Obsolete skills

[trekgeezer]

Check these out and see how many of these obsolete skills you have or have had.

http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills


Ah! DOS and Basic, those were the days.

[Jack]

• Adjusting the dwell angle on the distributor of your car's engine? - Well, I can diagnose and fix pretty much anything on a car, so long as it doesn't have a computer on it.
• Adjusting the tracking on a VCR - I don't know if that ever actually worked.  If the picture looked bad, you could play with those controls, but all I ever accomplished was to make the picture look bad in a different way.  Well, maybe once it worked, back in about 1991.
• Loading film into a 35 mm camera - I've actually got a camera that uses film.  Damned inconvenient and expensive (Go to the store, buy the film.  Go to the store, drop off the film for developing.  Go to the store, pick up the film).  Good that they've got digital now.  I bet it would be really cool to have one of those. 
• Stacking a quarter on an arcade game to indicate you have next - lol, I remember that!

 

[trekgeezer]

I've got a digital SLR that I'm still learning how to use. The great thing about it is that I screw up all the pictures I want and it doesn't cost anything.

[Trevor]

 

I had to smile at the one that said "Using a 16mm film projector". I still use one at least two or three times a month.

I have also used film cameras many times (motion and still) but have not yet used a digital camera.

 

[lester1/2jr]

neo conservatism

[CheezeFlixz]

Either I'm really skilled or really old as I have nearly all those skills and a bunch more that are older then those.

About these not on the list (I at least I didn't see them)

Milk a cow ... did this within the last week.
Slaughter a cow/pig/goat/chicken/turkey/deer/mutton etc. did all these within the last year.
Chop wood, did this the other day.
Patch plaster wall/ceiling (not drywall, real plaster) I think I'm the only guy in 100 miles of here that does it.
Pump water by hand (got one at the barn)
and so many others ...

I think it's that I'm just getting old.

[Andrew]

Many of those seem to fall into three categories:

Old computer and mainframe tasks (and audio and video mediums)
Caveman stuff
Rural living

[Newt]

...About these not on the list (I at least I didn't see them)

Milk a cow ... did this within the last week.
Slaughter a cow/pig/goat/chicken/turkey/deer/mutton etc. did all these within the last year.
Chop wood, did this the other day.
Patch plaster wall/ceiling (not drywall, real plaster) I think I'm the only guy in 100 miles of here that does it.
Pump water by hand (got one at the barn)
and so many others ...

I think it's that I'm just getting old.

Around here, it is called being competent.
Rural living indeed.

[raj]

Balancing The Tonearm On A Turntable

waddya mean "obsolete"?  I've got lots of vinyl.  Now I just need a new needle for it.


And threading a needle?  Do people just throw away shirts now if they lose a button?


Thinking For Oneself
Sadly, all too true for most people these days.

[Snivelly]

Since when is threading a needle an "obsolete skill"???????   I know LOTS of people who can do that.

[AndyC]

Darkroom photography skills - I thought it was so cool when I learned that around 1989 or thereabouts. Came in handy for a few years anyway.

A lot of obsolete skills in the newspaper business, and I learned most of them. I arrived at the beginning of desktop publishing, when plates were made from film negatives of pages cut and pasted by hand. Photos were resized and screened photographically and cropped with an x-acto knife. There were drawers of black tape in various widths and patterns for making lines and borders. Everything that got pasted together went through the waxer, which had to be heated up at the beginning of the day. It applied a uniform coating of moderately adhesive melted wax to the back of paper. I managed to just miss the days of the big, blue Compugraphic phototypesetting machine, that used fonts on transparencies that you bought and installed. And don't get me started on what we would have to do if we ever wanted a full-colour photo. Oh, and the finished full-page broadsheet negatives, shot on a vertical camera (another of my obsolete skills), once they were developed and dried, would need to be "opaqued" by hand. You put the neg on a light table, took a special pen, and meticulously touched up any place there might have been dust or a bit of a shadow. Someone would then have to drive the negatives to the printer, usually in the middle of the night by the time it was all done. Plate making was more of the same sort of thing (but using a lengthy UV exposure, similar to making a silk screen), but we didn't do any of that.

These days, the whole thing is done digitally from beginning to end. Digital cameras, word processing, scanners, OCR, electronic pagination, programs that actually exchange files of different formats. When it's all done, just FTP the PDFs to the press, where they might use direct-to-plate technology if they don't have press that can print directly from digital. I don't even need HTML to update the website anymore - it's just cut and paste and the rest is automated.

[Derf]

AndyC, I worked for 14 years as a typesetter with a business forms printer (quit last April), and they still use the camera, opaquer, film, etc., to print, so I've got most of those skills. I did my work on computer (I was also their IT guy), printed to an imagesetter to get the film negative (either that or we shot a printout), processed the film, and gave the film to our platemaker. As far as I know, they still use this method because the initial cost of going direct to plate is too high for them.

As for other obsolete skills, I do know DOS and I did program in BASIC (though only in high school and college). In fact, I have most of the obsolete computer skills with the exceptions of programming in any language other than BASIC and doing the actual electronics work (EPROMs and such). I can thread a needle and sew buttons and do most of the things required to be reasonably self-sufficient.

Many of the things on that list only serve to highlight our throw-away culture (if it's broken, throw it away and buy a new one). I don't choose to live that way; I want to learn to do as many things as I possibly can, even if I don't use the skills more than once or twice. I guess I'm part Boy Scout (Be Prepared!) or something.