Years ago I worked at an electronics store and have seen some very interesting products over the years with some being very useful.
Not sure how to do a poll on here but wanted to see how people matched on the ownership of some of these useful devices .
Have you ever owned a My (answers)
-PDA? Yes, I had a Palm IIIe
-DVD-Recorder? Yes. Successor to VCR sure didn’t last long… 😖
-WebTV? No. Interactive TV in the days of dial-up. 🙂
-3D Television? No
-Raspberry PI? No but I want to.
-Internet Radio Player? No This would be fun especially if it also had am/FM tuner
Missed my favorite obsolete tech, the minidisc player. I Loved that thing. It was superior to CD in almost every way but never took off. Still loved getting 17 hours of music from one AA batt.
And the sounds! The articulated clamshell that popped open to receive the MD (where you could see all these miniature mechanisms), the slightly rattly plastic sound of putting the MD in the player, just chef’s kiss. I had a couple in my last years of high school that I ordered from a Japanese importer. Seemed sooo futuristic. Almost forgot the inline remote! iPods had those for a minute years later but everyone gave up on inline remotes it seemed like.
That signature KaCHUNK and spinup <3
Of this list, I only had PDAs. I had a couple of versions of the Palm Pilot. I remember learning the script using the stylus.
I’m getting closer and closer to my 60th birthday, and still remember my delight at using a mouse on a Mac with one 3.5 inch drive. Inserting and removing program vs storage discs was tedious, but just loving the intuitive interface and how quickly I was able to make the mouse an extension of my hand. So much easier than learning function keys and keyboard shortcuts. And then combining mouse clicks, functions, and keyboard shortcuts to be so much more productive than ever before.
We still have an original iPod that my husband uses in our basement, and I believe we still have a working Atari game console.
How about a Colecovision console, or a Laserdisc player?
LaserDisc goes back go the early 80’s I didn’t go back that far and I’ve never heard of a Colecovision console before…?
My older brother had a Colecovision. The arcade ports were obviously SO much better than the hand-me-down Atari 2600 in my room. It died though, when he was playing it while our dad yelled at him and then yanked it out of the wall and chucked it across the room… The two of them, they, uhhh, didn’t always get along.
I still have my laserdisc player… i have been unable to get rid of it. Everytime i look at it, the nostalgia knocks me off my feet.
My parents had a WebTV when I was in highschool. They kept it for a very long time. it was awful.
I also have a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Pi Hole on my network. I don’t think raspberry pi’s are as unusual as some of the other things here. I know a lot of people who use them for various things.
I had a Palm IIIe, and a couple Handspring Treos including the thin all aluminum one and a Compaq PDA that took full sized PCMCIA cards where i connected an Orinoco Silver Ethernet card. Also got a Nokia linux PDA, can’t remember the model, and sadly it was too slow.
DVD recorder i got off of Woot back when they were a good service. CD player that was the size of a VHS. A VHS player while my best friend had BetaMax. Oh and one of those Toshiba rear projection big screen TVs.
No webtv or 3d.
Tons of Pis
AnonRadio on sdf.org. i have old time radio playing at home over Ice cast and mpd which also connected to VPN so i can stream stuff from anywhere.
Also got a Nokia linux PDA
I had the Nokia N810. Still one of the most satisfying bits of industrial design I’ve ever seen on a piece of Tech, but yeah, it was a bit of a slowpoke for the things I wanted it to do, and smartphones pretty quickly got good enough that I couldn’t justify keeping it around for anything mobile.
Raspberry Pi doesn’t quite seek to match the rest. What’s so strange about that? I have two, a 1b PiHole and a Pi400 that I use as a Steamlink.
Not the target age (mid 20), but I daily drive a Dell Axim X5 with Windows Mobile 2003 on it. Still got a smart phone, but I enjoy using old PDAs as my alarm, jotting in appointments, calculating store prices, taking notes and making lists, and it’s useful for swapping restaurant TVs away from Fox News!
useful for swapping restaurant TVs away from Fox News!
Why did phone manufacturers stop putting IR transmitters in phones? So damned useful it was having one!
Admittedly it’s a garbage means of transferring data xD I once transferred Doom from a HTC phone to a PDA. It took many minutes to do, and I had to restart it at one point xD
PDA - I had a WinCE thing I picked up, never really used it
DVD Recorder - Only in my PC… ‘backed up’ lots of movies
WebTV - I think my current TV still runs WebOS…
3d TV - had one, wasn’t suckered into the £150 active glasses and got a passive set where the glasses were about 10p. Had fun with it but it never caught on.
Raspberry Pi - Loads of the things…
Internet radio player - I guess my car counts.
Those passive 3d TVs should have been cooler back then. I remember Borderlands 2 had a mode where you could use the passive 3d to do splitscreen, but full-screen. P1s screen would be polarized one way, and P2s the other way. You had some bleed between the two, but it was playable
PDA- yes, plenty of Palm devices over the years. Pretty sure I had an IBM WorkPad 30x, a Zire 71, and a Tungsten T3. They were great devices, absolutely fantastic for the time period.
DVD recorder- yes, both for the TV and DVD burner drives in PCs.
Web TV- not me, but we did get a setup for my grandparents back in the day. What an absolutely terrible way to browse the internet.
3D tv- never saw the need personally.
Raspberry pi- oh yes, been playing with them since they came out.
Internet Radio Player- no, never did. By the time this made sense I was fully invested in the iPod world and had hoarded enough music to not make it worthwhile.
Let’s see
PDA: I mostly dodged this one. I did have a blackberry phone before I got my first Android.
DVD Recorder: Nope. I had a reader and a burner in my PC and I occasionally copied like that. My buddy had a 6 drive dvd duplicator though and that thing was amazing. Source disc I. The top, 5 blanks in their burners.
WebTV: No also. My mom almost bought a Philips 3DO but bailed at the last second crushing my hopes and dreams.
3D TV: I had a set of active shutter glasses from MSI that worked with a pair of 32mb Voodoo2 video cards in SLI. Each card rendered the image for an eye. I remember playing TONS of Quake 2.
RaspPi: Yes and it’s still in use running my 3d printer.
Internet Radio: I streamed a ton of internet radio on iTunes. Worked as a graphic designer for a newspaper and that was the only way to not hear my bosses breath whistle through her teeth.
Any TiVo veterans?
I loved my Tivo… could never get anyone at the time to understand the concept of recording without tapes. But it could have succeeded.
Then Tivo decided to force push a recording at peak time of an absolute garbage comedy program… and as these things only had a single tuner, hilarity ensued. The tabloids loved it. Tivo left the UK shortly afterwards.
VM licensed the tech many years later but it wasn’t the same… gone was the hackable powerpc board running luascript, replaced by a fully locked down vendor specific cable box.
A buddy of mine was so proud that he had the entirety of The Simpsons on his TiVo (at the time). He was soooooo pissed when lightning hit a utility pole and fried a bunch of his electronics. The tivo was wrecked.
Yes, TiVo lifetime but it has a s-video cable on it. 😥 Series II I believe
PDA: I had a Compaq iPAQ which I never really got the hang of using.
DVD-R: For a while this was a great way to back things up, before large flash storage was a thing.
30yo here. I’ve only owned a Raspberry Pi. I got one in college after a friend won in a contest and didn’t know what to do with it so she gave it to me.
I did have a few toys growing up that were basically PDAs for kids.
- PDA - yes. Palm Pilot and even an Apple Newton
- 3d TV - Yes, but I never used it
PDA: XDA EXEC and some others I can’t recall.
3D TV: no but I did setup my PC for 3D with Nvidia 3D
Raspberry Pi: setup a bunch of the gen 1 units as TVs at a children’s creche
Internet radio: skipped that went straight to streaming
I need to check my processor/motherboard specs to make sure I can set up 3d . Sounds like a blast.
DVD recorder - hell yes. I probably ended up with 300 totally legally burned copies of Netflix rentals that I’ve since thrown away because DVD quality now looks like trash.
Raspberry Pi - yes,though underused.
Didn’t have the others cause they didn’t really appeal to me. No major use case, IMO
