Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

This fucker right here.

The dreamcast and it's failure is a thing that's beaten to death but the VMU is the coolest. It let you trade save files and game data away from your console. It let you play game-specific minigames away from your console. When plugged into a controller it was a wee little display that a few games took advantage of. It also had a slammin' jammin' 128kb of game save storage :hellyeah:

The coolest thing about the VMU though is it's ability to interact with your game saves away from the console with minigames - even if just by proxy of a wee little gameboy clone. It's something that hadn't been tried before and hasn't really been tried since.

Too bad nobody knew what to do with the VMU because only a good 30 of the ~800 dreamcast games have any VMU minigames and it's not like any of them are any more than thrown together gimmicks that probably only exist because of pressure from Sega

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 05:53

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:29

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

Zasraik posted:

The beeper.

Not a failure, just obsolete.

Every kid these days has a smart phone and a laptop but I remember when you could tell the swag girls from the powhitetrash by beeper ownership.

"Someone is trying to call me!"

Carphones, yo

I knew tons of kids whose parents had carphones when i lived in the loving whitest and richest town ever (lake forest) back in the 90's. I don't think they were even hooked up, just status symbols.

E: actually considering how loving rich everyone was of course they were hooked up

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 08:33

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

JediTalentAgent posted:

Around 2000-2002 or so, there was a company that produced an MP3-ONLY CD player that was 'compact' in that it could only use mini-CDR discs. I almost bought one, but I'm really glad I didn't because it would have been sort of worthless in the long run, requiring me to only buy mini-CDRs and never working with anything normal CDs.

Which sort of reminds me, too. FAR from the 'best' in obsolete and failed tech: As the DVD age achieved its dominance, some companies started to try to put things out on MINI-DVD and even made special Mini-DVD players that worked only with that smaller size of disc.
http://www.amazon.com/CyberHome-CH-MDP2500-Portable-Mini-Player/dp/B0006IMRNO

It was a decent idea and aimed pretty much as a kid-size disk and portable player that would allow you to play the same disk on almost all full-sized DVD players, too. However, the obvious downside is apparent: If the movie or TV show wasn't released or available on the mini-DVD format, it was unplayable on the portable players. They were only on the market for a few years and probably died pretty quickly once larger screens and full-sized DVD portable players began to drop in price.

Portable dvd players are a thing that we're going to look back at and laugh at. Nothing about them is bad in theory but they're all overpriced crap with terrible terrible screens. Maybe everyone i knew with them just bought the bargain bin models though.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 08:38

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

Fearless_Decoy posted:

In the mid 1980s, my dad was enjoying his new middle-upper class paychecks so he went and splurged on one of these:

One and a half inch black and white screen. Mono sound. Only picked up the really strong broadcast channels. But it was awesome and the batteries lasted a fair amount of time for the time.

I found it in the attic recently. It still turns on and tries to show stuff, but outside of somehow attaching it to a converter box it's useless now.

I had one. Somehow. I think my dad stole it from someone's car because there's no way he would have bought one. Then again it was probably around like 2000 so it was cheap as heck. It takes a good 10 minutes to warm the bulb up to visible quality but that's probably because it's old as poo poo

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 19:17

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

Even though touchscreen keyboards are actually completely fine and easy to use, stylus keyboards and writing recognition are awful.

But UI design on palm and windows mobile literally did not change at all. Ever. They were the best on the market so why improve? And when apple kicked their asses into gear in 2007 nobody actually wanted to invest money in a real competetor because "haha how can apple compete with us" and welp long story short that's how webos died and how android is A Thing

the palm centro came out three months after the iphone did :shepface:

# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 22:01

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

I'm honestly surprised that there aren't any neato phone games with pre-rendered backgrounds. Then again there aren't any neato phone games period

# ¿ Jul 16, 2012 03:06

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

I can't count the number of times i've heard "the hard drive got fried by a virus so i'll just get a new laptop"

Either they're making up excuses to get a new computer (but the people that say it are always penny pinching poor???) or they got lied to by whatever tech guy to get a laptop/hard drive purchase

# ¿ Jul 16, 2012 03:17

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

mystes posted:

Incidentally, if pointing sticks are dead then I guess they are on my list of obsolete/failed technology that I like .

I really don't like touchpads, especially when set to allow you to tap to click.

Like every rational human being i loving abhor lovely trackpads and edge scrolling, but computers don't really come with bad trackpads anymore (unless you buy the $400 acer walmart special) that are okay and have multitouch.

And mac trackpads are probably the best imput method that has been invented :colbert:

# ¿ Jul 20, 2012 09:18

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:29

nigga crab pollock: Mar 26, 2010; by Lowtax

RC and Moon Pie posted:

When I was in elementary school, a few classrooms had a machine called a System 80.

They were outdated even then, as the school had purchased Commodore 64s a couple of years earlier.

The programs were on plastic punch cards that you you slid into the slot. From what I remember, the machine was insanely loud and because it was relying on young kids to slide a plastic punch card into a hole, it barely worked.

This 1971 article is one of the few I can find about them.

We had one of those things at a rural elementary school i went to for about 3 weeks. In 2001 or so :stare:

# ¿ Nov 29, 2012 19:58

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