Technonostalgia

Today at coffee break, a riff began about technology that once seemed cutting edge but that is now obsolete. Like the Yorkshiremen of Monty Python, we each tried to outdo the wistfulness of the clueless youngsters.

"When I did my masters thesis," said our most recently hired staff member, "all my data fit on one USB stick. 18 GB of data on one thumb drive."  

"When I was your age," I said, "nobody knew what gigabyte was."

"I used those hard 3.5 inch disks for my MSc," said someone else.

"Mine was on floppy disks that actually were floppy. We were afraid that if the disks bent the wrong way, all the data would be lost, so we made as many backups as we could. The computer didn't even have a hard drive."

"I remember when the monitors had no colour, and there were just these blinking amber letters."

"When I did my masters," I said, "I lived in a hole in the road, with a cardboard box for a roof."

Later, walking back to the lab, I said, "We think our technology is so cool now, but ten years from now, people will laugh at our huge cell phones, sighing about the days before phones were implants."

Same thing for lab equipment. We spend a lot of time writing experimental methods, ignoring the fact that many of the kits and machines we use to obtain our data will be unavailable by the time our papers are published. Obsolete equipment accumulates in labs like dinosaur bones in an archeological site, waiting to be scooped up, polished, and deposited in a Museum of the History of Science. Some people actually collect old lab equipment, as if it were as interesting and valuable to society as old baseball cards, antique ceramic shoes, or used postage stamps (the stickers that were once used to send email when it was still written by analog on paper and transmitted by couriers on horseback).