Obsolete technology is a critical thing to understand. People who do understand it would know how long to keep a piece of equipment and when to part with it and be able to avoid making costly mistakes. An obsolete piece of technology is one in which the useful life is gone and one that fails to interact well with similar modern equipment, is less efficient and is hardly upgradeable. It could be argued that a technology may be useful to one person while another considers it to be useless but there must be some international benchmark by which everything is measured and judged. For example, a firm in one country may decide to ship some old equipment to some poor community where the citizens consider the technology to be state-of-the-art. Isn’t that “new found” technology still obsolete? Yes, it is because when spare parts for that donated equipment are needed to maintain it they may not be available and that technology may not be as efficient as the more recent models.
In fact, new technology emerges to do a far better job so the earlier piece of equipment is no longer preferred. It means therefore that the speed at which more improved technology emerges determines the rate at which competing technologies become obsolete. We say that computers generally have a useful life of five years but when new and more efficient ones are made, we quickly dispose what we had as inadequate and purchase new ones. The five year life span becomes irrelevant. We must therefore measure the usefulness of technology using several units of measurements which must include: life span, availability of better models and equipment efficiency among other factors. This will help use to better understand at what point something becomes obsolete. I expect the life span of most technological pieces to shorten considerably.
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Lawrence,
ReplyDeleteI think you have a good idea in looking at the usefulness of technology in term of life span, availability of newer models, and equipment efficiency. It is easy to see that when a technology no longer has any usefulness it is now obsolete and should be discarded. There is one case in which obsolete technology needs to be kept, at least for a little while.
A library needs to have the retrieval equipment necessary to retrieve information from a media source. For example, if the information is stored on a laser disc, then a laser disc player would be needed to access that information, unless the information is transferred to a media that is easily accessible by more modern media, such as a DVD. The obsolete technology can be discarded after it has been determined there is absolutely no use for it, or that the information it could retrieve is no longer needed.
I agree that the life span of technology continues to shorten. My smart phone was on the cutting edge a few years ago when I purchased it. The iPhone really makes it look like an antique in terms of what it can do.
Gary Berringer
Lawrence-
ReplyDeleteFrequently I believe that we are forced to move to a different technology because of the marketplace. Companies are now making the lifespan of their equipment shorter and thus requiring users to purchase upgrades or new equipment. Think of zip drives. I have so much data loaded onto zip disks and no way to retrieve it because current computers won't read the drive.
I think our schools hold onto old technology and some teachers will never give up the old ELMO overhead until companies no longer make transparency sheets!
Wendi
Lawrence - Your comment about companies and the lifespan of their equipment makes me wonder about how much adjusting our culture needs to do with regard to adoption of a technology.
ReplyDelete- Jennie