Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Eclipse12 posted:

Got a Sony Mavica digital camera for Christmas back in 2001. Digital cameras were still extremely uncommon at this time; they were too awful to use for real photography, and too expensive to buy for casual family pictures. I'm pretty sure it cost at least a few hundred dollars. But at the time, the Mavica was a marvel of function at that price, even without any real purpose.

The specs of this bad boy:
-1.3 megapixel quality. This allowed for pixelated, grainy 640x480 images of over 50kb in size!

-No viewfinder. You stared at an ugly 2.5" screen and hoped for the best. The screen image lagged behind whatever you were actually pointing at, so taking photos of moving objects was a guessing game.

-Terrible light sensors. If you turn the flash off, the image is dark and blurry. And you had to use the flash if the subject wasn't being illuminated by a minimum of a police searchlight. Since that wasn't likely, for every picture, even in broad daylight, the flash would explode like a supernova, leaving your image glowing, with glare reflecting off any surface that's even slightly smooth.

-Floppy disk storage! This thing was a beast. You loaded a 3.5" floppy into it and got all that 1mb+ of storage to play with. Take a few seconds of video, even!

-Lithium rechargeable battery. After powering the LCD screen, flash, photo, and storage, it was likely to run out of juice after a couple dozen photos.

-Cool photo effects! Sepia! Black and White! Um... Blurry! Sepia!

Good For:
-People who are bad at photography. You could take a bunch of pictures and only print/keep the good ones.

-People who want to take pictures of stuff that's really, really pointless but don't want to pay for normal film development.

-People with nice printers and high quality photo paper. This wasn't me. Of course, even with nice printing abilities, the pictures would still be low-res as hell.

-People who wanted to take embarassing/pornographic photos without the guy at Rite-Aid judging you.

Bad For:
-Almost everything else.

I used to work for Fedex, they still use these for ID photos.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 01:14

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 14:40

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

amishbuttermaster posted:

This old Akai SCSI hard drive recorder (and Casio hardware sampler and synth beneath it):

Here's a couple hardware MIDI sequencers:

While all of these can fill some specific niches they've been replaced with the functionality that a modern DAW and VSTs provides.

I want one of these so bad. I had a Casio CZ230S back in the day, and I losted over the "professional" FZ series. One day.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 01:17

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Silicon Graphics graphics workstations and supercomputers.

Practically any movie that came out in the 80's or 90's and used any kind of special effects was probably made on an SGI machine. They costs thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars back in the day, and were serious investments for studios like Industrial Light and Magic and Lucasfilm.
But the computing age and things getting dramatically cheaper, plus the ongoing use of cheap Intel and AMD processor farms for rendering quickly made these obsolete. SGI filed for bankruptcy a few years ago, but they are still around. I think they got bought by Cray.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 01:25

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

What were those "mini records" called?

# ¿ Jul 14, 2012 11:24

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

No they were not singles, or 45's or flexi discs (which were loving cool). I remember we had a thread similar to this one before, they are like records but small enough to put in cars. I think they were marketed for cars yet they were a horrible failure.
If you google car record player, what comes up is not what I am looking for. I believe one company made them.

b0nes has a new favorite as of 10:13 on Jul 15, 2012

# ¿ Jul 15, 2012 10:10

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

JediTalentAgent posted:

About 5-8 years ago there was a minor bump in the US for store-bought HDD DVRs that weren't part of any subscription plan like Tivo or part of your cable/sat. plans.

Several companies made them, then overnight they all seemed to vanish. I think Magnavox was the one lone company that was still producing them for a US market, but not even Wal-mart or Amazon seems to have them now. (They've gone from about $200 new to over $400 USED. New ones on Amazon are listed at over $1000) However, I hear that part of the issue with why these devices stopped being made was because other companies held patents and the growing number of people with DVRs with their cable or satellite just didn't need or want them.

It's sort of funny because when I mention them to people they're really interested in them because they feel it would suit them perfectly.

Even something like the Sandisk V-Mate, which seemed poorly reviewed upon release, has managed to gain a following now and used ones go for about the same price as new when they came out.

edit: Are there even any decent DVD recorders with built-in tuners, anymore

I saw one at Frys a few weeks ago. I myself have a DVD recorder with a built in tuner, although I haven't used it in a while.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 05:15

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Geoj posted:

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.

Sensor size and lenses make better pictures.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2012 05:33

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

ultrabay2000 posted:

I got a Tapwave Zodiac 2 after the company shuttered, but it was still a great device. It wasn't quite powerful enough to do anything really 3D, but it could run Doom just fine. There was a Quake version that worked fine too. It had some sort of ATI graphical accelerator.

The screen was pretty nice for 2003 too, HVGA, and it was 3.7" large. It didn't have the ghosting issues a lot of PDA-type devices did around then, which made it a great media player. The video software it came with was garbage, but someone released TCPMP for it and you could play back anything converted to a reasonable format.

I think the PSP might have been better suited for games in general, the analog stick was pretty good but the control cluster on the right was a bit stiff. Of course, being a Palm-device it has a touch screen, which worked really well. The aforementioned interface had this sort of spider layout which you can see in the picture. This made it easily navigable with either the analog stick or the touch screen. I think it was pretty ahead of it's time interface wise, I don't think anything really compared until the iPhone.

Archos is bringing something similar to the table.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/29/archos-gamepad-with-physical-controls/

# ¿ Aug 29, 2012 21:59

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Athenry posted:

Apple still sells HD based ipods. I'm not sure if other companies gave up on that or not. I know apple is close to.

I was about to tell you not new but sure enough you can still get the iPod classic. I am thinking of getting an iPod U2 model seeing as they are so cheap on Ebay now compared to when they were new. I don't think I can fill up 160GB of music.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 07:21

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

0dB posted:

MiniDisc camera. It takes about 6 seconds to store each photo you take. But the disc holds 1G and you can drag n drop WAV files and no need for Sonic Stage. Built like high end SONY should. Status: it still works perfectly.

That wasn't really a camera, but a MD player with a lovely camera built in. Also Sonic Stage was THE WORST piece of software ever invented. I had bought a pink MD player on clearance somewhere and besides the color it was the coolest product I ever owned, except for the awful SS software. I had to sell it.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 07:30

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

WebDog posted:

Surprisingly my sim card lasted (and still works) for thirteen years across all of the phones till I replaced it on account of needing a microsim.

You could have cut your SIM into a microSIM.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 16:19

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

DrBouvenstein posted:

Bank transfers are horrible in the US. Last March I needed to get $800 to a friend several states away very fast. I thought I could just march on down to my bank and say,

"Hey, here's a routing and account number...please transfer $800 to that account, thanks."

Nope. Huge fee, probably take several days, horrible, horrible mess. Thought about Western Union, but they also had fees (though much less than the bank's, so I can see why they're still around.) She didn't have a "verified" Paypal account, so she could only send money, not accept it. She didn't have Serve, or anything else like that either. It sucked. Eventually had to bite the bullet and use Western Union.

Getting money from one person to another in this day and age should not be that hard. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to just type in routing and account numbers from my online banking page and have it be in their account the next business day.

The easiest way IMO is to transfer it from a bank account with a built in person to person transfer function. ING and Chase both have them. I had to pay my bill for my taxes being done in April. I sent my friend a person to person transfer and she got the money in a couple of days. I don't think you need to be a customer of the bank.

Edit: Missed the part of getting it to your friend very fast. I still think this is faster than WU.

b0nes has a new favorite as of 14:41 on Oct 19, 2012

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 14:32

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

DrBouvenstein posted:

Yeah, but neither of us had one of those banks (though I guess I would be the only one that needed that kind...unless they only did "internal" transfers and we did both need them.)

Actually, I think she might have had Chase, because now I do recall her saying that if I had Chase, I could do that transfer, but I don't have Chase.

It's worth signing up just for that feature (ING not CHase because it's a free feature and ING doesn't charge monthly fees).

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 16:51

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Don't forget about radium suppositories.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2012 16:03

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Is this being used anymore? I always assumed it was an East coast thing, I cant remember seeing any of these in California.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2012 17:49

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

HitClips!! CD's are now obsolete!

# ¿ Nov 16, 2012 20:13

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Ron Burgundy posted:

I have hundreds of these. They are usually very professionally edited together 20 minute consdensed versions.

How could all of that film only be 20 minutes?

# ¿ Nov 17, 2012 18:32

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

I saw this on Youtube, and I thought I had saved it, but there was a piano using British(?) technology that used pieces of audio tape to play music. Anyone know what I am talking about? It might have even been posted in this thread.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 01:58

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Mister Kingdom posted:

The Mellotron. A staple of 70s music.

Thanks that's it! Well going on that link I guess they are not obsolete since people are still using them today.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2012 02:10

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

# ¿ Dec 4, 2012 05:01

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Anybody remember back in the day before Sound Blaster and dedicated cards came out a company perfected the way to get speech and cd quality audio out of a PC speaker previously which was only capable of beeps?

# ¿ Dec 17, 2012 18:10

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

WebDog posted:

Access Software's RealSound? Which basically used highly compressed 6-bit audio squeezed through a PCM speaker.
Some examples here.
http://www.oldskool.org/sound/pc/#digitized

Under a Killing Moon blew me away in 1994 due to it's (then) photo realistic looking graphics and 360 degree movement around a game world.
Doom's 3D was raycasted where UAKM used texture mapped polygons.

Access Software were pretty sharp with pulling off all sorts of technical achievements such as video playback thanks to some pretty insane decompression. They also were one of the first to use DVD-Roms in 1998 when barely anyone owned one.

Yes Realsound was the company. I thought they were the first but apparently I am wrong. I didn't know the aaaauuuaauaugh from beach Head II was sampled, I thought it was synthesis.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 00:59

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Jibo posted:

This makes me think of the time a couple of years ago where manufacturers were making a big hoopla about apps for your TV for Twitter and Facebook and poo poo. You don't really see that as an advertised feature any more, probably because it's kind of dumb.

Pretty much every TBV I see at Costco ro Best Buy has built in apps. And i think they are pretty cool. My next TV will have built in WiFi, Pandora, Netflix and whatever. Beats having to connect poo poo to your TV. My friend uses Pandora on his TV all the time, they just leave the TV on at night and listen to it.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 01:01

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Aren't dedicated GPS units pretty much dead now if you own any kind of smartphone? I remember when they were expensive, now if you have one and it breaks it costs as much to fix it as it costs to buy a new one. I use Google Maps, Waze, and for when I don't have a data connection and CoPilot Live for its offline maps. Only people I really see using them are long haul truckers and soon they will be replaced. Eve Garmin isn't doing so good now I hear.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 01:05

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

I used to stay up on Saturday night just to watch Beyond 2000. I also had a subscription to Omni magazine.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 07:13

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Outside of Karaoke, does anyone still put CD+G on Audio CD'? I remember when it first came out how hot that was.

Also VRML.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2013 07:11

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Jasper Tin Neck posted:

Somehow dumping razorblades inside walls seems like a really strange idea, but I guess the houses weren't expected to last for centuries so they figured they couldn't fill up. It just seems to me that you could achieve the same convenience with a tin bank. You'd have to empty it every once in a while though.

Speaking of garbage, fortunately high-rise incinerators got banned the 60s in favour of garbage collection. Incinerators used to make the air in many cities legitimately dangerous to breathe. They were probably a great way to dispose of dead bodies too.

We didn't live in a highrise and we had an incenerator in our apartments back yard. I can't remember if we ever used it or not, but I do remember finding a huge stash of unburnt old Playboys in there as a kid.

# ¿ May 27, 2013 05:38

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Code Jockey posted:

That's so cool. I love old Sun boxes. Solaris would work right? I've got a pair of Sun 1U rackmounts [I forget what model] that I keep meaning to throw Solaris on.

My dream is to acquire some SGI gear. I used to play around on that, a friend of mine's dad was head of the CS department at the local big private college [read: money out the yin yang] and they had some awesome stuff. Playing Doom on an SGI screaming fast, when my home PC could barely do it, was cool.

Same here. I would love to get an O2 or an Octane to play around with.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2013 21:38

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Anyone remember hard cards? If you didn't have the expansion bay you would plug in an ISA card with a hard drive strapped to it.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2013 21:48

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

ol qwerty bastard posted:

Steam engines are so cool

Here's a picture of an early locomotive that I saw last month:

And here's another Leno video about a car with a propulsion system that never caught on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2A5ijU3Ivs

If I could have any classic car, it would probably be a turbine car, because holy hell they are neat.

Also really loving loud.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2013 18:12

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

p-hop posted:

My car is a 2006 Buick Lesabre. The stock stereo has AM/FM and a cassette deck. 2006 cassette deck. I have one of those cassette tape / headphone jack converters and it does the job just fine. I've heard that some models (such as mine) are built with outdated/legacy stereo stuff because the primary market is elderly people. It's a grandpa car and grandpa still has cassette tapes. Anyone know if that's true?

Also, I can't even imagine the smell when you open one of those glass-top cars on a hot summer day. You're out of work finally, go to your car to head home, open the car door and... WHOOMF 130�F of pleather/vinyl/plastic fumes.

I used to work at an electronics recycler, and among other cameras we would get Sony Mavica models that used a 3.5" floppy disk for external media storage. No other memory card options. You've got a whopping 1.4 megabytes of storage before swapping discs. Even when it was new, 1.4 MB was tiny and nearly useless. The strangest part is that after refurbishing and putting them on ebay, they would ALWAYS sell for a decent amount of money. Who on earth would want one of these and what would you even do with it?

I used to work for Fedex. They still used Mavicas for taking ID photos.

# ¿ May 5, 2014 18:42

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Mousepractice posted:

I loved these guys, after my friends moved on to better kit I ended up with about three of the early 128mb models and each one would hold a different playlist. I reckon I came out ahead, because my friends upgraded to these:

Sony NW-HD1, 20GB. A decent enough player, well-built, good controls, massive battery life, but the software was absolute dog shite and it took forever to put any music on it.

Yes. I had the HD3 and it was awesome. I actually like it better than anything available now. The SonicStage software you had to use was absolutely poo poo. If someone wrote new software I would pick one of these up again.

# ¿ May 7, 2014 05:19

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

And as someone else pointed out, his style parodies are way way better and don't age as badly as his song parodies. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLnapb-30hA

Is this a parody of "the White Stripes"?

# ¿ Jul 25, 2014 11:12

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

I found a computer I never heard of before. My neighbor was moving and let me go through her garage.
Morrow Systems

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 18:21

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Kidney Stone posted:

Is it this one?

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=613

I was hoping it was a self contained unit. Looks like i'm missing the CPU.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 23:02

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

Tubesock Holocaust posted:

Fixed. I don't know what the gently caress I was thinking.

I remember buying a 128MB Lexar thumb drive and then marveling at how amazing it was to save and transfer files that would take several floppy disks to move.

My first thumb drive was a 4MB see thru Lexar drive. I thought it was the bees knees. It still works too.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 08:05

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 14:40

b0nes: Sep 11, 2001

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.

There is/was a dedicated site where you could buy working SGI and SUN hardware and have it shipped. I'll look it up if you really want one. I want an 02 or an Indy.

A BeBox and a NeXT Station would be the the tits.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 08:07

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