Obsolete & Obsolescent

Obsolete (pronounced ob-suh-leet)

(1) No longer in general use; fallen into disuse; that is no longer practiced or used, out of date, gone out of use, of a discarded type; outmoded.

(2) Of a linguistic form, no longer in use, especially if out of use for at least the past century.

(3) Effaced by wearing down or away (rare).

(4) In biology, imperfectly developed or rudimentary in comparison with the corresponding character in other individuals, as of a different sex or of a related species; of parts or organs, vestigial; rudimentary.

(5) To make obsolete by replacing with something newer or better; to antiquate (rare).

1570–1580: From the Latin obsolētus (grown old; worn out), past participle of obsolēscere (to fall into disuse, be forgotten about, become tarnished), the construct assumed to be ob- (opposite to) (from the Latin ob- (facing), a combining prefix found in verbs of Latin origin) + sol(ēre) (to be used to; to be accustomed to) + -ēscere (–esce) (the inchoative suffix, a form of -ēscō (I become)).  It was used to form verbs from nouns, following the pattern of verbs derived from Latin verbs ending in –ēscō).  Obsoletely is an adverb, obsoleteness is a noun and the verbs (used with object), are obsoleted & obsoleting; Although it does exist, except when it’s essential to covey a technical distinction, the noun obsoleteness is hardly ever used, obsolescence standing as the noun form for both obsolete and obsolescent.  The verb obsolesce (fall into disuse, grow obsolete) dates from 1801 and is as rare now as it was then.

Although not always exactly synonymous, in general use, archaic and obsolete are often used interchangeably.  However, dictionaries maintain a distinction: words (and meanings) not in widespread use since English began to assume its recognizably modern form in the mid-1700s, are labeled “obsolete”.  Words and meanings which, while from Modern English, have long fallen from use are labeled “archaic” and those now seen only very infrequently (and then in often in specialized, technical applications), are labeled “rare”.

Obsolescent (promounced ob-suh-les-uhnt)

(1) Becoming obsolete; passing out of use (as a word or meaning).

(2) Becoming outdated or outmoded, as applied to machinery, weapons systems, electronics, legislation etc.

(3) In biology, gradually disappearing or imperfectly developed, as vestigial organs.

1745–1755: From the Latin obsolēscentum, from obsolēscēns, present participle of obsolēscere (to fall into disuse); the third-person plural future active indicative of obsolēscō (degrade, soil, sully, stain, defile).  Obsolescently is an adverb and obsolescence a noun.  Because things that are obsolescent are becoming obsolete, the sometimes heard phrase “becoming obsolescent” is redundant.  The sense "state or process of gradually falling into disuse; becoming obsolete" entered general use in 1809 and although most associated with critiques by certain economists in the 1950s, the phrase “planned obsolescence was coined” was coined in 1932, the 1950s use a revival.

Things that are obsolete are those no longer in general use because (1) they have been replaced, (2) the activity for which they were designed is no longer undertaken.  Thing that are considered obsolescent are things still to some extent in use but are for whatever combination of reasons, are tending towards becoming obsolete.  in fading from general use and soon to become obsolete. For example, the Windows XP operating system (released in 2001) is not obsolete because some still use it, but it is obsolescent because, presumably it will in the years ahead fall from use.

Ex-Royal Air Force (RAF) Hawker Hunter in Air Force of Zimbabwe (AFZ) livery; between 1963-2002 twenty-six Hunters were at different times operated by the AFZ.  Declared obsolete as an interceptor by the RAF in 1963, some Hunters were re-deployed to tactical reconnaissance, ground-attack and close air support roles before being retired from front-line service in 1970.  Some were retained as trainers while many were sold to foreign air forces including India, Pakistan and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe since 1980).

Despite the apparent simplicity of the definition, in use, obsolescent is highly nuanced and much influenced by context.  It’s long been a favorite word in senior military circles; although notorious hoarders, generals and admirals are usually anxious to label equipment as obsolescent if there’s a whiff of hope the money might to forthcoming to replace it with something new.  One often unexplored aspect of the international arms trade is that of used equipment, often declared obsolescent by the military in one state and purchased by that of another, a transaction often useful to both parties.  The threat profile against which a military prepares varies between nations and equipment which genuinely has been rendered obsolescent for one country may be a valuable addition to the matériel of others and go on enjoy an operational life of decades.  Well into the twentieth-first century, WWII & Cold War-era aircraft, warships, tanks and other weapon-systems declared obsolescent and on-sold (and in some cases given as foreign aid or specific military support) by big-budget militaries remain a prominent part of the inventories of many smaller nations.  That’s one context, another hinges on the specific-tasking of materiel; an aircraft declared obsolescent as a bomber could go on long to fulfil a valuable role as in transport or tug.

In software, obsolescence is so vague a concept the conventional definition really isn’t helpful.  Many software users suffer severe cases of versionitis (a syndrome in which they suffer a sometimes visceral reaction to using anything but the latest version of something) so obsolescence to them seems an almost constant curse.  The condition tends gradually to diminish in severity and in many cases the symptoms actually invert: after sufficient ghastly experiences with new versions, versionitis begins instead to manifest as a morbid fear of every upgrading anything.  Around the planet, obsolescent and obsolete software has for decades proliferated and there’s little doubt this will continue, the Y2K bug which prompted much rectification work on the ancient code riddling the world of the main-frames and other places unlikely to be the last great panic (one is said to be next due in 2029).  The manufacturers too have layers to their declaration of the obsolete.  In 2001, Microsoft advised all legacy versions of MS-DOS (the brutish and now forty year old file-loader) were obsolete but, with a change of release number, still offer what's functionally the same MS-DOS for anyone needing a small operating system with minimal demands on memory size & CPU specification, mostly those who use embedded controllers, a real attraction being the ability easily to address just about any compatible hardware, a convenience more modern OSs have long restricted.  DOS does still have attractions for many, the long-ago derided 640 kb actually a generous memory space for many of the internal processes of machines and it's an operating system with no known bugs.  

XTree’s original default color scheme; things were different in the 1980s.

Also, obsolescent, obsolete or not, sometimes the old ways are the best.  In 1985, Underware Sytems (later the now defunct Executive Systems (EIS)) released a product called XTree, the first commercially available software which provided users a visual depiction of the file system, arranged using a root-branch tree metaphor.  Within that display, it was possible to do most file-handling such as copying, moving, re-naming, deleting and so on.  Version 1.0 was issued as a single, 35 kb executable file, supplied usually on a 5.25" floppy diskette and although it didn’t do anything which couldn’t (eventually) be achieved using just DOS, XTree made it easy and fast; reviewers, never the most easily impressed bunch, were effusive in their praise.  Millions agreed and bought the product which went through a number of upgrades until by 1993, XTreeGold 3.0 had grown to a feature-packed three megabytes but, and it was a crucial part of the charm, the user interface didn’t change and anyone migrating from v1 to v3 could carry on as before, using or ignoring the new functions as they choose.

However, with the release in 1990 of Microsoft’s Windows 3.0, the universe shifted and while it was still an unstable environment, it was obvious things would improve and EIS, now called the XTree Company, devoted huge resources to producing a Windows version of their eponymous product, making the crucial decision that when adopting the Windows-style graphical user interface (GUI), the XTree keyboard shortcuts would be abandoned.  This mean the user interface was something that looked not greatly different to the Windows in-built file manager and bore no resemblance to the even then quirky but marvelously lucid one which had served so well.  XTree for Windows was a critical and financial disaster and in 1993 the company was sold to rival Central Point Software, themselves soon to have their own problems, swallowed a year later by Symantec which, in a series of strategic acquisitions, soon assumed an almost hegemonic control of the market for Windows utilities.  Elements of XTree were interpolated into other Symantec products but as a separate line, it was allowed to die.  In 1998, Symantec officially deleted the product but the announcement was barely noted by the millions of users who continued to use the text-based XTree which ran happily under newer versions of Windows although, being a real-time program and thus living in a small memory space, as disks grew and file counts rose, walls were sometimes hit, some work-arounds possible but kludgy.  The attraction of the unique XTree was however undiminished and an independent developer built ZTree, using the classic interface but coded to run on both IBM’s OS/2 and the later flavors of Windows.  Without the constraints of the old real-time memory architecture, ZTree could handle long file and directory names, megalomaniacs now able to log an unlimited number of disks and files, all while using the same, lightning-fast interface.  The idea spread to UNIX where ytree, XTC, linuXtree and (most notably), UnixTree were made available.

ZTree, for those who can remember how things used to be done.

ZTree remains a brute-force favorite for many techs.  Most don’t often need to do those tasks at which it excels but, when those big-scale needs arise, as a file handler, ZTree still can do what nothing else can.  It’ll also do what’s now small-scale stuff; anyone still running XTree 1.0 under MS-DOS 2.11 on their 8088 could walk to some multi-core 64-bit monster with 64 GB RAM running Windows 11 and happily use ZTree.  ZTree is one of the industry’s longest-running user interfaces.

The Centennial Light, Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department, Livermore, California.  Illuminated almost continuously since 1901, it’s said to be the world's longest-lasting light bulb.  The light bulb business became associated with the idea of planned obsolescence after the revelation of the existence of a cartel of manufacturers which had conspired to more than halve the service life of bulbs in order to stimulate sales.

As early as 1924, executives in US industry had been discussing the idea of integrating planned obsolescence into their systems of production and distribution although it was then referred to with other phrases.  The idea essentially was that in the industrial age, modern mercantile capitalism was so efficient in its ability to produce goods that it would tend to over-produce, beyond the ability to stimulate demand.  The result would be a glut, a collapse in prices and a recession or depression which affected the whole society, a contributing factor to what even then was known as the boom & bust economy.  One approach was that of the planned economy whereby government would regulate production and maintain employment and wages at the levels required to maintain some degree of equilibrium between supply and demand but such socialistic notions were anathematic to industrialists.  Their preference was to reduce the lifespan of goods to the point which matched the productive capacity and product-cycles of industry, thereby ensuring a constant churn.  Then, as now, there were those for and against, the salesmen delighted, the engineers appalled.

The actual phrase seems first to have been used in the pamphlet Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, published in 1932 by US real estate broker (and confessed Freemason) Bernard London (b circa 1873) but it wasn’t popularized until the 1950s.  Then, it began as a casual description of the techniques used in advertising to stimulate demand and thus without the negative connotations which would attach when it became part of the critique of materialism, consumerism and the consequential environmental destruction.  There had been earlier ideas about the need for a hyper-consumptive culture to service a system designed inherently to increase production and thus create endless economic growth: one post-war industrialist noted the way to “avoid gluts was to create a nation of gluttons” and exporting this model underlies the early US enthusiasm for globalism.  As some of the implications of that became apparent, globalization clearly not the Americanization promised, enthusiasm became more restrained.

Betamax and VHS: from dominant to obsolescent to obsolete; the DVD may follow.

Although the trend began in the United States in the late 1950s, it was in the 1970s that the churn rate in consumer electronics began to accelerate, something accounted for partly by the reducing costs as mass-production in the Far East ramped up but also the increasing rapidity with which technologies came and went.  The classic example of the era was the so-called videotape format war which began in the mid 1970s after the Betamax (usually clipped to Beta) and Video Home System (VHS) formats were introduced with a year of each other.  Both systems were systems by which analog recordings of video and audio content cold be distributed on magnetic tapes which loaded into players with a cassette (the players, regardless of format soon known universally as video cassette recorders (VCR).  The nerds soon pronounced Betamax the superior format because of superior quality of playback and commercial operators agreed with it quickly adopted as the default standard in television studios.  Consumers however came to prefer VHS because, on most of the screens on which most played their tapes, the difference between the two was marginal and the VHS format permitted longer recording times (an important thing in the era) and the hardware was soon available at sometimes half the cost of Betamax units.

It was essentially the same story which unfolded a generation later in the bus and operating systems wars; the early advantages of OS/2 over Windows and Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) over ISA/EISA both real and understood but few were prepared to pay the steep additional cost for advantages which seemed so slight and at the same time brought problems of their own.  Quite when Betamax became obsolescent varied between markets but except for a handful of specialists, by the late 1980s it was obsolete and the flow of new content had almost evaporated.  VHS prevailed but its dominance was short-lived, the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) released in 1997 which within half a decade was the preferred format throughout the Western world although in some other markets, the thriving secondary market suggests even today the use of VCRs is not uncommon.  DVD sales though peaked in 2006 and have since dropped by some 80%, their market-share cannibalized not by the newer Blu-Ray format (which never achieved critical mass) but by the various methods (downloads & streaming) which meant many users were able wholly to abandon removable media.  Despite that, the industry seems still to think the DVD has a niche and it may for some time resist obsolescence because demand still exists for content on a physical object at a level it remains profitable to service.  Opinions differ about the long-term.  History suggests that as the “DVD generation” dies off, the format will fade away as those used to entirely weightless content available any time, in any place won’t want the hassle but, as the unexpected revival of vinyl records as a lucrative niche proved, obsolete technology can have its own charm which is why a small industry now exists to retro-fit manual gearboxes into modern Ferraris, replacing technically superior automatic transmissions.