Whether it was a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a Sega Genesis, or a Nintendo 64, if a game froze or wouldn't come on in the first place, you blew into the cartridge to get out the dust and fix the problem.

Did it work? I remember reading precisely that it doesn't. Yet it sure seemed to—so much so that everyone I knew did it. I now have work colleagues who grew up on the other side of the world, and they did it, too!

7 Waggle Antenna

Back before TV had hundreds of channels, remote controls, or even buttons, they had antennas. Watching TV wasn't just a matter of turning to the right channel. Your antenna also had to point in the right direction.

Not only do TVs no longer have antennas on top, but many of us no longer even have antennas on the roof of our homes. We stream the local news, just like everything else.

6 Flip Over a USB Plug

Okay, so this one isn't yet quite dead, but it’s close. USB-A plugs were once dominant on everything, from flash drives to game controllers. Now, they've largely been replaced by USB-C.

USB-A ports have to be plugged in the right orientation, which just so happens to be the angle you got right the first time, yet somehow it didn't fit until you flipped it over at least twice. USB-C plugs, thankfully, work regardless of whether they're upside down.

5 Buy a Game on Multiple Discs

When Final Fantasy VII launched on the original PlayStation, the game didn't ship on just one disc. It came on three! You started on disc one, and when you reached a certain point in the game, you switched to disc two. This wasn't out of the norm for JRPGs. Final Fantasy IX came with four!

This practice largely went away by the release of the PlayStation 2, whose games were on DVDs instead of CDs. DVDs could hold more data, enabling most developers to fit the entire game on a single disc. These days, discs have grown significantly larger. Xbox Series X/S discs can hold 50GB. The Ultra-HD Blu-ray discs used by the PlayStation 5 can hold up to 100GB! And even when a disc can't fit the entire game anymore, rather than insert a second disc, modern games prompt you to download the rest instead.

4 Defrag Your Hard Drive

Do you know what it means to defrag your hard drive? I only vaguely know myself. Doesn't matter. It's something I haven't had to think about for well over a decade. Yet when I first got a computer, defragging a hard drive was a fundamental part of PC upkeep.

I'm no longer a Windows user, but this doesn't seem to be a chore Windows folks are bogged down by anymore. After all, must of our computers now run off SSDs that don't need to be defragged in the first place.

3 Dock Your iPod Into a Speaker

Before the iPhone became ubiquitous, it was preceded by the iPod, an iconic MP3 player with a scroll wheel. There were countless accessories made for these things with perhaps none more prominent than the speakers that served as iPod docks.

Back before Bluetooth connections, companies made speakers you simply plug your iPod (and only your iPod) directly into, with the iPod standing upright so that its screen and controls were accessible.

I never owned an iPod, yet I've still been gifted one of these speakers whose proprietary connector I couldn't make use of. These speakers were everywhere, so much so that their absence today sometimes feels striking.

2 Use a Pencil to Rewind a Cassette

I still purchase and download my music as MP3s. This makes me feel old-fashioned now that MP3 players have largely been replaced by streaming apps. Yet we have to go back to way before not just MP3s, but also the physical CD-ROMs before them, to get back to the humble cassette of my childhood.

You couldn't skip tracks on a cassette. You had to manually rewind or fast-forward by holding down a button that reversed or sped up how fast the tape turned inside the cassette. And if you didn't have a cassette player on you, you got even more manual by spinning the wheel inside the cassette by using a pencil. If only there were such a tactile way to fix Spotify when it messes up.

1 Enter a Product Key

When you purchase software, you don't actually purchase the bits of data that make up the program. You purchase a license to use the program. This is typically a string of numbers and letters unique to you.

These days, the license is largely invisible. But there was a time, back when PC software came in boxes, that you had to manually enter product keys to use both apps and games. In those days, you couldn't just snap a picture and copy the text, either. Smartphones weren't a thing. You had to type the key out by hand.

While it's easy to feel nostalgic for certain elements of the past, this is one most of us are happy to leave behind.

---

Like all things, tech comes and tech goes. We are left saying goodbye to tech all the time, be that signing into MySpace or driving a Pontiac. Some changes come suddenly and with heartbreak (RIP Dreamcast). Others simply fade quietly into the past.