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I was an early adopter of MP3 players...I got an RCA Lyra player when I was in highschool: Mine came with a 64 MB (yes, that's an M as in "megabyte") CF card. It could fit about a CD and a half of CD-quality audio, and was quite badass for the time (late 90s) as I could put my head down in study hall and fish one earbud out of my jacket pocket and listen to music without the studyhall monitor knowing. I can remember having debates with people who thought MiniDisc was going to win the "format war" and thought I was wasting my money. Later when I had my first full time job out of highschool I bought a Creative Nomad 3 for the princely sum of $250:  Compared with my first MP3 player it was a huge upgrade...20 GB platter HDD could hold my entire music collection with some to spare. It had more features than a swiss army knife - it could record direct to a number of digital audio formats from a line-in source including SPDIF, could run continuously for almost a whole day on a single charge with a second battery added and considering most people were still carrying around portable CD players at the time (early 2000s) its shape and bulk wasn't terribly nerdy. Looking back it would have been a total mindfuck to know that in 10-15 years dedicated MP3 players would largely be a thing of the past as playing music is now an ancillary cellphone function.
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Jul 13, 2012 03:57
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Prettz posted:Back before CD burners were widespread, or anywhere remotely near affordable, your only alternative to backing stuff up on shitloads of floppy disks was the iomega Zip Drive, with 100MB Zip disks. I can remember thinking how awesome these were when my family got our first "modern" computer when I was in middle school (a 133 MHz Pentium I, prior to which we had an old IBM 8088 with 2 5.25" floppy drives and no HDD.) I think the allure was you could carry 100 MB of data on a re-writable disk that you could carry in your pocket at a time when solid-state flash drives were barely on the radar, USB was "that funny little port that nothing uses" (assuming your computer even had it) and CD burners and media were still ludicrously expensive. Geoj has a new favorite as of 05:30 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 05:26
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^ In a way they were the ancestor of QR codes, so it wasn't for nothing. Speaking of antiquated optical scanning technology...  Timex Datalink. Hailing from a time when payphones were still the preferred method of communication when away from landlines it allowed you to store contact information on your wristwatch and be the biggest nerd on the block. Software that only worked on Windows 95/98/NT and with a CRT monitor (if you had a LCD monitor you had to get a LED adapter) let you manage your contact list on your computer, rather than painstakingly entering contacts using the buttons on the watch (which you could do while away from your computer.) When done you held the watch up to your monitor and it would flash black lines on a white background that the optical sensor in the watch would read. Geoj has a new favorite as of 05:51 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 05:48
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indigenous nudity posted:Yeah, my wife is a doctor and she uses a pager when whenever she's on call. I'm not sure why they don't just call her cell phone, but I'm sure they have their reasons. From my understanding (at least in hospital settings) old analog cell phones used the same/nearly same frequency as a lot of wireless medical equipment so cell phones were generally banned from use. Modern digital phones are well outside of the spectrum used by medical equipment but a lot of hospitals still enforce the ban. My friend's wife is a physical therapist and up until recently had to leave her phone in her locker at work, but apparently the hospital she works at recently relaxed their rules to allow cell phone use anywhere but in operating rooms and intensive care floors. Pagers are/were widely used by health care professionals because they are receive only and didn't emit anything that could interfere with equipment. Geoj has a new favorite as of 18:06 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 18:01
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brain739 posted:i miss you, kodak advantix.  they still make the film and most places that do 1 hour processing can run the film because its C-41 process and became ingrained enough that most film scanners can run it in addition to regular 35mm...Also about half of the disposable film cameras in circulation today use APS. Geoj has a new favorite as of 04:23 on Jul 14, 2012 |
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Jul 14, 2012 04:20
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Don't ask me how we've made it four pages without these mentioned... PDAs Kind of like a smartphone, only without the phone and a whole lot less capable. Kind of a crude handheld computer that could do rudimentary internet browsing, some multimedia and mostly e-mail and scheduling/calendar functions. I never owned one but knew a few people who did and never really saw the point in dumping hundreds of dollars on one. Although they definitely were a stepping stone to the smartphone as we know it today so I guess they weren't a complete failure...
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Jul 15, 2012 02:19
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RyokoTK posted:The PDA wasn't a failure at all. Betamax and Virtual Boy were failures. PDAs were really useful before the technology made smartphones practical. There's lots of good, important technology that's just obsolete -- nobody would decry VHS as a failure. Thread title posted:Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology Thread is for both obsolete and failed technology...even if you don't think they were failures they still belong here. Guess its a matter of opinion but PDAs never really seemed practical or useful to me v0v Geoj has a new favorite as of 04:20 on Jul 15, 2012 |
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Jul 15, 2012 04:17
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56k posted:
Going off of this it appears that Microsoft acquired/bought out WebTV and renamed it "MSN TV." While you can no longer buy new hardware they are keeping things running for current subscribers (which I would have to imagine number so few that you can count them on one hand.)
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Jul 18, 2012 04:04
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Dusseldorf posted:That's not an especially obsolete camera. Most CCDs today are still not that much bigger than 4 megapixles. I not really sure how a point and shoot camera today would be that much different than that. People really do put too much stock into a camera's megapixel rating. While somewhat important (unless you're making ridiculously large prints in which case bigger = better), the quality of the CCD and the optics in front of it matter more. My old Nikon D70 with a 6 MP rating can run laps around current point-and-shoots with over two times the megapixels.
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Jul 18, 2012 05:24
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ZanderZ posted:
When my wife was still living in the dorms when she was in college all of the bathrooms were equipped with these...the secret was sticking your finger up into the dispenser and rocking the blade forwards (it sits on a hinge) which trips a sensor telling the PCB that runs the thing its OK to dispense another 6" of towel. I would usually have to repeat the above three or four times before it would kick out an acceptable amount of towel.
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Jul 31, 2012 03:59
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Magic_Ceiling_Fan posted:Does anyone still find any obsolete technology useful? I have a brother typewriter for writing articles and random creative writing. I find that I can focus better on the typewriter because there are fewer distractions than on a computer. They still sell this typewriter, ribbons, and correction tape at Staples and on Amazon. Simple electronic typewriters like this still have a niche market amongst old fogies and creative writing types. A friend of mine bought an IBM typewriter at a rummage sale to fill out job applications and other simple form correspondence (like warranty registration cards) because his handwriting is borderline illegible.
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Aug 23, 2012 18:32
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Zack_Gochuck posted:Was it an IBM Selectric? That would actually be quite a find. They go for a pretty penny now. Don't know, I think he threw it away because he either couldn't find ribbons at a reasonable price or some of the keys stopped working.
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Aug 29, 2012 06:46
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Space Gopher posted:Yes, that's just a sticker, but a lot of processors around the same era actually had an exposed, unprotected die. Athlon XPs were great CPUs, but putting a heatsink on one was nerve-wracking. A bit of pressure on the edge of the exposed silicon, and you could do this to your expensive new processor: I had a few socket A Athlons (the first PC I built was an 800 MHz Athlon Thunderbird) that were so crushed that they looked like I took a file to all four edges that ran fine...guess I just got lucky...? Of course, if you were smart (or destroyed a $100+ CPU) you had one of these:  lazydog posted:Cheaper heatsinks where you had to force down the clip with a flat blade screwdriver were the worst. You also ran the risk of stabbing your motherboard if the screwdriver slipped. I got pretty militant about not using the clamp variety heatsinks after a few of my friends went through 2 or 3 processors. I ended up using one of these...  ...with a 92mm fan. I'm still surprised more manufacturers didn't take advantage of the four mounting holes around the socket, 95% of socket A boards had them.
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Aug 30, 2012 07:04
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Personally (outside of super-expensive high-end processors that cost upwards of $1000) I'd much rather replace a processor than a system board. Also I've corrected a fair number of bent pins, but typically once one of the contact points on a LGA board gets bent its nearly impossible to correct.
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Aug 31, 2012 08:21
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Boiled Water posted:I for one would like to see a graph of cooling efficiency of water versus air cooled. I'm sure water cooling is still more efficient, however air cooling solutions today have definitely closed the gap compared with 10 years ago. Most of the multi-heat pipe 120mm tower coolers have so much surface area that having a fan is only required if you're overclocking or running a 4-6 core CPU maxed out with something like Prime95.
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Sep 2, 2012 02:07
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Space Gopher posted:That's an old system, and the baseline for air-cooled CPUs was one of the annoyingly loud AMD stock coolers from that era. This is getting into the territory of the SH/SC parts picking thread, and we can take the discussion there if you want, but an air-cooled system built with attention to noise levels will almost always be quieter than a water-cooled system that has to run a pump as well as the same number of fans. Water cooled computers are, outside of a few specialized applications, an excellent subject for this thread - they're obsolete and failed technology suited mostly for increasing the owner's e-peen. Seconding this. My desktop uses all 120mm fans running at 60 - 75% of full speed (via an old school pcmods.com rheobus from 2001) and the fan noise is barely noticeable. e: Actually, mentioning the pcmods rheobus reminded me - have we touched on DIY PC modding yet?  I got into it about a year before you could buy cases with windows pre-installed on the side (end of the 90s/start of the 2000s.) I spent about three hours with a handheld electric dremel and 1" cutoff discs cutting through the .8mm case side to put that monster in. Thinking back this was literally the coolest thing I had ever seen when I first stumbled on it, and and now its so played out its not even funny. Geoj has a new favorite as of 03:34 on Sep 3, 2012 |
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Sep 3, 2012 00:19
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Dacap posted:I don't use my phone for music at all because it's only 16 GB and I hate having to narrow down what I want into playlists and prefer to just have my entire music library on me. Give it another year or so and you'll be able to buy a 128 GB microSD card for your phone (you can already buy 64 GB ones now.) Unless you have an iphone in which case you're stuck with whatever capacity Apple decides they should have.
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Sep 4, 2012 17:20
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SimplyCosmic posted:Obsolete technology can lead to obsolete furniture. It shocks me how many people continue to do this (put a small HDTV in an old TV cabinet.) I just helped a friend of mine install a 27" LCD TV in his grandparents' home, when he suggested they throw out the cabinet they had and buy a larger TV to be mounted on the wall they refused because they had spent several hundred dollars on their cabinet (in the mid-90s.) I should also add they had a tuner/early surround sound system from the late 80s which they were highly resistant to throwing out even though it lacked proper connections to work with the new TV or HD cable box  Space Gopher posted:I didn't bother to unplug it at the outside wall, because hey, what are the odds the phone will ring in the middle of a five-minute job? Its roughly the same as getting shocked by a household outlet - the "ring" signal sent down the line is something like 90 volts AC at 20 Hz. This is also why I hate wiring crews that wire phone outlets with RJ45 ports - I've had to replace more than a few system boards in computers that were plugged back into a sill live but unused phone line that's right next to a network jack by cleaning crews. Geoj has a new favorite as of 07:01 on Sep 16, 2012 |
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Sep 16, 2012 06:59
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Killer robot posted:Related, from the 486-Pentium era there were COASt modules, which literally meant "Cache On A Stick." At the time you'd have a tiny but fast L1 cache on the CPU and a larger, slower L2 cache on the board. COASt had that L2 on a stick like RAM, so you could buy a motherboard with none to save money then upgrade to 256k or 512k cache later. Eventually, manufacturers just started making L2 standard on boards before it finally got moved onto the CPU itself by the Pentium 2 era. These were still in use as late as the late 90s on AMD K6-III processors (albeit as L3 Cache.) IIRC a slower K6-III with a 1 MB L3 COASt installed was actually faster than the ridiculously expensive first-generation Pentium IIIs... 
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Sep 18, 2012 07:43
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0dB posted:Get her to upgrade to a NEW Yamaha Disklavier! My friend's mom actually had one of these in the mid-90s. Then one of the primary boards in it died in 2005 and the cost to repair it was something like 40% of the cost of a high quality used baby grand piano so she just replaced it. I guess she never really utilized the playback function anyways.
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Sep 18, 2012 21:45
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Space Gopher posted:That was the Athlon CPU - they set the frequency lock by laser-cutting certain bridges on the CPU package. With a pencil (or, even better, a tiny dab of conductive paint) you could reconnect the bridges and overclock it. Can't find any pictures, but by 2002 or so some PC modification retailers started selling stickers you could place over the traces (basically a sheet of plastic with conductive strips and adhesive) that made the unlock more permanent than using a pencil - it wasn't uncommon to have to re-draw the lines periodically - or less guesswork than using conductive paint. In later iterations of the Socket A Athlon (after they switched to a silicon substrate from ceramic) they were pretty much required because AMD started burning a hole in the substrate with a laser. Space Gopher posted:A few years later, AMD also released three-core CPUs that were really four core dies with one die locked out in software. With the right motherboard tweaks, you could re-enable the fourth core, which was often as not 100% functional. You can still buy Phenom IIs that are rebadged quad-core CPUs based on six-core dies. Granted its no i5-2500 but for $100 its a decent processor.
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Sep 20, 2012 03:36
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Flipperwaldt posted:I don't see a single benefit in this system over normal 35mm film. I wonder what the guy that came up with it was thinking. The disc system keeps the film safe/clean and ordering reprints is simplified. Otherwise its just a gimmick.
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Oct 2, 2012 05:16
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Smoke posted:However, I did come across this thing which I also recall using at one point: On this token...  While not exactly obsolete or failed, trackballs definitely deserve an honorable mention in this thread - having moved from a fairly common computer peripheral in the late 80s/early 90s (almost on parity with the common mouse) to a highly niche-market item only really sought after by CAD junkies or people who got hooked on them when they were more common.
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Nov 18, 2012 05:14
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I'm a bit late to the party on the microfilm discussion, but the technology is still alive and kicking. I used to work for a third party service contractor to FujiFilm and they launched a microfilm machine (it basically just exposed the film from digital sources) in the late 2000s. It's definitely a niche market item, primarily used by government agencies and companies that have to adhere to government record keeping standards. The logic behind it is once the film is exposed and developed it is extremely difficult to modify (unlike the digital medium its created from) so it's used as more of a redundant/secure second copy should questions arise regarding the authenticity of the digital originals.
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Nov 30, 2012 01:10
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DrBouvenstein posted:386, 4 MB or RAM, no CD-ROM or sound card...yet somehow still managed to get X-Wing and TIE Fighter to run...at pretty appalling frame rates, but beggars can't be choosers. I can still remember riding my bike across town with a friend to borrow X-wing on floppy from another friend of ours. The "I swear I did not just borrow this from a friend" EULA has hilarious.
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Dec 15, 2012 07:54
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Skeleton Ape posted:
Ford still offers them as an option on pretty much anything in their lineup. Considering its little more than a wireless entry remote that's two-side taped onto the door that works via a combination system it doesn't take much to put it on a car, and I'm sure the device costs less than half of what the option costs for a new car. FWIW I would assume the average car thief would break a window before spending 20 minutes loving around with the pad. Or move on to something easier to break into. eddiewalker posted:I am an absolute Zip disk hoarder because of these machines: If I'm reading this correctly, this is a device that pumps audio into a television broadcast? In which case it probably stands to reason that studios using them paid for licensed sound clips and would rather continue to use obsolete storage media rather than paying for new licensed content on a modern storage medium...
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Dec 16, 2012 01:49
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eddiewalker posted:Licensing isn't an issue, because when you license music for broadcast, you're paying for the logged usage, not the medium its stored on. In that case, more than likely people get used to something and never want to let it go - "why do I need this new-fangled USB thing when my ZIP disks still work?"
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Dec 16, 2012 05:43
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minato posted:As I recall, people thought that SCSI drives were more reliable than regular IDE drives, which made little sense to me because surely the reliability would be due to the disc/controller build quality, not the external data transfer mechanism. But either way, SCSI discs cost around 4x the price of IDE discs and were a pain in the rear end to set up. They worked pretty well once you got them going though. They were correct, but it had nothing to do with the controller or interface. Once IDE became the defacto consumer level data interface SCSI drives were almost exclusively used for server/data center purposes, and as a result were built to a higher standard (and sold at a higher price.) Consumer level SCSI devices pretty became a thing of the past around the same time ATX became the standard case layout.
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Dec 31, 2012 22:45
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Code Jockey posted:Did Nintendo ever freak out about the Gravis pad? I never thought about it before, though the similarity to the Super Famicom controller [those colored buttons Honestly I can't see them really caring, and beyond that they'd have a hard time proving in court that they had any actual damages. If Gravis had been selling a replacement that worked with their system they might have done something, or even if Nintendo was making a game port version of their controller. But it was a controller that worked on a different platform with a completely different connector, so I don't really see why they'd give any fucks about it.
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Jan 11, 2013 05:32
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] is undeniable. The Gravis pad didn't have shoulder buttons, if that counts for anything.
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Krispy Kareem posted:Would it boil water to create steam to push the turbines like a nuclear power plant? Basically the reactor would generate heat, and instead of a turbofan burning jet fuel to propel the aircraft forward either the bare core itself (in a direct air cycle setup) or a heat exchanger (in an indirect air cycle setup) would heat air in a nuclear "jet engine", and the rapidly expanding hot air would provide thrust. In theory this isn't much different from the way a turbofan jet engine works now - the majority of its thrust comes from rapidly expanding exhaust gases. Geoj has a new favorite as of 19:54 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 19:47
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Sagebrush posted:CNC machine manufactured in 2005...has 1 megabyte (1024k) of internal program storage That's just  My first job out of highschool (early 2000s) was running a circa-2000 three-axis CNC router at the lumbermill I was working at - the original operator was caught spending 5-6 hours a day surfing the web when he was  programming routines - and I had taken a few years of metal shop including a babby CNC lathe and a few years of drafting including AutoCAD, so I was a shoe-in for the position. I can't remember the size of the memory on the router but I only had to delete programs maybe once every 2-3 weeks or when it got too full and navigating the three-line LCD screen on the controller got too difficult. I think I can remember one time in about a year and a half when we had to stream the routine because it was too large.
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May 14, 2013 20:28
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two forty posted:Interesting to think of how far we've come in 15 years. This was I guess pretty much the pinnacle of portable media players back then, recording to minidisc at 1x speed. I'm honestly surprised they lasted as long as they did, given that they were basically smaller CDs that stored data on the disc by a slightly different method. I sometimes wonder if it was technological advancement and price reduction in solid state digital media players that did them in, or recordable CD media prices dropping below $1/disc in the late 90s.
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Jun 27, 2013 03:19
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Phanatic posted:My school had a wholly inadequate internet connection, it was a single T1 line for something like 2000 students, so that's 1.5Mbps. During the week it was bad enough, but this was a school where about 90% of the student body went home on weekends, and they'd leave their computers running, with their Napster apps running, with their entire music connections shared. So network performance on the weekends went to *poo poo* as the upstream bandwidth was saturated with all these music uploads. That's loving terrible. Was this some technophobic private christian school or something? My highschool around that same time had an OC-3...although granted they also shared the connection with all of the other schools in the district via fiber.
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Jun 27, 2013 17:57
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Mr. Beefhead posted:By the time solid state digital media players became cost effective you really didn't see minidisc hardware or media in stores anymore. Solid state was probably a bad example. By 2002 HDD-based players were well below the  price point and factors of magnitude more convenient to load (legal) music onto - drop CD into computer, rip to digital format and transfer to player in under 10 minutes vs. 1:1 dub from original format to MD, not to mention being able to carry an entire library of music on a single device without having to change out media.Dewclaw posted:Wait, the discs were unscratchable? Really? The actual disc was enclosed in a cartridge similar to a floppy disk. Unless you broke the cartridge (rendering the disc useless anyways) or deliberately opened the shutter and touched the disc it was protected. Geoj has a new favorite as of 04:44 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2013 04:42
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Phanatic posted:There was a big oops incident with a Soviet recon satellite which broke up and reentered over Canada, maybe that's what you're thinking of. But that wasn't an RTG, it was a nuclear reactor with 50 kilograms of U235 and a few months' operation of fission fragments. That scattered over 50,000 square miles of Canada and was a mess to clean up, but RTGs aren't fission reactors, and are specifically designed to survive reentry intact. More disturbingly, there are a fair number (~30) of these floating around in high orbit. Soviet RORSATs were all powered by liquid metal cooled reactors, which upon reaching the end of their useful lifespans were ejected into a higher orbit that will eventually decay and re-enter the atmosphere.
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Jul 16, 2013 21:04
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Delivery McGee posted:And that got me thinking about how cool it would be to build a Beowulf cluster out of HTC Evos -- it would fit in a single standard ATX case and run on a single mains power outlet, especially if you strip them to the motherboards. Seems feasible; Android is Linux-based, so the software's already mostly written, right? HP is doing something similar to this with their Moonshot program. The TL;DR is by using low power processing (currently using Intel Atom CPUs) they are able to pack 45 "cartridge servers" into a 4.3U enclosure: 
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Jul 20, 2013 05:08
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blugu64 posted:This is incorrect. There can only be one But can you use it as a life raft in the event of flooding?  
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Jul 23, 2013 16:17
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techknight posted:Wow, I didn't realize these were ever a commercial product. I downloaded one for numeric keypads a few years ago that you stick on with double-sided tape: Are you an early adopter of 3D printing...?
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Jul 29, 2013 20:59
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einTier posted:[edit] If your car doesn't have one as an option there are even off the shelf add-on HUDs that pull data off the OBD port.
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Aug 14, 2013 18:07
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gleep gloop posted:When I was a kid my mom had a mid 90s Ford First model year for the Focus was 99 in Europe/2000 in the US. You're undoubtedly thinking of the early to mid-90s Escort. Ford was in love with the auto shoulder belts during that era; my parents had a '92 Tempo that had them.
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Aug 14, 2013 23:08
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