posted by
chromas
on Thursday November 25 2021, @09:12PM
from the how-many-of-these-do-you-recognize? dept.
from the how-many-of-these-do-you-recognize? dept.
Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From The 1940s:
If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.
YouTube has a 17m00s video by IBM demonstrating many of these in use.
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Retrotechtacular: Office Equipment From the 1940s
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday November 26 2021, @10:18AM (3 children)
...also makes me feel old, because I recognize some of the devices. One quote worth mentioning: "they were built like a tank".
Absolutely this. Machines were built to last, lasted for decades, and were discarded - not because they broke - but because they were finally outdated.
Occasionally, you still find machines like this. We have a sealer for plastic bags, purchased just a few years ago: Solid steel, you could run over it with a truck, and be more worried about the truck. That is an exception nowadays. Most stuff is designed to die, because there's less money to be made if people never have to replace things. Our clothes drier just died. 24 month warranty, died in month 25. Compressor failure, and replacing the compressor would cost more than a new machine, because it's not designed to be replaceable. Asinine.
How can we incentivize companies to make products that last.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 26 2021, @10:23AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dwilson on Friday November 26 2021, @11:02PM
You can start by changing human nature. It's been shown over and over: People buy cheap stuff over expensive stuff, even when the cheap stuff is crap and the expensive stuff isn't. Not everyone. Not you, not me. But enough of a majority to exert a real influence on markets and producers. Not everywhere and not in every field, of course. Lots of niche areas exist where quality is the word of the day and cheap crap doesn't exist. But they are fewer every year.
So your cloths dryer's compressor motor? They did the math, and a better motor added x to the end price, raising it above Y, and Y was too much higher vs comparable models from competitors. So they went with the cheaper compressor motor.
Plastic vs metal in hinges, latches, covers and panelling. Better steel and closer tolerances in bearings and electrical components. And so on and so forth, for every item in the item. It all adds up in the final price, and the market has spoken pretty damn loudly, over and over: Low-priced sells, high-priced doesn't. Designing it to be easily repairable? Now they have worry about better components that can be removed and reinstalled without breaking, better assembly methods than plastic snaps and glue, more engineer-time making sure this can come out without removing that.. all adds to the cost.
If you're offering a solidly built thing that will last generations, and two spots over is a chinese flimflam-clone of it that's five bucks cheaper, you lose in the long run. As much as everyone likes to play the they-make-shit-to-fail-so-they-can-sell-us-more card, I doubt that's really in the front of anyone's mind, anywhere along the chain. It all comes down to that end price on the walmart shelf.
- D
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday November 29 2021, @08:33AM
Survivorship bias. You're seeing the tiny number of things built well enough to survive, not the vast masses of cheaply-made junk that failed after a shortish period of use. In particular lots of stuff made cheaply in the past was even worse than stuff made cheaply now because we know vastly more about materials science today.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday November 26 2021, @05:25PM
An old book about political activism recommended doing mass mailings with the "Hooven typewriter", which could fill in an actual name on each piece instead of sending out hundreds of "Dear Voter" letters. Input from paper tape.
http://branfordhouseantiques.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-product.cgi?d=branford-house-antiques&item=35118 [branfordhouseantiques.com]