What was around or ended more recently than people think?
What was around or ended more recently than people think?
I think the best example is the PlayStation 2 being discontinued in 2013, as well the PlayStation 1 in 2006
Slavery being legal in the US.
Ooops, sorry, I forgot that it's still perfectly legal in the US.
Slavery. People always talk about slavery like it's something that only existed in 19th century America as if it wasn't happening right now everywhere.
The ottoman empire
Many state legislatures in the Southern US (e.g. Alabama) had Democratic majorities until 2010.
Whaaa? No way! 🤯
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Alabama
Both houses were all-Democratic from 1975 to 1978, then more and more Republicans were elected to them, only from 2011 do they have a majority.
Rosa Parks lived until 2005
(Legal) Segregation in America was until pretty damn recently. Though loophole segregation is arguably still going on.
My sister actually saw her in elementary school! Even in her old age she was trying to educate us, and teach us better.
The last American Civil War pension recipient died in 2020.
How are pension recipients determined?
...Didn't that war end like 160 years ago?
US Civil war vets who lived to be 90 married little girls at the end of their life. Usually it was an arrangement. The little girls would then be eligible for the pension and it transferred to them when the veteran died. Some of these girls themselves lived to their 90s, hence you had state governments still pay civil war annuities in the era of TikTok.
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
People seem to think they lived mostly or entirely in the 1800’s. The fact that Rick Wakeman of the rock bands Yes and The Strawbs had once pushed Dalí offstage in 1970 is such a weird overlap of eras.
France used the guillotine for the last time in 1977.
There is still one Blockbuster store open, located in Bend, Oregon.
Salvador Dali was almost the emperor in Jodorowsky's Dune.
I say almost as if there was only one thing holding them back from making it...
holy crap you made me look that up and woa. official form of execution till they stopped capital punishment so they never officially used anything else.
Granted Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, where you could see the transition into cubism, was from 1907. He continued to create famous abstract works well into the 50s. Dali’s famous The Persistence of Memory (the melting clocks) is from 1931.
It’s wild that people think of the abstract movement pre-1900s to me! Pre-1900 was the Impressionists, and with Art Nouveau coming in at the turn of the century.
The 1930’s was really primed for the abstract modern painters.
I know shit about art and I know he was early to mid 20th century.
Yeah, I have no idea why people would associate things so definingly "modern" with the 19th century!
It can be argued that the Roman empire didn't truly end until WWI in 1918, 106 years ago.
The fall of the Byzantine Empire (aka the Eastern Roman Empire) resulted in a number of subdivided but diplomatically aligned states. By the end of the 19th century a number of European powers were still vying for some claim to the lineage of the Roman Empire (and the Emperor title). But as consequence of the war, the German/Prussian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires we're all dismantled (and France was out or the running because of the revolution) so every entity with a claim was dead or out of power for the first time since the 11th century.
I'm not a historian but can there still be an empire if there's no emperor or empress? The Eastern Roman empire is a misnomer for the Byzantine Empire, which started when the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in the 400s by some Germanic warlord whose name I forget. How is that not the end of the Roman Empire? Seems like deciding to call Ukraine Western Russia.
What you call Byzantine empire didn't exist as such, they actually referred to themselves Romans. Byzantine Empire is a later term https://byzantinemporia.com/why-is-byzantium-called-byzantine/.
The reference of Eastern Roman Empire is correct, everyone else who claimed to be a continuation is just a stretch though.
At the point the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed they were using a system with two emperors due to the massive amount of territory being impractical for one man to govern, senate or no. Only one of the imperial titles imploded, with the other going along just fine for centuries before that part of the empire also started to collapse.
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman empire - we really on refer to them differently for temporal convenience. The west were the Latin speakers and the east were the Greek speakers (as least for the first half-millennium). And many people still called themselves Emperor of Rome, in a continuous succession, after the fall of the west. For quite a while one of the Pope's titles was (legitimately) Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
By the 20th century it was down to 3 rightful heirs, all trying to make Europe recognize them as THE Emperor. But in the mean time their empires still recognized them as such.
Nixie tubes - those vacuum tubes that display a single digit or character on glowing wires - were commonplace in the 1950s and 60s but were superseded by LEDs. They're still made in the Czech Republic, bought mostly by hobbyists to build retro gadgets. I have a few myself that I haven't gotten around to using.
Tangentially related Technology Connections video: The Numitron: An obvious idea that wasn't very bright
Weren't they superceded by LCDs not LEDs? The whole big thing with Nixies was that you could display digits but if one filament burned out (which it relatively quickly did) the whole bulb was bad and even then you had to pump power into them and use these complicated plugs.
Enter LCDs, they take ages to burn in, you can run them off a coin battery for literal years, and they're a dozen times cheaper to make.
Nixie tubes were replaced by the multi-segment LED displays for numbers for many of those use cases where the numerals needed to glow. Think the last four decades of clock radios, TV channel number displays after mechanical channel knobs but before they removed the bezel stuff and put it all on the screen itself, etc.
There's a mod for Factorio that adds these in for use in our circuit spaghetti
The iPod was discontinued in 2022. I'm guessing there's already a lot of kids who have no idea where the term "podcast" comes from.
The Famicom Disk System, which uses a kind of floppy disk for the Japanese market NES, had kiosks where you could copy games onto disks. The last of those kiosks were removed in 2003 It overlapped the Game Cube.
I'm old enough to remember when iPods first came out but somehow I didn't realise podcast came from the word iPod. TIL!
Apple didn't invent the concept of podcasts, but they sure popularized them. They used to be called syndicated audio, and were pretty niche. Then Apple added it as a feature of iTunes. The idea was that because your iPod didn't have any wifi or data connection, you couldn't listen to new content while out and about. So you would plug your iPod into your computer with iTunes to sync down all the latest content before you leave for the day. Then they needed feeds of new content to provide to the users, so lots of new episodicals were started, and Apple grouped them under the umbrella of "podcasts".
Is the iTouch still around? I remember my beige got one and it was essentially an iPhone without sim card.
Adult content could still be accessed, so Apple were to bring out the iTouch kids.
Never happened. :/
Apple never made a product called iTouch. You're thinking of a product called "iPod Touch". It was the touchscreen version of the iPod (without the iconic clickwheel). The first one was essentially a slimmer iPhone 3G without a cellular modem.
I worked in an electronics repair store just after they came out. We replaced hundreds of broken screens on them. The sheer number of people who called them "iTouch" was surprising, considering Apple never called it that.
Audio CDs are still around. While they're surely not the medium people listen music from, they will most likely be on the merch table at the next concert you go to.
I'm a CD collector, they're definitely underrated
One of the only things I've encountered in life that provides greater joy than sex is the feeling of finding an awesome super underground CD in a $1 garbage bin at the local record shop.
Favorite findings:
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, Sad Tropics
Sunswimmer, New Madrid
New Moon Daughter, Cassandra Wilson
Do people really think audio CDs aren't around anymore? I bought several audio CDs in the last few years, I prefer to have local copies of music I like rather than depending on a streaming service.
On that note, vinyls have overtaken CDs in sales again
Who thought they weren't around?
The fact that high end music streaming platforms are only just now starting to offer super high bitrate lossless "CD Quality" audio as an option, gives you an indication of how good CDs actually are as a physical medium.
A cheap old CD player connected via SPDIF to a modern mid-range DAC with decent speakers will give you better quality audio than the latest Sonos system streaming from Spotify.
Despite anti-miscegenation laws being banned as a result of Loving v Virginia in 1967, support for interracial marriages only passed 50% in the mid 90's.
The human race went extinct about 17 years ago. We're all secretly something else, but we don't tell you about it until you're 45.
RIP
HEY! SHHH! You know the rule, and you know the consequences. I've said too much.
Juno is still around and still offers dialup internet plans. Earthlink was still offering dialup until last year.
Some women in Swiss were only allowed to vote in 1984.
Cleopatra is closer to us than she was from the great pyramid construction.
It helps to remember that Cleopatra was both from a completely different incarnation of Egypt and that she was the last independent pharaoh before Egypt became a Roman province.
A mainframe computer is probably still processing your paycheck in either your company or the bank.
...and doing at least part of it in COBOL. Random fact: there are about 10,000 mainframe computers still in use around the world.
Ruby Bridges is alive and well.
Leaded fuel. Avgas is 100-octane leaded gasoline that is still being used by most small aircraft piston engines. Lead-free alternatives exist, but production and supply infrastructure is nonexistent.
The same kind as being used by the hyper-rich to nip down the shops for a ham sandwich?
Lexus sold cars with cassette players until 2010
That isn't as crazy as it may seem. My main audio source well after graduation which was 2005, was a portable cd player that could play cd's burned with compressed mp3 libraries and connected to the car's stereo system via aux to cassette adapter.
Idk about the portable cd player with mp3 library being common but most blunt cruises in those days were done in vehicles using portable cd player with cassette adapter. I know this is super anecdotal and specifically about the car owner class that isn't buying new Lexus' but I still wanted to point out the cassette deck saw extended use long after people stopped listening to actual cassettes.
Insert relevant Technology Connections video here.
My 2006 RX factory radio unit had cassette and cd decks. Sometime around 2012, I remember feeling like I had unlocked a secret backdoor because an audiobook that I wanted from the library had a crazy long waitlist for the cd edition. I hadnt used cassettes in decades, but somehow I had the idea to check to see if they offered that audiobook on cassette. They did! And it was available to check out immediately!
I replaced the radio in that car shortly after that because I needed a bluetooth connection and handsfree capability.
Women's suffrage was ratified in US constitution 1920. But probably not for much longer.
Up until 1997 rape within a marriage wasn't defined as a crime in Germany. Because it was specifically defined as an act outside of marriage. Our (probably) next chancellor Friedrich Merz voted against the bill that finally made it a crime!
Continuing off OP's list, the last PS3 game was released in 2020
Heck, people are still producing new games for the Commodore 64.
The most recent commercial game using the modified 2.5D Doom engine, was released in May 2024 on Steam. It is called Selaco.
😲
Jim Crow.
The south still has similar voting restrictions, it's just the supreme court stopped caring and said 'sure, whatevs'.
The last cathode-ray tube televisions were made in 2015.
Being interested in CRT TVs, that's intresting to know
Polaroids are still going strong.
They mostly died and had a resurgence, you’re totally right!
I got one as a birthday gift once and it's one of my favorite gifts even despite the fact it's an invention that's five decades older than me. It's like some time traveler somewhere knew what they were doing.
Polaroids are what you get from sitting on an iceberg too long.
Democracy
Too soon bro.
Acknowledged.
There's plenty democracy in the world still. And your election seem pretty democratic if you count modern elections where oligarchs controlled media tells you who to vote for as democratic.
Feudalism as a form of government didn't end in Europe until 2008 when the Island of Sark converted over to representative democracy.
In MLB, the National League and American League didn't have unified rules until 2022, when the National League finally adopted the designated hitter rule.
Had no idea.. what else changed besides DH?
How can you talk shit to AL fans about pitchers hitting now? Have any stats gotten more similar between the leagues, where the DH diverged them before?
Western Secular Egalitarian Representative Democracy (though the majority doesn't realize it yet, and think the Americans only fucked themselves)
SlaveryAmerican chattel slavery.This doesn't qualify. Slavery is still in use in the world. You'd have to use a modifier like American slavery or the enslavement of x, y, z, people.
You're completely right. I did the American thing that Americans are wont to do. Apologies.
You're talking about prison convicts right? Actually lookup "chattel slavery", it means someone owns the person. No matter how you spin the words to make yourself right, convicts don't have owners. What they do is involuntary servitude not slavery. Calling it slavery devalues the experience of people who were forcibly kidnapped, shipped across the ocean, and sold in markets. And no, the race disparity in prison populations doesn't make prison labor slavery, anymore than being green makes grass a frog.
Now, now, just calm down there Charlie.
I said nothing about prison slavery. You're reading things into my post that are not there. The point I was trying to make is that the last the last living person who existed as property under what people think of as Slavery in the United States died in 1975. That's either not even or just barely two generations ago.
But the rest of your statement, yeah....idk. I'll just say that people are still being kidnapped, shipped and sold in this country. The mechanisms are different, the justifications are different. The underlying reasons? Not so much.
the last indiginous rehabilitation learning center in canada didnt close until 1997
i forgot the official name for it
