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This lovely device is a very early ATM, from 1918. The user would insert their passbook and turn the dial to indicate the next blank line where the transaction information would be stamped. Then they'd move the lever to indicate how much money they were depositing. EDIT: For the youngsters a "passbook" was a small book like a check register that would keep track of all your transactions at the bank. Initially they were manual but eventually they'd insert them into a computer to print the transaction onto a page. EDIT 2: Oh man some of you probably don't know what a "check register" is. 
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Sep 30, 2012 15:55
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Farecoal posted:I actually don't. What is it? It's for keeping a manual record of your checking account. The bank (or check printing companies) give you one to go along with your paper checks so that as you write checks you can keep track of them and balance your account. Quicken gives you a virtual version that looks similar. 
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Sep 30, 2012 18:05
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Kwyndig posted:Old people. If you ever want to know why something still exists, the answer is usually old people being unwilling to change. I pay my rent via check. I pay most of my medical bills via check as well. Everything else is cash or electronic. You complain about old people the same way they do about young people!
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Sep 30, 2012 19:12
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Back in the 1970s before calendars were common on watches (and before there were LCD watches) you could buy a pack of small metal calendars that had bendable tabs that would wrap onto your watchband. I can remember seeing them around 1972 and thinking that they were pretty cool, but in retrospect they're silly. EDIT: Looks like they still make them. Crazy.  
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Oct 1, 2012 01:15
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Here's a two-fer: A Kodak Instamatic camera with... A FLASH CUBE! When I was a little kid I would travel everywhere with one of these in a bag, along with plenty of flash cubes. The 126 film cartridge was easy to load, similar to the tiny 110 ones. Take a picture, and when you wind the lever the film would advance and the cube would rotate to the next, hopefully unused face. Here's a shot I took with one of my brother. You can see he has a camera bag of his own on his shoulder since we both had Instamatics. We switched to color film not long after but at the time black and white was still cheaper.  EDIT: He's pointing at dog poop because it was everywhere in Brussels and we were both amused and disgusted.
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Oct 1, 2012 01:56
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Jedit posted:And then there were the 126 cameras, which were basically a lot like 110 cameras but with a much taller cartridge. This combined the worst aspects of both 110 and disc cameras. 126 was not too bad, if you check my post on the last page you'll see a B&W 126 shot. 110 on the other hand... like the Disc cameras the negatives were very small and the construction and lenses were crappy. My mother used a Minolta 110 for years and the photos are uniformly indistinct. But it was a small camera for the time, had easy to handle film due to the cartridge and a built in electronic flash to make buying flash cubes a thing of the past. Disc cameras were bad in almost every way, short of their thinness which had appeal at the beginning. That did not last long.
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Oct 1, 2012 19:59
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Argyle posted:I just impulse bought 2012 and 2013 sets from Jackson Office Supply, one of the few companies that still makes them. They are absolutely silly and completely unnecessary in this day and age, but suddenly I feel like I MUST have them. Oh god, no! I'm spreading the madness! 
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Oct 2, 2012 01:57
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wipeout posted:Do you guys think we can get another 10 pages out of bank chat? That would be so awesome. I haven't seen a residential or commercial fusebox in a long time. I'm wondering how common they still are. Everything I've worked with since the 1990s has been circuit breakers. 
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Oct 3, 2012 18:12
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0toShifty posted:The light switches are all 4-way pushbutton switches. They let you do strange things like turn on the hall lights from 3 different floors. I haven't seen one of those since the 1970s. One of my only memories of my grandfather is when he carried me around his apartment letting me push all of those. They were two way so you push one and the other pops out. I used the phrase "poison pen letter" yesterday and completely baffled a guy who is in his mid thirties. 
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Oct 3, 2012 21:51
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In the old days if you didn't have room on the system board to add RAM you could get a memory expansion card. This particular beast packs a whopping 4 MEGABYTES so those Quattro spreadsheets should fly! I found a couple of these in storage at my last job, about three years ago. I am saddened that my elite mouse cleaning skills have become worthless. I used to enjoy coming across a mouse that felt like it was rolling over cobblestones and clean it really well. 
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Oct 3, 2012 23:02
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Bondematt posted:Can't wipe your rear end with the internet But there have been many times that I've wanted to.
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Oct 4, 2012 03:42
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My grandmother was using a wringer washer in her basement into the 1970s, as well as a treadle sewing machine. The power of that thing was amazing and I have no doubt it could've sewn right through my hand. My grandfather was an amateur carpenter with few power tools. You haven't drilled a hole until you've done so with one of these:  As a kid I found them a bitch to use but he could do it like it was nothing.
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Oct 10, 2012 19:20
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Boxman posted:I'm young enough where I had 5.25 floppies on my first computer. I remember being very surprised when I learned about the existence of 8 inch floppies. Around 1983 I temped at a place here in Los Angeles that had 8 inch floppies. They also had a Winchester hard drive that had to be turned on before the computer it was attached to so it had time to spin up. Sounded like a helicopter turbine and was maybe 30 megs, which at the time seemed like a massive amount of storage. The heads on that drive actually stayed in contact with the platters when spun down. There was a special landing zone for them.
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Oct 11, 2012 17:11
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wipeout posted:A friend of mine had a 40Meg one on his Atari - I remember it sounding like a washing machine. It seemed like future tech at the time. The Winchester was huge, in a cabinet of sorts. It was about ten years old at the time so it was from the Big Iron age of computing.
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Oct 11, 2012 18:21
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While we're on the subject of records, in the 1980s when 45s were still popular they came out with the idea of one sided singles. These were 45s that were only pressed on one side and sold at a lower price. I used to buy lots of singles so I gave this a shot and they sounded terrible. The reverse side originally was just lightly grained plastic but then they switched to a horrendous raised cross-hatching that would instantly eat the needle of anyone dumb enough to try and play that side.
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Oct 12, 2012 19:21
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Jedit posted:I'll see that and raise you flexidiscs. These were single-sided records printed on a thin vinyl sheet that would bend without damaging the groove. They were used in the pre-CD era as a way to include music or other audio content with books or magazines. CDs obsoleted them and they went out of production in 2000, but apparently there's recently been a resurgence of interest in them from the indie scene. Flexis in magazines were pretty common, but flexis you had to cut out of the back of a cereal box...  My brother and I collected a few of these back in the 1970s. The sound quality is what you would expect.
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Oct 13, 2012 00:09
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WebDog posted:However making new records was where the fun came in. One readily available material was X-ray negatives which were just durable enough to be used - and lasted around a month. These cost 1 to 1 1/2 roubles compared to the five roubles for a vinyl. It's not often I come across something I have never heard of or seen before. Thank you for this. My father was an x-ray tech and I sent this to him.
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Oct 14, 2012 17:04
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I was offsite for work yesterday at a building that is over 80 years old. I've been there plenty of times over the last year and a half but while taking a shortcut encountered some awesome (and obsolete) technology. This pipe looks like it melted.  Check out this awesome door. You're looking at the original instant messaging: pneumatic tube transport! You open it with the long handle which first lifts a small hatch to break the seal, and then the full door opens.  Put your message or other paperwork into a capsule, close it up, and drop it in here. When you close the door the pressure builds back up and sweeps the carrier to the collection point elsewhere in the building.  Here's a wall mount drop-point in a corridor.  This is a picture I found on the internet of what a collection point looks like. You can see a capsule on the counter as well.  EDIT: I looked up the name on the door and found Grover Brothers and Wood Company, founded in Detroit in 1915. If you can believe it the company still exists and still makes PTT, but now they're called TransLogic. Dick Trauma has a new favorite as of 14:00 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 13:57
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I emailed the pics to my Dad and he said they had it at the hospital he worked at back in the 1970s. He put a moth in one.
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Oct 20, 2012 16:09
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It's really cool to hear how pneumatic tube transport is alive and well. Other than bank drive thrus I thought it was long gone.
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Oct 20, 2012 19:22
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I Appreciate You posted:Also, pneumatic tubes are currently used in test and research nuclear reactors to move small experimental samples in and out of the reactor's core quickly. I GET IT. THEY ARE NOT OBSOLETE.   One thing I haven't seen in a long time are automatic doors triggered by rubber entry pads on the ground. Everything seems to be on a motion sensor now. Those pads seemed pretty cool when I was a kid.
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Oct 29, 2012 16:49
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wipeout posted:The earliest automatic door I remember was motion activated - I was about 6 or so. I remember them from the late 1960s, no idea how much earlier they existed. Also reminds me of "electric eyes" which I don't see anymore. I'm sure true optical electric eyes are still in use but when I was a kid they were the most common sensor you'd see for things like door and alarm systems.
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Oct 29, 2012 20:51
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Mister Kingdom posted:We had those when I was a kid (70s) and we were always told not to drop the pull tab into the open can for fear of swallowing it and dying. That was featured on an episode of Emergency! Some tubby old dude used to dropping the tab into his beers and he was choking on it. The thought of that thing stuck in there disturbed me. While we're on soda can chat I don't think anyone's mentioned press button cans. They were an attempt to get away from pull tabs where you had to push in two "buttons" on top of the can: a large one to pour, and a smaller one for pressure relief. Some pour buttons were round, others curved but all were sort of annoying because you could wind up sticking a finger into your soda. 
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Nov 16, 2012 00:13
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They were pre-cut and had a similar edge to a pull tab. Not likely to cut you unless you were really clumsy jamming a finger into the pour hole. Of course sometimes the little tabs broke right off into the can, or the pre-cut was no good and all you could do was squash the tab in a bit and then have to use the end of a fork to bash it in. Obsolete and failed.
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Nov 16, 2012 00:20
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The only name I remember for portrait monitors is Radius. They were nice for page layout, but when widescreen arrived seeing two pages side by side (albeit smaller) outweighed it. I have a Hanns G monitor from around 2007 that can do the portrait rotation trick but I've never used it that way. EDIT: Oh, Internet. Is there anything you don't know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvqxvODBydo EDIT2: Holy poo poo, Shufflepuck Cafe!
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Jan 2, 2013 21:24
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When I was a little kid in the early 1970s the schooldesks all had a hole in the top. It was years later that I found out they were for placing one's inkwell. We were all using pencils and ballpoint or felt tip pens by then.
Dick Trauma has a new favorite as of 18:34 on Jan 19, 2013 |
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Jan 19, 2013 18:32
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leidend posted:And to tie it all together, it was easy for my dad to transfer there because he worked for a large computer company most people under 30 probably have never heard of: Wang. I actually worked for Wang Global for a while back in the 1990s and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my career. A far cry from the original Wang Laboratories.
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May 7, 2013 17:44
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Lightning fast ZMODEM!  I shouldn't laugh. When I finally got Telix and a modem that could use Zmodem I thought it was pretty cool. 
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May 9, 2013 03:44
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slomomofo posted:Pizza says no. I order my pizza online. I am however disappointed by how many people try to handle complex, sensitive discussions via email, especially when there's five or more people copied in. One five minute conference call and it would be done.
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May 14, 2013 00:23
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DNova posted:I still use floppies every day at work to transfer copies of Quattro Pro spreadsheets off a 486 running Windows 3.1. All of this makes my brain hurt.
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May 18, 2013 05:51
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Here's John Harrison's first longitude clock, H1. Anyone interested in this device or this sort of early technology needs to watch Longitude, a quiet but excellent movie about Harrison's work. It's got Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon and lots of lovely views of Harrison's chronometers. Harrison's persistence and the pig-headedness of the scientific community of the day is remarkable. It also added the phrase "powder of sympathy" to my vocabulary. You need look no farther for an example of 17th century scientific weirdness.
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Jun 27, 2013 18:54
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I don't think I've seen this yet. It was a regular in Popular Science/Popular Mechanics back in the late 1970s: the BONE FONE! It was a response to the Walkman craze, the second wave of portable electronic music devices following transistor radios. I don't know if I ever saw one in person but this ad always caught my eye. 
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Jul 6, 2013 03:48
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Collateral Damage posted:That's a Mobira Talkman. Please recreate this scene for us. 
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Dec 2, 2013 11:52
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JediTalentAgent posted:That's the one. Digging through Stick videos I came across this wonderful thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbdmzIVRNxs
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Jan 5, 2014 18:34
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Fooley posted:These are almost EXACTLY what I thought "decks" looked like when I first read Neuromancer... I got your deck right here, buddy.  I can still remember the pain of playing Soccer on that evil controller.
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Jan 22, 2014 05:37
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Old James posted:The bold part reminded me of the old cable box remotes that had 12 radio buttons, a dial to adjust the frequency, and a lever to go above channel 13. I remember that switch on the left, to switch among the three tiers of channels. I got very good at running through all the channels at high speed, enough to make my Mom shout at me once because the constant "SNAP SNAP SNAP" was making her crazy.
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Mar 12, 2014 04:48
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Good news everyone! I've found a way to get all your news sent directly to your PC, live! Everything you want, all in one place and updated automatically.
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Mar 17, 2014 22:23
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Speaking of obsolete car tech do cars still come with vinyl seats? I can remember as a kid wearing shorts in the Summer and then having my flesh practically melt onto the rear seats of our lead sled. I was happy when cloth/mouse-fur became the basic option for car seats.
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Apr 2, 2014 19:08
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I hope pull-out car stereos have become obsolete. They were terrible.
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Apr 7, 2014 02:11
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Simply Simon posted:I have a detachable face on my car stereo. I usually just take it off and throw it in the glove deparment so that it looks like there's no stereo, or if a potential burglar knows about detachable faces, that I did bother to take it with me. My brother had a nice Alpine pullout stereo and left it under his car seat. Burglars destroyed the driver side door lock attempting to gain entry and wound up smashing a window. Stole the stereo of course. Pullouts were terrible because they were only truly useful if you were willing to take the stereo with you at all times. They were heavy and cumbersome and there would be countless occasions where it was a pain in the rear end to bring it along, like going to see a movie. At least detachable faceplates were slimmer and lighter. There was also the problem where the stereo connector would get worn out from all the removals and insertions, particularly if you weren't gentle with them.
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Apr 7, 2014 21:27
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