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Ron Burgundy posted:All this talk of the death of still photography film is a sad reminder that film is almost dead in cinemas too. I'm not sure of the exact amount, but the digital rollout is well over 50%, but 35mm film was the prime means of theatrical distribution for over a century. Let me present my hobby that is comprised of 100% obsolete technology. Everyone is gonna call me pathetic, but this almost made me cry. I remember going to the theatre as a kid, and sneaking peeks into the projector room, and it was like this amazing world of whirring machines and whizzing film going by at breakneck speeds. I was entirely entrance when that door opened, and several times tried to sneak in. I feel somehow cheated knowing that when I go to the theatre, it's just a bloody DVD they're playing for me on the projector. Hell, I have a goddamned DVD player. Motherfucker. The only thing is missing is the giant rear end everything. E: I didn't mean this to be newpage. I'm sorry for lame newpage.
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Oct 20, 2012 16:30
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I intended to volunteer for a very old theater in my previous city. They trained me on the projectors they had. 35mm affairs with carbon-arc lighting (loving cool). Two projectors were used for each movie, and a foot switch near the window would allow you to watch for the "cigarette burn" and stomp the switch to change to the next reel. It was really cool. I went in a few times but they had a bunch of projectionists already and I never got any shifts. It was fun to learn and operate that old stuff though.
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Oct 20, 2012 16:43
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DicktheCat posted:Everyone is gonna call me pathetic, but this almost made me cry. It's not a DVD, it's a fancy hard drive with hardware DRM. I don't think a DVD can get you the huge resolution you would need for a theatre.
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Oct 20, 2012 17:24
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mr. stefan posted:Not as much as someone might think. For frontline professional work, yeah, digital is pretty much all in charge, but fine art photographers still like film because the emulsion handles highlights and range differently than a digital sensor. Yeah, I should've specified. Artists are a weird bunch. Film is dead in the sense that it's only used in fine art these days. I forgot to take a picture of the old Kodak/Canon boat anchor, but as somebody said, it's this beast, the EOS DC3:  On a similar note, one of my coworkers made the score of the century yesterday: he had 15 minutes to kill between assignments, so he pulled in to an estate sale he drove by. He saw a nice name-brand camera bag, and he's been needing a new bag, so he decided to take a look at it. Opened it up, and sure enough it was full of old gear. A set of old manual-focus lenses -- Nikon 50mm f/1.8, 28 f/2.8, and a similarly awesome 105mm, all looking brand new. Then he got to the camera body itself, an F3/T. he didn't know how much it was worth, but he knew it was worth something, so he asked how much they wanted for it. "$40." He somehow kept himself from laughing. "Well,I really just wanted the bag..." "How about $20 for all of it?" "A'ight." When he got back to the office he searched eBay for it, and it's worth a bit more than that. Like, a couple orders of magnitude more. (Edit: he's keeping the lenses, and used the 50mm on his D700 to shoot an assignment in a bar with available light later that day.) DicktheCat posted:If you ever have too many, I will totally buy one off of you. I collect the damned things. A word of warning to any aspiring typewriter collectors: manual machines, unless completely rusted out, can be returned to running condition with a liberal dousing of WD-40, because the main problem is the grease drying out and clogging the mechanism. But don't buy a Selectric unless you can test it and it works perfectly -- when those break, they really break. I had a small Selectric II (the size of the blue original model pictured), and the little steel drivebelt that moves the ball broke. That really can't be fixed. Chillbro Baggins has a new favorite as of 17:42 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 17:32
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Delivery McGee posted:Nikon 50mm f/1.8, 28 f/2.8, and a similarly awesome 105mm, all looking brand new. Then he got to the camera body itself, an F3/T. he didn't know how much it was worth, but he knew it was worth something, so he asked how much they wanted for it. That is a hell of a deal, I paid like $200 for my F3HP. If that 105mm is a f/2.5 it is literally one of the best lenses Nikon has ever made. They are razor sharp even wide open. 8th-snype has a new favorite as of 17:41 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 17:39
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Dick Trauma posted:I was offsite for work yesterday at a building that is over 80 years old. I've been there plenty of times over the last year and a half but while taking a shortcut encountered some awesome (and obsolete) technology. I really want for this to make a comeback, if only to make an interesting way to order food in offices and apartments. Burritos via tube!
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Oct 20, 2012 17:40
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As people already stated. Pneumatic tube transport is far from dead. I'm a nursing student and use these pretty much daily at the hospital. Beats spending 15 minuters walking a blood test vial across the hospital. The system is fully automatic and you set the destination by turning 4 metal rings at the end of the tube. I love it. Sirveaux has a new favorite as of 17:51 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 17:48
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8th-samurai posted:If that 105mm is a f/2.5 it is literally one of the best lenses Nikon has ever made. I think it is. This was clearly the collection of a rich old dude who had more money than sense; the titanium F3 is so valuable nowadays because newspapers bought most of them and, well, newspaper photographers  .I wish my dad had been less frugal back in '76 -- he gave me his similarly mint, similarly top-end Olympus kit (OM-1, with one of the best 50mm f/1.8s ever made, 28mm f/3.5, 70-150mm zoom) but Olympus hasn't seen fit to make a DSLR that takes the old lenses like Nikon did.
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Oct 20, 2012 17:55
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DicktheCat posted:Everyone is gonna call me pathetic, but this almost made me cry. You could probably guess that I was once a projectionist. It was the job I always wanted to do and I did it for 5 years in my city's dingiest fleapit, but I could pretty much fix any problem we had with our 50 year old machines. Then we switched to digital. It was still a good job, but the romance was gone. Two of our other screens were still film so I stuck around a bit and learnt the digital system.(also the pay was poo poo and it was owned by my actually crazy distant uncle) The digital cinema files are delivered on a hard drive caddy and "ingested" into the movie server. Closer to the date of release, a digital key is delivered for the film which limits the starting and ending dates and times for the movie, also logging the number of showings. This is where the Digital cinema packages differ from any home video formats. The movie itself is in 2K (2048×1080) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution depending on the specs of the projector. The audio is 24bit wav format, every channel in a separate stream. The video is not a true video file but rather a series of packed JPEG2000 images which negates consumer video issues like key frames and motion artifacts.
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Oct 20, 2012 18:04
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Dick Trauma posted:Awesome Tubes Oh man, my local Home Depot had this great tube system complete with this crazy switching station on the roof that would route a big tube in the back to several tubes at all the cash registers. Employees would put checks and money in the tube and press a button, and a light would blink and it would get whisked away to the back office. They don't seem to use it anymore though, or maybe it's broken  As a kid I loved those drat things so much. I even asked the checker about them once and she let me fill one up with stuff and put it in the tube and press the button 
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Oct 20, 2012 19:17
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It's really cool to hear how pneumatic tube transport is alive and well. Other than bank drive thrus I thought it was long gone.
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Oct 20, 2012 19:22
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They're also used in drive thru pharmacies. I used to work at a pharmacy that had one and people used to do obnoxious poo poo like put a shopping list and a credit card in and expect the tube to spit out their shopping.
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Oct 20, 2012 19:27
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Sirveaux posted:As people already stated. Pneumatic tube transport is far from dead. I'm a nursing student and use these pretty much daily at the hospital. Beats spending 15 minuters walking a blood test vial across the hospital. Yep they have a very specific niche for things like that. I worked in a factory and pneumatic tubes were used for sending QA samples back and forth from the lab that was actually in another building entirely. Obviously you still see them at pharmacies and bank drive-through windows as well.
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Oct 20, 2012 19:46
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Delivery McGee posted:I think it is. This was clearly the collection of a rich old dude who had more money than sense; the titanium F3 is so valuable nowadays because newspapers bought most of them and, well, newspaper photographers If you shoot Canon you can get an adaptor for the Oly lenses.
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Oct 20, 2012 19:48
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Ensign Expendable posted:It's not a DVD, it's a fancy hard drive with hardware DRM. I don't think a DVD can get you the huge resolution you would need for a theatre. Pretty much. For all that I sympathize about big cool whirring machinery. Really "I have a DVD player at home" gets you no closer to the moviegoing experience now than "I have a Super 8 projector at home!" would in the old days. But to touch on dramatic machinery, let's visit something bigger and older than a 35mm projector and see what made the material for a lot of the big, heavy, old stuff in this thread: the Bessemer process. It's outside of the 70s-80s personal device core of this but there have been some other forays into the older and bigger stuff, and if you live in old steel country you're going to see remnants of the era, so here goes.   Steel is tricky: even leaving specific alloys out, it needs just a certain amount of carbon in the iron. Too much and you get pig iron which is brittle, similar to cast iron, and has limited applications on its own. Too little, and you have wrought iron, which is more useful but not as strong as even mild steel. Getting the right amount was hard, and for a long time this involved cooking bars of wrought iron and charcoal together in a furnace for weeks, leading to a fantastically expensive product just due to how much fuel it took to keep the furnace running that long and how slow the turnaround was. In the early industrial period, the more refined crucible process was invented with higher heat to work with molten iron. Production boomed, but it still took hours for a furnace to produce 30-500 pounds of steel. A Bessemer converter could make up to thirty tons of steel in ten or twenty minutes, and even the earliest models could produce steel at 80% less than its competition, sparking the widespread use of steel in rails, construction, and just about everything else. As for drama, it had plenty of that. As in the pictures above, a Bessemer converter is a big clay-lined pot mounted up on pivots. It would be tilted one way and filled up with molten pig iron, full of carbon and other impurity. Then high pressure air was pumped in through the bottom of the vessel, bubbling up through the iron: rather than cooling it, that just burned the impurities, generating more heat and purifying the iron into steel, with a huge plume of flame coming out the top. Watching the flames, or later on analyzing them with instruments, was how you could tell when the process was done. At that point, the air was shut off and the whole vessel tilted the other way to separately pour off the molten steel and the lighter slag, and the whole thing was ready to go. Typically steel mills would mount the converters in pairs: while one was doing the conversion, the other could be emptied and reloaded, for a continuous process. The Bessemer process had its limitations though. While quality was refined over time it was too quick and imprecise to allow for exact control of alloy contents, it wasn't very good with making steel from scrap or from iron made from ores with different impurity profiles, and once the technology was there to produce pure oxygen that worked much better than air. Some modern steel processes are derived from the Bessemer process, but the original type fell out of commercial use by the 1960s. But it turned steel into something cheap enough to use everywhere, with use of enormous steel furnaces and flashy plumes of fire.
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Oct 20, 2012 20:38
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Steampunk R2-d2
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Oct 20, 2012 20:49
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Used to see pneumatic tubes in Costco all the time. Not sure if they still use those, haven't been to Costco in a long time. I still see tubes pretty often at banks that have drive through tellers. Cool pieces of technology. Unfortunately, I've never gotten to mess with a system myself. One day, perhaps...
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Oct 21, 2012 03:35
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You still see the pneumatic tubes for business that handle a lot of cash and need a way to transport it to a secure room in the building. I have seen a canister come apart and the pump shred a serious amount of $50 notes to confetti.
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Oct 21, 2012 04:45
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redmercer posted:I really want for this to make a comeback, if only to make an interesting way to order food in offices and apartments. Burritos via tube! Sounds like you haven't heard of the Alameda-Weehauken Burrito Tunnel! quote:The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like what it is: an enormous gun. Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere... Excellent little essay. http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
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Oct 21, 2012 05:15
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Taeke posted:I always dreamed of creating a system like that around the house, preferably in legos. There was an episode of Monster House where they did exactly that.
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Oct 21, 2012 15:23
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Dick Trauma posted:EDIT: I looked up the name on the door and found Grover Brothers and Wood Company, founded in Detroit in 1915. If you can believe it the company still exists and still makes PTT, but now they're called TransLogic.
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Oct 21, 2012 18:08
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What about these anti-radiation screen things for monitors? I remember seeing these as a kid in the early 90's. My parents were even thinking about getting one, because I was getting bad eyesight and they accused the computer monitor as the biggest culprit. I have no idea if they were ever actually useful but I would imagine they became completely obsolete with the onset of LCD screens. And also these CDs with brushes for lens cleaning:  These ones still may be a thing even, I see them being sold online.
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Oct 21, 2012 21:16
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Here's an interesting camera I was given a couple of years ago. It's a Half Frame SLR. It fits two pictures on each 35mm frame - the late 80s equivalent of running your 12mp camera in 6mp mode so you can fit more on the memory card.  You hold it like a video camera, because the film has to travel vertically. It's actually very comfortable to use, although being fully automatic with no manual mode (it has no manual adjustments at all, except flash on/off) it's a bit boring. The flash doesn't work and I'm sure there's some fault with the shutter too but I got some reasonable photos out of it. 72 pictures on a roll!
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Oct 21, 2012 21:32
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I'm at a brand new hospital and we use pneumatic tubes, for lab samples and pharmacy deliveries. Probably some other stuff too, since it's easier then walking up two floors to drop something off. You input the ID for the station you want on a keypad and hit the send button.
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Oct 23, 2012 22:11
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Horace posted:Here's an interesting camera I was given a couple of years ago. It's a Half Frame SLR. It fits two pictures on each 35mm frame - the late 80s equivalent of running your 12mp camera in 6mp mode so you can fit more on the memory card.  Half-Frame cameras are actually quite older than that, the most famous examples being the original Olympus Pen series of cameras back in the 60's. They became somewhat less popular after the introduction of cameras like the Rollei 35 that used devious mechanical wizardry to cram full-frame camera measurements in a tiny pocketable camera, but they never really died out, mainly because they used 35mm film that was easily available instead of some bizarre specialty format like APS.Fun fact: The Olympus Pen series was resurrected recently as a part of the micro-4/3rds system, which uses a digital sensor exactly one half the size of a 35mm film frame, as opposed to the full frame/APS-C sizes of modern dSLRs or the tiny shite formats of point-and-shoots.
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Oct 23, 2012 22:32
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Coolnezzz posted:Does vaporware count? Who else remembers the complete idiocy that was the Phantom. This was a fairly early attempt at a Steam style content delivery system, unfortunately it was an utter failure, and during it's "development" there was many a laugh had by all. A good number of years ago I actually got to play one at CES (2006? 2005?). The guy presenting it seemed really disinterested in it and when it stopped working he just said "Oh well". The keyboard was weird because it was at an angle with the mouse underneath it.
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Oct 24, 2012 01:36
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TUBALLINATOR posted:What about these anti-radiation screen things for monitors? Those are seeing a resurgence in doctor's offices, because some models can make it impossible for people to read the screen unless you're sitting right in front of it.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:08
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Kwyndig posted:Those are seeing a resurgence in doctor's offices, because some models can make it impossible for people to read the screen unless you're sitting right in front of it. I see those in libraries a lot, and once in a mobile phone store where the employees' kiosks were in the middle of the sales floor. It's a great way to maintain privacy and sensitive information.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:10
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RunFish posted:A good number of years ago I actually got to play one at CES (2006? 2005?). The guy presenting it seemed really disinterested in it and when it stopped working he just said "Oh well". My sister worked at Infinium and it was a huge clustetfuck. I'll see if i can get her to write up some horror stories.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:38
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I thought that the Phantom was basically one giant scam? Like, the "corporation" behind it was just a rented room in a strip mall.RunFish posted:The keyboard was weird because it was at an angle with the mouse underneath it. The idea was that you could rest it in your lap so you could play PC games on the couch like a console, never mind what an ergonomic nightmare it must be. Now we just have the rad Xbox 360 controller supported by just about every PC title under the sun so it would be even more useless.
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Oct 24, 2012 02:50
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Kwyndig posted:Those are seeing a resurgence in doctor's offices, because some models can make it impossible for people to read the screen unless you're sitting right in front of it. I thought that they were intended as privacy screens. Am I thinking of some other dumb monitor hanger?
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Oct 24, 2012 03:02
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Zenostein posted:I thought that they were intended as privacy screens. Am I thinking of some other dumb monitor hanger? I think they also reduced glare, because CRTs could be annoyingly bright at times.
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Oct 24, 2012 03:12
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Rhyno posted:My sister worked at Infinium and it was a huge clustetfuck. I'll see if i can get her to write up some horror stories. Please do, I think I speak for a lot of us when I say that we want every wretched plastic bread detail of everything possible with that project.
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Oct 24, 2012 03:14
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SpruceZeus posted:Used to see pneumatic tubes in Costco all the time. Not sure if they still use those, haven't been to Costco in a long time. I still see tubes pretty often at banks that have drive through tellers. Cool pieces of technology. Unfortunately, I've never gotten to mess with a system myself. One day, perhaps...
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Oct 24, 2012 04:24
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 Posting this right now from this motherfucker pictured here. The HP Pavilion ze5500. Originally a benchmark tester for my roommate's dad when he worked for HP, "Methusala" here is now my fave older machine I own. This is basically my "desktop replacement." It has a great, solid keyboard, a touchpad that's still responsive (though I prefer a mouse), awesome sound, a bright, unmarred screen, and it can still run video games with a little love. I run Puppy Linux on it with WINE, and it's nicer to write/research on than my netbook or my roommate's fancy, modern desktop. I love this monstrosity. HP didn't do a lot right in the late '90s and early '00s, but I like this laptop a lot. Specifications: Processor // Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor 2.66 Memory // 448 MB Video // ATi Mobility Radeon IGP 345M, 64MB Shared memory. Hard Drive // Fujitsu MHT2060A ATA 60GB Wireless // Broadcom BCM4306 802.11 b/g Sound // Sound Blaster Pro-compatible 16-bit Display // 13.3 inch XGA TFT (1024x769) While not the coolest, this was pretty good for 2003! Considering the rate of obsolescence in technology is mind-boggling. Treguna Mekoides has a new favorite as of 04:51 on Oct 24, 2012 |
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Oct 24, 2012 04:44
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Finally took some pictures of the tubes:  Love it. Only time I actually have to get the test to the lab myself is lactic acid tests. But then I get to use this bad boy:  ...anyway plese resume your discussion about actual obsolete technology.
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Oct 26, 2012 17:07
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How does changing the 4-ring combination physically affect how the tube is routed? E: Or does it go to a central location, from where it's manually routed?
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Oct 26, 2012 19:22
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I believe they end up in some central location in each building and then automagically routed to the right building. It's not done manually at least.
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Oct 27, 2012 00:40
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Sirveaux posted:I believe they end up in some central location in each building and then automagically routed to the right building. Come on, have none of you played Grim Fandango? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceye5gJKX3U It all goes into a giant tube room core and a robotic gun reroutes them. DUH.
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Oct 27, 2012 01:41
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Ron Burgundy posted:I think they also reduced glare, because CRTs could be annoyingly bright at times. That's not to mention all the really goofy claims, like "it redirects the magnetic field away from your eyes".
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Oct 27, 2012 11:50
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