Terrible Robot posted:

I got more of a Phantom vibe from it.

ZanderZ posted:

Why the hell don't they just make a touchscreen gaming tablet? I play mobile FIFA more than I play PS3 FIFA and the only downside to a touch screen, analog stick (vs a physical analog controller) is when my hands get too sweaty.

Poknok posted:

My grandad collects old newspapers and books, and in his giant stash of paper I found a collection of ostensibly "scientific" magazines from 1950s which were in reality just pictures of cartoonish robots and someone's idea how space travel will one day look alike. Ridiculous and amazing at the same time.
Anyways, the writers of the magazine correctly understood the huge potential nuclear power holds and they were fascinated about it; the only thing they didn't catch is how loving dangerous it was. Among the things listed there were:

Wristwatch powered by plutonium RTG
Radioactive golf balls. The idea was that you'd find your ball using a directional geiger counter
Uranium-powered oven. Hey man, the bread sure gets warm when radioactive!

And so much more stillborn technology. Too bad my grandad lives six hours away, people in 1950s used to get worked up about stuff that we either take for granted today or the stuff that never came to pass for one reason or another.

Ensign_Ricky posted:

All this PDA talk going off and on for the past however many pages, and you all seem to have forgotten the granddaddy of them all...The Newton!


The drat thing could (supposedly) read handwriting and change it into basic text. Unfortunately, the dictionary of words that came pre-installed was a total joke. Still, I remember seeing one of my teachers with one of these and became convinced he was the coolest human being I had ever seen.

If I ever trade my Android for an iPhone, I'm gonna get a case mod just like this one.

So Eighties, you can practically smell the pure cocaine.

Not Your Senorita posted:

I think the Atari Lynx was the first handheld gaming system that was able to be played horizontally or vertically. In 1989 (same year the original Game Boy was released) it was also the first one with a backlit color LCD screen. Unfortunately the games for it weren't as popular as what was on the Game Boy (and later the Game Gear), and the battery life was pretty crap. Compared to the Game Gear's lovely color screen, though, this thing was fantastic. Still just as awkward and annoying to hold for more than 15 minutes, but nothing else came close to touching the colors and graphics at the time.

The hardware on it is pretty amazing considering the time it was released (in addition to the great screen and horizontal/vertical switching, you could network with up to 17 players for multiplayer games), but with Nintendo and Sega dominating the market with better titles, cheaper systems, and easier buying accessibility, it's no surprise this thing didn't make it.

My dad got my brother and I the updated model which is a little neater looking than the one in the ad. Paperboy was my by far my favorite out of the games we had for it. My dad probably still has it somewhere - a lot of the old Atari stuff he has would probably be great for this thread if I can dig it up.

movax posted:

I'm really excited that other people had MiniDiscs too! I thought I would be a rebel and get a MD player instead of a CD player.

Ended up with a MZ-R909 and had a great time dubbing my own MDs. I waited in vain for a MD burner/recorder to show up

I think there was one VAIO desktop model with a MD drive.

KozmoNaut posted:

Was it the Pantech C810?

I seem to remember there being a handful of phones that did as you described. Nokia also made a couple of phones (including the N95) that slid one way for numbers and the other for media controls.

Ensign Expendable posted:

Flash drives will never be obsolete, you can't boot from Dropbox.

Totally Reasonable posted:

TS44, TS44 Deluxe, TS22-209, and a rather early GPS
They still work (mostly), but it's only a matter of time.

treiz01 posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHlRmKAPFt0
This crazy poo poo. I played one of these for years. It had a plethora of synth crap but I usually left it on plain piano. I bought it from another kid at school for $50 and it came with a Sega Genesis AC adapter! This was the best part of the whole keyboard though, I drove my mother crazy mashing the demo button over and over again.

Phanatic posted:

If by "perfected" you mean "they modulated a beep to make it sound like something other than a beep," yeah. Even at its cleverest (Like in "Space Hulk,") it still sounded a lot like modem handshaking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Hulk_briefing.ogg

Inspector_71 posted:

I dunno, I think this is pretty true now. I mean, WebTV died but look at the features on set-top boxes now. Sure, I can't browse the forums on my TV, but why would I?

WebDog posted:

I did this the other night, where fresh off the charger, I'd forgotten to quit navigation and it'd devoured my battery to 40% within an hour and gave me a toasty leg.
The only real way to keep any smartphone alive through the day is to turn off or limit 3G networks as I understand when in an area of low reception some phones will boost power trying to cling into a 3G signal.

It's one thing I do miss, the days of week long gaps between charges thanks to the phone having very little for the battery to chew thorough..

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.

I think you could daisy-chain up to 8 of them on a single SCSI chain (with the controller itself being number 0), but most drives had to have their SCSI number set with jumpers, it wasn't plug-and-play. And for some reason, the only CD-ROM drives that were capable of ripping Red Book Audio (the raw 16-bit waveforms) were SCSI. I don't know why IDE drives couldn't do that, it's not like it they couldn't play CDs or anything. (Another obsolete tech - Play/FF/volume CD audio controls directly on the front of CD-ROM drives)

SCSI connectors could be gigantic, relatively speaking:

And each daisy chain had to be terminated with one of these blocks:


Apple Macintoshes were big on SCSI, as were PC CD-ROM-burning products (because only SCSI could keep up with the data rates required to burn CDs or something).

WebDog posted:

I once had a dedicated SCSI A3 scanner and A1 printer on some ancient IBM tower thing that I had scored from an architectural firm. I think even the CD burner was also fed into the SCSI card.
The problem was the SCSI card was ISA so I was unable to rat it and use it in another system so the payoff was a painfully slow system that I was unable to buy anything to upgrade it with.

I remember the scanner being a sheer nightmare to install where upon going to their website they only offered the drivers on CD for $20. Yet if you typed in their European address you were able to download it for free off their FTP.

Do obsolete 90's computer jokes count?

Astroman posted:

OozieNelson posted:

I was wondering if anybody remembers the white plastic slate/art board type thing that you hooked up to your TV and you drew on the slate with certain tools and it showed up on your TV. It was kind if like plugging in MS Paint and being able to draw and color an see it on your TV.

Arrath posted:

Oh wow, my parent's had this exact TV in their bedroom when I was younger. They mostly used it as a radio, but sometimes I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons in all its black and white glory.

oldskool posted:

Don't forget to have the TURBO button installed that didn't seem to do anything but turn on the 1 at the front of the display, thereby showing an absurd 166MHz speed

Ensign Expendable posted:

I was sad when I found out that those things didn't actually measure frequency, and were just pre-set 7-segment displays.

atomicthumbs posted:

you mean like StrongARM and XScale?

Taeke posted:

I was just thinking of coming back to this thread to edit my post and add that I'm by no means an expert and I was probably projecting, so you could all disregard my post, so you're absolutely right, although I've never heard of anyone using a docking station and frankly, I don't see the benefit of one.


Also, this is a very good point.

As for people who need multiple monitors for their work, those are the specialised users I was referring to that would need a proper desktop.

techknight posted:

The quality is poo poo, but the main thing was being able to take and re-take as many photos as I liked without incurring any film/developing costs. It was a really freeing feeling back then!

I also got a first-gen Casio Wristcam in late 2000:



It took photos at only 120x120 resolution (and not even in colour), but it was fun for little portraits and animated gifs.

Croccers posted:

There's an N-Gage in that picture. I think that's a good failed technology thing.
Have to hold it on the side to talk.

You had to remove the battery to change the game in it.

Citizen Z posted:

I still have an N-Gage QB key chain strap thing that I got while working for T-Mobile years ago. It was a dumb phone and no one ever tried to push them even with incentives, but the strap thing has served me well for years as a key chain doohickey.

WebDog posted:

On the first gen iphone you couldn't do multitasking or have a camera flash or a forward facing camera.
My aging P1 still held up fairly well feature wise. But dragging that out in an emergency did remind me how painfully clunky the UIQ3 interface was despite the phone managing to do everything I needed it to do.

JediTalentAgent posted:

I don't know if it was ever mentioned in this thread, but Sega for a while had that "Activator" motion-controlled gaming accessory for the Genesis. It was a big octagon that you stood on and were supposed to be able to control games via body movement. I guess it probably worked as well as expected.

The following is maybe more of a 'never-was' tech, but around the same time Sega also prototyped and promoted and finally cancelled a planned Sega VR headset that would feature head-movement detection that was set to cost under $200.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwY-EaUQ_Yc

A lot of popular theories were that Sega would have eventually used both devices and maybe a game pad in conjunction with one another for creating a 16-bit at-home VR experience.

It sort of makes me wonder how the gaming industry would have moved forward if Sega had managed to get VR down in the 90s for home use. It's obvious the Genny version wouldn't have really been all that impressive due to the tech limits of the system, but I wonder if Sega had gotten it to market and gotten it accepted by consumers enough to see it as a good enough bet to develop the Saturn with VR in mind at the start.

stealie72 posted:

This reminds me, at my first job we had a worst of both worlds item. It was a "projector" for a computer that was basically a transparency sheet for an overhead projector. Picture a really crappy LCD monitor (I think the resolution was like 800x600) that you can shine light through with a refresh rate that was so slow as to be visible. Basically a game boy color screen.

The worst part is that we would do presentations that involved hauling a portable overhead and this projection panel.

This was in 1998, so it's not like projectors weren't around, just pretty expensive.

Mister Kingdom posted:

This was my first VCR, the Panasonic PV-1220. Top-load with a wired remote that only controlled fast forward, rewind, and pause functions only after you pressed play on the VCR itself.

Humphreys posted:

I never got the Blackberry hype. People said it was great for business and what not, but I just don't know why any other established manufacturers weren't good enough. Was it just BBM?

KozmoNaut posted:

We had a guy come do a talk for us on WAP while I was at trade school taking electronics and programming. This was in 2003 or 2004, so WAP was pretty much already dead, or at least the writing was on the wall.

But this guy was absolutely adamant that WAP was the future, and that within a couple of years, the personal computer would be no more, since we would do everything on a mobile phone. He believed in it so hard that he had put all of his life savings into a WAP-focused company. While it's true that the original iPhone came out in 2007, nobody saw it coming, and it was still severely limited in what you could do with it.

A bunch of us got so tired of listening to his bullshit that we got up and started to walk out. He pretty much went "So! I guess only the smart and visionary people are left now, huh?"

To which one of my friends shot back "Nah, we were just leaving ".

Part of me wonders what happened to that guy, if he actually bombed and failed, or if he managed to get in early on the current wave of apps and mobile solutions. WAP died, but the idea of doing everything from a phone certainly hasn't.

KozmoNaut posted:

That's true in essence, but the severely-limited WML markup language and the concept of WAP-only sites with "decks" and "cards" died, as did the whole mobile WAP Internet separate from the real Internet. Ever since mobile devices gained proper HTTP/HTML-capable browsers, WAP has been obsolete, since it was much easier to develop mobile-friendly sites using proper "big Internet" HTML/PHP/ASP/etc., instead of with the idiosyncrasies and limitations of WAP.

And this guy was very particular that WAP was the future, not general Internet access on mobile devices. Several times he shot down the idea of general mobile Internet access, using the argument that the users would just end up confused, and that limited highly-specific WAP portals were the future. He had lots of examples of customized WAP portals that he had dreamt up for various businesses, it was nothing like the mobile versions of websites we know today. They were all incredibly limited in scope and ambition.

I will concede that WAP still lives on every time someone sends an MMS, but that's about it.

KozmoNaut posted:

"Hack" is probably the right word for it. It is an implementation of data packets on the voice-optimized GSM network, originally meant for status messages and emergency warnings and the like. It piggybacks onto the control stream used for controlling voice calls, hence the 128-byte (160 7-bit characters) limit per message.

Because of their original intended use and small size, text messages usually get through even when the network is heavily loaded (for instance on Christmas or New Year's Eve) and voice calls fail to connect.

I work for a telco, and by far the largest income source aside from wholesale traffic from other operators, is text messaging. Think of it, it costs literally nothing to send 128 bytes. Even unlimited messaging plans have an absolutely ridiculous profit margin.

uwaeve posted:

Not to interrupt the RIM hate, but from a few pages back there was some VCRchat.

In sometime like 1983-5, my dad bought a VHS camcorder/VCR combo. The VCR was split into two decks, one of which held the cassette. For using the camera. Like you were tethered to this huge europurse brick thing that weighed probably 30 pounds as you were trying to capture precious moments.

I can't find a good picture but you oldsters will know what I'm talking about.

Collateral Damage posted:

The pre-installed thermal paste on most CPU coolers is pretty crap though. I always scrape it off and replace it with Arctic Silver.

Ozz81 posted:

That's my only gripe about pinless CPUs - with a bent pin on a processor, usually a razor between the pins or a mechanical pencil can bend it back straight easily. On a motherboard, not so much, especially when you consider how easy it would be to gently caress up the board. Speaking of that, anyone else glad that most CPU coolers don't have to be mounted with screwdriver pressure any more? These big fuckers were a pain and I was always afraid of gouging my board if I slipped:

TerryLennox posted:

IBM sucks at making interfaces. The newest Lotus Notes STILL would not look out of place in Windows 3.11

ninmeister posted:

Lotus Notes is the worst thing for email. I don't get how anyone (including my job) uses Lotus Notes. What the hell does it have over anything else other than "frustratingly terrible program that runs like rear end no matter what"?

Computer viking posted:

As I've understood it, the main reason to use Lotus Notes is as a development platform, where email is just one of the features; it's supposedly a reasonable way to make enterprise-wide database/messaging things.

To my knowledge I've never been in the same building as an open Notes client, so I have no idea how true that is.