Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

True story: I would download zelda speed runs and burn them to video cd so I could watch them via portable dvd player on long car trips.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2012 14:16

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:37

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

How's support for the magic trackpad on non-osx OSes? I'd say give that a try.

For content:
The HP Jornada 720 (Or 'Handheld PCs' in general)

I wanted one so bad when I was in middle school. I would always go play with them in Best Buy and dream about one day having the money to afford such a small computer. Years later I got my first job and bought one off ebay for ~$200. This is still pre-smartphone proliferation, btw. I installed doom, but the screen ghosting made it unplayable, so I used it as the most awkward mp3 player ever. Also, if you let the battery die, it would resort to its' backup battery (a CR2032) to keep its' memory. Leave it dead for too long and you'd have a completely factory resetted device and a bunch of warnings about your dead backup battery. It's still sitting in my room.

quote:

The Jornada 720 was released in 2000. It featured 32 MB of RAM, a Compact Flash slot, a PC card slot, a Smart card slot, 56K Modem, 640x240 16-bit display, a 206 MHz StrongARM CPU, and has 9 hours of battery life[2]. It ran under the Windows CE 3.0 based HPC2000. The Jornada 728, released later, was identical except for the doubling of RAM to 64 MB and 14 hours of battery.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2012 15:25

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

buttopticor posted:

imagine something you connect to your Xbox to play PS2 games or something.

How about playstation games on your dreamcast?

# ¿ Aug 4, 2012 18:41

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Fuzz1111 posted:

Anyway, back on topic, I present to you the Toshiba T3100SX:

My parents got this thing in 1994 and it was obsolete even then (my dad got it because it was the same model that he used at work). Check out the specs:

Plasma monochrome display (thankfully we got a 14" monitor after a year or so)

2 heavy ni-cad batteries (which it would use one at a time), according to the specs from the link above they offered 2-5 hours of battery life when new - by the time we got it we were lucky to manage an hour

386SX 16mhz (with performance closer to a 286 than it's 386DX big brother)

7mb of RAM (which was actually pretty decent for 1994 where 4mb was more standard, I have no idea what a machine from 1989 was doing with that much ram)

40mb of hard-drive space

VGA graphics (ever tried beating off to gifs in 16 colour mode? Finding out that x-tree gold could display them in glorious 320*240*8bit was a godsend, though I had to pick what part of the picture I wanted to come to)

2400baud modem in an expansion slot (which I only realised after a few years - I managed to get on a few BBS's)

According to that link it had another proprietary expansion slot, which could be used for "a choice of modems and network cards, including GSM phones for voice, data-transfer and internet connectivity" kinda cool they include internet connectivity as a selling point in 1989
Though it was capable of running popular titles like Doom and Descent, it took several minutes to start them and they ran very very slowly: Doom was probably about twice as fast as Descent and if you shrunk it's viewport to minimum and enabled "low detail" double-sized pixel mode, you would still only get 10-15fps from your approximately 20*16 pixel, postage stamp sized viewing area. Do you think that stopped me? gently caress no! I even got a null-modem cable, connected ours to the one my dad got from work, and me and my brother played that poo poo multiplayer! Goddamn we must have been bored.

Sturdy as all hell and took every one of my teenaged temper tantrums like a champ (including putting it on the floor and jumping on the keyboard - yeah I was a little poo poo).

I hated the thing until we upgraded in 1998, but considering I'm a software engineer now, I should probably be thankful for those early experiences of fighting for the 640K, figuring out how to get the best out of my crappy selection of games (hex editor on savegames was fun), and figuring out how to expand my collection of games (had to use that hex editor to crack a few games myself).

Awesome. I have one of these. Found it at a thrift store. When I booted it up it still had a bunch of insurance company software on it. One thing that may not be obvious to those that have just seen the image: It's not really a "laptop", it's a "portable computer". I believe they made battery packs for it, but to use mine, I have to plug it into a wall with a standard computer power cable. The thing weighs about a million pounds, but has a built in handle. I've thought about bringing it with me to a starbucks for comedic effect, but I'm just not that goony yet.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2012 13:57

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Magic_Ceiling_Fan posted:

Apparently there are, in fact, enough places where you need to type stuff that don't have electricity to warrant the manufacture of a manual typewriter in 2012.

When I worked at CVS, the pharmacist told me that all stores (maybe all pharmacies in general) had to have one on hand so they could make labels even if there was a prolonged power outage. (Natural disasters, etc.)

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 15:48

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Magic_Ceiling_Fan posted:

Yeah, I know rich dudes will still wear gold watches and stuff, but I'm talking about 30 and 40 dollar run of the mill wristwatches. I didn't realize how much they've gone out of fashion until someone called me old fashioned for still having my trusty analogue wristwatch.

I used to teach, and the majority of children in junior high do not know how to tell the time from an analogue clock. It's pretty jarring once you realize something so simple to you is so strange and foreign to the kids.

I wear this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W
because of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detainees_accused_of_possessing_Casio_watches

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 16:17

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

I had this one:

Never had an issue with short battery life. I loved that thing. I think it got stepped on, and that's why I stopped using it.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 15:35

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Cleretic posted:

Hell, you can't give the GBA and DS credit for being durable as gently caress without mentioning the original Game Boy...surviving a Gulf War bombing.

It's on display at the Nintendo store in New York.

Manky posted:

Nintendo can have some silly ideas now and then, but drat if they can't make solid hardware while their competitors make consoles that ship with 1 in 8 failure rates. My Gamecube once fell three feet while I was playing Smash Bros. and it was fine. A few months ago a drunk friend peed almost directly into my Wii. It's still fine!

But you want to talk obsolete and failed? The Gameboy Micro. I don't know many other people who've seen or played one in person, so check out this picture for a sense of scale:

Yeah, it's insanely small. It only plays GBA games, no backwards compatibility. Great battery life, easily the best screen of the GBA generation (backlit, instead of the frontlit SP screens), and you could change the faceplates to personalize it. Why was it such a dumb idea, and why did it sell so badly? They decided to release it a year after the Nintendo DS came out.

Have one, love it. If you have small hands and good eyesight, it's easily the best handheld ever made.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 13:32

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Landerig posted:

Yeah. Then twenty years later you decide to replace it with a more modern TV only to realize that heavy son of a bitch isn't leaving your living room without a fight.

Could be worse though. It could be a Curtis Mathes monster:

Once that behemoth ends up in your living room, it's not leaving for a very long time.

I want modern tech in this style.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2012 02:53

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Mousepractice posted:

It's great showing people how to do this for the first time. "Just touch it on the top there ... and now your money's gone! No receipt."

Enough innuendo, back to film format chat. I used to have a camera that took APS film cartridges: this badman device

loading these little dudes:

Look at that poo poo, that's cool as hell. It didn't need any cumbersome winding, just slot it into the camera and wait about three minutes for it to auto-load! Also it took kind of small pictures that looked like rear end, cost more than 35mm to develop, and was utterly obsolete within two years of being introduced.

Of course, it was replaced it with this fucker, imported at some cost from HK prior to its UK release, and also obsolete within about a year:

As a former CVS photo lab manager, gently caress APS.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 14:09

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

I was turned away from a Norwegian McDonalds because they wouldn't take my (US) Visa. They said they only took "Norwegian credit cards". I guess this is because it wasn't tied to a Norwegian bank?

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 16:39

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Physical posted:

All you have to do is write an app that generates those tones. What frequency are they? I know most tones are actually two tones played simultaneously, so I wonder if these ones are constructed any differently. It'd like to hear them.

It's been a while since phone systems used the actual tones to dial.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2012 22:11

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

BoutrosBoutros posted:

Christ alive if it takes a few days you might as well mail them a check. There's no point in changing banks for that. Western Union is almost instant, takes like 5 minutes. I used to have to transfer money to my dad once a week and he didn't have a computer or a bank account he could use, and not once did the money take longer to get there than it took me to tell him it was coming.

It's instant if both parties are members.
My brother and I make bets all the time and use this for payment.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 19:38

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

El Estrago Bonito posted:

Also if your kid is 8 and wants to walk around listening to music a tape player is like 5 dollars and some random Beatles tapes from goodwill are like fifty cents. It's not like your kid is going to care a lot about audio fidelity and you as a parent don't have to worry about them breaking a hundred dollar MP3 player when they fall off their scooter or run through a sprinkler.

This is a great point. I'd like to do this once I have kids. It'll be something fun and cheap for them to collect.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2014 15:14

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

stealie72 posted:

"Daddy, how come Dakota and Raine have ipods and I have this stupid old boring walkman thing?"

Good luck with that. Maybe if you are blessed with alternative-minded teenagers you can try it then.

edit: and before anyone chimes in with "I would never let my kid be that bratty and stuff-focused" that's not the point. Your kid will not give a gently caress about your old assed walkman any more than I gave about my parents LPs and 8 tracks full of 60s and 70s music in the 80s. You might be able to show one off to them for some nerdy/cool cred, but it's not going to become any sort of actual music player for them.

You might be able to get away with one of the lovely pre-ipod/smartphone mp3 players out there. At least you can put the latest lovely pop band's hits on that.

I was mostly talking about the before school era. "Gotta run some errands but if you're good at the grocery store we'll go thrifting!" (We would go thrifting regardless.)

# ¿ Apr 18, 2014 16:10

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

a RAID of ps1 memory cards

# ¿ Aug 26, 2022 21:23

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

That one looks to be able to pick up 13 channels, including channel 1 (this is rare).
Source: https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/crosley_9_408.html

quote:

Notes
10" Pic. Tube, US Standard VHF Tuner with Channel 1! This set is a 1949 model, but the dial starts with Channel 1 and ends with Channel 13. Note: Channel 1 was dropped in 1948. This was one of the last 13-channel sets to be produced.

You can make your own analog signal with a decent enough modulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3k4e-0_Wy8

Note: This is probably very much against FCC regulations, but may depend on the amount of power you put behind it.

edit: lmao the first 10 or so seconds of that video

# ¿ Sep 11, 2022 05:29

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

I want to be his friend

# ¿ Sep 11, 2022 06:08

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

That is some real life star trek right there

# ¿ Sep 26, 2022 22:02

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

I got a 3 handset home phone system that can connect to two cell phones via bluetooth so you can leave your phone on the counter and just use a home phone if someone calls you. It works great, I used it to help break my phone addiction. I don't use it anymore though.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2022 21:59

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

goblin week posted:

I just wish someone would make an actual new good tape player like they do new turntables. I havw a hankering to collect physical music but vinyls are so loving expensive & shipping overseas is a nightmare

Collect CDs. It's easy and they sound good.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2022 20:07

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

I tried casting a halloween playlist to a speaker outside, but it kept cutting out. Instead, I hooked a discman up to a boombox and put in a spooky sfx disc. Way more reliable! The only downside was the discman is too old for a repeat function, so I had to start it over every hour.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2022 18:58

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Chainclaw posted:

Where do people get old, obsolete tech online nowadays? I want a compact video camera with RCA out to use in a live streaming setup, and eBay isn't what it used to be.

I get all kinds of neat stuff from shopgoodwill.com

# ¿ Nov 5, 2022 20:01

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Dick Trauma posted:

http://discmaster.textfiles.com/

holy poo poo!!!!! I was going to make this specifically for clip art but I gave up because :effort:

http://discmaster.textfiles.com/view/11027/12,000%20Clip%20Art%20Plus.iso/content/people/04/08560pe.wmf

I love this

# ¿ Jan 6, 2023 21:00

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

A YOUU AITCH EFF STATION!!!

# ¿ Feb 11, 2023 02:18

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

good lord that would wreck my neck

# ¿ Feb 12, 2023 23:25

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Dicty Bojangles posted:

What on earth would be the circumstances in which this would be a wise decision?

I could see this making sense at a check-in counter like at a hotel or doctor's office. Use of a computer is transactional, so the amount of time looking down at it is smaller. I miss desks where the computer isn't the main character.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2023 18:30

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

We have a pretty decent CD collection. Takes up less space than vinyl and you still get the same joy of choosing something intentionally rather than just hitting shuffle or starting a themed radio station. Taking turns picking out the next one while cooking or baking is really nice! Plus, very good quality.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2023 19:40

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

GreenNight posted:

Want.

Lady Radia posted:

i would pay an unreasonable amount of money for this

# ¿ Apr 6, 2023 21:03

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Arrath posted:

A classier, vintage version of those people building raspberryPis into pelican cases (which are rad and I want one)

I'd rather have one of those colorful iBook G3s with a modern raspberry pi in it. I would pay way too much for that, especially if it was easy to swap out/replace the pi over time.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2023 22:58

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Mantle posted:

Isn't it so they can force you to buy their headphones on the plane instead of using your own?

On delta at least they go up and down the aisle with a basket of individually packaged earbuds and give them out for free to anyone that wants them. The more people that use the built in infotainment the fewer they have to babysit.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 23:09

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

holefoods posted:

Watched some laserdiscs tonight, it had been a while. I really miss all of the ��and now our feature presentation� and THX intros and whatnot. The downside being that (in the case of VHS at least) it was coming after a ton of trailers, but just the overall presentation of home video being this amazing novel thing is something I miss. It�s such a normal thing now, who cares to spice it up anymore.

Laserdiscs are great, we've been building out our collection. We display them and watch them.

Nocheez posted:

A Plex server loaded with high quality media, skip intros and skip credits buttons is a far superior experience to flipping a disc every 45 minutes or so.

I like both.

# ¿ May 26, 2023 22:44

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Laserdiscs being displayed on wood paneling??

# ¿ May 28, 2023 06:03

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

steckles posted:

Incomparably blessed. I've got my copy of Independence Day on the mantle next to wedding photos, family portraits, photos of favored decease cats, etc.

The included patriotic lenticular hologram is also a great conversation starter.

Hell yeah! We have the VHS with that hologram card too!

# ¿ May 29, 2023 03:04

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

The perfect vehicle is the 1987 Subaru BLT

https://japanesenostalgiccar.com/1987-subaru-blt-concept/

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 00:56

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

Isn't most of nostalgia rooted in a desire for the simpler times of youth? It's not that things were better, it's that we didn't know enough to fear life.

also things were better

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 01:43

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

I got a knife from IKEA and a sharpener and that IKEA knife is sharp as hell. Real good knife.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2023 03:24

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Is it cyeramic?

stainless steel

# ¿ Jun 10, 2023 21:28

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

AlternateAccount posted:

I still have a chefs knife from IKEA I paid about $40 for 10 years ago. Use it constantly, sharpens easily, really good.

I can't imagine this one was more than $10

edit: oops, meant to combine those into one post.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2023 21:28

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:37

Wayne Knight: May 11, 2006

pelotons and teslas

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 22:14

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