Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Royal W posted:

I sprung $250 for a Minidisk player in 2001-02. It was badass because it came with a remote!

the downside was that I had to record to the MDs like the cassettes of old, playing the whole CD with the MD player on record; then adding the track breaks after the fact!

A friend of mine in Middle School was 110% absolutely and zealously convinced that MD was the way of the future and that MP3 players were a fad.

He talked about buying shitloads of Sony stock since it was going to be so pervasive.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 16:03

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:00

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

SimplyCosmic posted:

Fax machines are the top of my list. And will likely be on that list for at least another 5 to 10 years.

I was once trying to figure out why our shop's e-fax wasn't sending properly to some other dude's e-fax and it was like five minutes before we both realized we should just e-mail the loving thing.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2012 01:03

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Pompous Rhombus posted:

I've a split-flap alarm clock on my desk in front of me right now, that I found it at an antique flea market in here in Japan. Gonna be bummed to leave it behind, but it's only set up for the delicate Japanese 110V system. When I first got it I thought it was broken because it couldn't keep time for poo poo, then I thought to check the back and saw the switch to go from 50 to 60hz (East/West Japan have different power grids).

Sell it to an American!

# ¿ Aug 9, 2012 00:27

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Ensign Expendable posted:

Optical mice also didn't work on reflective surfaces, like my awesome shiny circuit board mouse pad.

A good, current optical mouse will work on pretty much anything short of glass or a mirror. And then, you buy one of the mice that Logitech makes that uses "Darkfield" tech so it will work on anything, including transparent and reflective surfaces.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2012 20:04

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Killer robot posted:

Also one of those old treadle type sewing machines, very similar to this one:

They don't have all the features you'll find on a modern machine, but they still do a lot of jobs perfectly well.

One of our customers uses one of these (minus actual machine) as a computer desk, and whenever I'm over there to fix something I always end up working the pedal the entire time, just spinning that flywheel.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 23:42

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

You assume the phones of today can actually hold those funky letter-numbers. Since he had to use a VoIP setup to get it to work, I imagine it's only something you can do in special software designed for it these days. Awesome, but kinda useless.

Which is funny since this means that the people most likely to be able to call your hosed up number are telemarketers since they use computers to dial you anyway!

# ¿ Oct 14, 2012 20:59

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

My father used to have a microfilm machine and lots of legal(?) documents on the actual film. I loved playing with it as a kid.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2012 04:01

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I tried setting my HDs to cable select once but I think my mobo didn't support it and I was crushed. Then SATA happened.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2012 05:51

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

eddiewalker posted:

I am an absolute Zip disk hoarder because of these machines:

I was really hoping Zips would go away eventually, but then the new model came out a few years ago, and Zip disks are still the only way to get files in or out without real-time recording them

Im amazed that someone is still making them drives. At least the new ones take 250mb disks. I still occasionally see digicarts with Bernoulli drives.

I was about to quote that first image and say "Wait, that looks like a very modern piece of equipment" and then I finished your post and just...

:negative:

# ¿ Dec 15, 2012 22:14

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

WebDog posted:

Way off

NEVER - An interactive TV in every home
Despite throwing about concepts of set-top boxes in 1996 they were adamant that we'd still see the TV as our entertainment device and the computer as the information one. The article does mention at the time Apple looking into TV technology - as evidenced by the 20th Anniversary Macintosh having a TV tuner in 1997. Despite every concept thrown around actually being correct, the idea was still seen as alien.

I dunno, I think this is pretty true now. I mean, WebTV died but look at the features on set-top boxes now. Sure, I can't browse the forums on my TV, but why would I?

# ¿ Dec 21, 2012 17:04

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

WebDog posted:

I remember the scanner being a sheer nightmare to install where upon going to their website they only offered the drivers on CD for $20. Yet if you typed in their European address you were able to download it for free off their FTP.

Standalone scanners are still total nightmares to install. MFPs seem to be able to scan without issue once you install them, but there is no loving end to issues with standalone setups. It's 20-loving-13, there's no excuse for how bad the state of scanners still is.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2013 00:34

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Jerry Cotton posted:

Split flap alarm clocks are the best. What better place for an appliance that makes a sound every minute than your night stand.

They do look really cool though.

I saw a link (probably from this thread) to a project a guy was doing that involved a split-flap alarm clock, where the flaps would stop advancing during the night until the alarm time came around, when it would go through the entire set of flaps and then display the correct time, which would act as the alarm.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2013 23:37

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

clockworx posted:

I would love to have one in my house or office that would just randomly go off. Maybe something to display that day's schedule, or my Inbox headers.

Here's something fun!

http://hackaday.com/2011/01/03/driving-an-8-digit-split-flap-display/

That XX:XX:XX format makes me think of using it to display MAC addresses, but I have no idea why you'd ever need that.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2013 05:27

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

DNova posted:

Cool, now make one that displays tweets.

For a quick demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU8GiaKptBM&t=28s

Note that in that video, the weirdness is because the calculator is actually outputting constantly while it computes, not any nixie-related issues.

I love that, I wish that modern calculators did the same thing, at least as an option.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2013 22:48

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Natural Joe posted:

I love crazy technology that solves problems that don't necessarily exist.

The Gyrobus, a type of electric bus. It doesn't store its power in batteries or capacitors though, it stores it in a 3 ton flywheel spinning at 3000 RPM. The principle of operation was sound, but it was too expensive to maintain.

Because I know nothing about physics and engineering, at first I thought the post/bar assembly was physically winding up the flywheel as the bus drove under.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2013 08:02

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Did the NYC MTA have nearly as many problems with the Bombardier trains that make up at least a decent part of the Subway fleet as seemingly everybody else?

# ¿ Jul 6, 2013 05:37

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Speedpass loving rocked before there were CC readers in every pump.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2013 06:40

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Phanatic posted:

It's still around

https://www.speedpass.com/

And it's definitely not an obsolete technology, it's one of the first consumer-level examples of RFID tags and those things are everywhere.

It seems kind of redundant nowadays. I guess it's handy for parents of teenagers who need to use the car but don't have their own debit/credit card?

# ¿ Jul 9, 2013 21:48

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

KozmoNaut posted:

We still use those (same format, different design/coloring) in Denmark, they've been in use for at least 40 years now. Mostly because they just work.

In fact, I've got one right here on my desk at work, for 10 trips between Helsing�r and Aarhus. It's a strip of cardboard worth ~$550 and you don't want to cut two squares by accident. No refunds.

There is an electronic replacement, similar to the Oyster card. Unfortunately, due to a characteristic Danish insistence on doing everything custom-made our own way (see the posts on the IC4 debacle earlier in the thread), there have been massive issues with it, including such basic ergonomic failures as the check-in and check-out spots being almost indistinguishable from each other. It's so bad that they've had to delay the phasing out of the old punch card system by two years.

Even Boston has a proper working electronic fare system. Denmark is doing worse than Boston on public transport systems.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2013 04:09

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Snark posted:

There was also a huge overlap between tokens and MetroCards. The first MetroCards came out in 1993, the last token was accepted in 2003. So there was some flexibility while the kinks were worked out.

You look at this timetable and while it is insane, you have to realize that the token dispensing machines were done away with rather quickly. They phased out the token accepting turnstiles much more slowly.

Boston, on the other hand, phased in the CharlieTicket* vending machines exceedingly slowly and phased out the token accepting seemingly overnight.

Which meant that for weeks you got to deal with incredibly surly MBTA employees manning these plexiglass boxes in stations without card reading terminals. Because they just ripped all of the turnstiles out of the ground at once with nothing to replace them.

You could throw a token, the fare in cash or your card into the box. That's right, if you had a card you had to just throw it in, even if you had $50 worth of fares on it. It was loving absurd, and at least one station went from tokens to the box back to tokens back to the box and then to cards.

The MBTA (I would probably argue Boston as a whole) is obsolete and antiquated.

(I will say I actually much prefer RFID systems like the CharlieCard and the countless others to the MTA swipe system, I hate having to fish around for my MetroCard instead of just plonking my wallet onto a pad like I could do in Boston.)

*CharlieTickets are paper tickets with a magnetic stripe that you have to feed into a slot on the turnstiles, while CharlieCards are plastic cards with RFID chips in them that you just bang on a reader. of course, being in Boston, you can't get a Card vended to you with money on it, you have to find the station agent booth, get a card, go back to the vending machines and put money on it.

Lazlo Nibble posted:

Can't speak for universities but yes, mainframes are still common in large businesses, because they're still the most cost-effective way to do the kind of work they do.

At least one rather large financial services company uses what must be a mainframe terminal emulator for account management. Seeing it pulled up on multi-monitor trading stations alongside all the slick graphing and analytic programs is a little jarring.

Inspector_666 has a new favorite as of 04:17 on Jul 27, 2013

# ¿ Jul 27, 2013 04:09

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Lazlo Nibble posted:

In any financial services company big enough to have a retail storefront all those transactions are going to end up on the mainframe for end-of-day processing anyway, so they may as well cut out the middleman and have the branch reps enter 'em there directly.

It's not that sort of company, they handle backend stuff for other brokerages. But yeah, it's probably the same thing at the end of the day.

It's just funny seeing them push out new software that's like "Here's the best and flashiest thing to analyze market trends now if you want to see how many shares customer X has you just fire up this terminal emulator window and..."

# ¿ Jul 27, 2013 05:17

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Geoj posted:

I want to believe that somewhere, there's someone with an AMC Gremlin that still has a factory 8-track deck, playing a smartphone through an FM transmitter and one of those...

I would gladly be that guy.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2013 19:28

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

KozmoNaut posted:

So what you're saying is that instead of developing electric cars, we should focus on cars driven by an explosive substance with high energy density?

Nonsense.

If electric cars worked by combusting their batteries, that would be pretty funny.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 16:19

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Cool, so it wasn't just me.

Add me to that list too.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 22:59

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Internet Friend posted:

(Future candidate for this thread)

I am going to buy the gently caress out of that keyboard the day it comes out.

Arrath posted:

If they let it dry much at all before they start busting it I bet the electronics will looove that good old concrete dust.

Concrete gets super hot and expands* as it dries, so if they left it in there until it was solid there would pretty much be nothing left underneath it to be mad about the dust anyway.

*Actually maybe it contracts? Same end result for the stuff swimming in it.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2014 04:26

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

gleep gloop posted:

I absolutely can't use swipe and don't know how anyone does. I had it on my previous phone, tried it for a bit, and just couldn't get used to it.

Swipe is the only way to type, dude.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 00:29

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Computer viking posted:

It's even worse than normal touch+dictionary in languages that like gluing together new words on the fly, and only a minority of my phone typing is in English. Two-thumbs typing it is.

I've always preferred a strong spell checking to prediction, so that's probably why I really like it.

Boiled Water posted:

But does it work with any language besides american english?

Like that matters :911:

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 01:11

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

I don't know how anybody likes the tiny-rear end keyboards on Blackberry devices. They're such an rear end in a top hat to type on with big hands.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 16:46

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

WebDog posted:

Plus the "pro" features (like movie saving) it begged you to shill for were included for free on a mac.

My favorite "pro" feature for Windows was full screen mode.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2014 15:57

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Penguissimo posted:

Jesus, has this guy ever been right about anything? I remember reading his columns in the mid-early 90s and even as an elementary schooler shaking my head at how stupid his poo poo was. He's like the Tom Friedman of tech writing.

I was about to make this exact same post. Dvorak sucks.

# ¿ May 6, 2014 04:23

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Lowen SoDium posted:

That's been Apple's M.O. for pretty much for ever. They release a product that has fewer features than the established market, at a higher cost, and usually with more restrictions. And people line up for it.

Except this wasn't the case with their early computers at all, and wasn't the case with the iPod, either. Do you know what feature it had that the other MP3 players didn't?

It was actually loving usable.

I dislike Apple for a lot of reasons, but trying to pretend that the iPod was them leveraging their brand to sell an inferior product is dumb as hell given that "their brand" as you're describing it only really exists now because of the iPod and iPhone.

# ¿ May 6, 2014 15:57

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Captain Trips posted:

I know I shouldn't be feeling this way, but I am anyway.

I recently broke my Galaxy Nexus, which was running a custom rom based on Android 4.4 (KitKat). I borrowed an old phone from a friend, and it's an HTC Incredible 2, running Verizon's bloatware-infested version of Android 2.2 (Froyo)

I feel like I've been sent ten years into the tech past, even though I know this phone is barely a few years old.

The usability stuff they've done with Android since v2 and v3 is really insane. My Skyrocket came with Gingerbread, and upgrading to ICS was like a new world.

Of course a lot of that is also the rom you use. I currently have an S4 running Verizon's stock JB image and it's terrible in a lot of ways even CyanogenMod ICS wasn't.

# ¿ May 7, 2014 22:27

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Line Matrix Printing is very much still a thing. It's apparently the go-to tech for printing shipping manifest/invoices in large warehouses and other places where the environment would probably foul up a laser printer in short order.

And Printronix is still the biggest player in that market.

# ¿ May 8, 2014 21:00

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Computer viking posted:

Here is a random 38 sq.m. apartment in a much newer building (I'd guess late 1990s). One of the pictures is the shower/bathroom.

Oh, and it's $1770/month.

The thing is, that bathroom isn't really that tiny even by American urban standards. But why not just put in a partition between the shower and everything else? It's not as if stand-up shower cubicle things aren't widely available.

# ¿ May 13, 2014 15:45

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

WebDog posted:

Every one who rubbished it as being a useless service pretty much rely on it 24/7. Even my grandfather, who swore computers were a communist plot, uses it now and then.

Within the last year I overheard somebody saying that Facebook was just a flash in the pan.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2014 16:53

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Captain Novolin posted:

They were the first to do push e-mail, and that was 99% of why they ever got big. Once smartphones actually started coming over to the west RIM was hosed unless they could adapt. As you can tell, they haven't.

Their CEO literally laughed when somebody asked if they through the iPhone was a threat.

Inspector_666 has a new favorite as of 17:14 on Jun 30, 2014

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 03:54

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Sir_Substance posted:

Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that given how cheap storage space and bandwidth are these days, it would be totally practical for most places to just give everyone a 1/5/10GB mailbox limit (whatever you like based on org size) and let them manage it themselves.

This is a management issue, not a technical one. You can do exactly this for not a terrible amount of money (compared to revenue, at least,) but every one of those users is going to run straight into that limit and bitch at IT about how they need more space.

99% of "Why is TECH THING still done this way?" can be answered with "Management and/or budgets."

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 15:07

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:00

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

nightchild12 posted:

Please do not do this to your poor tech support guy.

People aren't willing to spend money on proper large-scale wireless APs, so running a line to every room and plugging in some consumer box is pretty much the de facto way most places handle wireless.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2014 01:13

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