If you went digging through your closet and found an old laptop, what would you do with it? This situation happened to me, not so long ago. My dad was digging through the closet and found a laptop that looked almost comically small compared to most laptops nowadays. With this computer, I learned what a Netbook was. Netbooks are computers designed only for web browsing. The most important aspect of them was mainly their size. They are much smaller than normal laptops. They are the great-grandparents of the Chromebooks we have now! I am writing this article on a netbook! Netbooks were most popular between 2005 and 2012 but began to lose popularity in 2013 when cheaper laptops became more and more accessible and more powerful. Netbooks just couldn’t keep up!
A lot of the time with older technology, you will have to do some work to get it to … well, work. For example, this computer used to have Windows 10 on it, and it did not run well at all. But with some experimenting, I found out about an open-source operating system called Linux. Linux is a base operating system that many versions exist of, called Distributions, or Distros for short. After figuring out what the heck making a bootable USB was, I plugged it into the computer, and off it went! It was installed with no hassle. Now, this computer works amazing! While it isn’t fast by any means (It only has 1 Gigabyte of RAM, most computers now have 4 minutes) The size makes it perfect for a small work machine to write documents and do web browsing on, very similar to its original use case.
Another aspect of reusing old technology I have been experimenting with is an iPod. iPods are small music players from around the year 2000 to about the year 2017. iPods were most popular for their revolutionary technology of having tons of music in your pocket. Before iPods and MP3 players, you had to take cassette tapes or CDs with you in portable players if you wanted music on the go. Can you imagine taking an entire shelf’s worth of CDs with you on the go? The iPod became much more popular than a lot of other music players in the market because of Apple’s smart marketing. They sold songs for 99 cents a piece, something almost completely unheard of then. You could even put your CDs into a computer and put them on the iPod too! I keep an iPod with me at all times. Whenever I want to listen to music, I just plug in my headphones (or if you want, they can use wireless headphones too if you have the iPod touch series) and the music starts to play. Even after all this time, they still have amazing audio quality. One thing however, since batteries tend not to age well, some iPods may need a battery to be replaced before using it in any sort of portable way, however many resources exist online for this sort of thing.
Lastly, another thing I have been using is a film camera. Before digital cameras, like the camera in your phone, you had to load film into a camera. While digital and film cameras are quite different, the fundamental elements of the cameras are the same. The way that it works in short is that some sort of light-sensitive medium is exposed to light, and a chemical reaction takes place, imprinting onto it what the lens was looking at. Digital cameras are the same, but they replace the film with a digital sensor. This sensor records the brightness of each pixel and puts them all together to form an image. And all this happens in an instant! As fast as the camera’s shutter clicks.
These were just some things that I have done, but what are some things you can do? Here are some ideas:
- Find an old camera to take photos with! Are you looking to get into photography? Find an older used camera somewhere and use that! Older cameras still look just as amazing as newer ones.
- Need a computer for work or school? As I mentioned before, older computers can be revitalized by putting lightweight operating systems on them like Linux. Older computers are often smaller and lighter than newer ones and they still work great!
Where are some places to find things like this? The best places to find old technology are either in your home or a thrift store. If you look around, there are probably many old things that have been kept throughout the years just waiting to be discovered. Thrift stores are also great because many people give their old technology to them and you can often get them for very cheap. So, maybe next time you go through your closet and find an old piece of technology, experiment with it–you never know what you might be able to do with it!
