I think the best example is the PlayStation 2 being discontinued in 2013, as well the PlayStation 1 in 2006
Slavery being legal in the US.
Ooops, sorry, I forgot that it’s still perfectly legal in the US.
Slavery. People always talk about slavery like it’s something that only existed in 19th century America as if it wasn’t happening right now everywhere.
The ottoman empire
Rosa Parks lived until 2005
(Legal) Segregation in America was until pretty damn recently. Though loophole segregation is arguably still going on.
My sister actually saw her in elementary school! Even in her old age she was trying to educate us, and teach us better.
And Emmett Till could still be very much alive, had he not been lynched.
As brutal as that verb is, it’s an understatement as to what he went through.
Going out on a limb guessing kids aren’t learning this anymore.
I agree, I’m in the military so I end up working with a lot of 18-19 year olds. One day a few years back, a bunch of us were sitting around the table talking, and I don’t remember what the conversation was about but this kid lookes at the black guy and says “that’s how you get lynched”
There was a collective gasp and we then had to explain to him what that meant. He just though it was something offensive to say to someone.
The last American Civil War pension recipient died in 2020.
How are pension recipients determined?
…Didn’t that war end like 160 years ago?
US Civil war vets who lived to be 90 married little girls at the end of their life. Usually it was an arrangement. The little girls would then be eligible for the pension and it transferred to them when the veteran died. Some of these girls themselves lived to their 90s, hence you had state governments still pay civil war annuities in the era of TikTok.
Stuff like this is also why a lot of companies have also moved away from pensions, one it’s expensive, two mismanagement, but it turns out that offering to pay someone for free until the end of their life doesn’t make shareholders happy, so fuck the employees right?
now we’ll be lucky if we retire at all
Civil war employees must’ve had a powerful Union lol.
Nixie tubes - those vacuum tubes that display a single digit or character on glowing wires - were commonplace in the 1950s and 60s but were superseded by LEDs. They’re still made in the Czech Republic, bought mostly by hobbyists to build retro gadgets. I have a few myself that I haven’t gotten around to using.
Tangentially related Technology Connections video: The Numitron: An obvious idea that wasn’t very bright
Weren’t they superceded by LCDs not LEDs? The whole big thing with Nixies was that you could display digits but if one filament burned out (which it relatively quickly did) the whole bulb was bad and even then you had to pump power into them and use these complicated plugs.
Enter LCDs, they take ages to burn in, you can run them off a coin battery for literal years, and they’re a dozen times cheaper to make.
Nixie tubes were replaced by the multi-segment LED displays for numbers for many of those use cases where the numerals needed to glow. Think the last four decades of clock radios, TV channel number displays after mechanical channel knobs but before they removed the bezel stuff and put it all on the screen itself, etc.
There’s a mod for Factorio that adds these in for use in our circuit spaghetti
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
People seem to think they lived mostly or entirely in the 1800’s. The fact that Rick Wakeman of the rock bands Yes and The Strawbs had once pushed Dalí offstage in 1970 is such a weird overlap of eras.
France used the guillotine for the last time in 1977.
There is still one Blockbuster store open, located in Bend, Oregon.
Dalí was a huge Alice Cooper fan
Alice Cooper babysat Keanu Reeves. His mom met Cooper when she was a costume designer.
That is a fact that seems so believable that it’s unbelievable. But it’s also true!
Salvador Dali was almost the emperor in Jodorowsky’s Dune.
I say almost as if there was only one thing holding them back from making it…
holy crap you made me look that up and woa. official form of execution till they stopped capital punishment so they never officially used anything else.
Granted Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where you could see the transition into cubism, was from 1907. He continued to create famous abstract works well into the 50s. Dali’s famous The Persistence of Memory (the melting clocks) is from 1931.
It’s wild that people think of the abstract movement pre-1900s to me! Pre-1900 was the Impressionists, and with Art Nouveau coming in at the turn of the century.
The 1930’s was really primed for the abstract modern painters.
Yeah, I have no idea why people would associate things so definingly “modern” with the 19th century!
It can be argued that the Roman empire didn’t truly end until WWI in 1918, 106 years ago.
The fall of the Byzantine Empire (aka the Eastern Roman Empire) resulted in a number of subdivided but diplomatically aligned states. By the end of the 19th century a number of European powers were still vying for some claim to the lineage of the Roman Empire (and the Emperor title). But as consequence of the war, the German/Prussian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires we’re all dismantled (and France was out or the running because of the revolution) so every entity with a claim was dead or out of power for the first time since the 11th century.
I’m not a historian but can there still be an empire if there’s no emperor or empress? The Eastern Roman empire is a misnomer for the Byzantine Empire, which started when the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in the 400s by some Germanic warlord whose name I forget. How is that not the end of the Roman Empire? Seems like deciding to call Ukraine Western Russia.
At the point the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed they were using a system with two emperors due to the massive amount of territory being impractical for one man to govern, senate or no. Only one of the imperial titles imploded, with the other going along just fine for centuries before that part of the empire also started to collapse.
What you call Byzantine empire didn’t exist as such, they actually referred to themselves Romans. Byzantine Empire is a later term https://byzantinemporia.com/why-is-byzantium-called-byzantine/.
The reference of Eastern Roman Empire is correct, everyone else who claimed to be a continuation is just a stretch though.
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman empire - we really on refer to them differently for temporal convenience. The west were the Latin speakers and the east were the Greek speakers (as least for the first half-millennium). And many people still called themselves Emperor of Rome, in a continuous succession, after the fall of the west. For quite a while one of the Pope’s titles was (legitimately) Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
By the 20th century it was down to 3 rightful heirs, all trying to make Europe recognize them as THE Emperor. But in the mean time their empires still recognized them as such.
Which claimants are you thinking of? I know the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire both claimed to be continuations of the Roman Empire. I don’t think Italy ever claimed to be the new Rome, somewhat ironically, and I think Germany and France had stopped claiming to be Rome as well.
The House of Hohenzollern in Germany. The Habsburgs formally gave up their claim in order to create the Austro-Hungarian alliance/Empire, but they had asserted it less than a generation prior and also claimed their Empire status on that back of it. And in the Ottoman Empire the lineage of Mehmed, including Mehmed V during WWI, claimed to be the continuation of the Byzantine / Eastern Roman Empire.
Audio CDs are still around. While they’re surely not the medium people listen music from, they will most likely be on the merch table at the next concert you go to.
I’m a CD collector, they’re definitely underrated
One of the only things I’ve encountered in life that provides greater joy than sex is the feeling of finding an awesome super underground CD in a $1 garbage bin at the local record shop.
Favorite findings:
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, Sad Tropics
Sunswimmer, New Madrid
New Moon Daughter, Cassandra Wilson
On that note, vinyls have overtaken CDs in sales again
The fact that high end music streaming platforms are only just now starting to offer super high bitrate lossless “CD Quality” audio as an option, gives you an indication of how good CDs actually are as a physical medium.
A cheap old CD player connected via SPDIF to a modern mid-range DAC with decent speakers will give you better quality audio than the latest Sonos system streaming from Spotify.
The iPod was discontinued in 2022. I’m guessing there’s already a lot of kids who have no idea where the term “podcast” comes from.
The Famicom Disk System, which uses a kind of floppy disk for the Japanese market NES, had kiosks where you could copy games onto disks. The last of those kiosks were removed in 2003 It overlapped the Game Cube.
I’m old enough to remember when iPods first came out but somehow I didn’t realise podcast came from the word iPod. TIL!
Apple didn’t invent the concept of podcasts, but they sure popularized them. They used to be called syndicated audio, and were pretty niche. Then Apple added it as a feature of iTunes. The idea was that because your iPod didn’t have any wifi or data connection, you couldn’t listen to new content while out and about. So you would plug your iPod into your computer with iTunes to sync down all the latest content before you leave for the day. Then they needed feeds of new content to provide to the users, so lots of new episodicals were started, and Apple grouped them under the umbrella of “podcasts”.
Wasn’t it just not fancy rss?
Yeah, it was (and still is) a feature that was added to the RSS protocol.
Is the iTouch still around? I remember my beige got one and it was essentially an iPhone without sim card.
Adult content could still be accessed, so Apple were to bring out the iTouch kids.
Never happened. :/
Apple never made a product called iTouch. You’re thinking of a product called “iPod Touch”. It was the touchscreen version of the iPod (without the iconic clickwheel). The first one was essentially a slimmer iPhone 3G without a cellular modem.
I worked in an electronics repair store just after they came out. We replaced hundreds of broken screens on them. The sheer number of people who called them “iTouch” was surprising, considering Apple never called it that.
Despite anti-miscegenation laws being banned as a result of Loving v Virginia in 1967, support for interracial marriages only passed 50% in the mid 90’s.
Juno is still around and still offers dialup internet plans. Earthlink was still offering dialup until last year.
Up until 1997 rape within a marriage wasn’t defined as a crime in Germany. Because it was specifically defined as an act outside of marriage. Our (probably) next chancellor Friedrich Merz voted against the bill that finally made it a crime!
Ruby Bridges is alive and well.
A mainframe computer is probably still processing your paycheck in either your company or the bank.
…and doing at least part of it in COBOL. Random fact: there are about 10,000 mainframe computers still in use around the world.
