Obscure / Rare Technology you used.

Burns

Burns

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Hoss said:
he didn't cost anyone any money beyond what they spent to get to him. You really think a con artist would have trouble coming back from being debunked in a foreign country? The was in the infancy of the internet, it's not like he had a utube channel where all the followers of the conmen could watch their leader fail on livestream. I can't cite any sources specifically. It all came from the fact that I used to follow the jref like 20-30 years ago. I used to be entertained by it but I saw his underhanded dealings too often. I believe the child fucking came from a police report where he ordered a boy up to his room in the phillipines or something. I'm not going to go looking for it again. In fairness, IIRC there was only one report that came out and it could have been a setup. But also in fairness, he had enough stroke that he could have covered up other incidents.
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When you are out there showing the public how the scams that people like John Edward, Syvia Brown, and Peter Popov work, it makes for a less gullible public for lesser know fraudsters to take advantage of. The more publicity Randi got, the more people would feel that he is jeopardizing their livelihood (of running scams). Not to mention the people he would call out in print or on TV.

That's not even taking into account that a subset of the true believers in these frauds would be willing to do harm to anyone challenging their deeply held beliefs.
 
Hoss

Hoss

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Burns said:
That's not even taking into account that a subset of the true believers in these frauds would be willing to do harm to anyone challenging their deeply held beliefs.
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Fair enough. It was a long time ago. But this reminded me of something else I didn't like about him. There were too many JREF true believers. If I talked this kinda shit about him on a message board 20 years ago, there would already be a legion of them here trying to destroy me.
 
BrutulTM

BrutulTM

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Anyone else remember the days on USENET when someone would make a negative post about Scientology and the newsgroup would become unreadable for 2 weeks due to people spamming gibberish to it?
 
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imready2go

imready2go

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We were the only people in the neighborhood with a Pong system. LOL
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Fidlen

Fidlen

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Lambourne said:
Not exactly rare since they sold millions but probably obscure by now: Nintendo Game & Watch. Early 80s predecessor to the Gameboy.

Segmented LCD display so each only supported a single game and the mobs move by one segment extinguishing and the next lighting up.

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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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BrutulTM

BrutulTM

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Did anyone else buy stuff from the "Gifts and Gimmicks" section in the back of Boy's Life Magazine? It was by far my favorite part of the magazine. Don't think I ever actually fell for x-ray glasses, but I bought a shitload of knives, including the "Rambo" survival knife on multiple occasions, sea monkeys, a few different stamp collecting kits, and I'm pretty sure my brother and I actually chipped in on the Charles Atlas body building plan once.

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zzeris

zzeris

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BrutulTM said:
Did anyone else buy stuff from the "Gifts and Gimmicks" section in the back of Boy's Life Magazine? It was by far my favorite part of the magazine. Don't think I ever actually fell for x-ray glasses, but I bought a shitload of knives, including the "Rambo" survival knife on multiple occasions, sea monkeys, a few different stamp collecting kits, and I'm pretty sure my brother and I actually chipped in on the Charles Atlas body building plan once.

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I also bought the Rambo knife and it was one of my prized possessions as a young teen.
 
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Edaw

Edaw

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BrutulTM said:
Did anyone else buy stuff from the "Gifts and Gimmicks" section in the back of Boy's Life Magazine? It was by far my favorite part of the magazine. Don't think I ever actually fell for x-ray glasses, but I bought a shitload of knives, including the "Rambo" survival knife on multiple occasions, sea monkeys, a few different stamp collecting kits, and I'm pretty sure my brother and I actually chipped in on the Charles Atlas body building plan once.

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the karate kid GIF

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Fidlen

Fidlen

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Couple more. Wish I had a picture of the whole thing. Entire half of his basement is half retro and like 12 Ish of the arcade one up machines.

Edit - few more on facebook
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lurker

lurker

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BrutulTM said:
Did anyone else buy stuff from the "Gifts and Gimmicks" section in the back of Boy's Life Magazine? It was by far my favorite part of the magazine. Don't think I ever actually fell for x-ray glasses, but I bought a shitload of knives, including the "Rambo" survival knife on multiple occasions, sea monkeys, a few different stamp collecting kits, and I'm pretty sure my brother and I actually chipped in on the Charles Atlas body building plan once.
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I had one of these. Don't remember where I got it from. Could have been Boy's Life or maybe the back of a cereal box. You used to have to send in box tops as proof of purchase.

A baking soda powered submarine.

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You'd pull the top off the conning tower, put a teaspoon of baking soda in there and seal it back up. When you put it in the bathtub a small amount of water was let in to react with the powder and a stream of bubbles would exit out the back along a ramp underneath the sub and propel the sub forward.
 
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Palum

Palum

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lurker said:
I had one of these. Don't remember where I got it from. Could have been Boy's Life or maybe the back of a cereal box. You used to have to send in box tops as proof of purchase.

A baking soda powered submarine.

submarine-M.jpg


You'd pull the top off the conning tower, put a teaspoon of baking soda in there and seal it back up. When you put it in the bathtub a small amount of water was let in to react with the powder and a stream of bubbles would exit out the back along a ramp underneath the sub and propel the sub forward.
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They had a GI Joe version of that submarine from the 90s
 
Aaron

Aaron

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Man some nostalgia here. Here's one thing I did not do myself, but remember my Father doing. He was one of the first people in my little neck of the woods to get a PC. I'm talking the first generation of IBM PCs here. To connect to the "Internet" (read: a BBS service) he first had to call up the local operator, order a foreign phone call, then when it was patched through to the UK, then connect the phone to the modem. Good times.

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Speaking of IBM, while I was one of the first generations to learn to type in school on computers instead of typewriters, I still had to use one of these at my job right up until around 2020 when it finally went to a museum (literally, I was supposed to throw it away but I called a local cultural heritage museum and they wanted it).

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Then there is the first cell phone my Father had... well, "car phone" was the correct term I think. Can't find the exact make but it was a bit similar to this only the phone rested on the top. The battery pack was attached to the side of the phone box. Probably weighed about 10 pounds or so.

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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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Try to tell the younglings any of this and they ask you if you knew Fred Flintstone... or would if they knew who Fred Flintstone was.
 
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Aamry

Aamry

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Aaron said:
Man some nostalgia here. Here's one thing I did not do myself, but remember my Father doing. He was one of the first people in my little neck of the woods to get a PC. I'm talking the first generation of IBM PCs here. To connect to the "Internet" (read: a BBS service) he first had to call up the local operator, order a foreign phone call, then when it was patched through to the UK, then connect the phone to the modem. Good times.

View attachment 503299

Speaking of IBM, while I was one of the first generations to learn to type in school on computers instead of typewriters, I still had to use one of these at my job right up until around 2020 when it finally went to a museum (literally, I was supposed to throw it away but I called a local cultural heritage museum and they wanted it).

View attachment 503300

Then there is the first cell phone my Father had... well, "car phone" was the correct term I think. Can't find the exact make but it was a bit similar to this only the phone rested on the top. The battery pack was attached to the side of the phone box. Probably weighed about 10 pounds or so.

View attachment 503301

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.

View attachment 503302

Try to tell the younglings any of this and they ask you if you knew Fred Flintstone... or would if they knew who Fred Flintstone was.
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Shit Fred Flintstone? I made a damn Doogie Howser joke the other day and no one knew who I was talking about.
 
lurker

lurker

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Pioneer Laserdisc Player. Mine had a mechanism that rotated the head around the disc so you didn't have to flip the disc half way through the movie. I also bought a little board some guy made that you installed inside the unit to upgrade it to AC-3 or 5.1 Dolby Digital.

Still have it in a box along with probably 50 discs. Lots of Japanese pressings of Disney stuff including "Song of the South". Good luck finding that movie these days. Unfortunately, laserdiscs suffered from what they called "rot" that eventually made the discs unplayable. Many of mine are probably in that condition.
 
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lurkingdirk

lurkingdirk

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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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lurker

lurker

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IBM Selectric. It's the one with the little ball that held all the characters. No carriage. The paper stayed still and the ball moved back and forth spinning around. You could change fonts in seconds by swapping out the ball. My receptionist typed all the invoices for our business on this machine (the one in the picture is not mine). All our billing was done by hand and typed out on 3 part NCR paper. NCR paper for those who don't know is how we produced multiple copies of a form without carbon paper. You know what carbon paper is, right?
 
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