Obscure / Rare Technology you used.

redbandana

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lurkingdirk said:
Do you guys remember these things? Not computers, but word processors, had a tiny screen so it wouldn't print until you looked over text. They were absolutely horrible to work on.

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My girlfriend back in the day had one, I used to use it to type song names on Cassette tape liners so that my mix tapes for her looked nice. :D
 
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Lanx

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Aaron said:
Then there were the friends of my parents when I was young. I loved going to dinner with my parents to their house as after eating when the adults would sit and chat adult things, they would let me go into the TV room and watch Star Trek films on their LaserDisk.

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it's funny you found a photo of laserdisk photo for karaoke

obscure tech use,

that was the only reason asians had laserdisk in thier home, to sing karaoke

everyone wanna be just like jackie
 
Siliconemelons

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redbandana said:
My girlfriend back in the day had one, I used to use it to type song names on Cassette tape liners so that my mix tapes for her looked nice. :D
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I was super close to buying one that was a “laptop” it ran Corel write or whatever that old suit was called. It was only a digital word processor but it actually ran a version of dos so you could “hack” it and it was then in turn a suuuppper cheap laptop… I had a thing about odd form and stuff laptops, laptops now are so boring

want exactly this but was like it

also I had a Tandy? Or something old 286 laptop I’ll find a pic it was funny old thing

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Siliconemelons

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Ahh here it is! The half height blue lcd was so fun lol playing games on this thing, swapping disks etc mine the battery was shot to u kept it plugged and I had no hdd so one of the disk drives was just for the os

Edit : it had a handle to carry it lol

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BrutulTM

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At my old job we had a couple of these before laptops started to get powerful enough to go out in the field.

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Control

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Fidlen said:
My brother in law went through some midlife crisis and bought up every retro system he could find. This is just a small sample of what he picked up.

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Highly jealous of the collection! I can personally verify that that Donkey Kong machine is a cheating piece of shit! My Pac-Man was the more stylish version:
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Staredog said:
View attachment 503179lol DOSPC Novice November 1991 Magazine For Computer Newcomers! | eBay
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That sparks a very nerd memory! My first PC was a 286 and had no mouse. However, King's Quest 5 had the shiny new point and click interface and required one. But the computer didn't have enough ram to run the mouse and the game... So determined noob me read the OS manual to whatever was installed as well the one for a copy of IBM DOS 5 that we happened to have for some reason. I found that I could load high the mouse driver on 5.0 but not on the installed version, so noob me goes formatting the computer. Parents were NOT happy about this, but it all worked out eventually. I got my mouse to work, got to play KQ5, and became a very odd tech-savvy luddite when I hated it because the point and click interface sucked balls compared to the previous text interface. Also, the intro for KQ5 had digitized music and was so large at the time that it has it's own separate installer. I had to delete everything from the harddrive except the OS to install it, watch it a few times, and then delete it since the HD was 40M and the intro was something like 36M.

It's harder than I would have though to dredge up memories of obscure tech. It feels like I should have had more weird things. There were a few, though not sure how obscure they really were. Didn't know anyone else with these at the time though:
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The Treo may not have been all that rare, but I only got it to play NES roms. I'm pretty sure the number of Treo owners rockin FFI was pretty small.

Also had one of these converted to 12v and installed in my car, which felt pretty epic when I was in highschool:
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Haus

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Oh we're just talking about stuff that is rare NOW....

The year is 1985... And before I get allowed to use a terminal to write code for programs on the HP3000 minicomputer at school I must first earn the right to use a keyboard by manually punching up and entering my first assignment with literal punched cards....
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get... off... my... lawn...
 
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Aaron

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A group photo from next year's FOH meetup:
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Denamian

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Back in elementary school I would always volunteer to go to the school office to crank out copies on the mimeograph. The fumes from the ink was fantastic.

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lurker

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The first picture is moveable type I set for imprinting a customer's name onto some bookplates.

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The second picture is a slug from a Linotype machine. The brass piece laying next to it is called a matrix. It is one letter. I don't remember what I set this for. It says "...that you may have life and have it abundantly".

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Void

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I've had plenty of the things mentioned in this thread, including Pong, an Atari 800, zip disks, etc. But I never knew a single other person that had a Vectrex. I loved that fucking thing, even though it was monocolor and you had to put these colored plastic pieces over the screen to pretend it had colors. At one point I had beaten the top score on Minestorm, according to the official Vectrex magazine, but my mom wouldn't take a picture of my score :(

Vector graphics baby!

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Aaron

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Jesus, my cousin owned one of those. They're from the stone age!
 
Gamma Rays

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I can remember a local department store having one, where us kids would then just play the display one for hours.

I'm sure the staff were happy.

The vertical screen made it feel more like an arcade machine.
 
Siliconemelons

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Void said:
I've had plenty of the things mentioned in this thread, including Pong, an Atari 800, zip disks, etc. But I never knew a single other person that had a Vectrex. I loved that fucking thing, even though it was monocolor and you had to put these colored plastic pieces over the screen to pretend it had colors. At one point I had beaten the top score on Minestorm, according to the official Vectrex magazine, but my mom wouldn't take a picture of my score :(

Vector graphics baby!

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My best bro in HS his mom always talked about “pong” where they had to put a static film over the screen.

it was like the first video game system and is indeed rarely talked about in any of the docs I have watched, awesome to know a name now lol
 
Kharzette

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Siliconemelons said:
Just for fun, what are some pieces of obscure or rare tech that you have used or owned?

My first computer, a Tandy 1000SL - not super obscure, but not many really have had or used a Tandy at the time.

Working with this thing and being a budding gamer, the "Tandy" color, the "Tandy" CPU etc. posed challenges and compatibility - but I actually, looking back, learned a lot of being able to hack things to work, troubleshoot issues etc. I have many fond memories on this thing, and it started my (what would be) MMO addiction with BBS based game - Legend of the Red Dragon

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Next are kind of a set a Pocket PC running windows CE and Palm Pilot- a great little item, but technology was accelerating in the portable world so fast that these devices where essentially outpaced these type of devices - they all formed a rush of mobile tech that gives us our current phones, laptops and tablets. The Palm was a hand me down from my brother.

The PocketPC was a piece of tech I have no idea how I manged to afford in high school for myself lol- but it was so fun - I remember reading PC sales mags that had them over and over trying to find what one was the best and what I could afford. I ended up with the Casio - I wanted...soo soo bad the HP, that was color etc... I saw it at a store and played with it once. To tell more of the times, that was where they were also selling Cross Pen, Styluses.

I believe Windows CE still lives on or did in the embedded / IOT version of Windows.

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Kind of still in the line of small PC's that I was obsessed with, was my "College computer" - a Sony VIAO Picturebook.

I still have it, its a little.. broken, lol. But I just found its little 2.5 IDE drive the other day, plugged it in- had a click click that locks it up for a few moments, but then is fine - was able to find some old papers and stuff- was great.

What was more obscure was mine used (as pictured) a Curuso CPU processor. It was a slot CPU, so no pins or socket - it was kinda like a piece of ram, with the flat copper connectors on 3 sides of the square that slid into a C shaped slot. Not only was this CPU a real low power CPU in order to get the little laptop to last longer (the other models were I think p3?) - but it also was the first CPU to be able to have its clock speed changed on the fly via software from the OS itself. So you could go "slow" to save power and "fast" and a few in between all just in windows on the fly rather than going into bios etc.


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The last for now, is a graphics card(s)... a Real3D - StarFighter i740 - PCI VideoCard.

My first real paycheck I cashed and bought a computer... and it had a crappy built in video card that took the AGP bus...so I only had PCI. So trying to play games and stuff, and wanting to get something more than my Voodoo 2 - I got this thing somehow... took me back to my Tandy days as it was not really fully OpenGL etc. and it would just not run EQ... It was an interesting card and I was able to get some things mostly working by using hacked homebrew drivers...


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I eventually sold it to a friend and saved and got... a PCI Voodoo 5... I found the PCI version in stock at the last Babages about 1hr away. I used this darn thing for like 3-4 years - it was such a rock star haha. I was pissed when they released a PCI GeForce about 8 months later, for like 200$ vs this thigns $550 price tag.

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A Crusoe! I worked at transmeta (the cpu maker) back then and there were some nice little machines made with our chip. That company had some gigabrains, but originally they thought it was going to be this performance beast. I guess none of them had ever used an emulator.
 
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yaph

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We had one of these when I was in 7th grade or so. Only thing I remember about it was it was some kind of PDA but all we did was use the battle mode. I think some other company also made one that was compatible.


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My dad had a couple of bag phones way back when. They had like 15 minutes a month of air time or so.

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My dad upgraded to these when my siblings and I started driving. Pretty cool looking back being probably the only kid in my high school with a cell phone other than the drug dealers with pagers.
 
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