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landofcake posted:To me, Ceefax was always an indicator of "you've been drinking for too long and it's time to go to bed". Ceefax was something I could put on because I was having bother sleeping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NUesc8pXj4 RIP Ceefax 
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Jul 29, 2013 17:26
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onoflalks posted:Ceefax was something I could put on because I was having bother sleeping This is the coolest drat thing  It's like some retro-60's-era idea of what information delivery would be like in the future. I'm imagining one of these things: with the guts ripped out and replaced with Ceefax.
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Jul 29, 2013 17:35
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Monkey Fracas posted:This is the coolest drat thing Yellow E.T. with a boner.
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Jul 29, 2013 17:56
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Do they still make these goddamn things? Wow, I didn't realize these were ever a commercial product. I downloaded one for numeric keypads a few years ago that you stick on with double-sided tape:  http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2350 (that one's not mine, I would never try to photograph a keyboard that actually gets used  )
Snackmar has a new favorite as of 19:36 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 19:11
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DNova posted:Yellow E.T. with a boner. That's a Computer Space cabinet, you loving philistine. As for Ceefax, it ceased operation only when the last UK analogue signal was switched off nine months ago, a month after its 38th birthday.
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Jul 29, 2013 19:20
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Ron Burgundy posted:I'm going off a vague memory here but wasn't the Genesis control port RS-232 serial. Inspector_71 posted:The MBTA (I would probably argue Boston as a whole) is obsolete and antiquated. MadScientistWorking has a new favorite as of 21:00 on Jul 29, 2013 |
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Jul 29, 2013 20:52
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techknight posted:Wow, I didn't realize these were ever a commercial product. I downloaded one for numeric keypads a few years ago that you stick on with double-sided tape: Are you an early adopter of 3D printing...?
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Jul 29, 2013 20:59
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Geoj posted:Are you an early adopter of 3D printing...? Early adopter of home 3D printing, at least - I built MakerBot #169 but the specific process it uses (FDM) has been around since the mid-1980s! It still runs quite well for what it is, but against modern home 3D printers (ie ones not made from laser-cut balsa wood) it's incredibly obsolete: 
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Jul 29, 2013 21:26
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So - aside from my old home 3D printer, the reason I read through the entire thread was so that I could post my favourite obsolete bit of kit: The Kodak DC25! It was the first early digital camera to be somewhat afforable, as far as I know, and I got mine from Compucentre at the Woodbine mall for maybe $349 back in October 1997. There was an LCD screen on the back to look at the photos you'd taken, but it ate through those li-ion CR123A batteries if you did. (You had to look through the viewfinder to take a picture, rather than the screen.) The resolution was an incredible 493x373 aka 0.18 megapixel, and I still have all of the photos that I took during the following few years. Here are some unresized shots from around Toronto in 1997/1998:  Osgoode Station  The skies near Humber College north campus in Rexdale  College Park building at Yonge/College  The Spadina Station moving sidewalk (RIP)  Toronto Street Festival 1998 (notice the old version of the Eaton Centre)  City Hall at night If there's interest, I could post more. Snackmar has a new favorite as of 19:06 on Aug 1, 2013 |
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Aug 1, 2013 19:01
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techknight posted:If there's interest, I could post more. Please do! This era of stuff isn't really in style when it comes to retro fetishism ('soft grunge' or whateverthehell is markedly more early computers than early photography) so I don't really see much of it, but I really love it.
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Aug 1, 2013 19:30
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Wow, those are awful pictures. It's hard to imaging spending $350 for something like that! An obsolete camera: The PureDigital Dakota Digital Single-Use Camera. Since disposable film cameras were so popular, why not a disposable digital one?  They came out in 2003 and cost $10.99 each. They could hold 25 exposures in memory, and then the user was supposed to return them to the store for prints. However, people figured out how to hack them so that they could download the pictures onto their computers for free, and many bought them with the intention of getting a cheap, hacked digital camera.
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Aug 1, 2013 19:41
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Brother Jonathan posted:Wow, those are awful pictures. It's hard to imaging spending $350 for something like that! The quality is poo poo, but the main thing was being able to take and re-take as many photos as I liked without incurring any film/developing costs. It was a really freeing feeling back then! I also got a first-gen Casio Wristcam in late 2000:  It took photos at only 120x120 resolution (and not even in colour), but it was fun for little portraits and animated gifs.                Brother Jonathan posted:They came out in 2003 and cost $10.99 each. They could hold 25 exposures in memory, and then the user was supposed to return them to the store for prints. However, people figured out how to hack them so that they could download the pictures onto their computers for free, and many bought them with the intention of getting a cheap, hacked digital camera. I remember those! I couldn't find any in Canada, unfortunately.
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Aug 1, 2013 20:08
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Weirdly those pictures seem way more acceptable than the bigger, higher resolution color ones to me. Knowing that they were taken by a watch maybe does it? It kind of reminds me of the Gameboy Camera. I saved up and bought one, I have no idea what I thought I was going to do with it. The question was moot anyway because the day I bought it I also had a bunch of friends stay over including the kind of edge-of-group guy I didn't really like but he was around when I was inviting everyone else, and he stole it that night after I took a couple of lovely pictures and played an awful game with my friends' faces on it a couple times. I guess it could have been one of my actual friends but he was known for stealing stuff and since the thing was so useless I can't imagine a friend taking it.
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Aug 1, 2013 20:15
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That's all the inspiration I need to charge up the Sony CD Mavica someone gave me a few years ago. I even have a whole spindle of CDs for it.
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Aug 1, 2013 21:54
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Good grief, I feel like I'm watching the intro to The Wedge.
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Aug 1, 2013 22:22
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I'm tempted to steal this as a new avatar. Glorious!
Varance has a new favorite as of 23:24 on Aug 1, 2013 |
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Aug 1, 2013 23:21
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techknight posted:The quality is poo poo, but the main thing was being able to take and re-take as many photos as I liked without incurring any film/developing costs. It was a really freeing feeling back then! I almost got one of these for Christmas one year but my dad was (is) pretty computer illiterate. When he ordered it, the ship to address field was defaulted to Antigua for the country. So the sell supposedly shipped it to Kentucky Antiqua.
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Aug 2, 2013 13:17
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:Forever and always my favorite keyboard... I feel dumb for asking this but what makes this so special?
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Aug 3, 2013 16:19
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Doesn't it have a USB port on the side? I hate that it isn't a feature on a lot of USB keyboards.
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Aug 3, 2013 16:23
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MageMage posted:I feel dumb for asking this but what makes this so special? Its just a really nice keyboard. Its drat near indestructible, the keys have a really solid, smooth feel to them and it looks super cool. It also has 2 usb's on it but they're only V.1 slow ports. Perfectly good for a mouse though. My last one died to drink spillage and I went with a nice saitek backlit keyboard when I saw that the used apple pros were commanding unreasonable prices.
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Aug 3, 2013 17:07
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I have used those keyboards extensively and I personally found them to be mushy poo poo.
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Aug 3, 2013 17:13
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DNova posted:I have used those keyboards extensively and I personally found them to be mushy poo poo. Some people really like mushy keyboards  Of course they are wrong in the head.I love how some people say they don't use clicky keyboards because their colleagues complain about the noise. That's like working in a library and complaining about all the books. VVVV Ppffffft you're just pussies I bet you don't even use dot matrix printers. 3D Megadoodoo has a new favorite as of 18:35 on Aug 3, 2013 |
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Aug 3, 2013 18:14
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There are nice keyboards that don't clack like the battle keyboards of the 70s and 80s.
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Aug 3, 2013 18:18
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That Mx Cherry button (I think, I forget what colour my mate actually has) mechanical keyboards are annoying as hell. "Let's replicate the sound of typing on an old-fashioned typewriter " Typewriters are cool, keyboards being as loud as one because  mechanical keyboards are not.
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Aug 3, 2013 18:23
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Croccers posted:That Mx Cherry button (I think, I forget what colour my mate actually has) mechanical keyboards are annoying as hell. "Let's replicate the sound of typing on an old-fashioned typewriter It's not a real keyboard unless the Enter key is attached to a carriage-return bell. 
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Aug 3, 2013 18:39
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You want to talk old and obsolete keyboards? God drat do I love this thing, most underrated keyboard of all time if you ask me. Wonderful action, and the keys had an echo as you used them I had a 512k as my first computer when I was little, as part of my parent's mission to turn me into a good. I loved loved loved it. 100's of painting in macpaint pritned out on a dot-matrix printer. I miss the old thing, and as stupid as it sounds I might take it out of storage to write on again like a more modern, amateurish equivalent of eccentric authors who use typewriters still.
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Aug 3, 2013 20:19
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techknight posted:It took photos at only 120x120 resolution (and not even in colour), but it was fun for little portraits and animated gifs.
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Aug 3, 2013 20:56
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Croccers posted:That Mx Cherry button (I think, I forget what colour my mate actually has) mechanical keyboards are annoying as hell. "Let's replicate the sound of typing on an old-fashioned typewriter Cherry blue switches are the clicky ones but they make other varieties that have a nice feel and don't make that tik-tik-tik sound. Although, even the clicky ones are a lot quieter than those old IBM model F and model M keyboards from the 80s. Those are the ones that make the loud CLACK-CLACK-CLACK sound as you type. There is a company that still makes modernized versions of these with USB connectors and the extra windows and menu keys. Membrane keyboards suck and feel horrible when you are used to proper key switches. The current trend towards those awful full-size laptop style keyboards is even worse. Technology now is better overall than what we had before, but the quality of your average keyboard actually regressed.
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Aug 3, 2013 22:48
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Croccers posted:That Mx Cherry button (I think, I forget what colour my mate actually has) mechanical keyboards are annoying as hell. "Let's replicate the sound of typing on an old-fashioned typewriter The_Franz posted:
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Aug 3, 2013 23:02
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Pilsner posted:So agreed. gently caress modern laptop keyboards in particular, because you can't just swap them out as with a stationary. There's plenty of room, yet they continue to make them worse. I read an article about Lenovo's new keyboard layout recently, and their argument was basically that they wanted the keyboard to look more "modern". Nothing about usability. Fuckers. Actually they claimed to have done a bunch of usability testing on the new design: http://blog.lenovo.com/products/why-you-should-give-in-to-the-new-thinkpad-keyboard Whether you believe it or not is a different matter
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Aug 4, 2013 00:32
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This showed up on Hackaday and I thought it was pretty neat. An antique completely-mechanical birdsong generator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_aGnoJluRc I guess the bellows pumps air through a whistle thing that gets modulated by some cams. It's all spring-driven. Nifty. Mount it in a top hat, now you're a steampunk birdkeeper! 
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Aug 7, 2013 15:02
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Terminal chat reminded me, I bought one of these for a few dollars at a Goodwill a few years ago: It's not a tablet, it's a thin client that runs your XP desktop over wifi. I got it partially working -- it used 802.11a, and my router really only worked in 802.11g/n. Even when it did hold a connection and was able to log in, it didn't have the battery or the stand that turned it into a regular monitor, so it was pretty useless.
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Aug 10, 2013 14:12
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Croccers posted:That Mx Cherry button (I think, I forget what colour my mate actually has) mechanical keyboards are annoying as hell. "Let's replicate the sound of typing on an old-fashioned typewriter Just wait until you type on a mechanical keyboard- you'll never want to go back. Chiclet keys can go die, they're so much worse than even regular membrane keys.
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Aug 10, 2013 15:01
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Sunshine89 posted:Just wait until you type on a mechanical keyboard- you'll never want to go back. One of my friends was just saying this to me but I just don't understand what could possibly be so much better.
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Aug 10, 2013 15:17
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Mr. Mallory posted:One of my friends was just saying this to me but I just don't understand what could possibly be so much better. Have you ever fired a gun in anger? It's like that. With every letter you type.
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Aug 10, 2013 15:24
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Sunshine89 posted:Chiclet keys can go die, they're so much worse than even regular membrane keys. You can pry them from my cold, quietly typing hands.
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Aug 10, 2013 17:56
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Mr. Mallory posted:One of my friends was just saying this to me but I just don't understand what could possibly be so much better. You know the satisfying feeling of popping bubblewrap, clicking a gum tin/box open and closed all the time or the sound of bricks clinking together? Add them together and you have what a mechanical keyboard feels like with every keystroke.
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Aug 10, 2013 21:33
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The best example would be old style American Arcade Buttons. They use the same type of Cherry switches most mechanical keyboards do. That really satisfying click that accompanies hadoukening a dude can now be how you type everything. Also you mistype a lot less since it's pretty hard to apply the amount of force required to depress a button on accident.
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Aug 10, 2013 23:52
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The PS/2 adaptor and missing keys for my 1989 Model M rocked up a couple of weeks ago. I will never again use anything else.
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Aug 10, 2013 23:58
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Ron Burgundy posted:The PS/2 adaptor and missing keys for my 1989 Model M rocked up a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately it can last indefinately due to Unicomp (the people who bought the rights for the Model M from IBM) still offering repair services (along with new keyboards). http://pckeyboard.com/page/category/Repair
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Aug 11, 2013 00:38
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