We recently spent some money fixing a couple of broken components -- we debated about whether it was worth it, and decided the repairs were cheap enough compared to buying something new. We have to laugh, though, at how we ended up with the latest in 1990s technology, among other decades:

--one repair was the minidisc recorder. Minidiscs were a Sony-only product when CD recorders were still prohibitively expensive. Sony did release albums on minidisc (Simon & Garfunkel, etc.) but these weren't in the US very long, they were more popular in Japan, and it was only Sony/Columbia artists. The best part was recording whatever onto blank minidiscs, like concerts off TV

--the other repair was our combo CD/DVD/Laserdisc player. Laserdiscs started in the early 1980s, the precursor to DVDs except record-size instead of CD-size. We have about 100 laserdiscs and it's nice to have one player hooked up to our big TV that plays laserdiscs and DVDs

--of course we have a couple of record players, with a couple of boxes of records. We have a Victrola from probably the 1940s, it's a record player in a nice wooden case with an AM radio with tubes. It needs a needle though, and I have no idea where to get one

--we have a couple big boxes of cassettes, boxes of videotapes, a wall of CDs (600? I haven't counted recently), the DVDs are overtaking another set of shelves, and don't get me started on the books

What are we supposed to do with all this stuff? It seems passe now to have "hard copies" of things -- you're supposed to buy your iPod and download everything. So are we just dinosaurs for keeping all this?