Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Manky: Mar 20, 2007; Fun Shoe

The iPod photo.

Click here to view the full image

It was the first iPod to feature a color screen, and its only real selling point was the ability to sync your photos with your computer. (Though the idea of having cover art for music was personally more appealing.) Oddly, it was actually a distinct iPod line, like the mini or the nano. But it only saw one minor revision in its brief nine month lifespan before the line was killed.

The next summer it was made completely obsolete when Apple released the fifth generation iPods, colloquially known as the iPod video, now referred to as iPod classic.

But you know what? I love that weird little machine. It's eight years old, and last week I synced mine with my computer and set it up in the kitchen as a jukebox. The battery is down to about 30 minutes, but both the battery and the HDD are original, and I'm impressed they're operational. I'd say that's Nintendium level build quality.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 16:20

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# ? Apr 20, 2024 05:20

Germstore: Oct 17, 2012; A Serious Candidate For a Serious Time

Bertrand Hustle posted:

Christ. I was catching up on this thread and came across the Zen. I had a Zen. It was very fragile, apparently, and when it died after I dropped it or some jackhole knocked it out of my hands or something (I honestly don't remember anymore), Creative "offered" me the "opportunity" to drop $200 on a new one.

I haven't had a portable music player since.

I remember being super excited about my first laptop. It was heavy and thick and frankly kind of a piece of poo poo, but goddamnit, it was mine.

My first desktop had a 2 GB hard drive. I was ridiculously proud of that. It was top of the line. Now I have a 2 TB external HDD sitting on my desk that probably cost me less than the 2 GB would have at the time.

I still have my first laptop around somewhere and the last time I pulled it out I couldn't believe how thick and heavy it was. My first desktop also had a 2 GB HD. I eventually spent $300 upgrading to a 10 GB drive. I felt like I would never fill it up, and I didn't since back then most game installs were generally a couple hundred megs.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 16:49

NonzeroCircle: Apr 12, 2010; El Camino

DStecks posted:

I'm still using my sister's old Zen Stone (Creative's answer to the iPod Nano), and it's gotta be pushing 6 years old now, and it still works great.

These things were built like tiny little tanks, and I love the fact it has actual buttons so I could skip tracks etc without having to take it out my pocket. Can't do that with a touchscreen.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 17:22

MrEnigma: Aug 30, 2004; Moo!

NonzeroCircle posted:

These things were built like tiny little tanks, and I love the fact it has actual buttons so I could skip tracks etc without having to take it out my pocket. Can't do that with a touchscreen.

This is why the earbuds have the remote button on it.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 17:51

Leon Einstein: Feb 6, 2012; I must win every thread in GBS. I don't care how much banal semantic quibbling and shitty posts it takes.

Bertrand Hustle posted:

My first desktop had a 2 GB hard drive.

Mine had a 150 MB drive. I think it cost 3,300 bucks (the whole PC) or something at the time too.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 17:59

Frankston: Jul 27, 2010

Manky posted:

The iPod photo.

Click here to view the full image

It was the first iPod to feature a color screen, and its only real selling point was the ability to sync your photos with your computer. (Though the idea of having cover art for music was personally more appealing.) Oddly, it was actually a distinct iPod line, like the mini or the nano. But it only saw one minor revision in its brief nine month lifespan before the line was killed.

The next summer it was made completely obsolete when Apple released the fifth generation iPods, colloquially known as the iPod video, now referred to as iPod classic.

But you know what? I love that weird little machine. It's eight years old, and last week I synced mine with my computer and set it up in the kitchen as a jukebox. The battery is down to about 30 minutes, but both the battery and the HDD are original, and I'm impressed they're operational. I'd say that's Nintendium level build quality.

This came out the week after I bought a mono 20gb iPod, so I returned that and got the Photo. Awesome thing, I used it for 5 years and took it all over the world with me. It's in my bedroom, but I have a new iPod now.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 17:59

treiz01: Jan 2, 2008; There is little that makes me happier than taking drugs. Perhaps administering them, designing and carrying out experiments that bend the plane of what we consider reality.

Toast Museum posted:

It's pretty easy if you're not big on streaming. I'm just shy of 4TB in audio and video files.

This. Recording video, especially with Fraps, takes a poo poo ton of HD space. gently caress, I've got 500GB of VODs from IPL5 to sift through so I can watch my favorite Starcraft matches.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 19:18

Groda: Mar 17, 2005; Hair Elf

DStecks posted:

I'm still using my sister's old Zen Stone (Creative's answer to the iPod Nano), and it's gotta be pushing 6 years old now, and it still works great.

I helped an aunt with a few of these things (she loved it, but never had to install or load it), and I honestly couldn't tell if it was defective or if the software was just catatonic.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 22:58

chizad: Jul 9, 2001; 'Cus we find ourselves in the same old mess
Singin' drunken lullabies

KozmoNaut posted:

Similarly, my mechanic still uses a bunch of T2x Thinkpads to run Peugeot Planet 2000 () for the same purpose. They're reliable and can take a beating. Perfect for mechanics.

My old job was in IT at a heavy construction/road building equipment & forklift dealership. When I left in May 2010, only one of the half-dozen or so manufacturers they represented even had native USB diagnostic cables, and I think they'd only been available for a year or so. Everyone else was still using serial cables. We ended up using them with USB to serial adapters because of the hardware requirements for the diagostic and manual/schematic lookup software. It was either that or give every technician a modern system to run the lookup tools and a separate old machine with serial to actually connect to the equipment with.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 23:39

Mister Kingdom: Dec 14, 2005; And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

DStecks posted:

I'm still using my sister's old Zen Stone (Creative's answer to the iPod Nano), and it's gotta be pushing 6 years old now, and it still works great.

I have one of those, too. Mine's about four years old and I use it everyday.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 23:52

Jibo: May 22, 2007; Bear Witness; College Slice

leidend posted:

To be fair, I still don't know how people manage to jam so much stuff on their drives. I've got 700GB of 1TB free right now.

I'm pretty sure that I said I would never fill every hard drive I've ever bought. Right now on my PC I have 1.2TB of music, pictures, and Steam games and on my DVR I have 1.2TB of recorded TV and Steam games.

But I do have like 300 Steam games.

# ? Dec 5, 2012 23:58

Killer robot: Sep 6, 2010; I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!; Pillbug

I never was foolish enough to think I would never fill a hard drive I bought, just that I'd be comfortable with it for a while. The first I had new was a 2.5GB though, and it sure felt big compared to the 360MB total storage I'd had before that. And it came on sale with a free 8MB SIMM! Enough to run a decent Windows 3.11 machine, though tight for Win95. I formatted it into five partitions, because cluster size efficiency in the FAT format was still a thing.

I do admit that I never imagined at the time how soon a CD would seem like such a tiny amount of data in such an inconvenient format.

# ? Dec 6, 2012 00:29

Mister Kingdom: Dec 14, 2005; And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

Bertrand Hustle posted:

My first desktop had a 2 GB hard drive. I was ridiculously proud of that. It was top of the line. Now I have a 2 TB external HDD sitting on my desk that probably cost me less than the 2 GB would have at the time.

I bought my first computer (Leading Edge Model D) in 1988. It had two 5.25" floppy drives because I couldn't afford the 10Mb HD at $500.

I built a 386 machine in 1992 and put in a 400Mb drive that cost about $300. I just ordered a 2TB drive for $99.

I've been ripping all of my DVDs and have tons of other video and have been waiting for terabyte drives to come down. I figure I'll need 8-10 TB to hold it all.

# ? Dec 6, 2012 00:42

Urban Space Cowboy: Feb 15, 2009; All these Coyote avatars...they make me nervous...like somebody's pulling a prank on the entire forum!

RC and Moon Pie posted:

When I was in elementary school, a few classrooms had a machine called a System 80.

They were outdated even then, as the school had purchased Commodore 64s a couple of years earlier.

The programs were on plastic punch cards that you you slid into the slot. From what I remember, the machine was insanely loud and because it was relying on young kids to slide a plastic punch card into a hole, it barely worked.

Ooh, I remember these from my elementary school in the early 1980s (except substitute Apple II's for C-64's). I also remember gingerly loading vinyl records (!!) into the tops of 'em. I'd think those records would appeal to the sorts of maniacs who collect flea-market records, but they seem to have evaporated. Dang.

# ? Dec 6, 2012 02:16

GWBBQ: Jan 2, 2005

Mister Kingdom posted:

I bought my first computer (Leading Edge Model D) in 1988. It had two 5.25" floppy drives because I couldn't afford the 10Mb HD at $500.

I built a 386 machine in 1992 and put in a 400Mb drive that cost about $300. I just ordered a 2TB drive for $99.

I've been ripping all of my DVDs and have tons of other video and have been waiting for terabyte drives to come down. I figure I'll need 8-10 TB to hold it all.

My dad was a computer guy, so all of ours were home-built. Our first computer was a 286 with a 40MB hard drive and an 8MHz processor. My first computer, which my uncle saved from the trash at work and gave to me, was a portable computer (weighed 30lb and was the size of a small suitcase) and only had a 20MB hard drive but had the much faster 10MHz processor, as well as an early monochrome LCD monitor with a whopping 400x300 pixels. It ran Commander Keen and Civilization like a champ, although it looked a lot better with an external monitor unless I was playing something like California Games that was designed for Monochrome.

# ? Dec 6, 2012 04:18

sleepy gary: Jan 11, 2006

Mister Kingdom posted:

I bought my first computer (Leading Edge Model D) in 1988. It had two 5.25" floppy drives because I couldn't afford the 10Mb HD at $500.

I have a Leading Edge Model D.

edit: Also two floppies and no HDD.

# ? Dec 6, 2012 18:34

SC Bracer: Aug 7, 2012; DEMAGLIO!

DStecks posted:

I'm still using my sister's old Zen Stone (Creative's answer to the iPod Nano), and it's gotta be pushing 6 years old now, and it still works great.

Yeah, I know it's from last page, but my first mp3 player was a first gen iPod Nano, and I thought it really cool that it had 2 WHOLE GB worth of space in it, which was way more than my friend's. It was durable as hell I remember, and all the weird accidents I'd had with it when I went jogging didn't much more than leave a couple of nasty scratches on the screen. I wish I could say the say about the 60GB video one though - I had to get mine replaced 4 or 5 times, since apparently running made the hard drive wonky or something.

Re: Hard drive talk, my mom bought herself a 300GB one costing about $100 to keep photos in, since our old PC had maybe 60GB worth of space in it, and it was on the verge of passing on after nine years of service.* Before I came to college, I bought a 1TB drive for about $80. The USB drive I got gifted in like 2007 cost my dad a good 50 bucks or so for about 512 MB (bear in mine that I don't live in the US, and electronics are kind of more expensive back home). I can get 16GB woorth of space now for about $10. Memory prices have fallen ridiculously fast.

*might be the only reason my younger brother might have ever seen a floppy drive, since we've only had laptops since.

# ? Dec 11, 2012 12:14

treiz01: Jan 2, 2008; There is little that makes me happier than taking drugs. Perhaps administering them, designing and carrying out experiments that bend the plane of what we consider reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHlRmKAPFt0
This crazy poo poo. I played one of these for years. It had a plethora of synth crap but I usually left it on plain piano. I bought it from another kid at school for $50 and it came with a Sega Genesis AC adapter! This was the best part of the whole keyboard though, I drove my mother crazy mashing the demo button over and over again.

# ? Dec 12, 2012 08:30

Code Jockey: Jan 24, 2006; 69420 basic bytes free

treiz01 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHlRmKAPFt0
This crazy poo poo. I played one of these for years. It had a plethora of synth crap but I usually left it on plain piano. I bought it from another kid at school for $50 and it came with a Sega Genesis AC adapter! This was the best part of the whole keyboard though, I drove my mother crazy mashing the demo button over and over again.

Ha! I had this exact same keyboard, and yep, drove the parents nuts with it. :v:

# ? Dec 12, 2012 08:32

Lowen SoDium: Jun 5, 2003; Highen Fiber; Clapping Larry

treiz01 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHlRmKAPFt0
This crazy poo poo. I played one of these for years. It had a plethora of synth crap but I usually left it on plain piano. I bought it from another kid at school for $50 and it came with a Sega Genesis AC adapter! This was the best part of the whole keyboard though, I drove my mother crazy mashing the demo button over and over again.

Us cool kids had the Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard, complete with real Pulse Code Modulation technology.

Lets face it, the first thing everyone does is record a sample of a fart sound and then play one of the demo songs using nothing but farts.

Lowen SoDium has a new favorite as of 16:27 on Dec 12, 2012

# ? Dec 12, 2012 14:21

TinTower: Apr 21, 2010; You don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.

I liked pressing the "DJ!" button on Yamaha keyboards. :shobon:

# ? Dec 12, 2012 15:26

EatMySpork: Nov 19, 2009; Utensil of the Gods.

Lowen SoDium posted:

Us cool kids had the Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard, complete with real Pulse Code Modulation technology.

Lets face it, the first thing everyone does is record a sample of a fart sound and then play one of the demo songs using nothing but farts.

I had one of these, that Lion sample is forever ingrained in my memory.

# ? Dec 12, 2012 17:27

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

A sysadmin found this at work. The Quadram MicroFazer Data Buffer. It's an external printer buffer that adds 64k memory, so that when printing, it can hopefully cache the entire document before printing. It probably worked fine, but it's so utterly obsolete. The intro in the manual is also pretty funny. On the last page I scanned, there are instructions on how you need to remove the case and fiddle with jumpers to configure it.

# ? Dec 12, 2012 18:56

LTBS: Oct 9, 2003; Big Pimpin, Spending the G's

I had the SK-1. I also had this game. We played the poo poo out of it when we got it. Larry Bird could hit threes all day.

# ? Dec 12, 2012 19:02

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Pilsner posted:

instructions on how you need to remove the case and fiddle with jumpers to configure it.

There was a time when you needed to do that with some soundcards in the ISA era, to set IRQ and DMA. Which was inconvenient.

Perhaps, if it wasn't mentioned before, I can suggest autoexec.bat and config.sys as obsolete technology?

I've spent hours of my life messing around with those to get things running. LOAD HIGH, SET BLASTER and poo poo. I'm glad the dream that was Plug 'n Play somewhat came true eventually.

# ? Dec 12, 2012 23:56

Killer robot: Sep 6, 2010; I was having the most wonderful dream. I think you were in it!; Pillbug

Flipperwaldt posted:

There was a time when you needed to do that with some soundcards in the ISA era, to set IRQ and DMA. Which was inconvenient.

Perhaps, if it wasn't mentioned before, I can suggest autoexec.bat and config.sys as obsolete technology?

I've spent hours of my life messing around with those to get things running. LOAD HIGH, SET BLASTER and poo poo. I'm glad the dream that was Plug 'n Play somewhat came true eventually.

Sound cards, network cards, modems, video cards, motherboards with big rows full of jumpers. Not to mention that all those boards and cards were stuffed full of row after row of components because circuit integration was much less mature than it is today. Want to set your CPU to 40MHz? Better hope you have the manual to figure out what that row of jumpers needs set to.

Then when they came out with jumperless components, people didn't trust them. :tinfoil:

Admittedly because they were sometimes kinda lovely. Likewise things like integrated IDE controllers, sound cards, or similar devil-machines.

Other obsolete configuration things: having to manually enter your hard drive properties in the BIOS. Cylinders, heads, and sectors, or even picking from a fixed list of presets for common drive sizes.

# ? Dec 13, 2012 05:13

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I tried setting my HDs to cable select once but I think my mobo didn't support it and I was crushed. Then SATA happened.

# ? Dec 13, 2012 05:51

Gehenomm: May 1, 2008; Ask me about hitting on mathematicians.

Killer robot posted:

Other obsolete configuration things: having to manually enter your hard drive properties in the BIOS. Cylinders, heads, and sectors, or even picking from a fixed list of presets for common drive sizes.

We used to have one of those lovely Commodore clone PCs, no jumpers or anything, but you needed to boot with a special floppy to configure the BIOS, save your config, then wait for an age for the new config to be written to who knows where in the motherboard.

# ? Dec 13, 2012 06:15

kastein: Aug 31, 2011; Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.

Inspector_71 posted:

I tried setting my HDs to cable select once but I think my mobo didn't support it and I was crushed. Then SATA happened.

I remember this... the motherboard probably supported it, you just needed to set both drives on that IDE cable to CS and use a cable that supported cable select, you could always tell because the connectors were different colors or there was a hole punched in one conductor (pin 20, I think?) that set things properly.

As for my favorite obsolete/failed technology... hard sectored floppy discs.

Basically in a floppy disc (5.25 and 8" at least, I believe they eliminated it for 3.5" discs) there's an index hole that is viewed by a sensor in the drive, it goes by once per rotation of the disc and indicates that the first 512 byte sector of data on that track is about to appear. Back in the Bad Old Days (CP/M in particular comes to mind) some computers required what were called hard-sectored floppy discs which had more than one index hole per disc. I have a Northstar Horizon I've been meaning to resurrect for curiosity sake that requires them - it wants 8 index holes per disc.

Oh, and that Northstar Horizon? Dual full-height 5.25" SS/SD (single sided, single density - 360k per disc!) floppy drives. Four CDROM drives worth of volume to access 720kb of data at a time.

The BIOS chip is 256 *bytes* - just enough to store code to read the actual BIOS and OS off the floppy. Which is why I can't easily resurrect the machine, I don't have that floppy, don't have hard sectored floppies and can't find a BIOS image for a 40 year old computer very easily.

It's got 64k of RAM on two S100 cards, though. Such a waste to not use it :haw:

# ? Dec 13, 2012 07:41

Sagebrush: Feb 26, 2012

kastein posted:

It's got 64k of RAM on two S100 cards, though.

Ought to be enough.

# ? Dec 13, 2012 07:47

El Estrago Bonito: Dec 17, 2010; Scout Finch Bitch

Manky posted:

The iPod photo.

Click here to view the full image

It was the first iPod to feature a color screen, and its only real selling point was the ability to sync your photos with your computer. (Though the idea of having cover art for music was personally more appealing.) Oddly, it was actually a distinct iPod line, like the mini or the nano. But it only saw one minor revision in its brief nine month lifespan before the line was killed.

The next summer it was made completely obsolete when Apple released the fifth generation iPods, colloquially known as the iPod video, now referred to as iPod classic.

But you know what? I love that weird little machine. It's eight years old, and last week I synced mine with my computer and set it up in the kitchen as a jukebox. The battery is down to about 30 minutes, but both the battery and the HDD are original, and I'm impressed they're operational. I'd say that's Nintendium level build quality.

This was actually much better than the small 5th gens. Basically the 30 gig 5th gen had an issue where the battery was too close to the hard drive, so the heat from the battery would slowly corrupt the drive over the course of about two years. Its why they have such bad skipping and pausing issues as well. The 60 and 80, and later the Classic got rid of this problem but those 30 gig 5ths were some real lovely ipods.

# ? Dec 13, 2012 08:06

kastein: Aug 31, 2011; Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.

Sagebrush posted:

Ought to be enough.

ought to be enough for 1/10th of anybody, that's for sure.

# ? Dec 13, 2012 08:08

Red Fructidor: Jan 8, 2004

This seems like it belongs in this thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSwqnR327fk

# ? Dec 14, 2012 01:40

kastein: Aug 31, 2011; Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.

Another AI poster just reminded me:

MCA and EISA expansion buses. Oh, and external L2/L3 cache modules.

# ? Dec 14, 2012 02:17

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO: Feb 28, 1985

quote:

external L2/L3 cache modules.

A friend bought a cheap PC Chips 486 motherboard back in the 90's, and the onboard cache ram was fake, empty, plastic "chips". The BIOS must have lied about them being present.

What happened to PC Chips?

# ? Dec 14, 2012 12:59

KozmoNaut: Apr 23, 2008; Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle

wipeout posted:

A friend bought a cheap PC Chips 486 motherboard back in the 90's, and the onboard cache ram was fake, empty, plastic "chips". The BIOS must have lied about them being present.

What happened to PC Chips?

They're still around: http://www.pcchipsusa.com

You won't be surprised to know that they've been involved in numerous incidents regarding bad capacitors blowing up.

# ? Dec 14, 2012 15:39

Ensign Expendable: Nov 11, 2008; Lager beer is proof that god loves us; Pillbug

kastein posted:

Another AI poster just reminded me:

MCA and EISA expansion buses. Oh, and external L2/L3 cache modules.

My Digital Computers professor insisted that L3 cache wasn't faster than RAM enough to be practical, and no one would ever use it.

# ? Dec 14, 2012 15:47

venus de lmao: Apr 30, 2007; Call me "pixeltits"

Flipperwaldt posted:

There was a time when you needed to do that with some soundcards in the ISA era, to set IRQ and DMA. Which was inconvenient.

There was also a time, not terribly long ago, when you had to fiddle with jumpers when installing hard drives, and building computers was a very fiddly business indeed.

My dad (who built our first PC, a 486, from mail-order parts when I was just a tot) was blown away when I put together my desktop and all I had to do, more or less, was hook up all the parts, plug everything in, and turn it on.

# ? Dec 14, 2012 15:57

kastein: Aug 31, 2011; Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.

Ensign Expendable posted:

My Digital Computers professor insisted that L3 cache wasn't faster than RAM enough to be practical, and no one would ever use it.

But but the itanium chips these days have up to 32MB of L3 cache per die... oh. :eng99:

I actually worked on itanium for 3 years at intel. really cool tech, if they had released on time and sold at a price people could afford, it would have been amazing.

# ? Dec 14, 2012 17:19

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# ? Apr 20, 2024 05:20

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Flipperwaldt posted:

There was a time when you needed to do that with some soundcards in the ISA era, to set IRQ and DMA. Which was inconvenient.

What baffled me most was just that you needed to actually remove the case to set jumpers, as it was an external device. These days you void warranties by doing that.

# ? Dec 15, 2012 00:07

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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