Let's Learn English! Topic: Things That Are Obsolete! 📟⏰📠 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello and welcome to this English

lesson about things that are obsolete.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the word obsolete.

When something is obsolete, it means that

we don't really use it anymore.

It means that it's something that was invented a long time

ago, something that was used for a period of time and

now isn't used anymore or has make very little use.

Some of the things that I'll be talking about

some people still use, but most people don't.

So welcome to this English lesson

about things that are obsolete.

Things like these two things here.

If you know what these are, you can try and guess.

I'll explain what each of those are later.

The one thing here I used a lot as a kid.

I really enjoyed using the thing that allowed

me to record my voice and music.

So anyways, once again, welcome to this

English lesson about things that are obsolete.

These are cassette tapes or these were called

cassette tapes and they were something that you

used in a cassette recorder, or we sometimes

just called it a tape recorder.

When I was a kid, around eleven or twelve, I bought

my first radio that had a cassette recorder in it.

So I could put a cassette tape in, close it,

I could press record and I could record my voice.

I don't know where those tapes are, but they would be

early recordings of Bob the Canadian as a young child.

So cassette tapes, no one really uses these anymore.

They are definitely obsolete.

We had something else when I

was young called a mixtape.

A mixtape was when you took a cassette tape and you

recorded all of the songs that you liked on it.

Sometimes you recorded them from the radio, sometimes

you could record a tape from another tape,

but we would create something called a mixtape.

If you ever watched Guardians of the Galaxy, that

movie, the main character has a mixtape of songs

that I think his mum used to play.

So cassette tapes kind of obsolete.

Vinyl records now.

These are obsolete in the sense that

most people don't use vinyl records anymore.

We would buy albums or records.

We used two names in Canada and it would

have all songs from an artist or band and

you would play it on a record player.

So we called them vinyl records.

You would play them on a record player.

By the way, they had really nice.

I liked album covers and I liked

reading the front and back of albums.

These, though, have made a bit of a comeback.

So they're generally obsolete.

Most people have music on their phones now.

That would be the primary place.

But these have made a bit of a comeback.

Some people do still like to buy records.

They like to buy vinyl records.

And some artists and bands will even put their

music out on vinyl records, still compact discs.

So the compact disc was pretty cool.

This came out when I was in university, around

that era, right when I was finishing high school

and starting university, this was the primary way that

I purchased music as a young person.

I bought compact discs.

I didn't buy a lot of cassettes or vinyl records.

That was a little bit the end of my era.

But I did buy compact discs.

We just called them cds.

I had a large CD collection. I still do.

It's probably in the basement.

I don't use it anymore.

All of the music now I get basically

from streaming services like Spotify or Google Music.

But a compact disc or CD was

just a collection of recordings of music,

songs, comedy sketches, et cetera, et cetera.

And you would put it in a CD player, that's what

we called it, and you would hit play movie rentals.

So I lived in the era where there

was no Netflix, there were no streaming services.

If you wanted to watch a movie, you either had

to wait till it was on tv at a certain

time or you went to a movie rental store.

So blockbuster video was the biggest place.

We used to go and rent one or two movies on a

Friday, and then we would return the movies on a Saturday.

Initially, we rented VHS tapes.

I'll talk about those in a little bit.

But eventually we also were able to rent dvds,

and then we didn't really rent Blu rays.

I think by the time dvds were starting to fade out,

we just had a lot of stuff online at that point.

But movie rental stores, movie rental shops

definitely don't really exist anymore in Canada.

Definitely obsolete film cameras.

So these are cameras where you have to put film in.

You can see this person purchased, I think we

would say speed 400 speed film or iso.

And you would put film in the

camera, close the back door, don't open

the door until you're done taking pictures.

You would take a picture, and then you

would either click it to advance the film,

or it would do it automatically.

I had a camera when I

was young that did it automatically.

And then when you were done, you needed

to take the film to a development place,

a developer and most stores did this.

And you would drop off the film, and then

you would pick it up the next day.

Or eventually they had 1 hour photo where you could drop

your film off and do some shopping, come back an hour

later and pick it up and it would be all done.

But film cameras are obsolete.

But also, I should be careful here.

Some things are completely obsolete.

But some things are mostly obsolete.

Film cameras are still used by some people.

One of my kids has a film camera.

I think it's similar to vinyl records.

Some people like the sound of a vinyl record,

and some people like to take photos with film.

But the vast majority of the

world uses a digital camera now.

Language labs.

So I don't even know how to describe these.

If you aren't as old as me, if you were at

school or university, they might have had a language lab.

When I went to university, there was a language

lab, and the professor would assign listening, and you

would go to the language lab, and you would

sit, and then you would put on headphones, and

then they would play a french lesson or a

spanish lesson or whatever language you were learning.

And then you could also push a button

to record yourself talking in that language, and

the professor could look at it later.

I don't think schools use these anymore.

They just use laptops and computers, and some people

just use their phone with an app in order

to do their listening and speaking practice.

But a long time ago, there were

language labs, and maybe there still are.

Let me know if you know that. There still are.

But in my world, I haven't seen

a language lab for a long time.

A fax machine.

This one is mostly obsolete.

We still have a fax machine at work.

There are, I think, two companies where if we order

something, we still need to fax it to them.

But that is rare.

A fax machine, of course, you put a piece

of paper in, it scans the paper, and sends

the information over the phone line, and at the

receiving end, another fax machine recreates the document.

It's similar to a photocopier, except

the copy comes out somewhere else.

Does that make sense?

You put paper in, it scans it, and it comes out.

I could send my friend a fax.

So if I had a piece of paper

here, I could put it in my.

I can still fax with my computer, I think,

but I don't have a phone line hooked up.

But it would take an image.

It would scan an image, send it,

and the other person would have it.

The word fax, by the way, comes from

the English word facsimile, and a facsimile is

something that looks the same as the original.

So it is basically the same word as a copy.

Floppy disks.

So my computer does not have a floppy disk drive.

You would put a floppy disk in a floppy disk drive.

A long time ago, computers didn't have a

hard drive inside of them, and so you

needed a floppy disk to use the computer.

The floppy disk would maybe have the operating

system or another piece of software on it.

You would use one first to boot the computer up.

You would use the other one to load the

piece of software that you want to use.

My nose is very.

So that in the winter, the sun is low

on the horizon, and the sun's coming all the

way from my kitchen window and hitting me.

That will end soon, but I just think it's funny.

Whenever I lean forward, my nose gets very bright.

Anyways, I'm off topic.

Floppy disks.

These discs weren't actually floppy.

And what I mean by that

is this business card is Floppy.

Originally, floppy disks were big, and

they weren't rigid like these.

Floppy disks, like these, are kind of hard and rigid.

You can't bend them.

But originally, floppy disks, you could

bend, but the name stuck.

So we just called these floppy disks, even

though they weren't very floppy at all.

So you would have stacks of floppy disks

that you could use with your computer.

Eventually, you didn't need them to initially use

the computer, but you would keep all of

your files on a Floppy disk.

Typewriters.

So I learned to type initially on a typewriter.

I had typing class at school, by the way, a

typewriter is a machine with a keyboard, and when you

hit the letter, it would strike the paper, and that

letter would show up on the paper.

When I was in grade nine,

I took typing class at school.

I was in a room with about

2025 students and 20 or 25 typewriters.

And I do remember one thing about typing class.

It was really loud.

Whenever the teacher did a drill or when we were

practicing, it was a very loud class because of all

the typewriters making lots and lots of noise.

But a typewriter is definitely obsolete.

It was something you would use

in order to create documents.

Instead of writing by hand, which is also not

used very much, you would use a typewriter to

type a document, to create a document.

Pagers.

So a pager was an interesting device.

It was something that people used

before mobile phones, cell phones, smartphones.

What it allowed you to do is

you could send a message to someone.

Initially, a pager just beeped.

And if your pager beeped, you knew

you had to call a certain number.

And then eventually, when your pager went off,

it would show you a phone number, and

you would know who to call.

And then eventually, your pager

could show you a message.

Like this one says, major gas leak at unit 101.

So this is probably some pager

that a firefighter would use.

But a pager was a way to

notify someone that they were needed.

And before this, we didn't have

any other way to do this.

There were no cell phones.

There was no way to do it.

You basically had to find the person

if you needed to contact them.

So pagers were pretty cool.

What they allowed you to do is in English,

we would say to get a hold of someone

if you needed to get a hold of them.

A long time ago, I had a pager, and it would

simply let me know if someone had left a phone message.

That's how I set it up.

And then I knew to check my messages.

I ran a little tech company with

my brother when I was younger.

Overhead projectors.

So an overhead projector is, if you were ever in school in

the 80s or ninety s, you might even see one today.

It allows you to put a

transparent, we call it a transparency.

It's kind of like a plastic piece of.

It's not paper, but you know what I mean.

Something you could write on

and it's see through, right? You could see through it.

And when you put it on the overhead

projector, it would project it onto the wall.

When Jen taught math classes, by the way, did you

know Jen used to be a teacher as well?

I don't know if I mentioned that very often.

A long time ago, she would use an overhead projector

when her and the students were taking up the work.

In English, when you take up work, it

means the teacher shows you how to do

the work and shows you the answers.

So we would use an overhead projector.

I used them in French a little bit, too.

Answering machine now, again,

this isn't completely obsolete.

Most people don't have an answering machine anymore.

People call and leave me a message,

but it's not on my phone.

It's in the cloud somewhere, probably.

So answering machines were machines.

You could connect to your phone.

Actually, you would connect it to the

wall and connect your phone to it.

And then if someone called, they could leave a message.

My mom actually still has an answering machine.

She finds it simpler because she can just

push a button to hear her messages.

She also has an old fashioned phone,

like a landline, but answering machines.

I haven't had an answering

machine for probably 2025 years.

It's been a very long time.

But yeah, people can call.

You can record a greeting.

So it's like, hey, bob the Canadian here.

I'm not home right now.

Please leave a message.

And then if you phoned, you would hear that.

And then when I came home, I would see on

the display the number of messages that I had.

Encyclopedias.

When I was a kid, a man came

to our house and he was selling encyclopedias.

And I still remember my parents bought, like,

the first six or seven, and then they

didn't have enough money to buy the rest.

So when I was a kid, the encyclopedia set

only went up to, like, l or m.

So if you had to do a project

at school, you tried to pick something that

was in the first part of the Alphabet.

Encyclopedias are, of course, they're

more detailed than dictionaries.

Is that a good way to put it?

So if you wanted to look up anything and get

more information, you could look it up in encyclopedia.

If you wanted to know something about England,

you could look up England in the encyclopedia.

If you wanted to know something about donuts, you could

look that up in the encyclopedia, and then every volume

would have a letter on the know a through z.

But this was replaced, of course,

with things like Microsoft and Carta.

They would put encyclopedias on CD roms.

So, by the way, cds, we also called

them cdroms if they went in a computer.

And then, of course, Wikipedia is probably the main

dictionary or encyclopedia in the world right now.

Wikipedia encyclopedia.

You can see where its name came from.

Payphones.

So our school used to have a payphone.

Public places used to have payphones, and for

the most part, in Canada, they're gone.

If you go to the mall, I don't

know if there's a payphone there anymore.

I know there are still payphones in some countries, but in

my part of the world, there used to be a phone

booth in my local town with a payphone in it.

That's not there anymore.

There used to be one in our school.

We actually used to have one at

the front and back of our school.

So when students needed to call their parents, they could

just put a quarter in and use the payphone.

So again, a payphone was a phone that you paid

to use, but pretty much everyone has their own phone

right now, so there's no need for payphones anymore.

These are definitely few and far between,

is how I would describe it.

And then there's something called landline.

Landlines are definitely rare at this point in time.

A landline is an old type of phone

that is not a cell phone or smartphone.

We still have a landline, but it actually isn't

a landline, if you know what I mean.

It's connected to the Internet

instead of the phone line.

So let me get back up a bit.

There used to be or there still is a wire buried

from the road to our house that had a telephone connected

to it that got disconnected a few years ago.

But that would be a landline.

If you live in an apartment,

you might still have a landline.

It might just come with the apartment.

But for me, right now, my mom, I guess, has a landline.

None of my brothers or sisters have landlines.

I just phone them directly on their cell phone.

Vcrs.

So vcrs, you would put a VHS tape into a VCR?

VCR stands for.

Stands for video cassette recorder.

When I was a kid, these were just starting to come

out when I was about 13 or 14, I think.

I'm trying to think.

When my parents bought our first VCR, and

mostly my dad used it to record television

shows so he could watch them later.

And then we didn't rent a lot of movies because that wasn't

really a thing right away until I was 15 or 16.

But a VCR is something.

A cassette player plays cassette tapes

so you can hear things.

A VCR plays VHS tapes so you can

watch things on a tv or record them.

Alarm clocks.

I still have an alarm clock,

so this isn't totally obsolete.

I think a lot of people use

their phone as their alarm clock.

By the way, a lot of things on this

list have been replaced with your phone right now.

But an alarm clock is a clock.

So if you need to know what time

it is, you can look at it.

But you could also set an alarm.

So beside your bed on your night table,

you could set your alarm, and then your

alarm would go off in the morning.

It's very handy to have an alarm clock.

I did have an alarm clock like this when

I was younger, but the one I have now

is a little more modern and a little smaller.

I leave my phone charging by my computer at night.

I don't have it on my night table,

so I just use an alarm clock. A Rolodex.

I don't know if you remember this.

This one closest to me isn't actually a Rolodex.

I think we would call it an address book.

But the far one, the one at the far end,

where it looks like it flips, is a rolodex.

This was a way to store people's contact information.

So my parents, when I was a kid, used this closest one.

You would choose the letter.

Like if you needed to call the plumber and you knew

his last name was Smith, you would go to s, and

then you would push a button, and it would open.

And all the people whose last name started with

s would be listed there with their phone number.

The Rolodex allowed you to just kind of have a

card for each person and you could flip it.

We don't use these anymore either.

I think I have all my

contacts in a Google sheet somewhere.

I do not have a Rolodex.

We also just have a list of phone numbers somewhere.

But most of it's just in my phone, right?

Like, if I want to call my

sister, it's just in my phone.

If I need to call her, I just punch

the name of my sister and it dies.

Dials her. It doesn't die. It dials.

So this is not obsolete, but this

is definitely not used as much.

By the way, snail mail is

a funny term for regular mail.

I don't often send letters.

In fact, I never send letters in the mail.

I do receive birthday cards, sometimes in

the mail from relatives, and I do

receive postcards from some of you.

My po box is below.

Do you know what a snail is?

A snail is a little creature that moves very slowly.

So when we started using email, which is

very fast, some people thought it would be

funny to call regular mail snail mail.

It rhymes, and it kind of means

the slowest way to send mail.

So, of course, snail mail would be, by

the way, this isn't the official term.

It's a funny term.

I think we would call it regular

mail to send something by regular mail.

But, yeah, you would write a letter, put it in an envelope,

put a stamp on it, and put it in a mailbox.

That's how you would send it.

And then phone books.

So the phone book, we still do get a small phone

book, but I don't use the phone book at all.

I just look things up online

if I need to phone someone.

When I was a kid, we would get a phone book.

We would actually get two different phone books, one for

this area and one for the area beside us.

And it was this big book where you could look up

anyone's name so you could figure out their phone number.

So phone books, definitely not used very much anymore.

Maybe used a little bit. Maps.

So I used to have a whole bunch of

maps in my vehicle behind the driver's seat.

There's like this little spot

where you could store things.

And Jen and I would have all our maps there.

Sometimes you would call them road maps.

We had a book that we called a

road atlas, but we don't use these anymore.

In fact, in a week and a

half, we're going to Jen's parents.

Yeah, I forget the date.

But even though we know how to get there, we

still use gps on our phone because it tells us

if a road's closed or if there's an accident.

So, yes, some people still like to use maps,

roadmaps, et cetera, et cetera, but definitely something that

I do not use anymore at all.

MP3 players.

So you used to have devices where you

could put a whole bunch of music on.

Maybe you had an iPod that was a kind of MP3 player.

That's what it was called, right?

An iPod.

It's been so long since I've used one.

I never had an ipod, though.

I had an MP3 player, but, yeah, it was

something that replaced the CD player or the cassette.

Walkman was the other device.

So you could put a ton of music on

it and then you could listen to it.

Catalogs this time of year, when I was a

kid, actually about a month earlier than this, catalogs

would come in the mail for Christmas.

I loved the Christmas catalogs.

A catalog was from a store, and it was like

a booklet or magazine type thing where you could look

at all the toys that that store sold and how

much they cost, and then you could tell your parents,

oh, I want that truck, or something like that.

There was one from a store

called Sears called the Christmas Wishbook.

That was probably my favorite catalog.

When I was eight or nine years old.

I would look through every page of

the toy section of the catalog.

But catalogs mostly you just go online, you

find a website, and you use the website

to find what you want to buy.

Business cards.

Some people still use these, but most people, the last

event I went to, you quite often just exchange phones

and you put your information into their address book.

I was at a YouTube event a month

ago, and that's what we would do.

You would just exchange phones, like I would hand my.

And you would just put your number

in and then give the phone back.

A business card is something some people still use.

It's a card with your name, the name of

your business, if it's for a business, and your

phone number and email address, et cetera, et cetera,

but not used as much anymore.

Chalkboards.

So again, we use whiteboards at

school more than we use chalkboards.

We still do have some classrooms with chalkboards.

But a whiteboard, you use a whiteboard

marker, and it's just a little tidier.

You don't get chalk dust on your hands.

When I was a young teacher, I would have chalk

because I would put my hands in my pockets sometimes.

So the top of my pockets would have chalk.

It was not very nice.

And so we have gotten rid of

most of our chalkboards or blackboards.

The nice thing also about whiteboards is

you can use a variety of colors.

You can do that with chalk as well,

but with whiteboard markers, it's a little nicer.

Checks.

And there still is a way to give someone

money if you don't actually have dollar bills or

cash, and that was to write them a check.

So you would write on there, Bob, the Canadian $100

name and address, and then you would give me the

check, and I could go and deposit it.

We still use checks, but not nearly

as much as we used to.

So a long time ago, everyone

used checks to pay each other.

Now we use what's called an electronic transfer.

So I don't get a paycheck at work.

The money just shows up in my bank account.

But if the school, like, I bought food for my

french class the other day, and then I give the

school the receipt, and then the school does still give

me a check to reimburse me for that expense.

Handwriting, not exactly obsolete.

Definitely not used as much as it used to be.

Most people use a computer or their phone

to send messages now, which is kind of

sad because everyone has their own unique handwriting.

So as a teacher, it is

nice to see students handwriting still.

I find it very creative the way students write.

But mostly in the world, we don't use this.

And there's two forms of handwriting. There's cursive.

This is cursive writing.

And then there's printing, where you make block letters

similar to what a computer would make, an hourglass.

So an hourglass.

We do still use hourglasses for some board games.

We have some games where there's a little tiny

hourglass when you play the game with other people.

But for the most part, we use watches, we use our

phones, we use clocks on the wall to tell time.

The hourglass, by the way, I'm assuming, used to the sand,

would go through the hourglass, and it would take 1 hour,

and then you would flip it, and that's how you would

basically be able to keep time for something.

The incandescent light bulb.

So most of the light bulbs in my

house are now either fluorescent or led.

Those are the two newer types of light bulb.

In Canada.

It's hard to find an old style light bulb.

An old style light bulb has a filament.

I think it's made from tungsten.

And then when the electricity goes

through the filament, it lights up.

It's actually a very inefficient way to create light.

A fluorescent light bulb or an led light

bulb uses far less electricity in order to

make the same amount of light.

So kind of you save money when

you use those types of lights.

Although I did hear the world's actually

brighter at night now because it's cheaper.

People just have more lights at night.

So interesting.

Like, our house has outside lights, but a new

house would have ten times as many outside lights

in Canada because led lights are cheaper.

Dial up.

When I use the Internet now, it just always works.

But there was a time, a long time ago, when

you connected your computer through something called a modem to

the telephone line, and when you needed the Internet, it

would dial, and we called it dial up Internet.

So in Canada, you can have dial up Internet.

Well, you can't anymore, but you used to have dial

up Internet or cable Internet or what's called DSL or

I have wireless Internet, but a long time ago, it

was very slow, and it would go beep, beep, beep.

I can't make the noise, but it

would connect to the Internet that way.

Definitely a very slow way to connect to the Internet.

By the way, that says, I think 2400.

It might be bits per second.

I don't even think it's bytes per second.

That's very slow.

I wouldn't be able to live stream using that modem.

This is an abacus.

I had one as a child.

I didn't use it for counting or adding or subtracting.

But for a long time in history, this was a calculator.

This is how you did mathematic equations.

So abacus is the way you say it.

You might still see one in an old movie

or a tv show about an ancient time, but

definitely, I don't even know how to use one.

I should learn how to use one. That'd be kind of fun.

I'll watch a video on it this week.

And then there's something called an airship.

We also call this a blimp.

Airships.

I don't know if they've been replaced with drones now.

Definitely passenger airships haven't been used for

a very long time, but we did

still use airships for sporting events.

This is the goodyear blimp, and

I'm wondering if they still do.

They probably do so that they can get an aerial

view of the game or if they just use a

drone now, because we do have drones that can fly

very high and stay in one spot as well.