I wandered into the kitchen last night, and noticed that my wife had left her recipe-notebook open on the counter. It contains numerous pages of neatly typewritten (on a computer, of course) “personal” recipes, plus others that she’s clipped out of newspapers. The recipes are printed or taped onto ordinary white sheets of paper, which she has neatly organized into an ordinary three-hole notebook.

But to put the pages into the notebook requires punching holes at the appropriate places; and that’s most easily done with a three-hole punch, as opposed to the older single-hole punch, which looked like a pair of pliers. All through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a three-hole punch was an absolute must in whatever office I occupied, along with scissors, stapler, and tape dispenser. And because it was such a popular device, fellow office-workers would often borrow mine, and then forget to return it; so I wrote “Ed’s punch - do not steal!” on a small piece of paper, and taped it to the underside of the punch.

Sometime during the decade of the 90s, I gradually stopped using my treasured three-hole punch; and during two subsequent moves into new apartments, it disappeared — and I didn’t even realize it until last night. After all, who needs such a device these days, now that we store most of our useful documents in computer files — either as word-processing documents, downloaded materials from the Internet (including recipes from the on-line version of the newspaper), or scanned images of some hard-copy document?

So three-hole punches don’t matter any more; and it made me wonder how many other once-useful things have slowly faded away, completely forgotten in the rush of technological advancement. I walked past a park bench yesterday, and noticed a young woman chatting on a cell phone while looking up handwritten names and phone numbers in an old-fashioned address book. What an anachronism: why didn’t she simply enter the names and numbers (and addresses) into her cell phone? Once upon a time, I had a handwritten address book and calendar/date-book, and it always got so messy that I bought a new one at the beginning of each year, and manually re-entered all of the names, with whatever fresh new data had accumulated during the year. But it’s been at least a decade since I’ve had such a book; these must be tough times for the Filofax companies of the world.

What else has faded away? How about Sony Walkman cassette players? During the 80s, my kids regarded these gadgets with the same reverence that today’s kids (and adults) regard their iPods; and a common gift, from one teenager to another, was a personalized “mix” of songs recorded onto a blank cassette. Every once in a while, I see someone with a Sony Diskman, but the tape cassettes, and their players, have essentially disappeared.

Of course, there are occasional vestiges of old technology which remain, even though today’s generation has little or no idea what purpose they once served. Looking at the keyboard of my modern, wireless computer keyboard, for example, I notice a large key, on the right side, labelled “return.” You can hardly blame today’s children for asking, “What on earth does that mean?” Indeed, it wasn’t even particularly relevant when I bought my first ersatz “personal computer” upon graduating from college in 1965: a shiny new IBM Selectric typewriter. It was only back in the 1950s, when my parents gave me an old manual Remington typewriter, that the notion of “returning” the carriage (which held the paper) made any sense.

Society develops a collection of skills, guidelines, tip, tricks, procedures, and protocols for using various technological devices; and when those technologies fade away, the skills and guidelines fade, too. Most of the time, we don’t even notice; but sometimes we worry that the old skills might one day be important again — and the next generation won’t have the skills and the procedures. Parents today worry, just as I did with my own children 20 years ago, that their kids might grow up without knowing how to read an analog clock, or without knowing how to tie their shoes in a world of sandals, loafers, and Velcro-equipped shoes.

Perhaps what we need is a Web site, somewhere on the Internet, where we can preserve all of these old skills and procedures, just in case we do need them someday. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one already out there … perhaps I should google it. Good grief: how did we deal with questions like that before Google?