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

«‹›4 »

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

SwissCM posted:

Running with Scissors (1999) had a minor hit with "The Saga Begins". Poodle Hat (2003) didn't land any hits though (though "Why Does This Always Happen to Me?" holds a place in my heart as a Ben Folds fan).

He's never really gone away and even his "flop" albums chart pretty drat well.

And as someone else pointed out, his style parodies are way way better and don't age as badly as his song parodies. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLnapb-30hA

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 14:16

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 08:12

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Pham Nuwen posted:

Dare To Be Stupid remains a fantastic Devo style parody

...with bonus pseudo-Bob Dobbs in the video

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 17:31

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Remulak posted:

Does "Pre-internet weird culture" like the Church of the Subgenius count as obsolete? To what extent can there be in-jokes like that when anybody can GIS Bob and find out the whole thing?

"Bob" may be a charlatan, liar, thief and philanderer but in today's hustle-bustle world he's everything but obsolete :colbert:

It's also the only thing I've found that will make born-again co-workers quit witnessing to me.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2014 07:08

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

mints posted:

See qcrack,exe. When Quake 1 came out id included every game they'd worked on up to that point, with some phone in activation where you paid and they'd give you the key. Within hours of the discs showing up at retail locations someone came up with a crack that not only unlocked quake, but the back catalog of id.

Aaah, memories. Floppies with a copy of qcrack.exe were all that was necessary for Nerd Stardom back in 1996 :allears:

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 02:57

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Inspector_666 posted:

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.

It's an absolute poo poo way to do it if you're not a small sub-80 room property too. Nothing like having six different unmeshed APs to connect to, any one of which will drop off for no good reason.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2014 03:24

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

You Are A Elf posted:

You missed the most 1-900 commercial of my youth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdQiSGb4Luw

Why, yes, I'd like to spend $2 a call to listen to a prerecorded message from an ugly rubber puppet thing. Also,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70JzRpdI5xg

"OH NO! I CAN'T TIME MY JUMP OVER THE FLAME BAR IN MARIO!! *curls up into a ball*"

holy gently caress I forgot all about Freddy Freaker. Thanks for reminding me of that idiotic loving song that me and my idiotic loving friend would sing at each other idiotically all summer. That one and this one that Yo MTV Raps couldn't quit playing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPJs3OhFnmk

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 01:30

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Jonathan Yeah! posted:

Only people trapped in an endless hell still use ISA and RS232, and I don't think it's worth making their lives any better

If you've stayed at a hotel and used the phone or TV system, the transaction went through an RS232 connection somewhere. In that industry at least, it's going nowhere

# ¿ May 10, 2015 22:32

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Mister Kingdom posted:

After going through dozens and dozens of tapes, I found that this was the only commercial I saved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIIU2JvoMX4

Holy poo poo I remember this.

I'm glad YouTube exists, so I can confirm this commercial was real and not just a bizarre hallucination I had when I was 9 or 10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdQiSGb4Luw

Also, to this day I despise the Payday song because I'd hear it every single commercial break on MST3k's midnight airing and USA Up All Night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1y9OHh-N8s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6dFT06r9v4
WHY IS IT A YETI/ORANGUTAN THING.

# ¿ May 11, 2015 17:39

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

THE PENETRATOR posted:

THE ZUNE PLAYER

Zune > Every iPod ever made

Vanagoon posted:

Like, keep going until you smell burning, and you open your computer up to find an unrecognizable melted, burned place where the CPU was?

If your CPU doesn't look like a tablespoon of blackberry jam afterward, you're doing it wrong.

Delivery McGee posted:

All the discussion of RS232 made me wonder if anything still uses the ol' parallel port (i.e. the old-school printer plug).

Earlier I said hotel systems still use RS232 for telephone and TV systems; they also still have parallel port dot matrix printers doing manual call accounting.

# ¿ May 16, 2015 04:49

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Atal Vataman posted:

bonus picture of the weird effects created by deterioration:

In the course of cleaning and scanning my dad's photo archives I occasionally run into this, where the emulsion has either rotted off, or cleaning the film peels it off. It does render some stuff awesomely surreal.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2015 13:33

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

if only there were a way to turn useless stupid boring derails into clean fuel

# ¿ Jul 20, 2015 04:52

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

HMS Boromir posted:

Does anyone know of a site or blog or what have you that collects old predictions like these? I've seen a few and they're pretty entertaining, usually due to getting almost everything right with a few adorable exceptions.

not quite either, but I did find a precious "INTERNET BAD" thing in The Book of Lists 2, circa 1980

# ¿ Aug 4, 2015 17:29

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

ryonguy posted:

Jesus christ.

An audiophile and his money are soon parted...

~* somewhere, Alan Parsons awakes and begins demanding to remaster Dark Side of the Moon for 22.2; no one is in the room to hear his ravings *~

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 05:25

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

VCDs had a brief period of popularity amongst bootleg traders around 2001-2003, when broadband was ubiquitous enough that downloading a full disc was no big deal, but burning DVD was still prohibitively expensive. No generational loss like VHS, but half the people making them didn't know poo poo about quality encoding. So many Pink Floyd bootlegs ruined by blown-out clipped audio.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 03:22

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

peter gabriel posted:

When I was a kid I finished Berzerk on the Atari 2600, what happens is you play it for hours and then get a black screen
I guess they though no one would ever bother finishing it, but they didn't reckon on my spergin' childhood ways

Since Berzerk is one of the few video games with a body count, I imagine they thought it would finish you first.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 05:17

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Obsolete and failed, music edition: the notion that anything Radiohead has done post-2003 is worth anyone's time

# ¿ May 16, 2016 04:30

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Buttcoin purse posted:

I would like to port an RPG to the AS/400

But seriously, I Googled it and wow, that's pretty old.

I graduated college in 2000 and the IS/Programming Concentration course of study focused on COBOL and RPG. Apparently they were going to make us all rich fixing the Y2K problem for a bunch of textile factories around the state.

Then Y2k was a bust/in the past and the .com bubble burst slashing wages. Which didn't matter because all the mills and factories relocated to China.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2016 02:19

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a loving big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of loving fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the gently caress you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing loving junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, hosed-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . .

But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.

Who needs reasons when you've got period-accurate Golden Axe?

# ¿ Oct 19, 2016 01:14

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Krispy Kareem posted:

I don't think they even sell Beverly in any market anymore, but they keep it at World of Coke just so you can dare unsuspecting friends.

It's probably the same box of syrup from 20 years ago.

man me and some complete loving stranger were daring each other to try a second and a third cup. That poo poo creates kinship in its' awfulness.

I would buy the everloving poo poo out of some of those South African fruit sodas though.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2016 04:10

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Yesterday my grandmother says "I found this in a box with an old tape recorder of your grandfather's, what is it?"

# ¿ Feb 6, 2017 18:28

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Zune >>>> iPod Classic

thousands of people who never saw, let alone used one posted:

The Zune sucked

# ¿ Mar 15, 2017 13:49

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Last Chance posted:

my gf had one and the battery died after a year and it never woke up again. My iPod 5th gen from 2006 still works

if you call having to use iTunes for anything "working" I guess. My 2007 shitbrick-colored 30GB Zune is still working for the relative I gave it to after I got my 120GB in 2008, which also still works just dandy. Meh.

Criticism of the Zune boils down to "it doesn't have an Apple logo".

# ¿ Mar 17, 2017 04:58

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Vinyl is way overrated soundwise, but at least you can do this with them

# ¿ May 9, 2017 18:10

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

St Anger's waveform actually *was* just a solid bar.

You want serious volume adjustment, grab an early pressing of The Final Cut. If you turn it up loud enough to hear the quiet parts, the loud parts will blow your windows out. For the record I consider this a feature, not a bug

# ¿ May 11, 2017 03:11

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Laserjet 4P posted:

Let's hope it fares better than the previous one:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/29/retro_computer_ltd_vega_plus_refunds/

I still think the C64 ports of those games were usually better, with better music too.

they did bring back the C64 briefly, but it was basically just a modern PC inside a C64 case

# ¿ May 14, 2017 04:16

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Krispy Wafer posted:

So what's worse for unwanted attention, being a lady clerk at a sex toy shop or a lady clerk at a Gamestop?

The EB Games that opened in my town circa 2004 had an attractive lady clerk whose line was always twice as long as either of the two male clerks working the same shift. One time I went in and she sat there stonefaced and nodding politely as some pockmarked greasy-haired idiot was basically yelling "AND SO I TOLD HIM, HAVE YOU EVER *KNOWN* A 3D CASTLEVANIA TO BE GOOD? PFFFT" at her. Poor, poor thing. She didn't work there very long, she either quit or committed suicide pretty quick.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2017 22:28

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Vic posted:

The police sketches mustve been fun

posted immediately on DeviantArt

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 00:22

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:

You know what was fun? Being the only person who worked there who knew the password to (and how to even use) the security camera system. I never used it for anything nefarious, but I did use it to great effect to catch a bunch of shoplifters, which was always fun.

Ditto on being the only one. I used it for legit stuff once or twice, but mainly just archived videos of employees falling on wet floors and tripping on lobby furniture so I could show them to them over and over and over

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 07:14

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Trabant posted:

Turns out it was inspired specifically by the Teleavia P111 set from 1958, designed by the same guy who designed the Citroen DS and I just love the way it looks:

Wheels! Now we can watch Jackie Gleason while we eat!

# ¿ Dec 3, 2017 02:28

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Dick Trauma posted:

I'm available as a consultant on the year 1975. I work cheap.

How accurate is Jaws 2? Because man the clothing and everything else seems so painfully mid-1970s to me.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2017 04:31

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Metal Geir Skogul posted:

Were the 70s clothes like Jaws 2, or is Jaws 2 the reason you think 70s clothes were like that?

Really makes you think.

Judging from certain family photos, more the former

# ¿ Dec 17, 2017 07:07

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

rndmnmbr posted:

This has always been my problem with used book stores. Three rooms of Harlequin romances, two shelves of poo poo I actually want to read.

If I ran one, I would likely have a trade-in policy like most of the ones I grew up around, but unlike them it would be a No Romance Novels Allowed as those would just be going in a recycling bin out back and not actually being put on shelves.

hoo man, try visiting a used bookstore near any beach town sometime. Yikes.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2018 03:37

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:

I learned that despite Edge existing, Internet Explorer 11 is still a separate program. Why did I learn this? Because Federal Express, one of the giants of corporate shipping, still uses Java to talk to the label printers they provide their customers, and IE11 is literally the only browser left that will allow me to print shipping labels, because the rest of the world has already decided that Java is a toxic insecure mess.

The last hotel I worked at "had to" rely on IE. Why? Because even in the Year of Our Lord 2017, the latest thing the franchise's Property Management System officially supported was IE9 running on Windows 7 (though IE10 support was coming soon! Customer credit cards will be immensely safer now that your browser is only 5 years out of date!); anything later and it wouldn't even issue the SSL certificate for you to log on to the system in the first place. The stupid thing was, it worked just fine if you changed the user agent, installed the certificate, then put it back to normal. The only "error" I saw pop up using other browsers after doing this was that Adobe Reader wouldn't pop open new browser windows without asking.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2018 05:36

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

I used Doggy Hour for a long time until my wife threatened me with divorce.

God I love Doggy Hour.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2018 01:20

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

DoctorWhat posted:

(For context, we threaten to leave each other over every little thing)

There's "every little thing" and there's "my husband giggles at his idiot ringtone for 30-40 seconds before answering his phone every single goddamn time"

# ¿ Feb 9, 2018 04:58

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

I miss FM when they used to have actual DJs instead of some dude playing the exact same 100 songs over and over and slinging on whatever prepburger bits ClearChannel or Cumulus sent him. Dig the effort our legendary area AOR station WQDR put into their New Years 1984 countdown. The idea of splicing this together using analogue tape is nutso.

In regards to AM, also from my archives is the sort of terrible trainwreck AM radio we had locally. All that's missing is ladders collapsing backstage.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 05:45

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

The_Franz posted:

I wonder what's going to happen to AM radio in 20 years once it's audience is almost entirely senile or dead? Outside of broadcasting sporting events it's all either conservative talk, local loudmouths (which largely overlaps with conservative talk) or weird conspiracy shows like Art Bell. The only smaller station here which used to host the weekly shows for ethnic communities and generally had a wide variety of programming was sold to Clear Channel a couple of years ago and now it's just more non-stop right-wing blowhards.

Locally they use it to simulcast their awful "RARGH SPORRRRRTS AND LIMP BIZKIT" FM station. Makes sense in a way, since I live like 6 miles from the transmitter and can barely get their FM station in.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 17:12

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Delivery McGee posted:

I name all my computers after Royal Navy ships.

Close to my naming scheme; I use World War II operational names. Still in the house I have Overlord (main PC), Avalanche (Current laptop), Fortitude (Hackintosh, naturally) Barbarossa, Torch, Coronet, and the Wifi network is Eagle.

A friend had my favorite naming schema when he had 3 PCs in the house, named Run, DMC, and Jay. He now has like a dozen different systems ranging from an Apple ][e with a terminal emulator, to a C64, to a 1999 iMac, to his main i5 PC using Antarctic research stations and explorers now.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 04:47

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Antioch posted:

Would you call an experimental but ultimately doomed router "Market Garden"?

Boiled Water posted:

Name reserved for parachute account.

beauty

# ¿ Mar 21, 2018 04:38

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 08:12

Rev. Bleech_: Oct 19, 2004; ~OKAY, WE'LL DRINK TO OUR LEGS!~

Samizdata posted:

Back in the old days of the PC, I used to have a Copy II PC Option Board (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Point_Software), which I bought because of all the joys their Apple copier had brought me.

Jesus. Their Apple copier actually came with my ][e/c clone. Fitting I guess.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2018 06:14

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

«‹›4 »