Reusing Dead Tech

Another thing I am obsessed with (there are lots of these things, I hope you are prepared) is the concept of obsolete technology. It's such an interesting idea, because it is purely a cultural construction. Technology never becomes useless on its own; either we decide the use is no longer important, or something else comes along that we decide is more useful. (Of course we rarely think about the cost of adopting new technology, but that could be an entirely different post).

Whenever I think about this topic, I am reminded of my father, and his desire to write a novel. We had recently acquired a shiny new Macintosh, (this was probably 1991, or thereabouts) with all its amazing pointing and clicking and beige-ness. My dad told me how he wanted to write a book, and, of course, I showed him the new word processor on the Mac. I was astounded when he told me he wanted to dust off our old Apple IIe and use it, instead. How could someone possibly prefer the clacking, the cursor, and the monochrome to 4-bit color and a mouse?

Until that point I suppose I had never thought about the usefulness of obsolete technology. That Apple IIe had not ceased to flawlessly perform the functions it was designed for. We had simply decided to make different tools. Whether or not those tools were actually better...  is debatable.  But maybe I'll bring that up in another post.

To bring this back to relevance:
I love to go to second hand stores and look at the piles of technology we have decided has become obsolete. In almost every case the technology itself is simply astounding. At the time it was created, each piece was the absolute pinnacle of our advancement as a species. Yet only a few years had to pass before there was something better, faster, cheaper, or more appealing.

An example I have been studying recently are optical mice. There was a wave of posts in DIY blogs over the last year, and I was astounded after reading them. Every optical mouse contains a chip that is effectively a super-fast, low-resolution camera. It determines which direction it is moving by taking thousands of snapshots per second of the surface below it. It then sends those images to a DSP (digital signal processor), which compares each frame to determine the direction and magnitude vectors.

It boggles the mind to think that the technology that performs this function, so advanced that it can be used to accurately track a drone's flight, (which in the 1960s probably took a room of electronics to perform), has been miniaturized and integrated and streamlined and is so common place and unremarkable that I can buy one for $2 at Goodwill.

It is also a great excuse to buy a bunch of them and take them apart.