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.
Great idea for a post!
-PDA? Yes- Handspring Visor. It was supposed to be the Palm killer (it did have some success, as I remember).
-DVD-Recorder? No
-WebTV? No, but my less tech savvy friend had one. Those seemed doomed to fail.
-3D Television? Yes- spend way to much on two pairs of glasses that were used less than five time.
-Raspberry PI? Yes, but haven’t done enough with it.
-Internet Radio Player? No
I also had some type of smart pen around 2001 that would transfer what you wrote onto the computer. I think you had to plug the top of the pen into a USB port. It was a large pen (probably the size width of 5-6 normal pens combined). I can’t find the name of it. I think you had to have a special notebook with it too.
Did those 3D tvs actually work?
They did. But even at the height of its popularity, there were only a handful of movies that had it.
The glasses were around $170 per (if I remember correctly). That was a big barrier to entry.
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I remember being so happy going into Comp-USA and seeing so many different gadgets that I wanted to buy. It might have been 2000 when I bought my Palm PDA but they had been on the decline a little bit by then. I never hot my $300 out of it that’s for sure.
Regarding Raspberry Pi gonna see if there is a community for it on Lemmy. Maybe that would be part of the Linux discussion.
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.
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
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…?
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 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.
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.
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.
PDA - Pretty much all the Palm devices from the Original (US Robotics) Palm 1000, III, V, even the m125
DVDR - Just in my computer not standalone
WebTV - Nope but 100% Tivo user (Standalone and Directv)
Raspberry Pi - I have one but it mostly sits in a drawer
Internet Radio - I had a friend work at SimpleDevices that was a standalone internet player (company long gone)PDA: UsRobotics Palm Pilot!
DVD Recorder: No (apart from the one in the desktop), but VHS recorder Yes, a couple of them.
WebTV: No, it was never a thing in my country
3D TV: I knew it would flop, never bought one. But father-in-law was discarding his 49" one, so I got it (don’t even have the glasses). So yes, sort of.
Raspberry: Yes, bought one, 1st gen, to experiment for a project at work, but ended up using an ITX SBC, for all the RS232 and USB ports already integrated.
Internet Radio: No
Turning 35 in October here.
-PDA? Had the HTC Excalibur
-DVD-Recorder? No but I sure used the DVD burner on my PC a lot lol
-WebTV? Yes!! I still think about it all the time. I probably interacted with the strangest and most interesting online content through WebTV. A true fever dream irl if ever there was one.
-3D Television? It came and went out of style before I ever could consider getting one.
-Raspberry PI? No. Definitely should consider getting into it since the future will have everyone programming/ engineering computers from a young age.
-Internet Radio Player? Never even knew they existed!
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
Had a few Palm Pilots. Had a DVDR.
How come no love for the Mini Disc? What about the Laser disc? Laser Disc was the first porn I saw on a TV! Can’t forget about that innovation.
Many PDA’s, a few DVD recorders. No WebTV or 3d TV. A few Raspberry Pi’s and my car’s head unit can play internet radio.
Out of that list I only owned a PDA. I had a HP Ipaq 214 that I used as a digital dictionary to look up Kanji by written input when I studied Japanese at university. It was right before the dawn of the smartphone and it was truly remarkable technology.
