Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

$383.55 in 2014 dollars.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2015 20:45

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:19

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Elephant 5 1/4" floppies actually shed their magnetic coating after about a month. At my lab in the late 70s we used to say 'Elephants always forget'. Don't judge us. We had no sense of humor.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 18:55

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Internet Underground magazine was my go to for a long time. I also remember reading Byte and Popular Computing back in the mid 70s.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2015 16:46

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

In 1998 Kingpin Life of Crime demo was released. All 109MB of it. We were aghast at its size.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 21:54

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I still have my old HP 2100TN. Still plugging along after 16 years of constant use. Only thing I wish it had was duplex.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 18:22

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I still have my Treo 600 CDMA in a drawer. I was using it up to 2012.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2015 23:15

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Just plugged mine in. It still works!

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 02:20

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Oh god the 1541 FDD. So slow and easy to go out of alignment.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2015 12:57

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Novalogic Games (Comanche vs Havoc, the Delta Force series) were all voxel based.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2015 16:39

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

KozmoNaut posted:

Add-ons such as the Epyx Fastload corrected that, though.

AFAIK, the drive had basically the same CPU as the C64, complete with its own OS in ROM and a small amount of cache RAM.

Demoscene coders managed to exploit this to offload processing to the 1541 for increased performance.

The original drivers for the 1541 gave a throughput of 300 bytes per second or so. So 20 minutes to copy a 170k disk.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2015 20:34

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I did the MOO2 disk copy trick to work around a ridiculously finicky CD-ROM that would only recognize it had a disk in it once every ten or so openings and closings.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2015 11:53

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I currently have a Mac IIfx with a Radius Rocket Stage II Card in it. This was basically a Quadra on a 12" NuBus card with it's own memory and video.

http://lowendmac.com/2014/radius-rocket-far-more-than-a-mac-accelerator/ here's a full description.

What's it good for?

Not much anymore, but it's one of the weirdest pieces of tech I own.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2015 04:50

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I had a 9660 with the car adapter. Great phone for its time.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2015 05:13

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I have a 1930s vintage rangefinder Leica that takes awesome photos. I really should get back into using it.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 22:43

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I used that fucker all through the late 80s. I wasn't the radioman per se but we all swapped out carrying that bastard.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 02:58

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Jonathan Yeah! posted:

"20 year old tech" was a guess. RS232 came out in '69 and ISA in '81. And, people still use PCI, CR-2302, ATX and PS2 ports. 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

Way too much industrial and scientific equipment uses RS232 for it to be depreciated in any anything less than ten years from now.

# ¿ May 10, 2015 19:59

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Exit Strategy posted:

I still run my Power Mac 6100 sometimes to play old games.

I have a pair of 500mhz G4s next to my desk. One has 2GB of RAM, twin 8MB Voodoo2s and a Formac 7 card driving a SGI 1600W Flatscreen, and a built in Jazz2 Drive. Living the 2001 dream baby! :radcat:

# ¿ May 14, 2015 01:00

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Code Jockey posted:

Maaaaan I want SGI hardware so bad. I keep trawling local craigslist for it, but no dice.

One of my treasured childhood memories was playing Doom when it first came out, blazing fast, on an SGI workstation of some kind at a local university since my friend's dad was the chair of the CS department. Cool looking things, too.

I've got a [modern] Sun workstation, just need to add the SGI, and maybe a BeBox to round out the interesting PC collection.

I have a NeXT Turbo Pizza mobo framed on the wall of my office.

# ¿ May 14, 2015 19:31

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

They still have them at the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison I think (and they may still have one in the Field Museum).

Okay this is cool http://www.moldamania.com/

Humbug Scoolbus has a new favorite as of 01:56 on May 30, 2015

# ¿ May 30, 2015 01:54

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Looking at the moldamania site there are a bunch at the Milwaukee Zoo

# ¿ May 30, 2015 07:49

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Dick Trauma posted:

I'm pleasantly surprised that bringing up the Mold-A-Rama elicited such a widespread response. Maybe this one will do the same.

When I was a kid Radio Shack was the place to go for technology. They had an array of these electronic lab kits and I remember spending an awful lot of time working with mine. I believe this was my exact model, and goddamn if it wasn't an exciting introduction to space-age electronics. At least in 1975!

The board was covered in these little springs and came with an assortment of wires of different colors and lengths. The marked off areas on the board indicated the specific components you could work with and the guide told you which springs to attach with which wires. For example you could make a crystal radio with mine, but you'd have to hook up the antenna, speaker, etc. to get it to work.

In the picture you can see one of the components I found interesting: an LED! (To the right of the VU meter) It was just a single diode and at best it sort of glowed instead of blazing like a modern one, but I was fascinated anyway. My brother had the higher level kit that had an actual multi-segment LED and when wired up properly it could be used for logic experiments.

EDIT: Here it is. I see now they also had a solar cell! At that time it was pretty drat cool technology to be able to play around with.

I can't imagine this sort of thing would stand a chance in the modern world but there was something to be said for the combination of the physical and electronic for learning how things work. I can still remember looking at the one relay my board came with, being able to see it respond as I changed the way things were wired. Ah well.

I had the 150 in 1 when I was in middle school, and my sister and my 10 year old niece just found a complete 65 in 1 at a swap shop. Right now I'm teaching my niece about how logic gates work :3:

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 23:05

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I still use optical media for Netflix DVDs and for playing some of my old games that I can't be assed to get a no-CD crack for.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 14:19

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

disco_stu posted:

I only keep my FLAC files for whole albums that I love. The rest is 320kbps. I can't stand streaming as it exists, the cymbals are always too washy. I'll wait until streaming is better, but you can pry the media that I own from my cold, dead hands.

I lost a good chunk of my high range from age so cymbals always sound washy now. It will happen to you too.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2015 22:16

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

p-hop posted:

What is y'alls earliest internet/computer memory? My family were Mac loyalists, so I never got to play all the cool games my friends had. We had a B&W version of Glypha (2 I think?) on our Macintosh II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

My dad was a professor at Johns Hopkins in the early 70s. I was 7 or 8 down and my mom took me down to the campus to see him. He showed me the terminal he had just gotten in his office and the first thing I played was this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(PLATO)

My first computer experience was qan arena shooter. Explains a lot actually.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2015 15:42

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

One of the monitors on my desk is a 21" 1600x1200 Radius Trinitron Monitor I bought new in August of 1999. It's been running great for fifteen years and the image quality is still fantastic.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2015 20:07

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Probably http://scanimate.zfx.com/

# ¿ Jul 5, 2015 20:46

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

It's still on your desk because you need a crane to move one of those suckers.

_{also where are all the goons whose first computer memories involve the use of punch cards}

I started on a Plato system in the early 70s. In college I used punch cards for my Fortran and COBOL courses.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2015 23:05

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

ToxicSlurpee posted:

It's even more mind bending when you realize what some people managed to accomplish using practical effects.

Go watch 2001. Literally none of that movie was CGI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfRAfsK5cvU

# ¿ Jul 6, 2015 15:36

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

robodex posted:

I'm gay and was in the middle of rural wisconsin so I doubt I would have had much fun

You would think that wouldn't you...

http://clubfly.com/venue/905/oz_wausau.html

# ¿ Jul 14, 2015 20:34

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Platystemon posted:

Your parking meters take bills?

Berkeley CA Parking meters take bills and credit cards as well as coins. Parking here is still a nightmare though.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2015 16:38

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

ElwoodCuse posted:

What's the current status of laser eye surgery? The way it was advertised always made it seem low-rent and "will it gently caress up your eyes in 10 years? who knows!" If it was a super safe, super easy solution to 20/20 vision for everyone, would it really need to be advertised on buses and FM radio?

I had LASIK done in 2000 and it was the best idea I ever had. I absolute love it. Going from 20/250 to 20/10 was incredible

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 21:23

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Johnny Aztec posted:

I would love to toss my contacts, but the idea of anything going near my eye makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

My LASIK surgery took 22 minutes total a from the time I walked into the doctor's office to the time I left. The process is absolutely painless and you don't see anything out of the eye they're working on until the surgery is done. The exam takes about an hour and is pretty non-intrusive as well. Do it.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2015 16:00

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Everblight posted:

Wrong. Dreamcast was killed off by the widespread availability at the time of CDRs and CD Burners, and the fact that they did absolutely no piracy control whatsoever, so you could just burn a game onto a 40c disk and play immediately.

Piracy is generally just a response to an inefficient or overpriced market, but hooollleeee poo poo did Dreamcast screw the pooch on not making it at least marginally difficult.

Ripping a GD-ROM was not trivial and condensing all the video and music so it would fit on a CD-Rom wasn't much easier. The DC had such good games though that people made the effort. I still have my DC and play it fairly frequently.

Zonekeeper posted:

Yeah, they expected the weird proprietary GD-ROM disc format to act as the entire anti-piracy system, which would have worked fine as the blank discs weren't available anywhere nor could they be burned without special burners. It was Sega's decision to release a Japan-only series of multimedia CDs that unwittingly added a backdoor to bypass their antipiracy scheme entirely.

Mil-CD was a format released by Sega whose gimmick was that they were normal CDs that did extra stuff in a Dreamcast like play video or access web features. To support them, the Dreamcast needed to be able to execute code from otherwise normal CDs. That would be fine and dandy, except they were so confident in GD-ROM's ability to prevent piracy that they forgot to add an antipiracy scheme to the Mil-CD feature.

It also took the surge of Hotline for distribution. Usenet was big, but once there was direct unsegmented downloads that was the tipping point. (And DiskJuggler)

Humbug Scoolbus has a new favorite as of 19:58 on Jul 22, 2015

# ¿ Jul 22, 2015 19:54

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Slanderer posted:

One of the more interesting things to result from Dreamcast's poor security was Bleemcast. This software was an emulator bootdisc for commercial PS1 games that was ported over from the PC version. The bleemcast disc would exploit the security hole when booted, and would then launch an emulator from RAM, which would allow you to swap in a PS1 disc. It was originally going to be a universal PS1 emulator, but because of compatibility issues they only ended up selling 3 different bootdiscs for Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3, and Metal Gear Solid. Even with the emulation layer, the DC was able to run these games much better than an actual PS1, so they were rendered at a higher resolution with additional post processing. The DC controller didn't map 1:1 with the PS1 controller, which was an issue, but otherwise these discs apparently worked somehow. The PC version of Bleem was a full emulator, but many (or most?) games were unplayably buggy without dedicated compatibility fixes.

However, before they could release more bootdiscs (or a universal emulator), Sony sued them and drove them to bankruptcy with legal fees.

I have a Bleemcast version of Thrillkill actually.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 00:24

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Slanderer posted:

An unreleased emulation of an unreleased fighting game? Nice!

I've got a collection of unreleased games.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 14:55

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

pienipple posted:

Yeah, it couldn't move as many polys as the PS2 but the AA and selective rendering could do some sweet stuff. Skies of Arcadia and PSO were pretty amazing at the time.

Soul Caliber was so pretty.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 20:37

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Woolie Wool posted:

A better reason is that most modern CDs are mastered for low fidelity equipment (iThings, etc.) and undiscerning listeners and sound horrible by design. Even the CD rips of my Stratovarius and Dream Theater records sound amazing compared to the official CD releases despite being CD rips and subject to both the limitations of CDs and the limitations of vinyl and suffering inevitable degradation along the chain from the cartridge to the preamp to the ADC.

There are some drat good CDs from the '80s out there, though. I have a few albums where the CD beats the vinyl hands down.

As for vinyl records being direct transfers of brickwalled CDs, I guess I've been lucky because most of the modern vinyl I've bought was mastered for vinyl and sounds pretty great. The new Queensryche album is definitely a CD transfer though and so is Blind Guardian's big 4LP compilation--both sound terrible.

My high range is damaged because of C-130s and I laugh at audio purists. I simply can't hear the nuances. mp3s at 128bit sound perfectly fine to me.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2015 21:59

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

I'm still looking for a Dreamcast ethernet adapter that will not cost the GNP of Bolivia.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 03:15

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

Last Chance posted:

Can you still use the Dreamcast web browser? My friend managed to set his connection up somehow in the early 2000s and I remember it being horrifically bad.

Just tried it on my landline and a work dial up access number I had. It still functions!

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 05:36

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:19

Humbug Scoolbus: Apr 25, 2008; The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.; Clapping Larry

DrBouvenstein posted:

Speaking of obsolete TV tech, DLP TVs were the new hotness for all of a couple years in the mid aughts.

LCDs still had bad viewing angles, poor blacks, and were pricey. Plasmas were even pricier and had bad burn-in. CRTs were heavy as gently caress, and not really available larger than like 36". CRT Projection TVs were bigger, but still pretty heavy, and kind of pricey.

But DLP? Why, friend, DLP was all the good, none of the bad! No burn in, fairly inexpensive, real blacks, lighter than a CRT or CRT-projection (and a little bit thinner, too.)

Honestly, they weren't bad TVs, but then the price on LCDs came WAAY down, while getting better blacks and viewing angles.

I have a DLP Viewsonic projector and it is really pretty awesome.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 17:31

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

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