Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Sagebrush posted:

I loved that book.

Also, this was a pretty excellent parody of it:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/694245.The_Way_Things_Really_Work

Explains things like how Chinese restaurants get those hot towels so drat hot (they are placed into the pressurized core of a miniaturized tokamak that primarily heats towels, with the waste heat used for cooking) or how toasters always either just singe or incinerate the toast (the first push of the lever actually diverts most of the power to an enormous capacitor that is triggered on the second push).

I know this is a year and a half later, but that book pissed me off as a kid because I found it in the nonfiction section of the local library, so I assumed it was nonfiction. And I got REALLY mad when I found out. I trusted you, local library. I TRUSTED YOU!

I'm still a little ornery about it actually...

# ¿ May 16, 2014 23:51

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:30

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

A while back, people were complaining about WAP. I'm going to bring that back, sort of. WAP was awful. Not as powerful as HTTP+HTML, and far harder to work with than another technology that belongs here: Gopher.

Back in 1990-1991, University of Minnesota was setting up a Campus-Wide Information System. Now, very early work on the World Wide Web did exist at the time, but it was very much an experimental project at the time - if memory serves, NeXT was the only platform that had a reasonably functional web browser. This wouldn't do, their system needed to be accessible from, and even hostable on, everything from big iron to the tiny lovely DOS machines that ruled the desktop world. Gopher was the result: a simple protocol that had a simple menu format and file transfer capability. It didn't have fancy markup, just menus and plain text. And it worked.

Here's an example of two Gopher menus, in Lynx:

Notice something? They both look basically the same, and neither has a bunch of crappy clutter. That's because all that color and formatting is client side: all the server is sending is a basic menu.

Of course, that's also the reason it pretty much lost to HTTP+HTML, most likely: little room for branding or flashy gifs everywhere. Still, it was and remains an absolute breeze to work with and would have been perfect for early handsets.

If you want to mess with it without installing anything, there's a proxy run by the same guy as the menu in the first screenshot.. There's also an "Overbite" extension to add native support back to Firefox and Seamonkey, if you like.

Keiya has a new favorite as of 09:56 on May 19, 2014

# ¿ May 19, 2014 09:50

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

HyTelnet did indeed exist, but it wouldn't have been nearly as suited for mobile phone use. It was heavily oriented towards accessing telnet services, which would be absolute hell on T9.

# ¿ May 19, 2014 13:58

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

atomicthumbs posted:

The telnet catalog at my county library still worked the last time I connected to it, and it was faster to use than the web one!

Mine was faster, easier, and shut down in 2003. :eng99:

# ¿ May 20, 2014 00:40

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

cowtown posted:

In case you're still using Gopher, and you need to use a proxy to access it, Mac OS X 10.9 has you covered:

I'm not surprised, the current web browser with the best built-in Gopher support (not counting Lynx, which will probably keep being maintained until the sun runs out) is Omniweb for OS X. They implemented it as an April Fools joke, and just kept it because it's so easy to maintain. Of course, Mozilla doesn't think so; they removed their default implementation because of a bug in Safari's handling of URLs. Meh, the Overbite extension has nicer handling anyway.

# ¿ May 20, 2014 07:29

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

My cassete player doesn't really work anymore. It's decided to not play unless I physically hold down the button.

RIP or something, I guess. Except you won't, because the radio and CD player you're bolted to still work fine.

# ¿ May 27, 2014 04:08

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

When I was a kid I thought Bonzi Buddy was the coolest thing. But he couldn't quite do everything I wanted, so I started hacking together my own thing in vbscript. Which probably also belongs in this thread, come to think of it...

Oh, and there's one good game on Ouya now! (Because they promised it during the kickstarter, before the thing came out...)

# ¿ May 31, 2014 15:16

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

To be fair, some of those older ones are actually far better. At my local high school, they still pull out an old filmstrip for cellular biology, because it covers te basics in a much clearer method than anything newer. It'd be nice if copyright law would explicitly allow format-shifting though.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2014 01:08

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

leidend posted:

My dad has hated Bill Gates for as long as I can remember and I've never quite understood why. He's an OG "worked on the huge 1960s computers" type, doesn't seem particularly fond of Apple either. He recently bought a new PC and was complaining about it on Facebook, longing for the days of DOS.

In that case, he probably is pining for the pre-commercialization days. Understandable.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2014 11:25

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Phanatic posted:

My friend had an SX-64:

Let me tell you that the C64's video output was sharp as hell when it was being shown on a 5" CRT. I remember playing Gunship on it.

That is one SXy machine.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2014 23:13

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

... HCF is a known enough thing for AMC to name a series after it?

# ¿ Jun 13, 2014 14:40

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

My old elementary school was still using Apple IIs through 99-2000. They'd been relegated to the keyboarding classes, but they were still working for that so why replace them? And the lack of access to the school network and the internet was probably considered a benefit, not a downside.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2014 14:50

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Man, NET SEND was the best thing. Stupid rear end in a top hat spammers using it getting it removed from default installs...

# ¿ Jun 13, 2014 20:57

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

How is that surprising at all? They had a need for things like a nice, friendly installer, they wrote it, and they offered it upstream if upstream wanted it. That's how basically everything gets done.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2014 00:29

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

... QuickBASIC had proper timing tools...

# ¿ Jun 17, 2014 01:20

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Caedus posted:

Also I think it might be in my genetic code as a Canadian to defend robertson screws from blasphemy, sorry.

Robertson screws are fine in theory, absolutely useless in practice, because the guy refused to let anyone make or use the drat things.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2014 03:33

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

I mean, have you never used a desktop computer? It's not like we've never dealt with that before...

# ¿ Jun 20, 2014 17:25

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

p-hop posted:

The cartridges are about the same dimensions as a video game cartridge.

That... is one of the most meaningless statements I've read all day. I mean, somewhere in the range of GBA carts to NeoGeo carts?

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 07:33

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Lowen SoDium posted:

[GFWL-using] Shadowrun

Oh god that game. That does not deserve the title.

... though, maybe someone needs to hire some runners to get the server side part of some of these DRM schemes. That would certainly fix a lot of our problems.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2014 19:14

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Kammat posted:

Trying to keep mailings formatted so they display cleanly in a majority of mail clients is an ongoing nightmare here. How many ways are there to display one mailing given one simple page of HTML + CSS?

_{Way, way too many}

Just stop using HTML and it'll display cleanly in every mail client.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 01:57

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Albums are great. So are singles. The problem is trying to force all music to conform to one model, because some stuff is better as an album and other stuff just wants to be singles.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2014 21:15

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

CD keys probably are the best we've come up with in terms of ease of use. And they're effective enough to prevent casual 'hey man just install it off my disks' piracy, especially in multiplayer games that will refuse to work if multiple players try to use the same one - what's the point if you can't play with your friends?

# ¿ Jul 26, 2014 01:03

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Platystemon posted:

¹¹³Cd has a half‐life of 7.7�10¹⁵ years. For comparison, ²³⁸U, used in orange Fiestaware, has a half‐life more than one million times shorter

Wait, it decays before it's formed? That's a major breakthrough!

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 08:31

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

It's not really obsolete technology, but we found a nearly 200-year-old bible cleaning out my grandmother's house. That's kinda cool, right? (No photos because holy poo poo none of us want to touch it now that we know what it is)

# ¿ Sep 7, 2014 23:49

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

It's going, in the immediate at least, with the rest of the documents and photos to the genealogy people in the family.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2014 15:23

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

There already is one, but people are too drat stupid to generate a PGP keypair.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 22:19

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

ReidRansom posted:

Thus failing the widespread test. Basically it would have to be enabled by default and difficult to accidentally turn off if you expect people to use it.

I wasn't aware fax machines didn't have to be set up, you didn't have to make sure your building was wired with multiple phone lines correctly, etc.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 23:33

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Drone_Fragger posted:

Re: Fax machines:

they're still used a lot because iirc a contract that is signed via fax is still legally binding since they're quite difficult to intercept and spoof and the like. If you send a document via email or whatever you can't physically sign it in such a way it can't be altered at a later date so a lot of companies won't use email for sending contracts to make sure that it doesn't come back to haunt them later when some asshat contractor slips in a "you owe us a million quid, cheers gov" clause in it.

That's a pretty much solved problem, sign it with your PGP key (or an x.whatevernumber certificate, it's all the same idea) and then it's pretty much impossible to modify without access to your private keys.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 01:30

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

I wonder if there's an adapter that lets you use gamecube controllers or something. though I guess that does mean you wouldn't be able to chord C buttons...

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 18:19

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Ultimate Mango posted:

Best part about it was the original, OG original Adventure game. Find the jar. Get some mud. Climb the tree to see the message. Chop down the tree. Then descend into one motherfucking challenging maze cave of trying not to die. It was awesome.

That was on the PDP-10.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2014 21:16

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Pham Nuwen posted:

Maybe the absolute original Adventure, but it was on pretty much every other system before too long.

The PDP-10 was a pretty kickass system too. If you use Linux and have ever wondered why Emacs keybindings are just a bit different than other Unix tools, or why RMS seems to love Info so much instead of man pages, check out ITS. That's the pre-Unix OS he used on a PDP-10 and, like many things about RMS, has maintained a rose-tinted view of throughout the years.

That's also true, yes.

As for info... I get why he likes info over man pages (it's much better for the long-form documentation he prefers) but I wish that they'd do reference pages for man, too, because sometimes you just need to look up a single switch or something.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2014 00:36

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Gromit posted:

You just reminded me that the very first international flight I remember as a child had those headphones that were just hollow tubes, like these here.

I distinctly remember them being truly painful to wear.

Those aren't obsolete. Well, those are, but the mechanism isn't. It's possible to do with no metal, so it's used for things like patient headsets in MRI machines.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 08:13

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Baconroll posted:

Amazingly the thieves were caught and at trial their defence was that we'd contracted them in to repair the memory and thats why the Pcs were opened like that. Needless to say our IT manager didn't agree with the story when giving evidence.

... You have to hand it to them, that takes some serious balls.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2014 03:02

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

About the only things better than paper is carving it into rocks

# ¿ Nov 27, 2014 23:18

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Honestly USB is a mess, but the reasons it's a mess are mostly also its strengths, like the fact that anything can use it (devices can spoof other devices) and how things are plug and play (you don't notice 'bad' devices)

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 05:42

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Computer viking posted:

It deserves more than a short phone post, but in short: It was written specifically for good multimedia and desktop performance, and it's a fairly clean and modern design that delivered nicely on that. The API is also a nice clean C++ affair that forces you to write the GUI in a different thread than the rest, which helps it feel responsive even under load.

It's still being used for writing control systems for radio playlists/announcements/etc , since it both performs well and is easy to write for - and you can sell it as a package with supported hardware.

Also, the UI. God why has no one cloned the way it let you tab windows together? The only thing that has done so is Haiku (which admittedly improved it by adding automatic handling rather than forcing the user to manage it directly)

# ¿ May 16, 2015 19:13

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Capn Jobe posted:

Brilliant post, SubG. I love old calculators; I have a sizeable collection of random old units that I kept in my old office (sadly they now live in boxes as I have nowhere else to keep them).

One that I've always wanted is a HP 12C. They still make them, but they're too expensive for me to justify buying as just a novelty. The best bit of trivia about these is that in the 80s when they switched to an integrated circuit, they figured that users would be less likely to trust an answer that was given without delay. So they always under-clocked the processors so they'd have just a bit of delay.

My mom still has a 12C. Never uses it, gets mad if I so much as move it while trying to find something else in that drawer.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 23:45

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Zaphod42 posted:

The only people who made any "legit" money on bitcoin were those who got in early and then sold it during the boom bubble.

After that the only people who turned a profit were those stealing electricity from their landlords / parents. They were still burning more energy than they made, but because they didn't pay for it, they considered it profit. And they didn't see anything wrong with that.

Don't forget Butterfly Labs! They made expensive equipment that was just capable of outracing the pack for a little bit, sold it, then ran it (I mean, 'tested each unit individually') until it stopped being profitable before shipping it.

# ¿ May 27, 2015 04:06

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

They still have them at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison I think (and they may still have one in the Field Museum).

Okay this is cool http://www.moldamania.com/

Oh man, now I want to go to the zoo. I haven't been there since I was a kid.

# ¿ May 30, 2015 04:38

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:30

Keiya: Aug 22, 2009; Come with me if you want to not die.

Zaphod42 posted:

Everything was either Weird Al or System of a Down.

Especially that zelda song and the sesame street parody.

I retagged that Zelda song from Weird Al to System of a Down on the recommendation of some site that kept track of stuff like that. Apparently they didn't do a terribly good job.

Woolie Wool posted:

I remember back in 2006 an Arcturus concert DVD came out and it was not available for sale in any US retailer I could find for almost a year. I pirated it on eMule or some other pre-torrents filesharing service. Only it wasn't an Arcturus concert at all.

It was German midget porn.

I still remember one time I was looking for music and found a short low-res video of what I'm pretty sure was a 12-13 year old girl having sex with a dog, when I was around, well, 12-13. That was a very strange evening...

Zaphod42 posted:

Does this count for obsolete technology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

Man gently caress you BonziBuddy was awesome. Best malware I ever got suckered into installing. As for sheep and the like, the concept continues, it's just pony-themed these days.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 21:18

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