I suppose the list has some merit when obsolete skills include 'common sense'. >.>

Oh, come now. I've done 90% of that list, and I'm only thirty(-something). Heck, I've done twenty or so of those things in the last month.

Just because you can get away with not knowing how to cook a wet ignition coil, IPL their IBM, or operate a cartridge tape drive doesn't mean some of us don't do it on a daily basis!

Agreed - it seems more to be a list of skills you can get away without knowing these days.

There are a handful of truly obsolete skills but most are just specialised skills, such as JCL - most banks still use mainframe kit.

Common sense is dead though ;-)

I notice it was missing one on IPI'ing over your ASCII array of SMD MFM's while degaussing RLL's for VME. I should do a draft of that article, using my 3b2.

Why is "reading tide tables" an obsolete skill? Rather useful around the bay.

"Reading Moon Tables or Tide Tables,"

Won't all those commercial fisherman be surprised.

I'll have to call my ex-father-in-law up and tell him he can go out whenever he wants and damn the tides.

I just added a new skill, one which a quick read of their list will demonstrate is obviously obsolete: Deletion of obviously non-obsolete skills.

I tried to include only the most blatant examples (such as "cursive handwriting," "handling cash," and "sharpening a pencil"), but there are plenty of other stupid entries.

Also, don't forget the people who insist that such skills as "tinning copper cookware" and "pulse dialing" are not obsolete. (The latter includes a lovely example wherein pulse dialing might be relevant "in those hostage situations where you only have your nose free and the buttons have all been removed from the touch-tone phone." A condition which clearly comes up often enough to render the skill non-obsolete.)

I think the point is that there's no need to use lookup tables to find that information any more.

Wow, I used Vantive for years. I'm glad to hear it's obsolete.

I'll send you a telex about the ones you missed

I adjust rabbit ears about once a week. Better HD quality than my cable company.

Some are just wishful thinking--like not driving a car? Not practical for 90% of the US population.

I also disagree with "paying with cash". Still needed for some small businesses, individuals, garage sales, and general anonymity.

And with "reading a paper map". I use Google Maps and Mapquest like anyone else but I still print out their maps. On paper.

Was watching an early episode of The Simpsons yesterday. Lisa takes Bart to the library, and introduces him to...the card catalog.

It wasn't that long ago, folks!

Some of the skills on the list are truly obsolete--primarily those that involve technology that is simply not used any more.

Others have evolved into artforms. Calligraphy is still taught and is practiced enough that you can buy the supplies at any Michael's, Hobby Lobby, or other such craft store. I also know plenty of artists who mix their own paint.

And others elicit a WTF? Driving a car? Driving an manual transmission? Anyone who's ever been to Europe and has laughed all the way to the bank because of the ability to rent a regular car instead of one of the few automatics set aside--at considerable premium--for us North Americans will know the usefulness of that.

And some are just wistful thinking - e.g. Windows Vista salesmen.

Such quibbling. This is a fun list. I liked the flashcube reference. But I didn't know making a deer-fat poultice is out of style.

Here's another: replacing the cartridge in your cartridge pen.

The better term for these skills would be obsolescent. Some people still do these things on a regular basis, but they are passing out of use.

I think obsolete would apply to things like rendering whale fat in a try-pot.

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I took the fairy to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them. Give me five bees for a quarter you'd say. Now where were we, oh ya. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because if the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.

"I tried to include only the most blatant examples (such as "cursive handwriting," "handling cash," and "sharpening a pencil"), but there are plenty of other stupid entries."

I think you may be taking this way too literally.

Many of the items on the list, while still not completely obsolete, are certainly far, far less common than they used to be. Most people barely use handwriting at all these days except to scrawl shopping lists. In many countries you really don't need to handle cash much any more. A lot of people use mechanical pencils these days (I still prefer the old sort, though).

You could probably find small pockets of people out there doing every one of the things on the list, but don't let that spoil it for you.

A lot of guys must be bummed that this skill, which they no doubt worked very, very hard to master, has been made obselete:

"Calling a phone sex line"

I believe the particulars involved the custom grips and unique postures required to successfully manipulate the various pieces of equipment required for these transactions. This wasn't just dialing Granny to say hello, after all.

Some of these are sad - like "freethinking" "manners" "letter writing" - they're obsolete simply because no ones cares about them. I love driving my 5-speed Saab because it's more fun! Many of the list items were just sarcastic IMO.

Hello All:

I discovered this site via technorati and I'm hoping someone can tell me what precisely is the goal of this site. Is it a blogging site with classifieds or a discussion board with other informative / interesting features? I'm a web newbie and trying to learn HTML and become a more educated web user. Thanks all.

I'm glad to see that "Blowing The Dust Out Of A Nintendo Cartridge" made the list. A couple of months ago, a coworker of mine hooked up his old NES in our break room at work. Never have I felt so old as when I witnessed firsthand younglings completely unable to get the nintendo to load its cartridges properly. I guess this is the secret handshake of my generation. (As an aside, there is nothing funnier than watching an Xbox jock get pwnt by a cheesy old side-scroll game like Contra).

Sad to see typesetting on this list. I was trained as a typesetter in a combination of formal and informal ways starting in about 1983 using Compugraphic equipment. It's not so much that "typesetting" is obsolete; "typesetters" are obsolete. It was a specialized field. Now, a great or lesser knowledge of typography is required by everyone who ever uses any layout programs or design programs. Paste-up is dead; typography, not.

A friend of mine while I was in college was a music copyist. Again, the profession sort of disappeared, but its hermetic knowledge was actually needed by composers and musicians. It may have been lost.

@RigVeda

"Is it a blogging site with classifieds or a discussion board with other informative / interesting features?"

It's neither. It's a directory of, uh, hold on a sec, oh yeah, a directory of Wonderful Things.

I think it's the only directory of its kind on the Internet (though other directories do exist, such as http://directory.google.com). But blogging and discussion are involved, definitely, inasmuch as they help illuminate the Wonderful. Hope that clears up some of your confusion.

this is a big wtf ? who are these maniacs ? physiophiles wont let the digivangelists ruin reality for ever, it'll just get expensive for a while. type on.

When you are out at sea without your laptop or electricity you actually might need to read those tides tables from a piece of paper.

we should hang on to our paper maps as long as they don't take up too much space; they never need to be rebooted. But we should also be more discrete about how we select, create and collect (only the best) information or instructions. It can be an enormous waste of time if it has a limited shelf life.

In the words of Terry Pratchett:
"Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movement of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago."

True story:

Last year a group of took a road trip across country in several vehicles, keeping in touch along the way with portable radios. We stopped for lunch just outside of Indianapolis and decided to check what the best route would be to avoid Indy traffic. Someone pulled out a paper map and my friend Jeff snorted, "That's worthless, I'll show you how we do it in the 21st century!"

He ran out to his car and grabbed his TomTom from the dash. On the way back he tripped on a crack in the pavement and fell, dropping his TomTom and smashing the display to pieces.

All the rest of the trip we kept calling him on the radio to ask, "Hey Jeff, which exit does TomTom say to take now?"

Actually, it's kind of a comfort to find that I still use some "obsolete" skills. I plan to keep driving a manual transmission car as long as (1) I can continue to find one and (2) my knees hold out. My current car is only a year and half old, so they're still being made. And I live in the US. I think they're safer because you have to pay more attention when you're driving; it's just too easy to space out driving an automatic. Besides, a manual transmission is a good theft-prevention device!

However, I'll be glad to let go of adjusting rabbit ears, since I've never been particularly good at it. My TV is 25 years old, but I think I'll finally replace it this year rather than buy a converter box for digital. (TV is not that important to me. I bought my first computer about the same time that I got this TV, and I'm on at least my sixth computer at this point.)

And I look forward to the complete death of the fax machine, which was always an intermediate technology. I never did like them, but I'm still having to use one today.

I canceled cable last year. Adjusting rabbit ears has become my specialty, though I find myself interested in TV less and less. I don't need a converter box for my DVD collection, so I doubt I'll convert.

A few photography-related suggestions:

Using a Film Camera
Developing Film (any size)
Using a Polaroid Instant Camera
Using a Rangefinder Camera

"Obsolete" is a state of mind. When western civilization collapses many "obsolete" skills will suddenly be valuable again.

I still have rabbit ears and am fairly good at adjusting them.

>> * VCR Programming

I *knew* there was a reason my dad wasn't learning that one: now he knows less redundant material than myself. sneaky ;o)

Well, THIS list went over like a lead balloon, I guess. (Are they obsolete)? Just to add 2 more cents worth. People are still tuning analog radios. Check out what's available on ebay in the ham and shortwave sections. And on universal-radio.com.

Obsolete? The very first entry very obviously gives the game away: ADA programming is not just not obsolete, it's a required skill for many new and ongoing high-reliability projects.

If you click on it, you get a page that says: "Ada programming is not obsolete. It's still used for military applications for many NATO countries."

So maybe a better page title would be: "Skills compiled from random sources and labelled 'obsolete' to get people's dander up [*] and generate lots of page hits."

Oh, and @20: I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[*] This is not an obsolete expression: A) you knew what I meant and B) it's old enough to be retro, damnit!

I strongly object to the inclusion of "setting type for printing" on this list. This is still quite a useful skill, as attested by the thousands of hand-set broadsides, books and posters produced every year by small presses in the United States and elsewhere.

Here's my grumpy old man contribution to the discussion: Everybody should be required to take their driving tests on manual transmissions. If you can't count to 5 while driving, then you're too stupid to drive.

(I think manuals are here to stay for a while anyway, though, in sports cars if nothing else. Still better gas mileage, too. They're also easier to get deals on, since fewer people know how to drive them.)

This list is very first world, moneyed and shows a sheeplike acceptance of pre-programming. As to some of the items like adjusting color and hue on your television - that just means that people don't bother to do something which would make for a better experience. Or hand drafting - much easier for a small document than setting up a CADD file. And, of course, someone who thinks that handling cash is obsolete needs to go to more strip clubs.

Like Learethak I'd love to know in what sense the ability to read a tide table has become obsolete for commercial fishermen, sailors of any strie, or for that matter leisure anglers like me. Am I supposed to take my laptop onto the rocks and hope that a passing yacht will have an open network? Or maybe I just memorise a week's worth of highs and lows, for four or five locations, before I set off? Silly.

How about some skills that are going to be obsolete in another 10 years? My first thought; "texting." At the same time, I'd like to see the disappearing skill of "watching where you're going while you're wandering through the mall" make a come-back. Wishful thinking?

"watching where you're going while you're wandering through the mall"

Watching the road while driving would be a nice revival, too.

lots of people use rabbit ears for HD TV these days

Fortunately, editing a wiki is not yet an obsolete skill...

Do please now go back to your obsolete discussion...

"Swapping floppy discs"

Because it's so much different that swapping other forms of computer media, much less other "things".

Biasing vacuum tubes ain't dead because they're still used in high-$ guitar amps. See Fender, Marshall, Vox, etc. Also in some equally-or-worse priced audio amps.

"Creating Useful Websites"?

This list isnt very good. Many of these skills will not be fading for quiet while.

@ Nancy Jane Moore, amen on death of the fax machine. I've always hated those things.

@ BookGuy "Everybody should be required to take their driving tests on manual transmissions. If you can't count to 5 while driving, then you're too stupid to drive."

5 is, coincidently, the number of times I have been in a car with manual transmission (I'm 26, FWIW).

Calligraphy has always been obsolete. It was never useful, but it has always been pretty. Obsolescence does mean we have to stop.

As for adjusting rabbit ears... I know about half a dozen people who still get pay-TV. Most just use their tellies for watching DVDs, but sometimes there is something good on free-to-air, so the rabbit ears get adjusted.

If anything, pay-TV/cable is obsolete.

Here's a philosophical question. If a skill was extremely obscure to begin with (like half of the antiquated computer references on the list)is it reasonable to even put them on the same list as things like driving a manual transmission? Remember, over half the world still relies on wood fires for cooking and heating. If you're one of the lucky few who always have the latest technology, it doesn't mean the rest of the planet is obsolete.

Y'all might look up the definitions of obsolete. "No longer in use or no longer useful" is the most restrictive definition, but the word also describes something "of a kind or style no longer current: old-fashioned."

#49 - Depends what you mean by "calligraphy". A lot of the scripts we now call "calligraphy" were once merely "handwriting"--and as such were plenty useful, especially in the pre-printing press era. If it weren't for them, we'd have diddly squat surviving from any author pre-Gutenberg. And I don't know that we would have ever gotten to Gutenberg without some system of writing.

Incidentally, the typefaces used by Gutenberg look an awful lot like calligraphy. go figure.

That's a real mix. You can find real obsolete skills, you can find old-fashioned skills (that are not obsolete and are still current) and you can find lots of wishful thinking.

Just because some of these skills are still used doesn't mean they're not obsolete. Sure you can still know how to copy a VHS or cassette tape, but do you really need to? Hanging on to antiquated technology is hardly necessary. Fine, you might need tide tables once the apocalypse hits. You might need to build yourself a crank generator after the global economy collapses and there is no more power or oil. You may someday be the only person in your village driving a car because you alone knew how to hand crank that Model A Ford, the only surviving relic of the ancient civilization. But as for how those skills apply today, I will trump your abacus skills with my PowerToy calculator and my GPS will laugh at your map and dead reckoning abilities.

This list is so 30-something white urban American biased it's hysterical. And a little scary. The funniest part is they seem to take themselves so seriously that they've "documented" the year each named skill became "obsolete"? Whipping cream is obsolete since 1967? Hahahahahahahahahahaha. This cannot be for real.

From the wilderness survival page:

"A sampling of wilderness survival skills include:

Knowledge of native flora and fauna"

Are these guys seriously saying botany is obsolete? On what planet? The one without any plants? Good lord, what a tiny world these uneducated pasty white boys live in.

#53: YA RLY. When my girlfriend wants to impress dinner guests, she waits till *after* the meal to make some whipped cream to go with dessert.

#53

I agree with "30-something white urban American" but would add"geek" to the list.

That said, I thought it was pretty funny, as I assume the authors and contributors did too.

In the last week I have adjusted rabbit ears AND swapped floppy discs. What's wrong with me!? although I do live in Kansas -Peter

Another rant for non-obsoleteness. Fortran is not obsolete, it's used in science and engineering, and in supercomputers. Some companies hire fortran programmers For example the ones that produce chemical process simulators.

THAC0 will never be obsolete!

Perhaps such lists are compiled by persons too young to have seen everything in their wardrobes become fashionable a second time.

I've had a look at the site and, although I like the idea, was unimpressed by the execution. A little editing for consistency among entries might help.

Someone above wrote, "A friend of mine while I was in college was a music copyist. Again, the profession sort of disappeared, but its hermetic knowledge was actually needed by composers and musicians. It may have been lost." Anyone who's any good at this profession would be able to translate the entire skill set into programs such as Finale (which has been in development for a good 20 years now; I first used it on a Mac SE, and these days I use its Intel Mac equivalent). Such programs really are flexible enough to accomplish almost anything that might be handwritten.

The ability to clean a fish is hardly obsolete unless you like being ill or dying.

Fish cleaning is definitely on the obsolescence wish list. That's a childhood memory that no amount of therapy can cure.

cleaning fish is a spiritual experience

Cleaning a fish, obsolete? What, am I the only one who still eats every (non-undersized) fish he catches?

Waste of time and effort, catching a fish just to throw it back.

How to fark a girl. They already know what they want, and "introduce you" to their illegal in Texas and Virginia silicone friend that take batteries since their last two boyfriends evidently lacked spit and creative fingers.

I saw this list about a week ago.
It still reads more like a list for the self-impressed/absorbed digerati with-which to condescend.

Everyone should know how to drive a manual transmission. You never know when your brilliant career might tank and you have to drive a truck for a living.

I still use vantive. What a horrible application it is. The company which I work for doesn't see any problem in using a program developed and supported by a now extinct company.

Obsolescent = lucrative. Have a mechanical watch that needs repair? It now costs 3X as much or more to fix one as it did 20 years ago, and I'm in a position to know. A few people still want vacuum tube stereos, but far fewer technicians will touch them. Those of us who can still re-form capacitors and rewire circuits around unobtainable tubes are doing very nicely, thank you.

Hmm. Having read the list, I'm really not sure what it's a list of, except possibly 'things you should pat yourself on the back if you know how to do'. Or maybe 'critically important things that you probably have to pay someone to do for you'. Or some such. But over 50% of those skills are both in reasonably common use and still rather important...

"navigate using a map and compass"

c'mon. every hear of Orienteering?

I agree that it's very First World. That aside, there are some genuinely obsolescent skills in it, but many are simply skills the compiler doesn't use.

For instance, go into any fancy paper-goods store. Look at the selection of journals. They all imply handwriting, a fair amount of which can be assumed to be cursive.

There are still people who make their living doing calligraphy. In the Arabic world, there are even more of them. Hand-lettering large signs is a shopkeeper's skill that is only starting to disappear in the well-to-do Roman-alphabet-using first world.

Handling cash is a constant, as is counting back cash. Manners are likewise a constant. Writing letters is more popular than ever. Darning holes in socks and other knitwear is a skill I'm still glad to have, though I don't waste it on cheap fine-gauge knits.

What amuses me are all the skills contemporaneous with skills on this list that the compiler doesn't know exist. Knowing how to break and riffle a ream of paper is still useful if you have a tetchy copier. So are all the tricks for straightening and tamping a messy stack of letter-size paper.

I could go on like this for a very long time.