It is part of the human condition that, as we get older, we find that things that we once valued become no longer valuable. This was why I was a bit taken aback to find 18 flatscreen NEC Multisync CRT monitors sitting on a street corner in lower Manhattan.
My partner and I had been meeting a friend down at South Street Seaport and, having gotten there a bit early, were walking around when we suddenly stopped short. There, on the corner of Water and Beekman Streets, out on the sidewalk like a crowd of lost pigeons, were 18 Multisync CRTs, all apparently in good (and probably working) shape.
Now, you've got to understand: NEC Multisyncs were, for a long time, the crème de la crème of office computing. They offered better, brighter and more consistent images than most of the displays in their class; as a result, they were also more expensive. I remember years ago, when the display I bought from Dell turned
out to be problematic, I was thrilled when they sent me a Multisync as recompense.
So here they were: abandoned, unwanted, what was once several thousands of dollars worth of equipment dropped on a sidewalk in New York, waiting to be picked up (hopefully, by a recycling company). It was a study in the ephemeral nature of technology.
What will be sitting out on that corner in 10 -- or even 5 -- years? Will we see piles of LCDs tossed away like so many LPs? Will children one day blithely ignore garbage cans full of unwanted iPhones?
Maybe not. As we stood there contemplating the briefness of fame (and trying to figure out if there was anyone we knew who needed a display), a young woman in her early 20s stopped, pulled out her phone, and snapped a photo.
"Be nice if somebody could use those," we told her. She just smiled and walked off, tapping on her smartphone, hopefully informing her friends that there was technology out here for the taking that, if a bit long in the tooth, might still be of use.
My partner and I had been meeting a friend down at South Street Seaport and, having gotten there a bit early, were walking around when we suddenly stopped short. There, on the corner of Water and Beekman Streets, out on the sidewalk like a crowd of lost pigeons, were 18 Multisync CRTs, all apparently in good (and probably working) shape.
Now, you've got to understand: NEC Multisyncs were, for a long time, the crème de la crème of office computing. They offered better, brighter and more consistent images than most of the displays in their class; as a result, they were also more expensive. I remember years ago, when the display I bought from Dell turned
out to be problematic, I was thrilled when they sent me a Multisync as recompense.
So here they were: abandoned, unwanted, what was once several thousands of dollars worth of equipment dropped on a sidewalk in New York, waiting to be picked up (hopefully, by a recycling company). It was a study in the ephemeral nature of technology.
What will be sitting out on that corner in 10 -- or even 5 -- years? Will we see piles of LCDs tossed away like so many LPs? Will children one day blithely ignore garbage cans full of unwanted iPhones?
Maybe not. As we stood there contemplating the briefness of fame (and trying to figure out if there was anyone we knew who needed a display), a young woman in her early 20s stopped, pulled out her phone, and snapped a photo.
"Be nice if somebody could use those," we told her. She just smiled and walked off, tapping on her smartphone, hopefully informing her friends that there was technology out here for the taking that, if a bit long in the tooth, might still be of use.
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