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Never realized the Tandy and Coleco leather thing, but it's not surprising. A lot of those companies did completely different poo poo before the age of home computing. Nintendo was always into toys, but they also used to operate cab companies and "love hotels" before their highly successful foray into videogames. Namco used to make small amusement park rides or something and got into games after their president gambled and bought the already pretty dead Atari Japan for well over ten times the price the competition was willing to pay for it. I think there was also a company that used to make underwear too. I thought it was Namco but I'm not sure. Maybe it was one of Nintendo's hundreds of business ideas before settling on videogames. There were a lot.
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May 31, 2017 17:08
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It makes sense though, it's not like computers really existed before a few decades ago, and you couldn't* really just become a computer company from nothing. *unless you're fuckin Apple, I guess.
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May 31, 2017 17:10
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Maybe they had a guest house for visiting execs or something? Maybe it was a gently caress room FOR visiting execs. Computer viking posted:Edit: Solidly beaten. Also, Coleco had the Cabbage Patch Kids, which was a license to print money at its peak in the 80's, but it ultimately killed them because they tried to make lightning strike twice by making Alf dolls that were merely moderately popular, and not wildly runaway popular. EDIT: Also they made a computer that had the very minor problem of erasing any tape or disc that was in or near the computer when you started it up. Instant Sunrise has a new favorite as of 17:30 on May 31, 2017 |
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May 31, 2017 17:26
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Alf dolls were really the FiestaCats of the 80s. Ok maybe those were PeeWee Herman dolls...
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May 31, 2017 19:05
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Huh, I had one of those Alf plush dolls. No idea they were made by Coleco! We threw it away because the dog liked to violate it in ways my child mind could not fathom at the time.
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May 31, 2017 19:12
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torgo posted:Radio Shack is liquidating a ton of stuff in an auction. From the looks of it, they are selling everything that was leftover at their corporate headquarters. There's cool tech stuff like assorted radios, TRS-80 and Tandy computers. There's also random Radio Shack/Tandy corporate debris, like framed photos of executives, catalogs/newsletters, and various sales awards. I understand they cleared out their QA facility wherever that was some weeks or months ago. Guy I bought an oscilloscope from this past weekend had picked up a load of great poo poo from that, he said. e: some neat stuff there on that auction though, but future Dr. Mrs. Ransom has instated a temporary ban on me acquiring any more things, save maybe a receiver with a proper tape monitor loop, until we have more more room for me to set up a proper workshop later this year or so. ReidRansom has a new favorite as of 20:04 on May 31, 2017 |
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May 31, 2017 19:34
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Light Gun Man posted:It makes sense though, it's not like computers really existed before a few decades ago, and you couldn't* really just become a computer company from nothing. But yeah. When home computers and video game consoles were first taking off there really wasn't an established business model either for producing or for selling the things. So you ended up with all kinds of companies trying their hands at manufacturing (or rebranding) the things, and you'd find computer and game poo poo in random retail contexts. Like sometime in the early '80s I impulse bought a Timex Sinclair kit from a loving corner drug store, which carried like literally nothing else more tech related than batteries.
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May 31, 2017 23:01
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drat the thread has me itching for season 4 of Halt and Catch Fire!
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Jun 1, 2017 12:09
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Get your phreak on. https://ubidestates.hibid.com/lot/32247908/radioshack-acoustic-coupler-ac-3--26-1174/?ref=catalog
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Jun 1, 2017 12:43
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Team RadioShack race bike in there! https://ubidestates.hibid.com/lot/32248211/bike-56---white--new-/?cpage=7&ref=catalog
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Jun 1, 2017 17:22
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:One of these is still lurking in my closet... That reminds me, the dad of a friend of mine had a DVD-RAM based DVR system that he used from 2005-ish until about a year or so ago. Dr. Quarex posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApN2eLI4d-4
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Jun 1, 2017 20:38
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With a month left there's no way I win anything they're auctioning. Anything good at least.
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Jun 1, 2017 21:10
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Mr-Spain posted:Team RadioShack race bike in there! There are 4 or 5 bikes, and a lot of Lance Armstrong/LiveStrong and Team RadioShack autographed stuff. Here's a George W. Bush portrait that looks a lot more like George H.W. Bush. https://ubidestates.hibid.com/lot/32248409/george-w-bush-portrait--a-b--gross--/?cpage=7 empty baggie has a new favorite as of 22:50 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 22:46
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Lowen SoDium posted:That reminds me, the dad of a friend of mine had a DVD-RAM based DVR system that he used from 2005-ish until about a year or so ago. That video reminds me of wandering through the computer open market looking for cheap upgrades and seeing that video in every other stall playing tp try to draw people to buy fully built computers the small stalls built right then and there after you ordered it.
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Jun 2, 2017 03:15
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17zfz017s9A
Gonz has a new favorite as of 07:23 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 07:15
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That reminds me, I have all these old internal PCI modem cards, is there anything useful you can do with them these days? I heard you could maybe use them with Asterisk but I did a quick Google search and it sounds like that's not true. I wonder how many cents each they'd sell for on eBay?
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Jun 2, 2017 15:15
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SubG posted:There were a bunch, but almost all of them went under. There were moderate successes like Acorn, but also flash-in-the-pan companies like TeleVideo, and so on. Same's true with hardware that was aimed at the business/industry market instead of the home market---DEC was founded as a computer company and they were a big name until the market for big iron collapsed, but there were also a bunch of rapid burnouts like Data General. You made me remember this company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
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Jun 3, 2017 00:42
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Buttcoin purse posted:That reminds me, I have all these old internal PCI modem cards, is there anything useful you can do with them these days? I heard you could maybe use them with Asterisk but I did a quick Google search and it sounds like that's not true. I wonder how many cents each they'd sell for on eBay? I think it's possible, but out of the box asterisk expects some bare minimum PBX hardware.
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Jun 3, 2017 05:25
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not sure if you can consider it a 'true' relic, but I used to use one of these the Creative Zen Mozaic ez 100  I still have it, I just don't use it anymore If you want to watch videos on it, you need to use a special converter, which completely fucks the video quality.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:39
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CaptainSarcastic posted:You made me remember this company: 
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Jun 3, 2017 13:25
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Worth crossposting here, too: The The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment over in Oakland has launched NeoHabitat, a resurrection of Lucasfilms Games' Habitat, the world's first MMO. The proprietary Quantum Link (aka proto-AOL) serverside has been rewritten using a modern web framework, while the C64 client has been updated from the original source code.
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Jun 3, 2017 13:40
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As a wee kid in the first grade I'd carry my library books in a blue tote bag with the WANG logo on it. Mom got it for free somewhere in the mom ether. Wish I still had it.
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Jun 3, 2017 23:59
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CaptainSarcastic posted:You made me remember this company: I had a wang 2400 baud modem and a poo poo Brother laptop that I used to play around on local bbs's and wardial back in the early ninties. I miss that toggle switch in the back of the modem to turn it on.
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Jun 5, 2017 21:31
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I'm sure Floppotron has been mentioned before (and probably by me) but drat the guy who made it is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJwEgxmE3Dw
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Jun 6, 2017 11:25
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0 Long but pretty interesting video of two goons who worked at Sierra Online in probably their heyday sitting and chatting about the company.
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Jun 6, 2017 13:00
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Gonna crosspost from the Thrift Store thread because I found this poo poo yesterday:Titus Sardonicus posted:
Cleverest way to drop off literal garbage, I guess.
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Jun 6, 2017 18:13
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 context for this: In the 80's was the early beginnings of cable and satellite TV. At the time, satellite was primarily used to go between the studios and cable headend facilities, who'd broadcast it to their paying customers. And as a result these signals were broadcasted in analog and entirely unencrypted. To have satellite TV at home wasn't just a small DirecTV dish you'd stick on the roof and not really have to worry about. It was a big ugly thing about 5 feet in diameter and was on a motorized mount to steer it. This equipment was not at all cheap, running into the 4 or 5 digits in the 80's. But one of the things you could pick up was the satellite feeds that would normally go between a station like HBO and the cable TV head end, essentially getting HBO for free. As you can imagine, HBO was really not happy about that idea, and so they started encrypting their satellite feeds, and sold decoder boxes which required a subscription. Captain Midnight here was somewhat annoyed that the TV he had been getting for free would require a subscription now, and so he ended up hijacking the satellite feed for everybody to broadcast that message.
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Jun 6, 2017 18:47
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How did he manage that? Did he sneak into a ground station to type the message?
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Jun 6, 2017 18:57
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oohhboy posted:How did he manage that? Did he sneak into a ground station to type the message? Sort of, he worked at one. That's actually how they caught him, the guy worked for a different satellite station, and when he finished his shift, he wrote up his message on a character generator, aimed the dish at HBO's satellite and started broadcasting. He got caught because there's only so many satellite uplink facilities in the US, and the FCC was able to figure out which ones were in a position to do it, and by the font on the character generator he used.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:02
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Lowen SoDium posted:That reminds me, the dad of a friend of mine had a DVD-RAM based DVR system that he used from 2005-ish until about a year or so ago. This was also on the Windows 95 disk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
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Jun 6, 2017 19:03
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Instant Sunrise posted:
Here's a recording of the pirate broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbruOe6Yii0 oohhboy posted:How did he manage that? Did he sneak into a ground station to type the message? https://web.archive.org/web/20070128101239/http://www.signaltonoise.net/library/captmidn.htm But the one that gets me and is still being speculated on is the Max Headroom Incident. Recording of the pirate broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjeUuakHsLw
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Jun 6, 2017 19:04
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Instant Sunrise posted:To have satellite TV at home wasn't just a small DirecTV dish you'd stick on the roof and not really have to worry about. It was a big ugly thing about 5 feet in diameter and was on a motorized mount to steer it. This equipment was not at all cheap, running into the 4 or 5 digits in the 80's. But one of the things you could pick up was the satellite feeds that would normally go between a station like HBO and the cable TV head end, essentially getting HBO for free. I cannot find any evidence that what I am remembering existed...though to be fair if you had shown my 1990 self a 2017 remote control I probably would have thought it was huge with rotary dials when remembering it.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:19
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Dr. Quarex posted:My vague childhood understandings of satellite dishes as things that cost the same as a car and seemed vaguely illicit finally makes sense reading this. I also feel like I remember a huge remote control with a bunch of rotary dials or something. I can't speak for the rotary dials, but my grandparents had a dish. There was something about giving the dish directional instructions because the thing had to physically rotate to point at satellites.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:22
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Dr. Quarex posted:I also feel like I remember a huge remote control with a bunch of rotary dials or something. Iron Crowned posted:I can't speak for the rotary dials, but my grandparents had a dish. There was something about giving the dish directional instructions because the thing had to physically rotate to point at satellites. Finding random East Coast / Japanese channels was interesting. As was finding the Spice Network's Tommy Lee / Pam Anderson marathon. 
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Jun 6, 2017 19:35
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My dad had a big satellite. He was very picky about making sure you knew which channel your show was on because he wanted to limit the amount of movement the motor had to control.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:44
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We had one of those giant dishes in the 90s growing up. On ours there was no guide channel, so if you wanted to watch a channel, you had to first figure out which satellite to point your dish at and then wait 30 seconds for it to acquire the target. I think we had a cheat sheet printed out with all the major channels. One nice thing was you could watch wither a West Coast or East coast feed, so it was possible to watch certain things a couple hours earlier. It was fun, but I don't miss it.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:48
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I loved our big C-Band dish. It came with the house and my dad and I spent a summer getting that thing running in the late-70s. Watching interstitial stuff during commercial breaks could be hilarious on national news feeds.
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Jun 6, 2017 20:09
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FilthyImp posted:Some of the later VCR remotes had a rotary jog dial for FF/RW seeking. I don't think that's quite the same as what you remember. Those jog dials were so loving stupid. Like, a jog control makes sense on a piece of equipment that lets you physically roll the tape back and forth frame by frame at a variable speed, like on an editing deck. But a VCR, where you have play/FF/rewind and the "jog" dial is just a spring-loaded momentary input you could replace with a single button for each function? Pure marketing hooey, and of 100 VCR buyers 99 would have no idea why it was supposedly shaped like that.
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Jun 6, 2017 20:11
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I am wondering now if all those big rear end satellite dishes no longer work due to migration to digital in one form or another.
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Jun 6, 2017 20:14
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Data Graham posted:Those jog dials were so loving stupid. I recorded every single seinfeld to VHS, manually stopping and restarting for commercials. that jog dial was a godsend
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Jun 6, 2017 20:18
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