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On the subject of video mediums I was just thinking about the first VCR my dad owned, the third entry in the "VHS versus Betamax" war, a Philips V-2000 (or Video 2000, based on the logo) top loader, with optional remote control (the IR receiver plugged into a little port on the bottom of the front panel, as seemed to be a theme with Philips back then, he also had their second ever hifi CD player where the IR receiver was an enormous pyramid you plugged in the back). We had a bunch of home movies for it, including Airplane, Saturday the 14th, and a tape filled with ancient old cartoons including one where Mighty Mouse visits the pyramids in Egypt, which my parents had bought from the local rental place after V-2000 failed in the marketplace (there was probably a higher number of them than average in our town because Philips had a major presence there at the time, and employees including my dad could buy them at a discount from the company shop). The machine was really interesting though - it had support for stereo, automatic tracking using piezo-mounted heads (a feature VHS didn't get until the late '90s), a digital track if you just wanted to embed some kind of digital data alongside the video and audio, and most weirdly of all, you could record on both sides of the tape, it used literally half the "width" of VHS to store everything. My dad was actually curious about this as VHS was much lower quality than V2000 so he took apart a VHS cassette and spooled the tape itself (which was the same specification, so it fit) into a V2000 cassette, and it worked perfectly, including recording on both sides. Apparently the V2000 also moved the tape at 2.44cm/s versus the VHS 3.335cm/s, so VHS just wasted media. What this really meant is that 10 year old me used the B sides of all the commercially recorded cassettes to record cartoons. The cassettes also looked bonkers because they could be used from either side, but still had a mech to protect the tape.
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Feb 18, 2024 05:40
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:11 |
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I've read a few articles over the past few months predicting (or even pointing out signs of) a mild recovery in the physical media market, possibly just due to collectors but possibly a reaction to the fact that streaming is kind of collapsing into a pile of filth as every single company wants to have its own service even harder than before or randomly pulling content people thought they'd have forever (or just having less content), all while adding adverts and increasing prices. Personally I've actually increased my physical media purchases over the past year, but that's partially just because I backed up my entire collection into Jellyfin so I could hide the disks from our toddler and realised there were gaps with movies I wanted. Also I bought some Star Trek: Lower Decks as I wanted to watch it and I didn't want to give Paramount+ any streaming money, and it was cheaper on disk than "buying the series digitally". The funny thing about "niche Bluray publishing companies" is it's not that dissimilar to the experience as it's always been. Missed out buying that random '80s movie you liked when that DVD came out? Good luck finding it because they only made a few back in 2009 when you hadn't even thought about it and now you need to deal with Amazon, eBay, or a local used media shop. (I do kind of hope the "physical media makes a comeback" thing works out to be true solely because it'd be really funny for that to happen right after Best Buy/etc. get out of the market)
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Feb 27, 2024 00:01
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I had a Sony SCSI CD-ROM drive that came with an old Sun SPARCStation IPC I had, but sadly I lost it all in a move. It was actually a mildly handy thing to have if you like playing with retro computers because it was all so interchangeable and there's still ways to burn new CD-Rs that would work in it, though you could just buy a SCSI2SD at this point. I also mentioned it in my V-2000 post but that Philips CD player my dad owned was pretty early, 1986 or so. It didn't need a caddy (since it was meant for music, after all) and had the normal front loading mechanism that CD-ROM drives would eventually settle on, but it was pretty weird otherwise. Also, if you stuck a CD-ROM in it, it did actually know what it was and would just show "dAtA" on the screen. From what I recall it would also play the data, if you wanted. Want a remote control? It's an optional extra, involving an obtrusive pyramid you were meant to tastefully leave on top of the unit. My dad hated this, took them both apart and embedded the receiver PCB inside the main unit, only having to make a little hole on the front for the IR dome. He also worked for Philips at the time, so he had the maintenance manuals from them, including full schematics. The maintenance manuals turned out to be useful because when he first received it, it didn't work. He had something like 6 CDs, and only one of them played, and even then it was just like half a track before it failed. At the time Philips had a major presence in the town I grew up in, so there was actually some onsite support available and he dropped it off personally with the repair guys. They returned it saying everything seemed fine...so he just opened the maintenance manual himself and started doing the troubleshooting steps as described. A few steps into the "laser pickup assembly" diagnostic steps the manual found the problem - the focus lens was installed upside down. He flipped it over and it worked perfectly, and it seemed pretty clear the guys at the repair department hadn't even tried to fix it. Last time I saw it my brother was still using it in his hifi.
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Feb 29, 2024 07:51
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I remember when I was young Kellogg's Frosties did something similar, by putting "thin vinyl" on the front of the cereal box that you had to cut out. I had a few of these (image stolen from a YouTube video about it)
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Mar 2, 2024 22:01
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By popular demand posted:
She's just having a smoke  Do Carry On films count as obsolete and failed technology?
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Mar 4, 2024 22:02
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Collateral Damage posted:56k, luxury! 56k was the only phone modem we ever had as my dad didn't want to pay an ISP, so we didn't have home internet until I started University, and he knew the uni I went to had a pool of like six modems for the students and staff to dial into. We used that for like six months before we just switched to Freeserve, which was a significantly better ISP than a university. I did have a few internet experiences before that though, since the reason he knew anything about the Uni having those modems was because he worked in their business park (previously, he was actually an employee, but a UK tax rule changed so the Uni would actually need to pay tax on their previously very profitable wholly owned businesses, so his work was quickly spun off but they remained in the same office). Their business park had fibre lines run from the Uni's big fibre pipe, so in the early '90s when my dad had to work weekends I'd sometimes join him and enjoy some Windows 3.1 high speed surfing. I did experience incredibly slow speeds though, as by 2000 I'd decided mobile internet was obviously the future and I was determined to live in that future even if nobody else had caught up, so despite being at Uni and having no income I managed to get an O2 contract (thanks to my parents) with a Motorola Timeport L7089 with the data set up, offering a whopping 9.6kbps of internet. I used this with an HP 320LX which came with Windows CE 1.0, but there was a free upgrade if you sent back a registration card included in the box. This in turn caused them to physically ship you a Windows CE 2.0 ROM card which replaced the already installed one in a little bay on the bottom of the device. Mildly neat also was that it included AA rechargeables and would charge them if you used the provided PSU, but if you ran out of power, you could swap it out for plain old AAs until you were able to get back to your charger (a few PDAs were like this, back in the day). Also it was pre-Bluetooth so to get that 9600kbps you had to align the IR port on the PDA with the IR port on the phone. Even back then with Web 1.0, stuff barely worked on "Pocket IE". The picture is my actual devices, they both still work, though I'm not sure the phone could still do data (the phone and SMS parts are fine if you stick a SIM in it. Battery's incredibly dead, though)
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Mar 9, 2024 08:20
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credburn posted:When I worked at T-Mobile we sold HTC products and a lot of customers would ask what it stood for. I'd say "Hi-Tech Corporation" and they'd laugh every time. What a boring rear end name. Their full name is High Tech Computer Corporation, which I think is even funnier as it's so weirdly unimaginative. Just "we make computers, they're high tech, what of it?" I had a few HTC phones as I was into "smart" phones way before iPhones/Android was a thing so had a bunch of Windows Mobile ones: HTC Artemis  This one was pretty fun, as it contained a GPS back when that was still rare. As such, it could run TomTom for in-car navigation without requiring a separate GPS (I did also have a TomTom Bluetooth GPS for that reason before I got this one). Because it was intended for "navigation" they also slapped a bunch of random inputs on it - a jog dial (which generated cursor up/down events, so let you speed through menus/etc.) *and* a little nipple you could use if you didn't want to use the touch screen. The little nipple could function like cursor keys, or you could switch to a mode where a little mouse cursor appeared on the screen you could move around with it, which seemed pretty pointless for a PocketPC. In the end I sold this one to my dad. HTC Touch Diamond  This one was their flagship briefly, and you can see the Windows Mobile custom homescreen they developed for it resembles the one they also shipped on Android when they started developing those devices. It was nice and all, pretty fast CPU but otherwise a pretty generic PocketPC you couldn't really customise the home screen on because they'd modified it so heavily. Had the 3G videocall stuff, but most notably it came with an extremely good "marble" game where you just had to guide the ball to the destination without falling down any holes, but it somehow had haptics that felt better than even on a modern iPhone, which Apple constantly goes on about as if it's some amazing groundbreaking thing. I sold this one on eBay as I had no money at the time. You couldn't put it down on a table easily because the "diamond" rear case was actually a bunch of angles. HTC Universal  This one was kind of cool as it was also somewhat high end CPU-wise, but also had a 640x480 screen so it was "high DPI". It had a user-facing camera so it could implement the 3G videocall stuff, on top of the usual build in camera, too. The screen could rotate so you could have a normal "PocketPC" formfactor or a clamshell, with a little hardware keyboard with terrible keys. It was also like half an inch thick, which was way too thick even for the time. I still have this one, though I know the audio no longer works (I believe the audio ribbon cable through the screen joint has failed, so it's probably repairable) and the battery is gone, obviously. I still have this one, though. I actually have a bunch of non-phone Windows CE devices too. Edit to add: I once went to the Microsoft Embedded Developer Conference for work, and while I was there, Microsoft did not waste a single moment badmouthing HTC the whole time. I was no fan of HTC beyond they made devices of the sort I wanted to buy (e.g. non Symbian smartphones) but it seemed incredibly unprofessional how they'd just make fun of HTC (who were their literal primary partner for Windows CE, they'd develop new versions in conjunction with HTC for testing on-phone and things), right up there on stage during presentations and things. One funny thing I remember them mentioning though was a phone with 32Mb of RAM, which should have been plenty at the time, barely working as HTC's video capture driver for the work allocated like 25Mb of RAM on boot and just hung on to it forever. Charles Ford has a new favorite as of 05:40 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 05:29
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Remulak posted:Everybody at Microsoft hated CE, and I’m sure it rankled them that it was a success for somebody else when they thought it was garbage. The Windows CE source is riddled (or was) with comments about how much it sucks. Oh yeah, having used the business end of it (both the plain and Windows Mobile versions of Platform Builder) it definitely felt like nobody really cared. They did seem to occasionally actually care in terms of API though, they'd add interesting things now and then. The funniest thing to me was when they added a "get device unique ID" for doing licensing for apps/etc. and then some OEM (not HTC) implemented it to return all zeroes, so it was just useless for its intended purpose anyway. Of course, on top of that, they had another interesting API called the shimming engine that let you shim any API in the entire system, so it was difficult to actually "protect" apps anyway as anyone could do anything they wanted (except on devices where app security was turned on, where you'd need your app signed with the privileged key from MS or the network. But it was rare for a PocketPC smartphone to have those protections turned on). I did once have to SIM unlock my phone (my HTC Universal) and I got a free tool online from some random website, and I followed the instructions: 1) use this simple tool on a host Windows machine to change the device's IMEI to this specified IMEI 2) run this second tool on-device 3) use the first simple tool to change the IMEI back to your own IMEI When I got to the second step it displayed messages that made it pretty clear the "free" download had come from someone who was selling the unlocker and tying it to IMEI as a means of product security, but even the IMEI on that device was not locked down (and that wasn't even Windows CE's fault, the modem in that phone was a separate baseband attached by USB to the AP).
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Mar 30, 2024 20:57
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The talk of tiny cassettes reminded me of these things - did anyone else have one? The movie "cassettes" were little circular drums through which an actual film would zip through, and a bulb inside would let you see the "movie" through a little lens. I think it was probably a stocking filler when I was small, it was good fun.
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May 6, 2024 05:37
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:11 |
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Wayne Knight posted:Do they loop? It’d be fun to have these as like physical gifs. They do! Just the same little clip from a movie or tv show, over and over, with no sound. So pretty much exactly like a GIF now that you mention it.
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May 7, 2024 11:34
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