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I had a Sega Nomad (posted earlier). Imagine a "portable" Playstation 3/Xbox 360 with a built in screen. Unlike the Game Boy ( ), the Nomad played Genesis cartridges with no jerry rigging or anything. Battery life was a loving joke but if you had an AC adaptor for your car or whatever it was fine. You could even hook it up straight to your TV and it had a second controller port so it was basically The Genesis II.
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Jul 15, 2012 09:09
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Speaking of Trinitrons, I had a Sony GDM FW900 24 inch CRT monitor way back in the day: It weighed about 100 lbs and increased the temperature of my room by about 15 degrees but it had amazing colors and made games look so drat beautiful. Also 2304 x 1440 resolution 
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Jul 15, 2012 09:18
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I handled TVs at Sears in the early 90s. Just my experience but weight and reliability seem to be related with CRTs. We almost never saw Trinitrons and Mitsubishis come in for repair or replacement, both were comparable in weight. My parents had a NEC from the mid 80, they used it about 15 years then handed it down to my niece. It was pretty heavy too.
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Jul 15, 2012 09:57
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No they were not singles, or 45's or flexi discs (which were loving cool). I remember we had a thread similar to this one before, they are like records but small enough to put in cars. I think they were marketed for cars yet they were a horrible failure. If you google car record player, what comes up is not what I am looking for. I believe one company made them. b0nes has a new favorite as of 10:13 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 10:10
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bossy lady posted:Speaking of Trinitrons, I had a Sony GDM FW900 24 inch CRT monitor way back in the day: I had a dell model exactly like this and I can attest to the fact that these fuckers weigh more than my current refrigerator. Favorite story about it was I was under my desk messing with cabling and proceeded to shift the weight on the desk by accident and it proceeded to land about 1/8th of an inch from my head... I should be dead...and the fucker still worked. As for content  The Sony Mavica line of Digital cameras... They took loving floppy disks and shoot at about 140x210 resolution and fit around 10 photos per disk and it took about 30 seconds to a minute to save a photo after you took it.
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Jul 15, 2012 10:13
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Palm pilots paved the way for the Treo phones which were the closest thing to a smart phone you could get in the early 2k's. I loved mine and got both a good phone and a great PDA out of it. It was a bit chunky and limited to whatever cheap rear end SD card you could find for it. Still a pretty beefy little decide for the day.
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Jul 15, 2012 10:43
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Geoj posted:Don't ask me how we've made it four pages without these mentioned... You underestimate them. When I was working in IT procurement in 2009 I was asked to find a quicker way for swimming instructors to create class attendance logs in their Excel database. It was taking hours to enter the data by hand; the pool had several instructors each taking four or five classes a day, but they only had one PC and they were forced to hotseat. I sourced them a few old PDAs from stock that could run Excel, and suddenly the job took seconds - they could create the log file at poolside and cut and sync it all at the end of the day.
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Jul 15, 2012 11:18
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bossy lady posted:Speaking of Trinitrons, I had a Sony GDM FW900 24 inch CRT monitor way back in the day: Holy poo poo, I was looking at this picture for so long thinking "Wait, F.E.A.R was never made for Gamecube, right?" before I realized that's a CD.
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Jul 15, 2012 11:57
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A friend of mine just got a 40-inch crt TV for like 10 bux. I shudder to think of the weight of it.
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Jul 15, 2012 15:02
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Oppenheimer posted:A friend of mine just got a 40-inch crt TV for like 10 bux. I shudder to think of the weight of it. I still have a 27" CRT TV and googling tells me it weighs 108 lbs. So that 40" is probably close to 150-175lbs.
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Jul 15, 2012 15:27
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Jedit posted:You underestimate them. When I was working in IT procurement in 2009 I was asked to find a quicker way for swimming instructors to create class attendance logs in their Excel database. It was taking hours to enter the data by hand; the pool had several instructors each taking four or five classes a day, but they only had one PC and they were forced to hotseat. I sourced them a few old PDAs from stock that could run Excel, and suddenly the job took seconds - they could create the log file at poolside and cut and sync it all at the end of the day. There was period before the Blackberry took off and mobile phones were quite basic still that the PDA's had their place. It wasn't uncommon for a Palmpilot or two to be out during a business meeting.
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Jul 15, 2012 15:58
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Royal W posted:I sprung $250 for a Minidisk player in 2001-02. It was badass because it came with a remote! A friend of mine in Middle School was 110% absolutely and zealously convinced that MD was the way of the future and that MP3 players were a fad. He talked about buying shitloads of Sony stock since it was going to be so pervasive.
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Jul 15, 2012 16:03
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Wasn't the MD stupidly popular in Japan? I remember hearing it was the fact that it never really took off in the West that killed it as a format.
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Jul 15, 2012 16:11
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Mister Kingdom posted:I still have a 27" CRT TV and googling tells me it weighs 108 lbs. So that 40" is probably close to 150-175lbs.  If its a sony trinitron, it weighs exactly 325 pounds.
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Jul 15, 2012 16:19
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:Wasn't the MD stupidly popular in Japan? Oh my yes, one of my friends was still using MDs up to last year. Home PC ownership in Japan has always been fairly low compared to Europe and the US, which led to very late adoption of MP3 players. It's also why Walkman MP3 players have had a record function. Also probably for similar reasons, first time job seekers in Japan are still required to produce a hand-written resume. That and they might believe in graphology 
RillAkBea has a new favorite as of 16:36 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 16:28
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Minidisc is also popular with radio media types. All of the radio reporters I know still tote around minidisc recorders for interviews of whatever.
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Jul 15, 2012 16:36
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Cage posted:
Off topic a bit I guess but: I still have the remote from my old Sony Trinitron tv for some reason. Oddly enough it works perfectly fine for my Bravia HDTV and my Sony 3D Display (that I use as a pc monitor), without having to program the remote or anything. I'm not a sony fanboy I swear. They just always seem to be on sale when I'm shopping for a new tv/display.
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Jul 15, 2012 16:44
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bossy lady posted:Speaking of Trinitrons, I had a Sony GDM FW900 24 inch CRT monitor way back in the day: And we have met the Deskbuster 3000. LCD's have gotten good enough, but a well made CRT will still kick their rear end at resolution and color rendering.
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Jul 15, 2012 17:17
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:Wasn't the MD stupidly popular in Japan? I remember hearing it was the fact that it never really took off in the West that killed it as a format. They were pretty popular in Russia as well. There used to be shops where you could purchase music files and have them burned onto MD while you waited.
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Jul 15, 2012 18:02
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b0nes posted:No they were not singles, or 45's or flexi discs (which were loving cool). I remember we had a thread similar to this one before, they are like records but small enough to put in cars. I think they were marketed for cars yet they were a horrible failure. You're thinking of Highway Hi-Fi, an in-car record player made for Chrysler in 1956 that took weird 10 inch discs that played at 16⅔ RPM. The company that made them was CBS (yes, as in the TV network) Electronics. It's no surprise that it was a colossal failure when you think of a record player in a car, especially one as large and heavy as a '50s Chrysler.
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Jul 15, 2012 18:18
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You Are A Elf posted:You're thinking of Highway Hi-Fi, an in-car record player made for Chrysler in 1956 that took weird 10 inch discs that played at 16⅔ RPM. The company that made them was CBS (yes, as in the TV network) Electronics. It's no surprise that it was a colossal failure when you think of a record player in a car, especially one as large and heavy as a '50s Chrysler. You want real ridiculous failure, imagine a record player in a VW Beetle (top center): 
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Jul 15, 2012 18:44
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Mister Kingdom posted:You want real ridiculous failure, imagine a record player in a VW Beetle (top center): See the windshield washer kit in the top left? The WV beetle came with a windshield washers that ran off the air pressure in the spare tire. Looks like the aftermarket kit came with an electric pump like every other car ever. e: Oh lol, a spare fuel cannister to keep under a seat inside the car. Sounds like a fantastic idea!
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Jul 15, 2012 18:50
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axolotl farmer posted:See the windshield washer kit in the top left? They also sold a gasoline-powered heater.
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Jul 15, 2012 18:58
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small change posted:Minidisc is also popular with radio media types. All of the radio reporters I know still tote around minidisc recorders for interviews of whatever. There's an alternative Digital Audio Tape solution that is much better. It's called DCC 
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Jul 15, 2012 20:07
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axolotl farmer posted:
What? Tell me they also provided an air pump.
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Jul 15, 2012 20:34
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Jedit posted:You underestimate them. When I was working in IT procurement in 2009 I was asked to find a quicker way for swimming instructors to create class attendance logs in their Excel database. It was taking hours to enter the data by hand; the pool had several instructors each taking four or five classes a day, but they only had one PC and they were forced to hotseat. I sourced them a few old PDAs from stock that could run Excel, and suddenly the job took seconds - they could create the log file at poolside and cut and sync it all at the end of the day. The PDA is a perfect example of how all the processing power in the world doesn't matter without good design backing it up. If they got over their stupid fixation on styluses and handwriting-recognition and built-in keyboards and tried what Apple did with a user-friendly touch-screen interface and a simple operating system we would still be using them.
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Jul 15, 2012 21:36
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Farbtoner posted:The PDA is a perfect example of how all the processing power in the world doesn't matter without good design backing it up. If they got over their stupid fixation on styluses and handwriting-recognition and built-in keyboards and tried what Apple did with a user-friendly touch-screen interface and a simple operating system we would still be using them.
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Jul 15, 2012 21:44
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Even though touchscreen keyboards are actually completely fine and easy to use, stylus keyboards and writing recognition are awful. But UI design on palm and windows mobile literally did not change at all. Ever. They were the best on the market so why improve? And when apple kicked their asses into gear in 2007 nobody actually wanted to invest money in a real competetor because "haha how can apple compete with us" and welp long story short that's how webos died and how android is A Thing  the palm centro came out three months after the iphone did 
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Jul 15, 2012 22:01
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Mister Snips posted:the palm centro came out three months after the iphone did Yeah but the Centro was the biggest success in a while for Palm? That device is why they were around as long as they were after the iPhone was released. Beyond that, webOS was intended to be a "real competitor," being a complete redesign of what Palm had been serving up for years. Problem was that it was a hail mary play and failed to hit some key milestones and partnerships early on. e; To be clear, the Centro is most certainly obsolete, and pretty much was at release. That's not what killed the company though. 
sirbeefalot has a new favorite as of 22:22 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 22:20
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Mister Snips posted:Even though touchscreen keyboards are actually completely fine and easy to use, stylus keyboards and writing recognition are awful. I never owned one but I did a bit of QA on those before they came out. They feel much cheaper than they look (the stylus in particular feels like it's going to snap in your hand at any second).
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Jul 15, 2012 22:22
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Mister Snips posted:Even though touchscreen keyboards are actually completely fine and easy to use, stylus keyboards and writing recognition are awful. I don't think their UI was even particularly bad (aside from the resolution and the use of a stylus instead of a multitouch touchscreen it's really not that different from the interface on modern smartphones at all), it's just that it would have been totally impossible to upgrade it to modern hardware and applications. mystes has a new favorite as of 22:26 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 22:23
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I was working for Sprint when the good ol' Palm Pre came out in 2009, and they raved like it was going to be the end-all-be-all of cell phones and nothing would ever be the same. We had to go to a several hour long class on how to use it and how to present it to the customers before it hit shelves. We were busy as hell, shuffling phones from store to store, offering special bonuses depending on how many of them you sold. I hadn't been with them long at the time (and didn't stay with them long either), so my personal cell phone plan was with Verizon. It's lucky I was in the middle of a contract, because I was brainwashed into nearly dropping the early cancellation money to Verizon to get one of those goddamn things. SO glad I didn't!
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Jul 15, 2012 23:11
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TShields posted:I was working for Sprint when the good ol' Palm Pre came out in 2009, and they raved like it was going to be the end-all-be-all of cell phones and nothing would ever be the same. We had to go to a several hour long class on how to use it and how to present it to the customers before it hit shelves. We were busy as hell, shuffling phones from store to store, offering special bonuses depending on how many of them you sold. I hadn't been with them long at the time (and didn't stay with them long either), so my personal cell phone plan was with Verizon. It's lucky I was in the middle of a contract, because I was brainwashed into nearly dropping the early cancellation money to Verizon to get one of those goddamn things. SO glad I didn't!
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Jul 15, 2012 23:14
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mystes posted:I thought WebOS was actually supposed to be decent? Either way, nobody cared at that point and that would be reason enough to steer clear for app/compatibility reasons. WebOS is great, but it doesn't matter. The biggest advantage to smartphones is applications, which WebOS just didn't have enough of. It will be the same thing that continues to kill RIM even if they manage to launch the new BB and have it not suck, and it still hurts WindowsPhone7. WebOS is great at multitasking, but if you don't have any poo poo to multitask with who cares?
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Jul 15, 2012 23:22
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Guy 1 : Oh jeez, I wish we could model awesome and detailed environments in our videogames, but this is the 90s and everything sucks. Guy 2 : If only there was a way to have the environment take up as little memory and computing power as possible while still have it look good so we could use all that saved up power to do nicer thing with those lovely consoles and horrible PCs. God himself : Have you considered 2d pre-rendered backgrounds ? Seriously though, I love the idea behind that tech. Painstakingly modelize every environment from a combination of photos, 3d rendering, drawings and whatnot, convert it into a 2d picture, define how it is supposed to work (ie : this is a wall so you can't go through it, this is the floor so you'll most likely stand on it, once you go through this invisible line, something happens...), integrate some 3d models of your characters and you're done. Basically, it means beautiful scenery on somewhat lackluster hardware :   Parasite Eve 2 and Resident Evil 3, on the PS1  Onimusha 2 on the PS2  Resident Evil Rebirth on the Gamecube Seriously, it looks gorgeous. Of course, there are several limitations on what this tech can do : For instance, the camera will never move (and when it is positioned in an awkward place, it pretty much creates a blindspot, just ask anyone who played one of the early REs), it only works well with certain types of games like survival horrors, RPGs or Point&Click Adventure games(I can't really imagine anything too action-y working well). Nevertheless, I still find it extremely cool, and if I had anything like programing skills and storytelling talent, I guess I'd do some game/tribute to a bygone era and ask for financing on kickstarter. Tangentially related to the previous subject (by a very long shot) : MO disks. They kind of look like the bastard child of floppy and a CD , and they can hold up to over 9G of data which makes them perfectly appropriate for this thread.
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Jul 16, 2012 00:36
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mystes posted:I thought WebOS was actually supposed to be decent? Either way, nobody cared at that point and that would be reason enough to steer clear for app/compatibility reasons. The phone itself was the problem. It looked nice, but it fell apart. The screen could shatter from being in your pocket, the slide function broke half the time, the headphone jack would break.. It was real shoddy work, but it looked rather nice.
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Jul 16, 2012 01:44
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WitchFetish posted:2d pre-rendered backgrounds stuff I remember I was always floored by how good the graphics on Digimon Worlds was, it looked so lifelike!
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Jul 16, 2012 01:57
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I'm honestly surprised that there aren't any neato phone games with pre-rendered backgrounds. Then again there aren't any neato phone games period
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Jul 16, 2012 03:06
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WitchFetish posted:Tangentially related to the previous subject (by a very long shot) : MO disks. They kind of look like the bastard child of floppy and a CD , and they can hold up to over 9G of data which makes them perfectly appropriate for this thread. There was an article I was reading somewhere about some company that worked on a pretty massive project back in the early-mid 80s and saved absolutely everything on a proprietary storage media that didn't have a lot of adopters. Eventually, the few drives they had failed and they were unable to retrieve the data, so they just threw everything out. However, they had zero hard copies or back-ups other than that. I sort of wonder how often something like that happened with media that never caught on with the mainstream and people just chucking things out thinking it was forever irretrievable.
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Jul 16, 2012 03:10
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These have all been mentioned, but I actually have a box in my closet with "obsolete tech" written on the side, so I had to pull them out and grab a picture before I finally throw them in the trash. Clockwise from top: Olympus D360-L (went through batteries like a Sega Game Gear) Diamond Rio PMP300 CueCat Radio Shack PocketVision (somehow drained batteries while the power was off!) Iomega Zip 250 USB I even had a VirtualBoy for a while that I picked up with 3 games for $30 at Best Buy when they were unloading the last of them, but I gave that away a long time ago.
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Jul 16, 2012 03:11
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