Delivery McGee posted:

My grandmother had one of those. She never saw the point in paying the extra 37 cents a month for touch-tone, but my mom bought her one so she could bank by phone. A few years ago my mom and aunt got together and got her modern phones and service, but she was using rotary phones well into this century (and still had one on the back screen porch until she died last year in case anybody called while she was out tending her plants).

Slide rules, typewriters, and wristwatches have already been mentioned, but I kind of collect them, so have some more:




I've given a couple to friends and bought a few since this picture/last time I counted them, but I had 13 then. As others said, great for filling out forms and such. You can still get ribbons for the manuals (sold for printing calculators, you have to rewind it onto the spools that came with the typewriter) and film cartridges for the Selectrics at any decent office-supply store.

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.



This is the finest purpose built portable 35mm projector that money would buy you in 1960. The Philips FP3. Designed by Jan Kotte, the man who also designed the best film projector ever made, the DP70.

That's portable?!

Yeah you really couldn't get much smaller for 35mm. It did also ship with a fold up tripod for actual portability.

Those are 2000 foot magazines attached. That's 20 minutes of film. If you wanted continious performance you needed a pair. There is a larger 6000 foot film magazine for this machine but thats still only an hour before you need an intermission.

So what's the difference between this and my 8/16mm projector?

35mm projectors were mechanical workhorses that had very little internal electronics and relied on external equipment for things like power supply, audio processing and amplification.

This is the Dolby CP55 Cinema Sound Processor. This was the most cutting edge piece of equipment your theater could have in 1985 for turning little squiggles on film into surround sound. It has Dolby A type noise reduction. SR had yet to be invented.


The processor is completely modular to enable 0 downtime for component failure.

So the actual films for this thing are going to be really big and bulky aren't they?

Oh my gently caress yes. All of these reels make a single 102 minute film.

(DVD for size comparison not what's actually on the reels)

The films are off-market items. 35mm prints were never intended to break a cycle from film distributor and cinema. Once the film had completed its run it was sent back and either kept for future showings or destroyed. But like any good system things escape anyway. This is why a list of available titles is not a thing and the pricing is an unregulated collectors market.

How does the sound work?

Good question, the modern 35mm motion picture film holds many sound formats, which I think this article explains better than I could. My projector only plays the oldest format, analog sound. By shining a bright slit of light through the modulated soundtrack area onto a solar cell.

univbee posted:

I don't think there's much left in the flight stick world, mainly because there's very little in terms of flight sim software being made these days, but they're still available from Saitek and possibly a few other manufacturers.

Toast Museum posted:

You're in luck, kinda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxOxiOQ4sXU

wipeout posted:

One obselete thing I just remembered about PC's was turbo buttons, and displays on the case showing the clockspeed. Remember those?

Base Emitter posted:

I don't have that problem, but I do have to invert mouse-look in almost every single game I play. This is almost entirely the fault of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and A-10 Tank Killer.

Code Jockey posted:

Post pictures of it! Reel to reels always seemed really cool to me.

Speaking of media which comes on reels, somewhere in my garage I have my old 8mm and a box full of old cartoon reels. I wonder if they're worth anything? The reels are in great shape, last I checked.

Code Jockey posted:

I waaaaant to say some old Betty Boop and some other random cartoons, like one off type things? I want to say maybe some old Popeye too, but I honestly can't remember, I saw that box when I moved into the house like 6 years ago and haven't seen it since.

DNova posted:

Are you referring to Dataplay?

Phanatic posted:

It's it's still fully-auto it's also a felony to even possess unless it was registered prior to 1986, so don't actually try to sell it to anyone. The ATF are complete killjoys.

Auryn posted:

Do those of you who don't use fabric softener live in warmer climates? Because during winter around here, my clothes get so much static cling that if I don't use fabric softener I walk around with my pants glued to my legs and crackling with every step.

Pilsner posted:

My high school (1997-2000) library had two regular computers with internet access. On them was a custom program installed that wiped all sorts of installed and personal files upon the computer booting, meaning you couldn't save settings or bookmarks from visit to visit. It kinda "reset" Windows on each boot.

I figured out how to beat it - upon Windows starting up, I opened the task manager with Ctrl+Alt+Del, and found it that it was a simple executable being run at startup. I killed the process and renamed the executable - woot, free use of the computer!

There was no such thing as filtering or anything back then though.

Also, in related context: When the librarian of said high school library retired in the year 2000, someone had composed a song for her that we sang in the atrium to say goodbye. It contained a line going something like "such and such, and search on Google...". My friend and I were like "haha, WTF is 'google'?" to eachother. I believe I used https://www.hotbot.com/text back then.

RC and Moon Pie posted:

In concert, c. 1974:

Luisfe posted:

Wakeman looks like a jrpg boss. That is playing his own goddamn boss theme. Holy poo poo.

Collateral Damage posted:

an air-breathing fire

Platystemon posted:

Yes, there are fires that don’t involve oxygen. In chemistry terminology, oxidation isn’t something that only oxygen can do. Oxygen isn’t even the best oxidiser.

Anything will burn in normal air will burn better in an atmosphere of pure oxygen and excellently in a fluorine atmosphere. Fluorine is like oxygen’s big brother.

You don’t need an atmosphere at all to have “burning”, though. Some things contain their own oxidisers. Gunpowder, for instance. You could fire a gun on the Moon if you wanted because the reaction doesn’t require outside oxygen—it couldn’t, because then the reaction couldn’t happen fast enough. In gunpowder’s case, it happens to contain actual oxygen, but there are plenty of explosives that do not. Silver azide come to mind, it just comes apart into pure nitrogen gas and silver dust.

The Sun, by the way, isn’t burning. It’s undergoing a nuclear reaction. Burning is just an analogy used in school.

Mr. Flunchy posted:

You sound exactly like my grandpa.

WebDog posted:

Krispy Kareem posted:

E-ink is an odd technology in that it really doesn't get utilized anywhere near as much as it should. Kohl's department stores recently went to digital price tags on their display racks and used terrible looking washed out LCD screens, when for that purpose, E-ink would have been perfect and probably cost less.

DarthBlingBling posted:

True story: when I got my first CPU with no pins it came pre-assembled. When I went to take it out one day I thought that the pins had been pulled from the CPU and were stuck in the mobo and panicked. Took me a while to realise what had happened.

Code Jockey posted:

Screw anti-radiation filters. I grew up playing Fallout, and I'd like to think all that radiation absorbed from gigantic CRTs I spent my childhood staring at is going to someday unlock some kick rear end vision perks. Night vision? Perception bonuses? Eye lasers? Retinal cancer? Who knows!

moller posted:

No space lasers, but Prop Cycle let you bicycle through the sky in a bizarre (steampunk anime?) fantasy land.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2qFz1yw4Xo#t=60s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_y7LVrQVdw

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Take them.

Jedit posted:

I love the story of how Booth came up with the vacuum cleaner. He'd gone to some demonstration a guy was giving of his revolutionary dust removing device. Booth observed that the device was merely blowing dust around the room, and that a real removing device would suck up the dust instead. "Sucking is impossible", said the rival inventor, upon which Booth demonstrated that it was not by personally sucking the dust off the settee. He proved his point, but nearly choked to death on dust in the process.

Humphreys posted:

Now that's a project I would be wholey interested in. And oh the memories of trying to get my parents 75Mhz Ipex computer to play Interstate 76.

EDIT: Anyone remember Disc Format Film?

Gromit posted:

Yeah, a long time ago. Well, to be fair it was more of a stories thread where I had crudely illustrated some tales in MSPaint about some of the raids I and colleagues had gone on. It's been a few years, maybe I should bust out my terrible drawing skills and do an update.

Kaizoku posted:

You don't need to plow/salt every time you see a white dot on the ground. Less than 4in? Suck it up and drive you'll be fine.

Exit Strategy posted:

I've always wanted to put a modern machine into an F1XD, entirely so that I could drive a pair of VR goggles as a display and show up to ren faires as a confused console jockey.

SubG posted:

I think my favourite (in terms of aesthetics) computer-in-a-keyboard is the Elektronika BK, which is a Soviet-era PDP-11 clone. Just look at the fuckin' thing (photo from the wikipedia article):