And honestly: One of the thing I (and others) seem to love about them is that sound. :D
(Obviously, the chunkier Nikon sound is preferable to the sharper Canon sound.[/fanboy])

I have a movie projector that I picked up to transfer old 8mm stuff to video, and the kids have seen it run.

For finding sounds (including some obsolete ones) I love this particular resource:
http://www.freesound.org/browse/

I remember that too! I wasn’t as fond of it as you were. I thought it smelled bad, and consequently disliked having my picture taken.

This building at 700 East Joppa Rd. in Towson, MD, was locally known as “the flash cube building” when I was a kid.

It would have also been interesting to have the sounds presented without description as a challenge for people to identify them. Maybe some kind of multiple-choice “get off my lawn” quiz.

On a side note, does anyone else remember their early childhood (prior to age 4 or so)? My overwhelming visual impression from my early childhood is of oversaturated, vivid colors, especially yellow. I’m wondering whether this is a common phenomenon (due to immature vision or something) or just a side effect of having been a young child in the late 70s.

I’ve got a 40s-era bakelite G-Man phone from one of my old jobs. We wired it up as a speakerphone (with XLR output). That thing works great during power outages and you could fell a troll with one swing of that brick. The ring and the sound of the dial as you dial 9 always put me in a good mood. Provided I don’t have to listen tot he thing all day long.

I was kind of hoping the “Obsolete Sounds for the Aging” page would include the sound of a newsroom filled with the cacophony of typewriters and teletypes. Or the sound of a busy street in London or NYC in the Edwardian Era when horses and cars still shared the roads.

There’s an interesting aside in one of the later books of The Forsyte Saga. Soames silently remarks that the sounds and smells of the streets have changed so dramatically in only a decade. Horse shit was on the wane, but clouds of rank exhaust were overwhelmingly abundant.

I’m often reminded of that passage when I think of the many dramatic changes in our lives since the adoption of cellphones and computers by a large percentage of the US population.

I also wonder what sort of effect the disappearance of horses has had on humans. Rich or poor, people were intimately connected to horses in their daily lives. Horsepower. I wonder if horses will make a come-back as transportation when we’ve depleted oil supplies. You could walk down to your local ZipHorse stable and rent Bucephalus for your day’s errands. I think I’d rather welcome that change.

I also drank coffee from a tin percolator both yesterday and saturday, and my mom has a Royal brand manual typewriter that sees occasional use.

And honestly there’s no shortage of gas station bells around here, either.

I suspect whoever compiled this list is a city slicker!

Thank you for the list, though, Maggie; I am going to buy one of those Milton’s bells for my shop.

What about sounds that came out of nowhere, were everywhere, and then vanished just as quickly?  I’m thinking of the whine of a tape rewinding, or the “clunk” a tape deck makes when it gets to the end.  How long before those are gone?

Also, I’d nominate camera shutters for “endangered sounds”.

Tubular!

There’s always a computer, a plane, a power-line hum, something.