Tubesock Holocaust posted:

They made sense when I spent a couple of years couch-surfing amongst friends and family. Since I didn't have a place I could permanently set up a desktop without wondering if it was going to be broken or stolen, I longed for a gaming laptop, nevermind how gaming laptops are rolling compromises due to this one simple fact: their form factor means they can't dissipate heat very well. Well, that and the most powerful laptop GPU is still not nearly as powerful as the upper-mid-tier desktop GPU.

WebDog posted:

Hello my PDA of 1998!
These were a bit of a thing around the 90's as not everyone could afford a flashy Palm PDA with touch screen stylus so this was the bargain option. Granted there were beefier models with better calendar features and so on.
And yes 32kb of space to stuff in your life!

Though I'm guessing in 2002 you were buying one of the fancier touch screen stylus ones as these were pretty cheap.

Oh and this

I wish I could find this again. It was a learning maths calculator that operated on the principle of flash cards. It was meant to check sums as opposed to calculating them for you. As an actual calculator it got a bit useless as it can't do negative numbers.

Powered Descent posted:

Counterpoint: that loving ActiveSync thing. It was a pain to set up and half the time it didn't work at all. I always wanted to grab the engineers responsible, shake them, and tell them to make their next device show up as a plain old USB mass storage device so at least you could just move files back and forth yourself (perhaps even using something other than Windows), and then make whatever overcomplicated "sync" bullshit they wanted into an (optional!) layer on top of that.

I never got the chance to do that, but apparently some of them got the message anyway, because a few years later Android devices came out and that's pretty much how they worked. Apple still hasn't gotten that particular usability memo, sadly.

Uncle at Nintendo posted:

(sadly, this is not my image as AOL blocks people from signing on with anything older than 6.0)

WebDog posted:

Efexeye posted:

Pinball is kind of a tech relic, right? Are there any companies still making machines?

I want to buy cheap and lovingly learn to restore a Creature from the Black Lagoon, the game I learned to love pinball on