TWO INTERESTING REPLACED AND OBSOLETED TECHNOLOGIES

PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)

The ancestor of the modern mobile phone, a personal digital assistant that offered limited access to many modern capabilities such as Internet access, word processing, touch screen functionality and more. They were very successful in the 1980s. They were programmed using a programming language called BASIC. The suppliers of these, some of them are known today, such as Casio and Acer. In 1995 the market for these grew even more thanks to the company Palm, Inc. They even put RAM and processors in these devices years later. After the 2000s, once smartphones became popular, PDAs quickly became obsolete, but before that time they were a favourite of business people all over the world.

FAX (Facsimile)

Also sometimes called telefax or telecopy, the humble machine was essentially a modern version of the telegrams. For many years, it allowed individuals and companies to transmit scanned documents. There were different types of transmission:

- Cable transmission: early types of facsimile, created in the 1840s, with the first successful transmission made in 1843. Different people improved the design and added improvements to the first fax machine. Until the 1920s when wireless fax machines appeared.

- Wireless transmission: an improvement made in 1924 where a photo of the resident was sent from NY to London. These types of FAX are still in use today for the transmission of information to seagoing vessels

- Telephone transmission: in the 70's was the boom of the FAX machines, where were invented attached to a telephone and accessible to the public due to the reduction of size and price. From then on many countries all over the world entered the fax machine market. A few years later, multifunction machines were developed which, apart from the fax machine, could also scan and print.

The recipient would be happy to receive a fax from one telephone number to another. The recipient would have the joy of a hard copy of the document coming out of his machine. This was all done via a transmission of audio frequency tones that were decoded at the other end.

Like many of the older technologies, fax machines have gradually become obsolete largely due to the invention of email, the Internet and advances in computer technologies.

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