Old Tech: When does it stop being useful?

I have a curious technological dinosaur in my living room (and no, I'm not talking about myself). I'm talking about an old reel-to-reel tape deck that my Dad used for many years to record music - as well as the various musings of family members. I have it because I want to move the various bits of old audio he created into a digital form (probably WAV or MP3 files) so that they can be shared with the rest of the family.

But it's also kind of a cool thing to look at - with it's glowing VU meters, slowing rotating tape spindles and giant buttons. It has a real, tactile quality to it that I just don't feel from the digital recording software on my PC or smartphone.

For the purposes of this blog, however, the real question is when it - and other devices like it - stop being useful and make their way from being living room curiosities to items that need to get dropped off at Goodwill? Aside from the aesthetic quality of the device (and the same could be true of an old record player, VCR, cassette deck, 8-track tape player, slide projector or 8 mm movie projector), the real answer may be the use of the media with it is associated.

If I have old tapes, slides and movies, there's an obvious usefulness in keeping the old machines around. It also saves me the trouble of actually doing that "rainy day project" of moving all the pictures, audio tapes and video tapes from their current form to a digital one.

But I'm beginning to think there's more to it than that. There is actually something to the experience of watching slides on a classic projector, hearing the 'thunk' of a VHS tape as it stops in exactly the right place to begin playing an old movie or dropping the record player needle in exactly the right place on an old LP.

So I guess old technology really stops becoming useful when you stop having any feeling for it. Don Draper said it all in the classic Mad Men episode "The Wheel" - when he extols the virtues of Kodak's then new slide carousel with the following words:

"This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

As long as we want to keep going back to those places where we know we are loved, old technology will always be with us.