The Museum of Obsolete Technology

      We have a record player, an actual turntable that plays actual vinyl albums. We have lots of actual vinyl albums. We even have a number of 45s, although I’m not sure I could find the spindle that would allow us to play them on our actual turntable.

      We also have two or three Walkmen, although I’m not sure any of them still works or walks. In my desk are three different tape recorders, including one that only uses micro cassettes. The other two use regular-size cassettes, and we have lots of that size, and a number of the micro cassettes as well.

      CDs, you ask? Yes, we have lots and lots of them. Want to hear “Beethoven: The Complete Symphonies” or Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”? Got those and many more. And a number of metal CD racks in which we store them.

      What about DVDs? Of course, dozens. We do indeed still have a DVD player—although, to get it to work, you have to first find the specific remote for the DVD player, turn it on, click on the TV set’s DVD icon, get up from the couch and switch that little black switch to the left of the TV set, but, yes, it still works and we can watch old Hitchcock black-and-white films on it. We have those, too.

      Of course, we also have a VCR and several piles of video cassettes, including the filmed versions of a number of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. If you want to watch “The King and I” on video, we can oblige. And by the way, we are kind and we do rewind. Mostly, or at least when we remember.

      I am not counting here the drawers filled with old flip phones and the transistor radios in the back of the closet. Nor am I counting the bags full of old cables, converters, battery packs, power cords, power strips and other detritus of the digital age that we still have. Maybe it’s because those bags are in the garage and thus generally out of sight.

      We have new, modern stuff, too—the usual laptops and smartphones and tablets and subscriptions to Spotify and Netflix. But our house is, yes, a museum of obsolete technology. Or maybe mausoleum.

      Why? Well, first, of course, my wife and I have difficulty getting rid of anything. We have too many books, an abundance of flower vases, a plethora of coffee mugs. Over time, we have been fortunate enough to accumulate lots of stuff and we are reluctant to disembarrass ourselves of much of it.

      But I think it’s more complicated than that.

      It’s complicated because, over the last few decades, there simply has been so much new tech. We all have lived through a technology revolution, with new means of entertaining ourselves coming to the forefront every few years so, replacing the great leap forward of the previous few years, which replaced the gizmos of its previous few years. Everything changed so swiftly and stuff has therefore quickly accumulated.

      Tech, of course, is always quickly evolving, but usually not this quickly. When our parents’ generation got their black-and-white television sets, they kept them for 20 or 25 years, before they ultimately traded in for the color model. Their parents had the same radios for a generation.

      There are, perhaps, some reasons to hold on to old tech. Some older devices simply do things that new ones can't or don't do as well—like how vinyl records supposedly offer a warmer, more natural analog sound than digitally compressed music files. That’s not our reason. Frankly, I really can’t tell the difference. My ears are not that good.

      There’s always the possibility that we might need that old laptop in the closet and the old flip phone in the desk. They are “just in case” devices.  Because what happens if our current phone breaks down and the Apple Store is closed or I have to write this story and my newish laptop displays the dreaded blue screen of death? There always has to be a backup, right?

      I think, however, it’s far more likely we keep some of the old devices because they are sort of our time capsules. An old iPod might be filled with a carefully curated playlist of favorite songs of the 2000s. I have a CD in the car that’s a mixtape full of the Kinks and Ben E. King. (And yes, I have an old car that can still play CDs.) An old phone was the one we took on a memorable road trip. That old laptop might contain the first novel I ever tried to write and the old camera may be the one where we took the first photos of our new baby many years ago. Even if all that data is backed up, the physical device feels like the original source material for important things.  

      These aren’t just old gadgets then. They are technological souvenirs, vessels of memory.