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Meet the Deutsche Bahn series 430.0-1: These were running in Stuttgart since the end of April. This week, the last of them were sent back to Bombardier (hmm, a familiar name in this thread  ), for persistent problems mainly with the doors. The last straw was when one of them refused to close its doors in the central S-Bahn* tunnel in Stuttgart, blocking all traffic for over an hour, during the evening rush hour. This wasn't the first time, either, so they actually had some  experts from the manufacturer riding on that train; even they couldn't fix it.(* In Stuttgart, the U-Bahn runs mostly above ground, the S-Bahn below. Swabians are weird that way.)
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Jul 5, 2013 17:53
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Ron Burgundy posted:It was pretty much abandoned essentially because it's a limited system. Funny, I always thought it was abandoned after all new releases were DDD.
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Jul 11, 2013 17:58
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I found a pretty piece of obsolete technology while scanning some holiday photos:
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Jul 14, 2013 17:29
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Prenton posted:Handheld joysticks Those are not real joysticks. This is:  Clamp that sucker to the table and you're all set.
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Jul 24, 2013 19:25
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Kwyndig posted:Tell that to a real rocket scientist and you'll get a lot of Well, here's a video by a real rocket scientist playing KSP showing that it can be as simple as "just go up".  He cheats.
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Oct 8, 2013 18:10
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out of them. [...]
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Sagebrush posted:They're status lights for the processors inside. If a processor is working on something, its LED comes on -- so technically if the computer is running properly, executing a well-written highly parallel job, all the lights should be on and steady. People expect computers with lots of lights on them to be blinking like the bat-computer, though, so when Connection Machines were a thing, it was really common to add extra spurious instructions to make them blink in interesting patterns. The BeBox had two rows of lights showing the CPU load (it had two processors - in 1996).  I sold mine 
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Oct 25, 2013 20:34
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Smiling Jack posted:I forget if it was in Things I Won't Work With or Ignition! but someone developed a compound so sensitive it exploded if you shone a bright light on it. A simple mixture of chlorine and hydrogen will do that; it's a common experiment in chemistry classes. Unfortunately this is the only video I can find showing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYU7nQxdRG8
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Jan 13, 2014 20:23
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Captain Trips posted:Clarkson had an interesting take on those nubs on Top Gear a couple years back. You get out of the car, close the door, and it locks as you walk away. But then you think "Did that really work? Is it locked?" so you walk back to check, and the door unlocks as you walk up to it. That sounds like a nightmare for someone with OCD.
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Apr 3, 2014 18:20
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Captain Trips posted:No, I mean, a rear USB is going to be inside the dash. How do you get to it, and why not just have two on the front? You route the cable to something like the glove box or cup holder. I didn't go for the optional iPod adapter when I bought a Mazda 3 some years ago. It does have an AUX input, but that wouldn't let me use the controls in the steering wheel. Last year I installed a cheap Chinese knockoff (these are sold under various brand names, but seem all to be the same hardware). Connects to the stereo's CD changer port, and almost works perfectly (it reports the wrong tracks sometimes, and switches out of shuffling mode when a traffic announcement comes in on the radio, but otherwise it's fine). A bit like this (not my actual model, but see above): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR7EHoVHCw0
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Apr 9, 2014 05:44
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Jerry Cotton posted:Luckily brass doesn't rust. Mark Twain posted:Huckleberry was filled with admiration of Tom's facility in writing, and the sublimity of his language. He at once took a pin from his lapel and was going to prick his flesh, but Tom said: "Hold on! Don't do that. A pin's brass. It might have verdigrease on it."
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Apr 21, 2014 13:26
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KozmoNaut posted:BASF was also part of the IG Farben group of companies, which you may have heard of as the manufacturers of Zyklon B. Yeah, but the part of IG Farben who produced it was actually Degesch, not BASF. Degesch still exists, and a Czech company still makes Zyklon B, under a different name.
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May 5, 2014 16:50
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Last Chance posted:Wow, I had no idea that obsolete tech like manual transmissions were still in heavy use around the world. Love this thread. Yeah, let's talk about really obsolete stuff... like unsynchronized manual transmissions. Clutch, shift into neutral, HIT THE GAS, clutch, shift into next gear,...
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May 12, 2014 05:44
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KozmoNaut posted:^^^^ Try driving a truck for a hour in traffic. Truckers generally have the patience of saints, despite all the poo poo they have to put up with from lovely drivers. OTOH, driving the most massive thing on the road can be strangely relaxing. As my army driving instructor said: "If we had seat belts in here, nothing bad could happen to us at all." Yes, of course he was joking. Though I'm not entirely sure about that "gently caress cyclists, just run him over" thing.
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May 12, 2014 16:22
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Sir_Substance posted:and emacs is better
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May 15, 2014 05:27
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 e: Ow, my tables. Sorry. Zopotantor has a new favorite as of 18:33 on Jun 3, 2014 |
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Jun 3, 2014 16:58
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I still have that somewhere. 
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Jun 3, 2014 17:11
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Monkey Fracas posted:Please tell me this is some kinda art-type photoshopped commentary on technology replacing real-life experiences/interactions. Unfortunately, it's an advertisement. (For "multiplayer" bike training software.)
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Jun 3, 2014 18:20
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KozmoNaut posted:I remember some of the later Bang & Olufsen tape player could skip tracks with reasonable accuracy and stop fast-forwarding by themselves once the hit the next track. I always thought that was pretty neat. I have a twenty-year old Yamaha tape deck that can do this. It fast-forwards to the start of the track, then has to reverse a bit because it overshoots (I guess it works by detecting the end of a silent stretch of tape). It also has a preview mode where it will play the first half minute or so of each track.
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Jul 14, 2014 19:57
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Sir_Substance posted:Truly, no finer form of memory has been known. Bubble memory is pretty nifty. My favorite obsolete electronics technology is integrated injection logic. Power consumption close to CMOS, but more robust (and unfortunately more complicated to manufacture).
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Sep 16, 2014 17:51
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duckmaster posted:I remember at school in about 1998/1999 our computer teacher telling us about ridiculously expensive RAM was and how criminals, at least in the UK, would break into offices and just rip the RAM out of computers. He even showed us a video about this! Chip theft at HP Germany (in German; translated by Google).
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Nov 25, 2014 18:44
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Pham Nuwen posted:You'll run into a lot of not-that-old digital oscilloscopes that use floppies. The newest ones have an Ethernet port and you can just point a web browser at the scope, but my first year at college (2005-2006) we still had to use floppies. Oh, that reminds me of...  HP-IB/GPIB/IEEE-488 Designed in the 1960s, and it's a fair bet that almost every chip in your smartphone was tested on equipment that is controlled via this interface.
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Nov 27, 2014 07:07
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eddiewalker posted:...How did that make more sense than a 4-track head and reversing motors? Patents.
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Dec 16, 2014 19:57
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axolotl farmer posted:Dust is terrible for water treatment plants. Contains a lot of heavy metals and other things. Most household dust is just skin scales, hair, textile fibers and mite poop. If there's a significant amount of heavy metals in yours, you probably want to move.
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Mar 15, 2015 09:27
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Oh hey, people posting their cameras!  Here's a picture taken with one of these: 
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Apr 24, 2015 19:34
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Way too much industrial and scientific equipment uses RS232 for it to be depreciated in any anything less than ten years from now. That's very optimistic. I had to write some RS232 driver code just a few months ago.
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May 10, 2015 22:01
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Elliotw2 posted:Microdrives totally go here I guess. Ahem.  This is a Microdrive.
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May 13, 2015 06:13
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Vanagoon posted:Then there's this. The fact that large parts of classic Mac OS were running under emulation to not break 68k backwards compatibility. Emulators are cool, yo.  (That's a CP/M emulator running inside a Mac emulator inside a Windows emulator inside another Mac emulator, on BeOS.)
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May 14, 2015 08:13
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Pope Guilty posted:You ever read that Neal Stephenson essay, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line"? Dude had a major boner for BeOS and the BeBox. I owned one of those. And yes. 
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May 14, 2015 13:14
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Zaphod42 posted:At the intersection of mechanical computers and calculators we have... mechanical calculators! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKm9eM2BuM0 This guy also has a video showing some of the steps in restoring this beast to working order. Basically, inside the casing it's one solid block of cams and levers. Also, a few months ago I looked at Curtas on eBay. They go for upwards of 1000€. 
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May 20, 2015 17:43
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Zaphod42 posted:Yep, sounds like it. I like how they're called "Simoleons", isn't that the currency from The Sims? I wonder if that's where they got it.  Both written by the same guy.
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May 28, 2015 17:11
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flosofl posted:Christ, 10base2 networking. Trigger warning please. I keep getting flashbacks to soldering those BNC connectors. 
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Jun 3, 2015 18:08
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SubG posted:If you think the Radio Shack kits were cool, try looking up Denshi blocks and the Gakken EX kits. Basically electronic legos. The Lectron system is probably the oldest "electronics brick" system. Just over 50 years old and still being produced. This was the first electronics kit I got:  Kosmos still makes kits, but they seem to have given up on their old system (which had spring clips sitting in the slots of boards like the one in the picture, with most components directly plugged into them). Here's some kind of radio built using such a kit:  I think those old kits are still lying around somewhere at my parent's house, untouched for 3 decades...
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Jun 4, 2015 10:50
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Collateral Damage posted:Electronics kit chat, I found CircuitScribe the other day which looks pretty neat. I guess it could get expensive pretty quick though since the pens are $20 each. This seems like a badly thought-out idea. What do you do when you need to let two signals cross? e: Apparently you put a "jumper sticker" on the bottom trace and draw over it. Sounds tedious. Zopotantor has a new favorite as of 16:56 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 16:51
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Magnus Praeda posted:If you were very specifically trying to, yes. But you'd have to touch two leads to your tongue or something. They ran off either a 9V or a few AA batteries (depending on which one you had). It's definitely possible to give somebody (mild) shocks with a 6V relay rigged as a buzzer, just ask my sister. 
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Jun 8, 2015 20:42
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 One of the first computer reviews I ever read, of the original Apple II ( ), complained about the Reset key being right next to the Return key. Back then it may have been a bad idea; today it's clearly malicious.
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Jul 10, 2015 20:08
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KozmoNaut posted:It's gotta be the model with the detachable cable, steel plate and drainage channels. I wonder where my old one is now, I gave it away some years ago.
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Jul 11, 2015 10:04
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Imagined posted:What's really brilliant is how Tengen, who made the most famous unlicensed NES games, got around the 10NES. Instead of reverse engineering it or hitting it with a voltage spike like some other unlicensed companies had done, they conned the patent office into giving them a copy of Nintendo's lockout system patent, and used that to make a workaround. Of course, Nintendo sued them into the dirt, but they got a lot of games out before the thumb came down. "Conned" the patent office? The point of a patent is that the holder gets a period of exclusive use in exchange for making an invention public. It is literally the patent office's job to let anybody who wants one have a copy.
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Jul 23, 2015 20:47
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mobby_6kl posted:My parents and I got busted in Vienna the first time we were there because we never saw anyone buy or use any sort of ticket or card. At the time we were used to having turnstiles everywhere so the fact that you can just walk in was mindblowing. Turnstiles: obsolete technology. I can still remember that, when I was a kid and we were picking up my Dad at the train station, we had to get "Bahnsteigkarten" (platform access tickets) if we wanted to meet him on the platform. There was a barrier with 4 or 5 booths where everybody coming from or going to the platform had their tickets checked. All those jobs, gone...
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Sep 4, 2015 00:37
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BattleMaster posted:Weird fact: Linux's ls doesn't work properly on a real terminal if colours are enabled; they'll bleed because they're terminated in a way that works with a terminal emulator but not a real one apparently. That probably means you set the $TERM variable incorrectly, or there's a bug in the corresponding termcap/terminfo database entry. (I don't remember which one Linux uses.)
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Sep 12, 2015 16:26
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Three-Phase posted:Core memory is pretty wild in that it's not really random-access, you have a bunch of cores arranged together, and one way to read them is to basically cycle through them. Actually,  core memory works almost exactly like dynamic RAM. It's organized into individually accessible words; reading is destructive and the controller automatically writes back the word's value after reading. The main difference is that core memory is non-volatile, while DRAM is volatile even when powered.I actually had to study this stuff as part of a course in memory technology (~30 years ago, when it was already long obsolete).
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Sep 14, 2015 07:23
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