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39 Vintage Tech Ads Showing Just How Far Gadgets Have Come
Name a better time capsule than ads for technology. Go on, I'll wait.
Looking back at a gadget from decades ago really shows how far humanity has come. A landline answering machine, a 10-megabyte hard drive... It's crazy to think that at one point, now-obsolete technology was not only top-of-the-line but also a bargain. Now, paying a couple of months worth of salary for memory that fits no more than a few songs makes little sense when you consider that 4 terabytes of external storage cost less than $100.
These vintage ads no longer serve any other purpose than to point out the major shifts in technology and how much better things are now. But then again, that's quite something.
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![Tandy Ct-300 Cellular Phone: $1,499.00 [$3,116.43 Today]](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/old-vintage-technology-ads-1-2-5f2a54d04a3dd__700.jpg "Tandy Ct-300 Cellular Phone: $1,499.00 [$3,116.43 Today]")
As this list clearly illustrates, there seems to be a significant innovation that changes how we live our lives each decade. With these advancements, some technology always becomes obsolete. With this in mind, one might wonder: which today's devices can become useless in the future?
Isaiah Nwukor, web developer and designer at Storemods, a service for e-commerce-using individuals, said that the cloud might eventually become all that people use for data storage, pushing the flash drive out into oblivion.
In the early 2000s, USB drives replaced floppy disks, CDs, and DVDs due to their larger storage capacity, but now cloud storage has become the top competitor when it comes to storing and sharing. Mostly because of its limitless capacity and increased security.
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![Imsai PC With 10mb Hard Disk, 64k Ram: $5,995.00 [$18,700 Today]](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/old-vintage-technology-ads-1-12-5f2a54e532eb6__700.jpg "Imsai PC With 10mb Hard Disk, 64k Ram: $5,995.00 [$18,700 Today]")
Some experts are also saying their goodbyes to laptops. "Laptops are quickly being replaced by tablets. Modern tablets have more computing power than the traditional user needs," Bryan Lemon, software development lead at Heliponix told Business Insider, adding that most computing needs, even those of many software developers, will likely transition to tablets.
Lemon said it might become common to have a tablet with a docking station that allows peripheral attachments, like a keyboard or a larger screen.
![Panasonic Rx 5500 Stereo: $576.19 [$2,046 Today]](https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/old-vintage-technology-ads-1-4-5f2a54d529e9a__700.jpg "Panasonic Rx 5500 Stereo: $576.19 [$2,046 Today]")
And let's not forget the advancements made in developing autonomous cars. "The driver's seat will become just another passenger seat as self-driving cars become more powerful and a new generation doesn't even learn how to drive," Lemon said.
Of course, all of this play out to be completely differently. Because as you might not, even though there have been accurate prophecies about the future, there were horribly bad ones, too.
#37
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