List of obsolete technological nomenclature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As new technologies arise, names are required to describe them and the things we do with them. Often, the first names and phrases brought into use by journalists and marketers fail to enter into common usage. Sometimes the technologies themselves fail to take root, don't work or are superseded. From time to time a new generation invents new words to describe a technology their parents used. This page catalogues those names and phrases.
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[edit] Computers & the Internet
- Information Superhighway - a nickname for the internet. By the mid 1990s seldom used other than for sarcasm or humor.
- Infobahn - another obsolete term for the internet
[edit] Communication
- Dial tone - Still heard on most land-line telephones, but absent from cell phones. Despite the almost complete disappearance of rotary telephone dials, the verb 'to dial' still persists.
[edit] Domestic Appliances
[edit] Kitchen Appliances
- Twin Tub - as late as the 1960s, the processes of washing and drying clothes were carried out using separate machines at home. Twin Tub machines combined a washer and spin-drier in the same unit, although wet clothes still had to be transferred to from the washer to the spin-drier using a giant pair of wooden tweezers
[edit] Radio
- Wireless - British popular expression deriving from Wireless Telegraphy or Wireless Telephony now replaced by Radio
- "Tuning In" - expression deriving from the period when Radio receivers required a control to be turned to select the frequency of the desired radio station
- Crystal Set - an early radio receiver using a Galena crystal as part of the detector
- Cat's Whisker - a fine wire placed in contact with the crystal in a Crystal Set, forming part of a point-contact diode
- "Warming up" - back when such appliances as radios and televisions were constructed of vacuum tubes, they needed time to "warm up" between being turned on and when they became fully functional.
- "Transistorized" - back in the days when the transistor heralded a new age of mobile music, radios proudly boased that they used this technology. Since the first "transistorized" radios were much smaller than vaccume tube radios people were used to, for a time "transistorized" was slang for something new and startly small, or a metaphor for something miniturized. As late as the 1970s some even showed the precise number of transistors as an advertising point.
[edit] Audio recording
- Gramophone and Phonograph - The dominant audio technology for much of the 20th century, now little used other than by disk jockeys, audiophiles and collectors of historic or obsolete audio. Common terms used these days are turntable and record player.
- HiFi - short for High Fidelity, this expression described the better quality, and stereo, music equipment which entered homes in the 1950s. The German technical standard DIN 45500 gave a definition of what was and was not 'HiFi'
- Stylus - posh word for the 'needle' that cranked round the groove in your records to play them. If you had a 'HiFi' you definitely had a 'stylus' not a 'needle'
- Radiogram - In the 1930s, engineers combined Radio receivers and gramophones into spectacularly large pieces of furniture without which no home was complete
- Victrola -- A brand name of phonograph built into a furniture cabinet. This popular brand became a common generic name for wind-up phonographs the following generation.
[edit] TV
- "The White Dot" - old TV sets used to power-down slowly and as the capacitors in the power supply discharged, the picture collapsed down to a white dot in the centre of the screen that then faded away over a period of upto a minute. Many children of the 1940s-70s will fondly remember this sad yet contemplative moment as the set was turned off and it was time for bed.
- "Televisor" - A word used by pioneer John Logie Baird to describe what we now call a TV set
- "Closedown" - the end of transmissions for the day. It doesn't happen any more in a world of 24 hour TV.
[edit] Transport
- Clippy - Obsolete British expression for a female tram or bus conductor (ticket collector)
- Phaeton - the horse-drawn equivalent of a sports car
- Post-chaise - a fast, two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage
- Horseless carriage - obsolete term for an automobile or motor car. Sometimes used to denote early automobiles. Some American states use "horseless carriage" on their registration plates for what other states classify as "antique" automobiles, those over 25 or 30 years old and not used on the public roads for transportation.
[edit] Generic
- "Deluxe" - universal adjective applied to technologies ranging from cars to hair spray and intended to imply that they were somehow aspirational.
[edit] Materials Technology
- "Bri-Nylon" - a contraction of the words 'British' and 'Nylon' made famous by manufacturers such as Courtaulds.
[edit] Electrical
- "Alternator" - Old term for an alternating current ("AC") generator. All mechanical electromagnetic generators produce alternating current. The old commutated generator used a segmented conductive drum mounted on the rotor that changed the connections of the rotor coils in time with the rotation of the rotor so that a pulsating direct current is produced. The modern automotive generator uses solid state diodes mounted either within the generator case or nearby to rectify the alternating current to direct current.
The term "alternator" has been discouraged by the Society of Automotive Engineers since 1993. However, its use persists even in SAE publications. It is essentially meaningless as (as noted above) all rotating mechanical electromagnetic generators produce alternating current from their power windings and therefore the term does not distinguish anything.
- "Dynamo" - Former term for an electrical generator. Still in limited use to describe the hand crank-powered generators on emergency radios and similar devices.
