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Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



I guess my poor experience with those MP3 cd players is due to a combination of early adopter's problems, bad luck and my tendency of buying the shittest brands (I'm a cheapskate :ssh:).

Lowen SoDium posted:

Say hello the Psion Series III.
I wanted this thing so loving bad. Not that I could have used it for anything then. Or even now.

But, gently caress, a tiny computer that fits in your pocket! It's got a real keyboard and everything.

If the thing ran DOS and had sound, I'd still be interested.


EDIT New page content: remember these?

Flipperwaldt has a new favorite as of 18:39 on Aug 29, 2012

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Lord Sexatron
Aug 1, 2003

Kharmakazy posted:



I was still using this for a decade. It still works. I gave it to my grandmother and she uses it daily. The batteries last for quite a while.

You have to take the cd out to change the batteries...
Plays RW discs! So I could erase them and rewrite them!
Reads songs into memory and stops spinning, so it was actually good for jogging and poo poo.

This was THE best MP3 cd-player on the market. Little fucker was indestructible, I dropped it so many times and even broke the plastic completely off in front of the LCD screen, still works perfectly. Unlike most other players, if you put your MP3s in organized folders you could easily navigate between them. I loved the batteries being under the cd on the inside of the unit. I was a clumsy rear end kid, so many times I've dropped a cd player only to have the batteries come flying out of the back of the unit. Not this beast.

Poknok
Mar 14, 2007

by Y Kant Ozma Post

I'm aware that cheap knock-off manufacturers liked to advertise their product as "XXXX in 1" thing but this is the first time I've seen the XXXX number go past 400! Holy poo poo man, how can anything compete with a console that has no less than 9999 functions in it? Oh man! :D

9axle
Sep 6, 2009

Zack_Gochuck posted:

Also, does anyone still use a wristwatch? I still wear one daily because I like to hike, and taking your phone is sort of against hiking etiquette.

I have to wear an watch for work. It must be analog and have a second hand. Even having a cell phone on your person, or having it turned on but in your bag can get you terminated on the spot.

Gyro Zeppeli
Jul 19, 2012

sure hope no-one throws me off a bridge

9axle posted:

I have to wear an watch for work. It must be analog and have a second hand. Even having a cell phone on your person, or having it turned on but in your bag can get you terminated on the spot.

Some kind of super-NDA, I take it?

9axle
Sep 6, 2009
Not at all. A big railroad.

d3c0y2
Sep 29, 2009

9axle posted:

Not at all. A big railroad.

WHy do you have to have analogue wristwatches and no electronic devices for a railroad? Is it to do with interference?

Acute Grill
Dec 9, 2011

Chomp

Zack_Gochuck posted:

Also, does anyone still use a wristwatch? I still wear one daily because I like to hike, and taking your phone is sort of against hiking etiquette.

I do. I find it a lot easier to look at the back of my wrist than fish my phone out of my pocket every time I need to check the time, let alone fiddle with the stopwatch app if I need to quickly time seconds on something. Plus it was a gift.

Now for time-keeping things we don't see anymore: dedicated clocks. I don't remember the last time I saw someone with a desk clock or one up on a wall, other than in a school. A lot of people I know don't even have alarm clocks.

Iacen
Mar 19, 2009

Si vis pacem, para bellum



Zack_Gochuck posted:

Also, does anyone still use a wristwatch? I still wear one daily because I like to hike, and taking your phone is sort of against hiking etiquette.

Despite having had all kinds of smartphones, I'm still wearing my different watches. The one I'm wearing now is a Citizen Eco-Drive (Sun powered, bitches) I got for my Confirmation, some 11 years ago and it's the best watch I've ever had.
I'm not much for fashion, but to me the watch is simply more comfortable and easy to look at, than finding and dragging my mobile forth v:shobon:v

9axle
Sep 6, 2009
They want a second hand so we can time certain brake tests, and no personal electronic devices is in reaction to an collision of commuter trains in California. Texting may or may not have been a factor, but it makes the power-that-be feel important and effective to write a new rule.

Totally Reasonable
Jan 8, 2008

aaag mirrors

So much old crap lying around.

Seriously. I think I have an XT board around here somewhere, but the m100 is p old.

Poknok
Mar 14, 2007

by Y Kant Ozma Post
I once had a run-in with a desktop calculator from 1969 that used Nixie tubes and Delay line memory.

The idea behind delay line memory was simple: the memory module was a coil of wire with a "speaker" on one end and the "microphone" at the another. The bits in the delay line were encoded as pulses, or "wire tugs" if you like, continuously transmitted by the speaker on one end, and picked up by a mike on the other end. The length of the wire and the frequency of the pulses were constants, so it was possible to encode something like 64 bytes of data in 20~ish meters of wire with reasonable reliability. This was enough for all memory registers of the calculator, even though the display register was often used for calculation in these early beasts, leading to a beautiful "rolling digits" effect, especially during division.

The calculator I had, a Monroe 990, had a defective delay line which couldn't be tweaked or repaired, so I cannibalized Nixie tubes from it and made several clocks. :)

edit: you could actually hear the delay line in action; it was a feint buzz that varied in pitch as you keyed in the numbers! Take that, CMOS memory! :)

Poknok has a new favorite as of 19:50 on Aug 29, 2012

Trebek
Mar 7, 2002
College Slice
[quote="Datasmurf" post="406993696"]
/quote]

I'll nominate "bass boost" as an obselete technology. Everything had them, no one had idea what they did. Come on IPhone, where da BASS BOOST!?

redmercer
Sep 15, 2011

by Fistgrrl

Trebek posted:

[quote="Datasmurf" post="406993696"]
/quote]

I'll nominate "bass boost" as an obselete technology. Everything had them, no one had idea what they did. Come on IPhone, where da BASS BOOST!?

I'd agree, except there's actually a bass boost option for headphones in Windows 7.

Fur20
Nov 14, 2007

すご▞い!
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね!

Totally Reasonable posted:

So much old crap lying around.

Holy poo poo, CPUs used to look like that? I never built a tower until last year so I wouldn't have known, but... god drat.

Zamujasa
Oct 27, 2010



Bread Liar

Flipperwaldt posted:

EDIT New page content: remember these?



Oh god, I had at least three of these in various flavors and denominations, but I think I actually had this exact one at some point.

I think it actually did have a fair number of games (possibly 5, mostly games like Tetris/Quarth/Breakout/lovely Racing Clone), but they were all pretty much terrible in the end.

The White Dragon posted:

Holy poo poo, CPUs used to look like that? I never built a tower until last year so I wouldn't have known, but... god drat.

I'm pretty sure that's just a case for the CPU. They've actually pretty much stayed the same size since 1985 or so.

Bonzo
Mar 11, 2004

Just like Mama used to make it!
Now I feel old. The CPU is a Pentium II and what you are seeing is more of a cartridge.

From Wikipedia

quote:

The Pentium II microprocessor was largely based upon the microarchitecture of its predecessor, the Pentium Pro, but with some significant improvements.
Unlike previous Pentium and Pentium Pro processors, the Pentium II CPU was packaged in a slot-based module rather than a CPU socket. The processor and associated components were carried on a daughterboard similar to a typical expansion board within a plastic cartridge. A fixed or removable heatsink was carried on one side, sometimes using its own fan.

Also this just reminded me of how big "MMX Technology" was and how hard they pushed it.

SPACE HOMOS
Jan 12, 2005

The White Dragon posted:

Holy poo poo, CPUs used to look like that? I never built a tower until last year so I wouldn't have known, but... god drat.

For a while intel and amd decided to use CPU slots but they were quickly phased out. Pentium 1s were sockets like you see today. I know some P3s were socket and some were slot also. Some of the 'older' processors had the die exposed on top unlike today.

Jibo
May 22, 2007

Bear Witness
College Slice
It's too bad I've just moved and my girlfriend made me store away all my old computer gear. I'll have to see if I can dig up the processor from my first PC, it was a 66 Mhz Pentium.

I also have one of these:



One of these:



The Palm m100, pictured above and a bunch of other crap.

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



Zamujasa posted:

Oh god, I had at least three of these in various flavors and denominations, but I think I actually had this exact one at some point.

I think it actually did have a fair number of games (possibly 5, mostly games like Tetris/Quarth/Breakout/lovely Racing Clone), but they were all pretty much terrible in the end.
Some of the tetris variants with exploding bricks were ok. It was the ultimate in pre-angry birds bathroom break gaming! You could totally pause the game and continue during the next poo poo for extra high scoring.

0toShifty
Aug 21, 2005
0 to Stiffy?

SPACE HOMOS posted:


Some of the 'older' processors had the die exposed on top unlike today.

That's actually a hologram sticker of what the die looks like. It is about 3 times larger than the actual chip. I took a pentium II cartridge apart the other day. The package itself was a FCBGA - flip-chip with ball-grid-array - and it can't really be taken apart. Wikipedia has photos of a slot 1 P2 with the cover removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug

Kharmakazy posted:

Like my palm tungsten t2 with keyboard!


If I had waited a month they released a version with wifi. Everyone thought it was cool as hell that I essentially had a laptop folded up in my shirt pocket though.

I paid $100 of a 64mb sd card for that thing. On the upside, it could play NES games.

My Palm IIIc had a perfectly good keyboard that plugged into it, but then I bought a Tungsten E, and I was forced to use a terrible IR keyboard that never worked properly and whose batteries kept dying.



9999 tetris clones in one!

As for my obsolete hardware, I still have one of these bad boys. Sure, I could do calculations with my phone, but it's all the way in my pocket. My only complaint is that the screen doesn't have a light, so I can't tell time when it's dark.

b0nes
Sep 11, 2001

ultrabay2000 posted:



I got a Tapwave Zodiac 2 after the company shuttered, but it was still a great device. It wasn't quite powerful enough to do anything really 3D, but it could run Doom just fine. There was a Quake version that worked fine too. It had some sort of ATI graphical accelerator.

The screen was pretty nice for 2003 too, HVGA, and it was 3.7" large. It didn't have the ghosting issues a lot of PDA-type devices did around then, which made it a great media player. The video software it came with was garbage, but someone released TCPMP for it and you could play back anything converted to a reasonable format.

I think the PSP might have been better suited for games in general, the analog stick was pretty good but the control cluster on the right was a bit stiff. Of course, being a Palm-device it has a touch screen, which worked really well. The aforementioned interface had this sort of spider layout which you can see in the picture. This made it easily navigable with either the analog stick or the touch screen. I think it was pretty ahead of it's time interface wise, I don't think anything really compared until the iPhone.

Archos is bringing something similar to the table.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/29/archos-gamepad-with-physical-controls/

Totally Reasonable
Jan 8, 2008

aaag mirrors

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
Holy poo poo, disc 10, how many floppies did it come on?

Totally Reasonable
Jan 8, 2008

aaag mirrors

Ensign Expendable posted:

Holy poo poo, disc 10, how many floppies did it come on?

As I recall, somewhere north of 25. At the time, a CD-ROM drive was well over $800.

SPACE HOMOS
Jan 12, 2005

0toShifty posted:

That's actually a hologram sticker of what the die looks like. It is about 3 times larger than the actual chip. I took a pentium II cartridge apart the other day. The package itself was a FCBGA - flip-chip with ball-grid-array - and it can't really be taken apart. Wikipedia has photos of a slot 1 P2 with the cover removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II

I wasn't referring to the P2. I am more referring the Athlon XP I had.



And by older I mean late 90s/early 2000s. My family's first PC was a 486.

spog
Aug 7, 2004

It's your own bloody fault.

Totally Reasonable posted:

As I recall, somewhere north of 25. At the time, a CD-ROM drive was well over $800.

I recall that they were something odd like 1.5Mb per disk instead of the standard 1.44Mb

MS did something clever to squeeze out a little extra space on each disk - thus meaning that you had to make sure you took care of all 25 disks as you couldn't copy them and make a backup set.

EDIt: 1.7Mb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

Smiling Jack
Dec 2, 2001

I sucked a dick for bus fare and then I walked home.



Apparently they only stopped making the things recently.

GhostShirtSociety
Jun 6, 2009

Television. Doesn't it make you want to kick things?

Lowen SoDium posted:

The Vadem Clio



I had one of these back when I was in college in 1998. It was a fairly unusual device for the time and was ahead of it's time in lot of ways.

It had a unique design that allowed you to use it as a laptop or a tablet. I used it quite a bit to type notes in class and draw sketches on the notes. It ran Windows CE 3.0 and was all flash and ram. This allowed for it to start up very quickly (because it was never really off, just asleep). It also meant that you would loose data if you ever let the battery completely drain.

But no worries, you could just sync it to your PC when you got home using the proprietary mini dock cable that connected to your serial port and used a very old version of Microsoft Active Sync.

Battery life was a lot better than your averager laptop. Partly because the thing had either an 84Mhz or 168Mhz MIPS CPU.

No wireless connectivity of any kind since it predates WiFi and bluetooth standards. But it did have a 56K modem built in, so you could enjoin the internet of the late 90's on Pocket Internet Explorer 3.0, which is about as much fun as it sounds.

Sharp sold a rebadged version of it called the Tri-Pad that I think was a little more popular.

I still have mine in my attic. Honestly, I would kind of like to see an updated version of this. Same form factor and everything, just with a modern OS and modern internals.

I know this is 2 pages back, but I think what you're hoping for is essentially the Microsoft Surface. It's going to run a real version of Windows (not something lesser like Android or whatever is on iPads with appstores) but plays like both a tablet and laptop with a removable keyboard cover.



http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx

I'm really excited about it. I used to have a tablet laptop about 4 years ago and loved the thing and was recently hoping to get a new one. But with Surface around the corner, I'm going to hold off until that comes out and Win8 catches its stride.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

My dad is a bit of a pack rat and has been collecting random electronics and nerd poo poo for something like 40 years now. He has a little cardboard box of every user-replaceable processor (like, 286, 386, 486, early Durons, Pentium 1's with that hardware bug) he ever got, from all sorts of different companies including ones that don't exist any more. Also he has a ZX Spectrum ("Timex Spectrum", since it's the US version), a bunch of other old home computers, and like 4 commodore 64's still in original packaging complete with memory upgrade and copies of GeOS that he got when they were being phased out.

His hobby is restoring old 60's, 70's and 80's VW's.

He has one of those Casio calculator watches that he still wears sometimes, and it still works.

I'll have to take some pictures next time I drop by, pretty much everything he owns fits in this thread :allears:

Jibo
May 22, 2007

Bear Witness
College Slice

Smiling Jack posted:



Apparently they only stopped making the things recently.

$40 for a weather radio that can also play cassette tapes actually isn't such a bad deal.

Space Gopher
Jul 31, 2006

BLITHERING IDIOT AND HARDCORE DURIAN APOLOGIST. LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS SHIT DON'T STINK EVEN THOUGH WE ALL KNOW IT DOES BECAUSE I'M SUPER CULTURED.

0toShifty posted:

That's actually a hologram sticker of what the die looks like. It is about 3 times larger than the actual chip. I took a pentium II cartridge apart the other day. The package itself was a FCBGA - flip-chip with ball-grid-array - and it can't really be taken apart. Wikipedia has photos of a slot 1 P2 with the cover removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II

Yes, that's just a sticker, but a lot of processors around the same era actually had an exposed, unprotected die. Athlon XPs were great CPUs, but putting a heatsink on one was nerve-wracking. A bit of pressure on the edge of the exposed silicon, and you could do this to your expensive new processor:



That's a tiny little chip out of a tiny little chip, but it broke the hearts of a thousand careless nerds. Who all proceeded to post about how AMD $UXXXX on early internet forums.

Bonzo
Mar 11, 2004

Just like Mama used to make it!

Totally Reasonable posted:

As I recall, somewhere north of 25. At the time, a CD-ROM drive was well over $800.

26. It took at least 2 hours too, or at least it felt like it. The shop I was working at soon started doing installs without the games because that saved about half an hour.

Totally Reasonable
Jan 8, 2008

aaag mirrors

Bonzo posted:

26. It took at least 2 hours too, or at least it felt like it. The shop I was working at soon started doing installs without the games because that saved about half an hour.

Depriving children of Hover! should be lumped in with similar crimes, like genocide.

Jasta
Apr 13, 2012


I had a Toshiba Gigabeat F40 back in the day. I liked it but it died for no reason after a couple weeks so I took it back and got an iPod, which still functions.

Sunshine89
Nov 22, 2009

Jibo posted:

$40 for a weather radio that can also play cassette tapes actually isn't such a bad deal.

Sony also revived the Walkman brand by sticking an mp3 player in an Xperia Pro case.

As for the Microsoft Surface, there's going to be the regular Surface which will run on a mobile/tablet OS, Windows RT, while the Surface Pro will have full Windows 8

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug

Space Gopher posted:

Yes, that's just a sticker, but a lot of processors around the same era actually had an exposed, unprotected die. Athlon XPs were great CPUs, but putting a heatsink on one was nerve-wracking. A bit of pressure on the edge of the exposed silicon, and you could do this to your expensive new processor:



That's a tiny little chip out of a tiny little chip, but it broke the hearts of a thousand careless nerds. Who all proceeded to post about how AMD $UXXXX on early internet forums.

What, really? My first computer that I built was a Socket A, and I somehow managed to not break the die as a clumsy teenager with a vague idea of how computer bits go together, even though I swapped processors/heatsinks in that thing a dozen times.

JediTalentAgent
Jun 5, 2005
Hey, look. Look, if- if you screw me on this, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, you rat bastard!

Flipperwaldt posted:


EDIT New page content: remember these?



Personally, the one of the best Tetris-clone devices I ever used was (no surprise) the officially licensed Tetris Watch that I got from Kellogg's back in the 90s. You could sit and play it pretty well on your wrist with just one hand.

The 'surprise', though is that I ended up getting an officially licensed Tetris Keychain several years later that I thought felt like a knock-off.

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lazydog
Apr 15, 2003

Ensign Expendable posted:

What, really? My first computer that I built was a Socket A, and I somehow managed to not break the die as a clumsy teenager with a vague idea of how computer bits go together, even though I swapped processors/heatsinks in that thing a dozen times.

I never personally broke any, but Google has 1.8 million results for "cracked athlon core"
It helped if you had a well made heatsink.
Cheaper heatsinks where you had to force down the clip with a flat blade screwdriver were the worst. You also ran the risk of stabbing your motherboard if the screwdriver slipped.

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