Strolling through your local OfficeMax or Office Depot is like walking through a museum of office items that seemed like things we couldn’t live without just a few years ago.  Now they’re obsolete thanks to the progress of the smart phone.

The Rolodex

Ah yes, here it is, the infamous “rolodex”.  A full rolodex was a badge of honor—the more connections you had in your rolodex, the better.  You could get hired just by the names you had in your rolodex.  Imagine carrying that thing around with you.  Now we have connections through LinkedIn, and we can access LinkedIn through an app on our phones.  The idea is still the same—if you have quality connections in social media, you can still wear it like a badge of honor, and you might even get hired because of it.

Floppy Discs

Remember copying files to a floppy either to transfer to another computer or back up?  Remember when the hard case floppy’s replaced the larger softer floppy’s that had an opening that exposed the actual disc?

Yellow Pages

Thanks to Google you can find anything on your phone with interactive maps and all sorts of dynamic aggregated data.  Gone are the days when you’d pull out a big thick stinky book that was most likely not up to date to find a number or address to a business.  And forget about trying to look up any sort of government office in the “blue pages”.  Chances are you had an entire cabinet full of yellow pages and white pages.  Now you can find all that stuff on a device that fits into your pocket.

Cassette Tapes

I can’t even think of the last time I saw one of these but remember how everyone had cassettes all over the place?  In the car, in the office all over the place full of personal notes, lectures or music.  60-minute tapes weren’t long enough, but 90-minutes tapes were too long and you’d have to fast forward to the end of the tape to start the other side.

Once CD’s came out they made the cassette a thing of the past.  Smaller, more durable and capable of holding more data—the CD and DVD too are on the verge of being obsolete thanks to the smaller flash drives that fit on a key chain and hold gigs of data, music or movies.

Stamps (that you lick)

Stamps now come with adhesive backing so all you have to do is peel and stick.  It’s too bad because I used to like licking the stamp and smearing it around on the envelope before it dried in place.  Luckily, with adhesive backed stamps, you have a 100% success rate whereas stamps you lick would come off 5% of the time, but there’s only a 50% chance that’s accurate.

Answering Machine

First there was the telephone, then there was the answering machine.  Then there were infomercials for tapes you could order with jingles about not being home and leaving a message.  Remember rewinding the tape so you could check your messages?  That was before there were “voice mail” messages.  Answering machines made great strides when they made it possible to check your messages from a remote location.

Now you just pick up your cell phone and get your messages anywhere, any time.  Seems the smart phone has replaced many of these “must-have” items from yesteryear.

Maps

I can remember being a kid going on family vacations just like the Griswold’s.  We’d be packed into the family station wagon driving for hours with no air condition and no idea where we were going.  My Dad was not a real fan of asking for directions and wasn’t real good about reading maps.  Maps were not the most user friendly tools—they’d tear, you had to have a different map for each place you were going to and they were hard to read with small type.

Now there’s GPS navigators or Google maps.  Just type in the address, or better yet, search for it.  You’ll get turn by turn directions, street views and even current traffic conditions.  Most of these now obsolete items were all made so by the smart phone.

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