Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By

April 30, 2010 — -- Remember when dialing a telephone number actually required you to turn a dial? Or when typing a letter meant using a typewriter? Finding answers used to mean you needed a set of encyclopedias.

And it wasn't so long ago that John Cusack serenaded his girlfriend in the movie "Say Anything" with his boom box. Just over 20 years later, and now kids get their music from devices about the size of an old cassette tape.

But it's not just that we've moved on from outdated technology -- it's that we're moving on faster than ever. Anna Jane Grossman has cataloged the mounting number of items that are going the way of the Dodo in her book, "Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By."

"What appealed to me about this idea from the very beginning is that I'm still relatively young," said Grossman. "I'm 30 years old, and I feel already that time is just going so quickly and everything is very different than it was. Ten years ago, I didn't have a cell phone, I don't think I had a laptop, and I still listened to a Walkman. All of those things now seem like ancient history."

We met up with Grossman at the place where things make one of their last stops before becoming ancient history: the Salvation Army.

"It's like these little elves that are breathing the last bit of life into objects that would otherwise go in the dumpster," Grossman said.

Dumpsters are filling with VHS tapes, Polaroid cameras and an array of electronics from just a few years ago. Grossman believes even books are on their way out.

What about the whole sensation of reading and getting to the next page?

"It's special and I'm certainly I'm going to miss it," said Grossman. "But I wonder if kids who are growing up without that will miss it, because they never knew it to begin with."