS YOUR SCREEN.

So it's a TV then. Just embedded into your wall.

TVs might be gone anyway, assuming they can make good enough and light enough VR/AR goggles. Like, no bigger or heavier than regular glasses. Or even as small as contacts.

[Mr. Carnelian]

Floppy discs were great fun, I loved them. Dial-up internet can rot in its cold grave, hated that trout. Blockbusters was good, it's easier to get a sense of what you're looking for when movies are laid out physically in front of you then if you're just scrolling through Netflix. Getting photos developed was brilliant, you had no idea whether the photos you were going to get were great or absolute garbage. And when you picked them up from Boots, they came in a neat little folder. Don't really remember fax machines, to be honest, I was too young to be in a position to have to use those, really. Only ever saw a rotary phone as a retro statement: they weren't really a thing by the mid-90s, the vast majority of people had push-button.

Me taking this possibly a bit too seriously: some technology that might become obselete within the next 50 years

Scientists have invented a sieve with holes so fine that they can filter the salt from sea water, turning it into fresh, potentially drinkable water. So, hopefully prohibitely expensive desalintation will become obselete, and people dying of dehydration will be a thing of the past in the not-so-distant future.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39482342

Physical memory storage could well become obselete, at least for the general population. More and more data is being stored on "the cloud". Obviously, this does mean that the data is being stored in a physical device somewhere, but I expect that consumer technology will rely more and more on cloud storage and increasingly less on having inbuilt memory storage.

Perhaps even external computers full stop could become obselete. By which I mean, people might have computer chips in their brains, which they interact with through augmented reality displays.

Possibly nuclear fission reactors. Cold fusion - i.e nuclear fusion which uses less, ideally significantly less, power to initiate than it produces - could be just around the corner, relatively speaking, although it's seemed like it could be "just around the corner" on and off for decades, so who knows.

[Citizen Bleys]

Possibly nuclear fission reactors. Cold fusion - i.e nuclear fusion which uses less, ideally significantly less, power to initiate than it produces - could be just around the corner, relatively speaking, although it's seemed like it could be "just around the corner" on and off for decades, so who knows.
[/spoiler]

Cold fusion is a joke. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics prohibit it.

[Mirage]

Perhaps even external computers full stop could become obselete. By which I mean, people might have computer chips in their brains, which they interact with through augmented reality displays.

Unlikely. If we can get x amount of computing power in a brain-chip, the same technology is probably going to enable machines with x*100 the computing power in a regular computer, simply because of the power limitations you'd need to put in place for a chip that's going to function inside your body. Sure, maybe a lot of people won't need that amount of power, but professionals who need to do a lot of hard data processing will. Or they'll rent computing power from some cloud service, but that's not going to be free either.

Not sure why it would have to be in people's brains though, if it's going to use an external display anyway.

[FFNut]

Speaking of phones, I remeber having a Bag Phone in the truck, and when it rang the truck horn would go off. Then we all got flip phones. Those didn't last either.

[Mr. Carnelian]

Cold fusion is a joke. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics prohibit it.

Room temperature fusion will never happen: cold fusion wasn't the right phrase, I was thinking of low-energy fusion. Low-energy fusion - at least low energy enough to make it worthwhile - could well happen.

Perhaps even external computers full stop could become obselete. By which I mean, people might have computer chips in their brains, which they interact with through augmented reality displays.

Unlikely. If we can get x amount of computing power in a brain-chip, the same technology is probably going to enable machines with x*100 the computing power in a regular computer, simply because of the power limitations you'd need to put in place for a chip that's going to function inside your body. Sure, maybe a lot of people won't need that amount of power, but professionals who need to do a lot of hard data processing will. Or they'll rent computing power from some cloud service, but that's not going to be free either.

Not sure why it would have to be in people's brains though, if it's going to use an external display anyway.

By augmented reality display, I mean that people might interact with technology using a virtual "display": i.e there's no physical display, it's superimposed onto the real world by the chip, and the chip interprets your interactions with the sumperimposed image as instructions. Kind of like the omni-tools in Mass Effect. You're absolutely right that larger machines will always be needed for professional purposes. But regular consumers really don't need all that much processing power: I have no problem believing that all the computing power a regular person could need could fit into a device small enough to be placed inside someone's skull within this century.

[Mirage]

That is, unless we hit some road-block when it comes to improving computer components. Silicon is already close to its limits, so something better, that is as cheap to manufacture, is going to be required to get much further than we are today. There are some promising technologies that are being explored, but no one's really made a functioning prototype with them yet.

If we actually do reach such a road block, I suspect we'll get much more cloud-based tech, maybe even just a mini-cloud that you'd put somewhere in your house, that would distribute high-quality, super-low latency video streams to our smaller devices, reducing their need for processing power. The main drive in semiconductor tech now is to increase performance per watt, rather than performance in total, although total performance does creep upwards a bit every gen too. It's just not a lot anymore.

Due to the enormous power bills of supercomputers, this works just as well for them as making more powerful single chips, as they can just use several less powerful that have higher performance:watt ratio and it'll still pay off in the end because they can calculate more with less power. It does take more space, however.

I really doubt we'll have commercial direct brain interface chips in 50 years. Maybe in 100, though. The current technologies we have for brain interfaces is... extremely primitive, and research into it is going slow, due to not a lot of people being interested in having their skulls cut open and be guinea pigs. It's basically only done with people who have severe disabilities and could gain a lot from even low-level primitive interfaces. These interfaces are also big, and require cables going through your skin, and sometimes you start bleeding around the plug.