Quote:
Originally Posted by JBotAlan
Bulletin Board System: I never actually logged onto one of these, but the way I understand it, they were servers that you could dial (yes, a modem over a telephone line was high-tech) into to...chat with other people? Like I said, I never used one, so I have no idea. I would guess it's somewhat a precursor to our MUDs.
Mainframe: Need I say any more? I cringe when I hear people use this word in a modern sentence. (What is a mainframe, anyway?)
Cassette tape: old to me, but new to my parents.
Acoustic pickup (?): Before modems connected to the phone line, you would dial the BBS's number, then put the phone in the pickup to link it to the computer.
Correct me on these if I got them wrong--I don't know some of them.
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Actually, Bulletin Board System (BBS) style forums still exist. They are all modeled off of the highly successful 2channel in Japan. They are fully anonymous, with no registration required. They tend to run off of modified versions of either shiichan/futaba/wakaba (for image boards) or kareha (for text boards) script. Of course, since they are anonymous, they tend to be a haven for the less than pretty part of the internet. A lot of old Usenet forums were/are BBS. This is a good essay extoling the virtues of forced anon:
http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/
And my favorite archaic word has to be thou. English really needs a second person informal pronoun, you has been doing double duty for far too long.
Aside from that, phrontist(roughly means a thinker) and phlogiston(caloric fluid) are also good old words.