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Cassettes, VHS, Tube TVs, Laserdisk, dedicated VCD players, oddball personal computers of the 80s-90s, portable CD players, CRT monitors, set-top boxes, etc.: They're all sort of regarded as dinosaurs now, but for every single obsolete device that existed, there has to be something that was thought of as the 'best', either through personal experience or critical/consumer review. I have to admit, I am sort of a fan of older technology stuff, and finding anything from the 70s-very early 00s sort of piques my interest. So, I thought a thread like this might help people who are retro and vintage technology fans to get a better idea of some of the stuff out there that's actually worth looking for or get a bit of a history/specs lesson for the devices along the way.
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Jul 13, 2012 02:42
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Pocket Billiards posted:My understanding was that the blank media for VHS was much cheaper than Betamax. So people adopted VHS in droves so that they could record what was on TV without it being prohibitively expensive. There were a lot of theories for the success of VHS, and I think they all tended to culminate to make it successful: There is the oft quoted 'porn' aspect where it was cheaper and easier for adult entertainment companies to create and sell VHS content, there is the Sunday Football story where the longer recording times gave VHS an edge for folks who liked to record all the Sunday football games, more companies on board with VHS tapes, and so on. Geoj posted:^ In addition to this, didn't MS and some other company get together to make some sort of data watch that would be able to pick up news information and display it on the watch via a background signal transmitted over normal radio frequencies or beeper frequencies in certain major metropolitan areas? I guess it would allow people to keep up with current events on their watches or something to that effect, but it too would have been some product around the 1996-2000 era, I think. It never really made a big impact, though.
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Jul 13, 2012 07:34
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Prettz posted:Blu-ray is way, way superior to HD-DVD -- not just in terms of doubling capacity, the standard also allowed higher maximum bitrates, which is very important for squeezing out the last bit of visual quality given a target filesize. My major complaint about BD, though, is that HD-DVD seemed like it was a better stopgap video solution, since many titles came out on the hybrid discs that allowed you to have DVD on one side and HD-DVD on the other side. It seemed that if maybe MORE movies had been released like this they could have been able to promote HD-DVD more easily to a customer base that had perhaps just jumped into DVD ownership. "Hey, you can still buy this movie as a flip-disc and watch it now, and when you buy an HD-DVD player in a few years, you ALREADY have a library of HD-DVD movies to enjoy!" Personally, I think the name killed it: Five syllables that sounded awkward rolling off the tongue vs. Blu-Ray. I know that sounds stupid, but I sort of think it didn't help the brand. They probably should have called it something else. Even DVD-HD sounds better. HiDVD, H-DVD, S-DVD, etc. About a year or so ago I saw an HD-DVD player at a store and felt like it weighed a ton trying to pick it up: I forgot how heavy the first generation players were.
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Jul 13, 2012 07:41
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:Back when the average mp3 player had about 256 meg of memory, I felt so smug for picking up an mp3 CD player: exactly the same as a regular portable CD player, but you could also burn mp3s to a regular CD and play them! Yeah, it was bulky, and trying to find an individual song was an immense pain but I had a bajillion times the songs the rest of you plebeians had with me 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. Mister Snips posted: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. Say what you will about the old carphones, I knew someone who bought one in the early 90s because they were commuting and wanted something in case of emergencies on the road and they will still swear their old car phone had the absolute best sound quality of any cellular phone they've ever had: Loud, clear, and almost always had a strong signal. I think they even said they wished they would have just kept it, but I'm sure the needed infrastructure for it is likely no longer functioning. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 08:37 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 08:34
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WitchFetish posted:Tangentially related to the previous subject (by a very long shot) : MO disks. They kind of look like the bastard child of floppy and a CD , and they can hold up to over 9G of data which makes them perfectly appropriate for this thread. There was an article I was reading somewhere about some company that worked on a pretty massive project back in the early-mid 80s and saved absolutely everything on a proprietary storage media that didn't have a lot of adopters. Eventually, the few drives they had failed and they were unable to retrieve the data, so they just threw everything out. However, they had zero hard copies or back-ups other than that. I sort of wonder how often something like that happened with media that never caught on with the mainstream and people just chucking things out thinking it was forever irretrievable.
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Jul 16, 2012 03:10
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Humboldt squid posted:Also, I don't know if this is still true or not, but the cheapo e-machines and whatnot that a lot of people used to buy are basically non-upgradeable, or at least non-self upgradeable. By a similar note, a relative bought a Barbie-branded PC about 10 years ago that was bolted shut: You'd need a drill to open the case.
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Jul 16, 2012 06:38
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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? JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 12:19 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 12:11
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lllllllllllllllllll posted:Between VHS and DVD there was Video-CD. The funny thing was that compression artefacts and low resolution made for a worse picture than a good VHS tape. Few players exist. I remember around the DVD era, though, VCD had a bit of a following for folks because several DVD players supported VCDs, allowing folks to burn stuff on their PCs with regular CDs. Along these lines, there was also MovieCD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MovieCD It was a proprietary movie playback format for computers. It had quite a few titles released, but it never caught on. As time has moved forward, apparently the required installed codecs needed to play back movies no longer work with modern OSs. Oddly enough, I had some of these I bought on clearance several years ago and they weren't great, but they weren't all that bad, either. It was just way too niche an audience to make it succeed, especially when you had to have a computer to play back any of the movies.
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Jul 17, 2012 12:18
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With Divx, I remember an issue with them at the time was the fact that they needed to be connected to a phone line every time you wanted to play a movie, even part of a movie, and you had to have a credit card connected to the player. If you wanted to watch a single scene in a film, you were charged. Also, there were some privacy concerns at play. One theory was that eventually Divx HQ might share information with somewhere like Domino's: After starting a movie on a Friday night, you might get a phone call saying, "Hey, we see you're getting ready to watch a film! Would you like to order some pizza?" Or they could track viewing habits of people, too. Of course, Disney and other companies did love the hell out of Divx because it represented the problem they had in the VHS era: After the initial sale, the companies pretty much never saw any money from rentals or repeated viewings of private purchased copies. With Divx, any time your kids wanted to rewatch the Little Mermaid, they'd get a few bucks. Of course, many Divx apparently had the option to do what I think they called "gold disk" where you'd pay a one-time fee of about $20 and unlock that movie for the life of your divx account and not have to pay additional fees.
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Jul 18, 2012 01:44
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I know they're generally mocked these days, but RealAudio used to be pretty popular back in the 90s. I know that in the pre-podcast, pre-youtube and pre-broadband days of internet video and radio it was a choppy and blocky, but it was still about as good as it got when it came to getting such content on slow connections. Even when it was popular, it was even criticized due to the footage not being of the same quality as Quicktime-grade video. Then once MS got into the game, Napster and file-sharing MP3s became the norm, it seemed like the reign of Real started coming to an end. The only real streaming competition that I ever saw at that time was a format called "Vivoactive" which I thought was better than Realvideo with comparable file sizes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VivoActive According to a wiki on Vivo, it says it was popular because of its use on porn sites in the 90s, but from my recollection I only ever knew it from some early music video and movie trailer sites.
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Jul 27, 2012 07:38
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Trebek posted:Yeah that's where I was going with it. Sat radio is doomed. Does satellite radio presumably have enough technical power to maybe introduce a mobile satellite video service in response to that? Sure, you'd have fixed schedules and programming, but I could maybe see something like that having an audience who would be interested in a little box that hooks up into the portable DVD player in their backseat or family van that gets something like Sirius XM Nick, Sirius XM Disney Channel, Sirius XM ESPN, etc. if HD and on-demand wasn't an issue.
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Aug 1, 2012 00:31
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On the subject of batteries, whatever happened to the minor "Rechargeable Alkaline" boom of the 90s? It seemed like for a few years there was a company selling a device to let you 'safely' recharge all your normal alkalines, and Rayovac was selling dedicated rechargeable alkalines. I guess they're still around, but they seemed to vanish even before the NiMH batteries started to get cheap. (My memory was sparked, no pun intended, by the sight of a charger at a rummage sale a short time ago.)
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Aug 6, 2012 06:19
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Kaboom Dragoon posted:'What happens when goths discover brown' is always my favourite description of it. Then I feel sad because I actually like steampunk... We need to get in on the ground floor of the next '-punk' movement and own it now. If it doesn't already exist, I call 'Gildpunk': Everything all golden, silver, pearl, silken and ivory, polished to a perfect clean.
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Aug 9, 2012 06:38
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Flipperwaldt posted:
Personally, the one of the best Tetris-clone devices I ever used was (no surprise) the officially licensed Tetris Watch that I got from Kellogg's back in the 90s. You could sit and play it pretty well on your wrist with just one hand. The 'surprise', though is that I ended up getting an officially licensed Tetris Keychain several years later that I thought felt like a knock-off.
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Aug 30, 2012 05:55
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Also at every swapmeet ever you find those ones that look like N64 controllers that play NES ROMs that are totally not illegal. There are apparently legit devices like that you can buy with several Sega Genesis games built into them. Oddly enough, they make one that is licensed and everything with the added bonus of having an SD card slot that apparently allows you to download ROMs and play them off the device. http://www.amazon.com/Sega-Genesis-...ds=motion+sonic It seems such an odd feature to add to the device as it seems almost guaranteed to promote piracy.
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Sep 4, 2012 05:46
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I get why there is a market for those sort of things, though. My mom has ZERO interest in a game system of any sort, but she's expressed interest in some of those Atari things on occasion just to play Pacman and the like. I do remember about 6 years ago there was an Atari Keychain of a minuature roller controller or joystick that were tiny, but you could connect a little cable to and hook up to a TV to play some games with. http://www.amazon.com/Atari-ATARI-JOYSTICK-KEYCHAIN/dp/B000TXTCES I've been tempted to buy one to keep at work to play in the break room during lunch.
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Sep 4, 2012 06:25
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Adus posted:Nah it was actually designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who is the creator of the original Game Boy. Not every project can be a winner, I guess. The technology of the Virtual Boy was probably better suited for arcades than any sort of home system, where gameplay is limited to minutes and it could expand the capabilities of the design to perhaps expand beyond monochrome graphics, or allow for a degree of head movement in controlling gameplay.
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Sep 5, 2012 06:16
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Fooley posted:I like how this and the CueCat were sort of the precursors to QR codes being everywhere. Also, back in the late 80s/early 90s, there were some VCRs that got released with a barcode reading pen in a sort of overdone VCRPlus+ How it was supposed to work in the commercial setting was that just like VCRPlus, your local TV listings and TV Guide would include barcodes that you would scan and that would tell your VCR to record that show. An article on them here: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-10-31/entertainment/8603220140_1_bar-code-bar-code-tv-guide In that same article they mention Toshiba having a VCR with a light pen that you would touch on the screen to set recording parameters which I never even heard of until now being used on a VCR.
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Sep 8, 2012 07:55
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Setzer Gabbiani posted:MINDDRIVE, it looks like the only purpose of this was to play games, considering we heard nothing about the super-revolutionary Miramax films utilizing this. Also: the games look really lovely. It sorta looks like that thing for the Wii you would clip on your finger that was never released Back in the 80s or so I seem to recall some various biofeedback devices being advertized for home computers, too. I don't really have any information on them other than I think most of them were more along the lines of probably just capturing a pulse rate and and giving you video/audio patterns to focus on to help do so.
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Sep 28, 2012 17:19
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On the subject of flexidisk records, the novel "Fast Sofa" from the 90s actually came with one featuring the punk group The Flesheaters. http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Sofa-Bruce-Craven/dp/0688123368/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1350108029&sr=8-2&keywords=fast+sofa I think there was also a music magazine from the era called "Reflex" that also included flexidisks with them, too.
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Oct 13, 2012 07:01
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Killer robot posted:"Soda Stuff" Along these lines, do you or anyone else remember the what the "extra large" drink cups at places used to look like? Rather than the normal cup and lid that we have everywhere today, some places used to have these strange cups that were round at the bottom like a regular cup then would become more boxy as along the top. Rather than a lid, the top folded in like a milk carton with a plastic tab holding it together and you punched out a hole to put your straw through. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 10:23 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 10:16
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I think I mostly remembered them from local mom-and-pop fast food places, but the last time I think I saw any was the mid-80s. It's likely that the bigger chains were able to just faze them out sooner. But now that you mention it, KFC does strike a memory with me and those cups. This site has an image of the CLOSEST thing I can find to those old-styled cups, but they're a new cup with a more modern design. http://thecompleat.com/
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Nov 15, 2012 11:40
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Along these lines, a few years ago I was looking for one of those old tiny trackballs that would slide into the edge of a laptop keyboard and hang off the side and couldn't find any still being made. Granted, they're likely never coming back, either, but I think I would have preferred to have one for some laptop gaming compared to a trackpad or the eraser nub thing. But in the late 90s, they seemed to be fairly popular, or at least available at just about every retail outlet out there.
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Nov 22, 2012 08:52
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:What would "bubble sheets" like Scantrons even have been replaced with? Once electronic handwriting or voice recognition becomes good enough, likely that. It might allow full-automation without the multiple choice acting as a hint where the correct answer possibility can be whittled down by guesses, word-recognition and known-falses.
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May 9, 2013 10:32
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We had something like a split flap displays for years around our town. They were large and instead of letters or numbers, they were just 'pixels' that would flip to green or black little paddles to form out a single long line of letters, numbers, and very simple symbols. Standing beneath the sign was like hearing a thousand little claps going on ever 3-5 seconds at each change. Chlap! Chlap! Chlap!
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Jun 28, 2013 23:03
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mystes posted:Yahoo just announced that it's shutting down AltaVista. Apparently AltaVista still existed. They've also announced that in another few weeks they're going to start deleting Yahoo e-mail accounts that have been inactive for a year and recycle them, letting new people claim them.
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Jun 29, 2013 04:28
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Wanamingo posted:Just the other week I helped my mom delete her Yahoo email account after it was hacked and sign up for Gmail. I kinda thought that most of their userbase was people like her, who only used it because it's what they've always used. Why would anybody ever want to possibly sign up for a new account there? I know I still use a lot of Yahoo for most of my email stuff, and prior to that it had been Hotmail and I know I ended up making a few side accounts over the years there just for random websites and contest entries. I just never felt really all that in a hurry to make Gmail my primary Email account and mainly only use that as a means for being able to access the Play Store or watch videos and red band trailers on Youtube that make me swear I'm over 18. I know one of the big complaints/concerns about the Yahoo plan of recycling addresses is the potential for identity theft and privacy issues. Despite having your old account's emails deleted, a person who scoops up your old address could just as easily start to go around to a lot of popular sites and do a password retrieval for them to see what sticks and what they can glean.
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Jun 29, 2013 07:46
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I do remember about 10-13 years ago there was a lollipop company that came out with a device that had a built-in radio and it would hold your sucker at stem. When you tuned it in and turned to a radio station, if you rest the sucker portion on your teeth you could 'hear/feel' the music in your ears. It was relatively decent sounding, all things considered. I bought one on clearance as a goof but never really used it all that much because I could just wear headphones. It even came with a plastic 'sucker' so you didn't have to constantly have a lollipop rotting your teeth just to secretly listen to the radio. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1999-08-12/lifestyle/9908110421_1_pop-radio-lollipop-teeth I don't think they make them anymore, but I can hardly imaging sugar and vibrations being all that good for teeth on a prolonged basis.
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Jul 7, 2013 22:49
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The proprietary ISP web of the 90s is sort of still interesting to think about. Prodigy, AOL, etc. I remember when some of the ISPs like Prodigy used to charge you for every email you sent and received. In fact, there was a teacher who set up a Prodigy account on a classroom computer that told us a few days later, "Do not send messages to people." Someone in a class used her account to message to stranger, and the stranger was unhappy that they had to pay not only to receive the message, but also to send a message telling the teacher to never contact them again so they didn't waste any more money.
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Aug 11, 2013 19:09
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:There's the Casio DG-20. Kind of a mix between a guitar and a synth and a MIDI controller. I've always wanted one but can never justify buying the odd ones on ebay. Yamaha put out something called the EZ-EG a few years ago that was somewhat similar, but I think it's discontinued. It doesn't look like it has a full fret, though. There's also something called the Q-Chord that I've watched demos of and I still can't figure it the hell out on how it's supposed to work.
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Jan 3, 2014 18:48
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That's the one. The sad truth is that I ALMOST bought one of these years ago before I knew what it was. There's a musical instrument called 'the chapman stick' that sort of interested me for a while and I think is legitimately still cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GS0nKIebCc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT6GScX-Yh0 JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 21:03 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 21:01
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I'm hoping it goes on long enough for people to start going, "Remember that horrible motion controller MS did for the 360? I think it was like the Connex or something."
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Jan 20, 2014 08:45
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Varance posted:This thread needs more ROB, Power Glove, etc.. 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.
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Jan 20, 2014 10:01
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I know that technically all our tech and design today is 'better', but I love that angular and button-laden design of 80s technology.
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Jan 22, 2014 04:54
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IBM ThinkPad Butterfly keyboard was an idea that I'm sort of surprised never caught on when netbooks became popular, as it would be a way to keep the relatively small size but increase the size of the keyboard, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTlQxHFCaDo Apparently, it ceased being practical when screen sizes increased, meaning a normal keyboard size could also increase, too, without the need of a folding mechanism.
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Jan 23, 2014 22:45
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With those Card Kiosks, I seem to remember another issue was that they put in safeguards that restricted people from using certain words in the cards, too. I do also seem to recall that people had figured out ways to get around it that they system wouldn't have instantly blocked: Spaces between letters, spelling words vertically, etc. It might block: Eat poo poo!, but not: E S a h t i . t . !
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Jan 25, 2014 05:05
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I was in a used bookstore a few weeks ago and they had one of those thick Internet Yellow Pages-type books that used to be pretty popular in the 90s on their shelf. I glanced at it really quickly and it looked like it was copyright 2006.
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Jan 25, 2014 05:16
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Talk of printers reminded me that in the time of Dot-matrix there were also the daisy-wheel printers that were excellent if you wanted a consistent and 'typed-out' look to your work. I knew someone back in the 90s who argued, for example, that a dot-matrix printer's output didn't look 'professional' enough for a resume or a school report regardless of how good you did set it because if they sat there and REAAAALY looked hard, they could see the bumps of each dot.
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Jan 26, 2014 01:31
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Not really a technology, but along the lines of software: The space/flight sim genre. In the 80s and 90s it seemed like these were extremely popular genres that had titles shipped several companies: Microprose, subLogic, Spectrum Holobyte, Dynamix, LucasArts, Origin, etc. Complete with massive, binder-filling instruction manuals, keyboard overlays and, on lower-end computers, slow frame rates. Then it seems like the moment PC technology started to get really powerful and more widespread to the point that these sort of games could finally be done extremely well, the interest in the genre really dropped off. I know there's still games out there being made, but there just doesn't seem to be the output, passion or interest like there was a generation ago.
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Feb 8, 2014 07:24
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Actually, that seems sort of cool if a sim would randomly throw you a major error that may or may not be a no-win and you got graded/rated on your handling of it.
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Feb 8, 2014 09:40
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