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Framptonlive posted:When I was younger, I had this little blue portable dvd player thing, but it took little CD type things. Tiny black and white screen, but I thought I was cool as hell watching spongebob on an airplane. Anyone know the name?  Dat screen. Mr. Bones has a new favorite as of 01:04 on Oct 15, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 00:55
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Pop quiz: What's this device? Hint: It's something to do with floppy discs Answer: It cuts a notch in the floppy disc sleeve so that the drive detects the disc when flipped over, meaning the other side can be used to store data too. Didn't work on very early floppy discs, but effectively doubled the capacity on most.
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Oct 11, 2012 00:56
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Inspector_71 posted:One of our customers uses one of these (minus actual machine) as a computer desk, and whenever I'm over there to fix something I always end up working the pedal the entire time, just spinning that flywheel. All computer desks should have those, imagine how much exercise us computer nerds would get.
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Oct 11, 2012 00:57
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Sagebrush posted:51? Meh. Try 400: I know it isn't, but I really want to believe that that thing is called the "Disk Exploder" 
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Oct 11, 2012 01:12
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I can't even picture 400 CDs in my head. I can just imagine the fun of spending an entire afternoon loading every CD you own into that thing and then keeping a mental inventory of which disc is which.
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Oct 11, 2012 01:25
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Manfrompoot posted:I can't even picture 400 CDs in my head. I can just imagine the fun of spending an entire afternoon loading every CD you own into that thing and then keeping a mental inventory of which disc is which. My uncle has one that's at least 100, and has a printed list of which DVD is in which position.
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Oct 11, 2012 01:57
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Manfrompoot posted:I can't even picture 400 CDs in my head. I can just imagine the fun of spending an entire afternoon loading every CD you own into that thing and then keeping a mental inventory of which disc is which. quote:
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Oct 11, 2012 02:02
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Sagebrush posted:When I was an undergrad our IT department had a couple of units very similar to that, but with an ethernet connection instead of the video-out, which they used to store all the software installer discs required for the whole campus. This is interesting, although I have to wonder how much those things cost when compared to just getting a SAN. If you've bothered to wire up your whole campus with bandwidth sufficient to do remote installs I don't know why you wouldn't invest in a SAN, but bureaucracy can lead to stupid decisions.
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Oct 11, 2012 02:11
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Inspector_71 posted:One of our customers uses one of these (minus actual machine) as a computer desk, and whenever I'm over there to fix something I always end up working the pedal the entire time, just spinning that flywheel. That's pretty much what I did when I was little. Could do that for hours and never grow bored with it. The wooden top was destroyed, but the cast iron frame was still in great condition. And it squeaked every time it rotated.
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Oct 11, 2012 03:06
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 I just got this phone in the mail today but I am having some trouble texting because there is no Q or Z. 
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Oct 11, 2012 05:02
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leidend posted:
I always wanted to take a cassette adapter, and put it into one of these: 
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Oct 11, 2012 05:08
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Manfrompoot posted:I can't even picture 400 CDs in my head. I can just imagine the fun of spending an entire afternoon loading every CD you own into that thing and then keeping a mental inventory of which disc is which. How do you even cram 400 CD-drives into anything smaller than a desk sized box? (I have never actually seen a disc changer, so please excuse my probable ignorance.)
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Oct 11, 2012 05:34
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Farecoal posted:How do you even cram 400 CD-drives into anything smaller than a desk sized box? (I have never actually seen a disc changer, so please excuse my probable ignorance.) Well the whole point of the "changer" part is that it's one CD drive and a mechanism that swaps out the CD's in it from a rack or a rotating spindle. I used to have one of those huge ones with the giant trays that you put five CD's in at once and it would just spin the whole tray around to get to the next one, good times. EDIT: Now that I think about it, it's basically the exact same mechanism as is in jukeboxes, only tiny so you can store it in your trunk. Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 05:38 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 05:36
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Nerdrock posted:or, you could drop the cash for the sweet Panasonic Q Gamecube. That is totally made using the frame of a broadcast preview monitor.
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Oct 11, 2012 06:59
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The CDs are stored vertically, like this: The "track" they sit in loops around inside to form a continuous circle. This whole toroidal unit is called the "carousel". The drive is mounted off to one side. When the indexer calls up a CD, it spins the entire rack of them around until the selected disc is lined up with the drive, then pulls it out and loads it. When you switch to another disc, the currently loaded one is put back and then the carousel rotates to the next location. So yeah, pretty much like a jukebox.
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Oct 11, 2012 07:02
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Manfrompoot posted:Hit Clips!!! I really liked hit clips, because they made a device for making custom hit clips with other audio, as well as a hit clips alarm clock, meaning that I could have a kickass custom alarm clock to wake up to! Now I do the same thing with my cellphone, at a fraction of the space.
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Oct 11, 2012 08:15
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Manfrompoot posted:That would be the VideoNow. Yes, that's it! oh man I thought it was so cool watching spongebob on that tiny screen.
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Oct 11, 2012 10:28
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minato posted:Pop quiz: What's this device? That trick only worked on C64 and Apple II discs. PC discs used both sides by default. When 3.5" drives became popular, DD discs stored 700kb and cost about half of HD 1.4M discs. The only difference was a 4mm hole in the upper left corner. Since I was a broke highschool student at the time, I bought DD discs and took an electric drill to them. Most of the time it worked great, as long as no plastic chips got inside the disc casing.
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Oct 11, 2012 11:24
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axolotl farmer posted:That trick only worked on C64 and Apple II discs. PC discs used both sides by default. Not quite; I have an ancient PC with a single-head 5.25" floppy drive (the first PC my dad ever brought home, in fact). But it's true that single-heads were becoming rare at about the same time that home PCs started becoming widely available. (Fun fact: I can't use that old PC to read the hundreds of 5.25" floppies I have in my closet - because I no longer have a keyboard that works with it! "NO KEYBOARD DETECTED - PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE"  )
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Oct 11, 2012 12:47
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My dad had a bunch of 5.25 floppies from 1989 or so that he was trying to give to me. I honestly can't even remember the last time I've seen a 5.25 floppy drive. Mid 90s maybe?
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Oct 11, 2012 15:12
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euphronius posted:I had this awesome stereo in college I had a Sanyo version of this type of stereo with a 3 disc changer (and dual tape decks, "surround sound" and a digital radio tuner). It really sounded excellent. I used it as speakers for my Xbox for the longest time after the cd player went out.
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Oct 11, 2012 15:51
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thedouche posted:I had a Sanyo version of this type of stereo with a 3 disc changer (and dual tape decks, "surround sound" and a digital radio tuner). It really sounded excellent. I used it as speakers for my Xbox for the longest time after the cd player went out. Aiwa steroes seemed to pretty much be standard issue for late 90s dorm rooms. I'm not sure I've seen anything made by Aiwa in a while, and their US web site doesn't seem to load.
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Oct 11, 2012 16:08
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Leon Einstein posted:My dad had a bunch of 5.25 floppies from 1989 or so that he was trying to give to me. I honestly can't even remember the last time I've seen a 5.25 floppy drive. Mid 90s maybe? I'm young enough where I had 5.25 floppies on my first computer. I remember being very surprised when I learned about the existence of 8 inch floppies.
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Oct 11, 2012 16:19
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Maneki Neko posted:Aiwa steroes seemed to pretty much be standard issue for late 90s dorm rooms. I'm not sure I've seen anything made by Aiwa in a while, and their US web site doesn't seem to load.
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Oct 11, 2012 16:19
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I couldn't find a picture of it, but at the very tail end of the portable CD player age, say 2002-2003, my friend brought over a cool little thing. It was a discman that also played DVDs and displayed them on a 3-inch color screen. At the time, I thought it was the greatest thing for road trips I had ever seen.
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Oct 11, 2012 16:29
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Speaking of floppies, it seems they're not dead in the Canadian military: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/10/10/pol-delisle-spy-guilty-plea.html Text dump to Notepad, save to floppy, bring floppy to unsecure PC, copy to USB drive, go home with USB key, sell data to Russians.
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Oct 11, 2012 17:02
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Boxman posted:I'm young enough where I had 5.25 floppies on my first computer. I remember being very surprised when I learned about the existence of 8 inch floppies. Around 1983 I temped at a place here in Los Angeles that had 8 inch floppies. They also had a Winchester hard drive that had to be turned on before the computer it was attached to so it had time to spin up. Sounded like a helicopter turbine and was maybe 30 megs, which at the time seemed like a massive amount of storage. The heads on that drive actually stayed in contact with the platters when spun down. There was a special landing zone for them.
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Oct 11, 2012 17:11
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Dick Trauma posted:They also had a Winchester hard drive that had to be turned on before the computer it was attached to so it had time to spin up. Sounded like a helicopter turbine and was maybe 30 megs, which at the time seemed like a massive amount of storage. A friend of mine had a 40Meg one on his Atari - I remember it sounding like a washing machine. It seemed like future tech at the time.
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Oct 11, 2012 18:08
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wipeout posted:A friend of mine had a 40Meg one on his Atari - I remember it sounding like a washing machine. It seemed like future tech at the time. The (even then) ancient IBM XT I briefly had in the mid 90s came with a full height 5.25" hard drive with all of 10MB capacity. For those not familiar, stack two optical drives on top of each other, but far heavier. The 5.25" floppy was the same height. VVVV My university main computer lab used a platter from one of those as a keychain.Like a metal disk the size of an LP, but with a far larger hole in the middle. Killer robot has a new favorite as of 18:28 on Oct 11, 2012 |
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Oct 11, 2012 18:11
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wipeout posted:A friend of mine had a 40Meg one on his Atari - I remember it sounding like a washing machine. It seemed like future tech at the time. The Winchester was huge, in a cabinet of sorts. It was about ten years old at the time so it was from the Big Iron age of computing.
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Oct 11, 2012 18:21
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Maneki Neko posted:Aiwa steroes seemed to pretty much be standard issue for late 90s dorm rooms. I'm not sure I've seen anything made by Aiwa in a while, and their US web site doesn't seem to load.
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Oct 11, 2012 18:44
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 Not sure if it's been mentioned already, but the Mattel HyperScan, an attempt to combine the two coolest things ever, TCG and Video games. Horrible, slow technology and long loading times. Although it was an interesting idea, the tech was horrible.
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Oct 11, 2012 18:45
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All this talk about Aiwa brings me way back. I had this thing all through middle / high school / college and only got rid of it a few years ago although at that point the only thing that worked was the radio and aux in. It was beast.  I remember listening to the radio and whenever the song would change being ready to record the next one if it's something I wanted onto the tape deck. Then napster showed up.
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Oct 11, 2012 19:20
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WebDog posted:
I'm a 30 year old bloke who has no idea how to sew, or indeed a desire to. BUT THAT IS BEAUTIFUL AND I WANT IT. What's wrong with me?
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Oct 11, 2012 20:18
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Boxman posted:I'm young enough where I had 5.25 floppies on my first computer. I remember being very surprised when I learned about the existence of 8 inch floppies. I'm 26 and I remember when 3.5" floppies were the hot new poo poo. I was probably in second or third grade and the teacher held up a 5.25: "This one can hold only a few pages on Clarisworks..." then held up the 3.5: "...but this one can hold HUNDREDS!"
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Oct 12, 2012 06:21
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Dalax posted:I'm a 30 year old bloke who has no idea how to sew, or indeed a desire to. BUT THAT IS BEAUTIFUL AND I WANT IT. Nothing -- it's classy. The LED display kind of ruins it for me though; the originals are true industrial art.
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Oct 12, 2012 07:48
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Sex Hobbit posted:I'm 26 and I remember when 3.5" floppies were the hot new poo poo. I was probably in second or third grade and the teacher held up a 5.25: I'm 30 and remember being pissed when PC games started coming out on 3.5" disks, because my machine didn't have that type of drive.  e. behind me on a bookshelf I have a sealed box of 5.25" disks I bought at Goodwill a few months ago. Was going to use them in my C64 since I've been learning Commodore Basic, but I dunno, the novelty of owning an unopened box of those is kind of cool [and I already have a zillion already-used-but-reusable 5.25" disks I could use anyway] Code Jockey has a new favorite as of 08:05 on Oct 12, 2012 |
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Oct 12, 2012 08:03
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Dalax posted:I'm a 30 year old bloke who has no idea how to sew, or indeed a desire to. BUT THAT IS BEAUTIFUL AND I WANT IT. You're a 30+ year-old person lacking basic sewing skills who's easily seduced by pretty tech? I'm sorry, I'll be straightforward: you suffer from a lifelong debilitating disease called "being pretty much everyone."
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Oct 12, 2012 09:46
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Here's the Seeburg 1000 A very 50's looking microwave size jukebox that played proprietary size 16rpm records of background music for public areas. The records were supplied by Seeburg and recalled and destroyed when a new set was sent out (sometimes). They had 3 tailored libraries: Basic, Mood and Industrial. Basic was for supermarkets, shopping malls and the like, Mood was for fine dining etc, and the Industrial library was specifically formulated to increase productivity and reduce noise related fatigue which can occur in a factory setting. The records were in mono, 9" with a 2" centre hole. The jukebox has 25 records, 20 songs a side, so 1000 selections in the jukebox at any given time. After the jukebox had played the side of a record, it lifted that record up and played the other side upside down, with the tonearm rising to meet the record. Once the whole stack of records had finished, the jukebox lifted the whole stack and started again. It really is cool to see. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_UIUsyrTsU I collect the records, and slow them down in Audacity, but I really need to get me one of the jukeboxes. Ron Burgundy has a new favorite as of 10:35 on Oct 12, 2012 |
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Oct 12, 2012 10:30
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Prons posted:
I'm pretty sure it's been posted before, but I never made the connection that eventually, this concept worked. It just took another 4 years or so before Skylanders came out, after all.
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Oct 12, 2012 12:49
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