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Technology

Technology That You Loved from the 70/80/90's? 207

Posted by Cliff from the gadgets-that-you-wouldn't-be-caught-dead-with-today dept.
modi123 asks: "I was spending a large chunk last weekend watching VH1's I love the 80's: Strikes Back with a couple of friends. We would comment and laugh at all the dreadful things we were into, and then the topic shifted towards old tech and gadgets from then. I brought up my old 486 Packard Bell (DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1, Doom, all for $3700.00), and it spiraled out from there. The usual things cropped up: Nintendos, Sega Master Systems, Apple II Gs, and so forth. Then it delved into more weird items: Rob The Nintendo Playing Robot, HyperCard, cell phones with 50 lb batteries, and the pager craze. I am curious what the /. community remembers as their favorite technology from previous decades (be it 70's, 80's or 90's). Perhaps we can even chart a timeline if people toss in when they first remember it."
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Technology That You Loved from the 70/80/90's? More

Technology That You Loved from the 70/80/90's?

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  • Synths (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Monte ( 48723 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @05:38PM (#13449194)
    Analog synthesizers. REAL analog, not some pseudo-kindalikeafilter-emulated plastic thing made of CPUs and DSPs, but beasts with discrete component muscles and op-amp souls, machines that could rip speaker cones apart at the twist of a knob.

    Back in the day, you could build your own. Now... can you even get the Curtis chips anymore? *nostalgic sigh*

    Rest In Peace, Dr. Robert Moog. You will be missed, but your legacy lives on forever.

    • Re:Synths (Score:3, Informative)

      by cei ( 107343 )
      Don't know about the Curtis chips, but PAiA [paia.com] still has kit analog beasties.

      Yeah, I sometimes regret selling my Moog Liberation and my Oberheim OB-8, but really, they were a pain to keep in tune...
      • Pain to keep in tune, indeed. More than once, I would be playing in a small club on stage under the hot lights when somebody would open the door, letting in cold winter air. The tempature shift would whack half my gear horribly out of tune. My moog source was the worst (I still have it), but the memorymoog didn't fare much better. I don't have the memorymoog anymore. I miss it.

        Some digital synths come close enough for me to the fat analog sound, though. I don't really miss analog too much, except for the KN
    • Doesn't Moog still sell analog synths?

      From their website:

      Moog Music presents the award-winning minimoog Voyager Performer Edition, an all analog performance synthesizer incorporating virtually all of the functions of the original minimoog synthesizer, produced from 1971 to 1984, and a number of new features that makes this the minimoog for the 21st Century.

  • 100 Minute Cassetes (Score:4, Funny)

    by gambit3 ( 463693 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @05:39PM (#13449198) Homepage Journal
    ahh... being able to create my own mixes for the first time... making one HUGE cassette of the songs that I liked.

    I didn't see how it could get any better than that...

    • Only to have the tape break (or get sucked into the capstans) because they had to manufacture it a little too thin for tolerances in order to get 100 minutes into that little space. One or two additional songs per side was not worth the risk.

      C-90 was the way to go. An album per side, plus amybe selected songs or an EP to fill the side out. Plenty of room for a mix. Just enough for a walk to/from school and class breaks without having to change cassettes too frequently.

      • Back in the mid to late 80s and early 90s, I think my collection of music and ZX Spectrum games on D-90s single-handedly kept TDK in business.

        Now, I can't even remember the last time I saw a cassette, let alone used one.

  • Simple Games! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Goalie_Ca ( 584234 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @05:42PM (#13449234)
    Games by a long Shot! Grew up with nintendo, C64, arcades, and the super nintendo. Games were immersive, cheap, and very entertaining. I could play them for a couple of minutes or for hours. Graphics stunk compared to today's standards but they were extremely well polished which is all that really counts.

    • One Word (Score:4, Insightful)

      by D.A. Zollinger ( 549301 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @06:48PM (#13449702) Homepage Journal
      PONG!
      • PING?

        • Re:One Word (Score:3, Informative)

          by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) *
          No, Ping isn't a game, it's a network test. Pong is the game, aka "Video Ping Pong", originally programed on an oscilloscope and quite likely the first home video game system many people had (even though it only played the one game). It was also the very first arcade machine with a screen instead of cardboard cutouts and metal ball channels.
    • Definately arcades. They were just the coolest thing I've seen. I don't know how many quarters I dropped in Asteroids, Defender, that two person football game with the big track balls, etc., etc. There are not many games even today that can stand up to the fun and gameplay of those games.
      • that two person football game with the big track balls

        Atari Football?

        Myself, give me a good Battlezone game. Of course, I came after the time of arcades, but...
        • That's it! They had 2- and 4-person versions. Man, that was fun, and you really got a workout spinning those track balls. Looking back on it, given the problems I have had with mouse track balls, I am impressed the track ball in that football game held up so well under the wear and tear.

          Battlezone was way cool as well. Nothing like running for your life backwards all the while shooting at that red tank!

  • Not really 80's But I DO remember playing Merlin when I was really young. An electronic Tic Tac Toe of sorts. But my fondest gaming memories are of the NEC Turbo Grafx 16 and it's portable counterpart The Turbo Express.

    The system received a face lift in Japan called the Super Grafx but it was abandoned after just a few months. I got one off eBay a few years ago and it was worth every penny.

  • Osborne I luggable (Score:3, Insightful)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <rhollan@@@clearwire...net> on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @05:44PM (#13449252) Homepage Journal
    Subject says it all, a portabe computer with a 5" monochrome CRT (16x64, IIRC) and two 5-1/4" full height floppy disk drives running CP/M on a Z80.

  • Capsella (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alta ( 1263 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @05:44PM (#13449255) Homepage Journal
    I remember this fun toy... a geek's dream
    http://www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html [discoverthis.com]

    They were a lot of fun, came with motors, gears, wheels, fan blades, all sorts of cool stuff. They weren't cheap though, but I sure enjoyed them. Looking at this site, either the price has come down, or I was really poor as a child.

    I'd say I had this in the mid to late 80's.
    • I think the price has come down. It was probably the same price or slightly higher in mid-80's dollars without considering inflation.

      Capsela was my first experience in mail order parts. After getting a basic set for my birthday I went for the add ons to make the fire fighting boat. It was also my first taste of the dreaded "S&H extra."

      And those yellow floaty things... Thanks for the memories.

      • It was also my first taste of the dreaded "S&H extra."

        Heh, let's just say Capsela was one of the first things where I began to discover the limitations of the Indian Rupee. :-) M dad was so concerned about me breaking this expensive toy that he made sure he was around when I played with it. In fact, I had to ask for permission before I played around, and had to be accompanied while I remove the parts from the packaging.

        This might sound like a class thing, but good to hear that even American kids fo

  • this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @05:45PM (#13449258) Homepage Journal
    10 print "Derek likes Lisa!! ";
    20 goto 10
    run

    ahh the joys of elementary school in the 80's. :-)
  • SIMON. (the game with the lights)

    ISA slots... sure they are outdated now, but the cards seemed to slide in so much easier.

    Sega CD. I swear I had to be one of the only people to have loved that add-on for the Sega Master System. ->> sewer shark.
    • Unix. Dial-up kermit and UUCP. Bourne shell. 32Kb executable RAM. 1 Mb /home. mail with ! paths.

      All accesed from an Apple ][+ with an 80-column card and 300 Bps modem.

      • Zmodem- the friend that made downloading possible on my rotten phone lines at 1200 baud (why? Because the downloads could be RESUMED! Now there's something they should add to firefox!)
        • Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT (an ssh client for Windows) has support for it and it's great for logging in somewhere and quickly sending files to/from your local machine, no filesharing necessary.

          Many Linux distributions still have Zmodem installed. I think the package is "lrzsz".

          Just to plug SecureCRT, so far it's the fastest, most convienent, best SSH client I've ever used on any platform, which is sad considering it's a Windows app.

          • Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT (an ssh client for Windows) has support for it and it's great for logging in somewhere and quickly sending files to/from your local machine, no filesharing necessary.

            So you add the overhead of an error checking and correcting protocol (zmodem) over top of a protocol that already checks for and corrects errors (tcp)? Why not just use sftp/scp and skip installing an extra piece of software on your server?

            Just to plug SecureCRT, so far it's the fastest, mo

            • So you add the overhead of an error checking and correcting protocol (zmodem) over top of a protocol that already checks for and corrects errors (tcp)? Why not just use sftp/scp and skip installing an extra piece of software on your server?

              Actually, TCP does a pretty bad job on the error correcting side- packets aren't buffered properly (in that, if a machine suddenly becomes unreachable for a couple of days, TCP will simply never deliver the packets. Zmodem, on the other hand, will resume upon reconnect

              • Actually, TCP does a pretty bad job on the error correcting side- packets aren't buffered properly (in that, if a machine suddenly becomes unreachable for a couple of days, TCP will simply never deliver the packets. Zmodem, on the other hand, will resume upon reconnection, discarding spare packets and assembling it's file correctly. Just try to do THAT with a TCP protocol like FTP).

                The whole point is that you are running zmodem over ssh which is a protocol that runs over TCP. You are adding the overhea

          • Zmodem rules. I use it all the time. SecureCRT

            I have just decided to like you. Zmodem was, and is, an awesome inline transfer protocol. I wish it supported hierarchical structures (i.e. folders), but, like you, I use it with SecureCRT. You don't, by some chance, work for NYISO, do you?

      • I assume you didn't run a true Unix directly on the Apple II. That would be quite impossible.
    • Sonic CD man. Not exactly 80s, but still. I still think that was the best Sonic game yet made. I used to watch the little intro movie that was on the disc (that was so amazing back then) all the time. I recently found it was on the Sonic collection for the 'cube (the video, I think you have to unlock the game) that my sister owns. I was amazed how much better it looked (they used a MUCH higher quality version). Brought back memories.

      I loved the SNES/Genesis generation. Those graphics were good enough for m

    • Aren't you thinking of the Mega CD add on for the Mega Drive (called Genesis in the States)?

      I guess many Americans might have missed it (the Amiga only really taking off in Europe) but the Amiga CD32 came out at around the same time. I remember seeing the game Microcosm on both platforms and the CD32 really showed up the Mega CD...

  • Cameras made from glass and metal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @06:00PM (#13449375)
    That shot real film. Ok, I love my Nikon D70, but I also love the feel of a vintage Nikon F1 or a Hasselblad 500cm.

    Computers that you could understand. I mean understand the whole thing. I worked on PDP 8's and I could keep the entire thing in my mind. I could see the gates that changed state when an instruction executed. Now I'm lucky if I can figure out how the SDRAM refreshes.

    Cinemascope and Technicolor. I loved the widescreen of Cinemascope and the soft vibrant colors of Technicolor.

    Tube amps. Rich, warm sound, pretty orange glow.

    Analog oscilloscopes. Tek 485, the finest portable scope ever made, Tek 7844, 2 completely independent excellent scopes in one box.

    Hammond B3 organs and Leslie speakers. If you don't know why, find them and listen.
    • I used a Yashica fixed-lens camera for years, including professional work. Had a genuine buld flash attachment with a fan-fold reflector. Graduated from that to a Pentax 1000, and finally to a Nikon D90.

      Loved HP analog scopes, to which you could attach a logic analyzer that displayed everything in binary.

      Had several tube amps and even a few tube radios and phonographs.

      My first computer was an Intel SDK 85 breadboard setup with 7-segment HEX display and HEX keypad. Programmed it in HEX ASM code. Later got an

    • Hammond B3 organs and Leslie speakers.
      Oh, Amen! And I say that partly because that's what our church has. Though our best organist has moved to California, and we haven't yet found someone who can put it through the paces like he could.

      I'll put a Mellotron and an Optigan [optigan.com] (or Talentmaker) up there with the things that need to be found and listened to.

    • Amiga forever and ever, and some days more!

      I loved those machines. Over the years, I had an A500, an A2000 and an A1200. I had also gutted an IBM PS/2 tower to use as a SCSI HDD tower, which I had connected at different times to the 2000 and the 1200.

      I had the 2000 decked out with two SCSI controllers (one was on a processor accelerator card -- 68030/68883 16MHz) and I had, between the two busses, four HDD's, a zip drive, and an Irwin tape drive. It was configured such that I could not only boot from

    • I have fond memories of Agnus and Denise. Although I seem to remember Agnus getting pretty fat towards the end.

  • Analog Magtape Walkmans (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Julian Morrison ( 5575 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @06:14PM (#13449474)
    Unlike a CD, you can bounce around as much as you like wearing a walkman, and the thing won't skip. Unil solid state MP3 players, they were the only mobile way to listen to music - and I could argue they're still simpler. No need to preload them from a PC, just pop the cover and snap in a tape. Oh, and tapes remember where you stopped listening, and resume where you left off - even if it was years ago and you've listen to a thousand tapes since.
    • Oh, and tapes remember where you stopped listening, and resume where you left off

      Which is a pain in the arse when you're using them to record, since you inevitably forget to track to the end of what you've already recorded and stomp over something you wanted to keep.

    • Unlike a CD, you can bounce around as much as you like wearing a walkman, and the thing won't skip.

      Sure, the thing won't SKIP, but you will get "warble" in the sound if the walkman is being held the right way. Its subtle, but the flywheel's centrifugal force is effected by the bounce of the jog, and you'll hear it in the sound. Then again, if you're jogging or doing some other activity that would cause a modern* portable CD player to skip, you probably won't even notice the warble.

      * by modern, I'm re

  • 300 baud modem, CGA color (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DougInthezoo ( 745880 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @06:20PM (#13449512)
    I spent WAY too many nights logged into the local BBS with my 300 baud modem. Loved chatting in those places.

    And, I had a CGA monitor, with EGA envy. I dreamed of EGA color for (what seemed like) years, and then VGA came out and my world was never the same.

    Which colors to choose, Magenta, Cyan, White, Black, or the ever popular Red, Green, Yellow, Black? I just couldn't ever pick.

    • Re:300 baud modem, CGA color (Score:4, Interesting)

      by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @08:57PM (#13450532) Homepage
      At that time I was a consultant and was driven nuts by the people who would choose totally illegible color combinations on their computers. Things like cyan on magenta with these only half-legible CGA monitors. And I would change the combinations to good ol' green on black, so I could read it, and everyone complained. The colours weren't pretty, you know.

      The other thing I remember from that era was running a small multi-line BBS. It was lots of fun and I got to know a lot of cool people. Tragically, after my BBS went down due to a hardware disaster in 1987, my social life took a giant dive it has not recovered from since.

      I love the Internet, but nobody seems to have created a really good way to bring local people together in a friendly way ...

      D
    • Don't forget the super sharp 640x200 black and white mode. Sweeeeet. I remember booting into basica and playing with all the circles, lines, and pixels I wanted.
  • I had two. The first one had a 7-segment LED display, and the second a cool LCD. Used the heck out of both coding all sorts of stuff, from 8085 assembly and machine code to character generator PROMS (remember those?) and Data General mini-computer ASM stuff (Octal).

    It's been a while, but I seem to remember the caclulator would do binary conversions, too.

  • Tech and replacements (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cei ( 107343 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @06:53PM (#13449741) Homepage Journal
    10 or 15 years ago I wouldn't have pictured the cell phone almost completely replacing the pager. On the other hand, I would have expected fax to go the way of telex, to be replaced entirely by email by now. Yet fax still persists.
    • In both cases, it's the usability.

      I still have to carry a pager because there's a significant difference in the coverage areas of cell towers and pagers. There are some areas that are exclusively one or the other and still a couple spots with neither.

      Fax - I have a piece of paper to send to you. Do I:
      sit down at the computer
      open the scanning app
      scan the image
      hit save
      desktop...filename....save
      open the e-mail client
      new message
      To: Mabel
      Subject: the letter
      File..Attach...Desktop...which file was it again? Oh,

  • Pagers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by D.A. Zollinger ( 549301 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @06:58PM (#13449768) Homepage Journal
    Back in the early '90s our dept. all got pagers so we could all keep in touch with each other. We got a good deal with one of the dealers, and we got these monstrous things with multiple buttons being able to do many different things, from displaying messages that had been typed in through a messaging service, to setting and changing the time displayed, as well as cycling through the numbers left and when we were paged.

    We all had those pagers for a short period of time as we got used to them, and the contract was smoothed out. When it was finalized, we all got new pagers with one button that did everything depending on how long you held the button down. Upon hearing how we were to interact with the new pagers, one of my colleagues quipped, "God save us from technology!"
  • We were watching a Miami Vice rerun a couple of weeks ago, and had been giggling more or less continuously since the opening theme music. But when Tubbs pulled out one of those lunchbox-sized 1980's cell phones -- my wife literally fell off the couch laughing.

    Man, that was a great show. I think you could make a plausible case that business casual clothing wouldn't exist (in the US, anyway) if hadn't been for Detective Crockett.

  • Complete with continuous roll newsprint paper. Used the heck out of them when I worked for Reliance Telecom. Made "real computer sounds." I was always amused when some TV show or movie showed characters typing out on a CRT with teletype sound effects.

    Also used Nixie tube display DVMs and freq counters, and an acncient Wang computer that had a modified IBM selectric typewtiter for a printer when I worked for Tracor Westronics.

    Them was the days.

  • 1K of awesome power! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Deanasc ( 201050 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @08:50PM (#13450482) Homepage Journal
    Sinclair ZX81

    • Re:1K of awesome power! (Score:4, Funny)

      by The Cydonian ( 603441 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @12:11AM (#13451539) Homepage Journal
      Heh, I still have my Sinclair ZX Spectrum + somewhere at my parents' home, and often hook it up to a television for old time's sake.

      Let's just say my 10 year old cousin didn't quite see the point of listening to screeching noises for half an hour only to play a text adventure game with shoddy fonts. :-)

      • Haha, my nephew wanted to see what computer games were like when I was his age, so I dug out my old ZX Spectrum 48k. You should have seen the disgusted look on his face when I started loading a game off of a tape. :)
    • Too right!

      I'm not just saying this from misty-eyed nostalgia, the Sinclair ZX81 was a computer that an enthusiast like me could understand at the lowest level because of its ingenious use of the simplest of hardware. Simple hardware meant not so many features but to this day with a electronic engineering degree under my belt that's the only desktop computer I've fully understood every part of how it works at every level. Sure I know how this PC works at a more than superficial technical level but I dont r

  • DOS 6.0, Windows 3.1, Doom, all for $3700.00

    And that was 1994, not the 1980s. DOS 3.3 and Windows 2.0 were all the rage on PCs in the 1980s.

    I'd like to relive 1988, though: Gas was 88 cents a gallon. Oh, wait, I can, if gas stations would only start stocking biogasoline...

  • IBM 370
    KIM-1
    Printing terminals
    LED readouts
    PONG
    Rabbit-ear TV (3 channels)
    Really long phone cords, so you could talk around the house.
    Polyester leisure suits
    Carburators
    3 to 2 prong plug cheats

  • [Someone should set up a site for the early cell phone users]

    Mine was a Mitsubishi which was huge, the base contained the large battery. The base unit connected to the handheld had a slide-out handle to carry it around. Together, the assembly was about the size of a Kleenex box.

    Motorola subsequently came out with a totally handheld version - that was really cool at the time.

  • Free porn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @10:45PM (#13451111)
    I am curious what the /. community remembers as their favorite technology from previous decades (be it 70's, 80's or 90's).

    CompuServe GIF, 320x200 256 color VGA displays, uudecode, and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. 300 floppies of 100dpi 256 color porn.

  • HP-11C (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xTown ( 94562 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @11:19PM (#13451321)
    I got my HP-11C [hpmuseum.org] in 1987. I still use it.

  • Commodore 64 (Score:3, Informative)

    by bursch-X ( 458146 ) on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @11:23PM (#13451336)
    Boots in 1 second, never breaks, looks like a piece of shit and makes sure you'll have hours of fun waiting for the games to load from the datasette (tape), while adjusting the tape head with a screwdriver.

    Ah, yes there was the 1541 Foppy drive, but it cost about as much as the whole computer and it might be not vintage enough for C64 purists...
  • Dungeon, the predecessor to Zork and the mother of all text-based games!

    In the early '80s I'd leave my after-school job (night manager of a McDonald's - ugh!) and drive to the local Cal State campus, where you could log into the mainframe's public account and play games in the 24-hour computer lab - but only if there were 25 or fewer users on the system, campuswide. Lots of nights, I'd leave the computer lab at 7 a.m. and drive back to high school for a day of classes.

    I installed Dungeon it on my FreeBSD se

  • The internet has always been here, right? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @01:46AM (#13451929) Homepage Journal
    Okay, I'm almost 30... but somehow my mind edits everything in retrospect, so unless I sit down and think about it, it feels to me like I've had an email address since I knew how to spell. Like my Mom must have ordered "Where the Wild Things Are" for us kids from Amazon.com, then googled up some info about the newest line of Transformers.

    Weird... of course, that's all nonsense.

    When I stop to think, I remember playing Jungle Hunt on my uncle's TI computer, which had cartridges, but could also save data to a cassette tape. Most schoolwork was hand-written, though I wrote a few papers the hi-tech way, on my Dad's (expensive!) computer with no hard drive, but TWO floppy drives, one for the Word Perfect diskette, and one for the save diskette. When I went off to college, I had to use actual, paper maps to figure out how to get there. And I brought along a Macintosh computer with an 80 MB hard drive. And Tetris!

    I know why I take modern technology for granted, though. This IS my life. The internet has totally pervaded my existence. What would my life be like without these technologies?

    I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer... at work and often at leisure as well. I have now moved hundreds of miles away from the company I still work for, communicating primarily over email, writing code in a language invented less than a decade ago, adding features to a system that runs over the internet. Checking changes into a source control system that is, likewise, hundreds of miles away. Or updating my other source of revenue, a website that I built entirely using free tools and which I host in a server also hundreds of miles away from my home. When people pay for something on my site, they are shunted to s different server on the other side of the country. When a customer lives in Zambia, or the Netherlands, or in North Pole, Alaska, it's interesting but no surprise. But when a customer actually lives somewhere in my area, I'm startled. I wonder with an curious shiver if I may have actually SEEN this person before -- that would be amazing!

    I had some serious vision problems last year (long-term damage from an infection I had as a kid), and went through a series of operations to replace various parts of both eyes (and advances in medicine are off-topic here, but again, thank you modern technology). But as long as one eye could make out magnified text on a 21" monitor, I could still do my work and still earn a living... it didn't make a difference at all that I couldn't see well enough to leave the house.

    So how would my life have been different if I'd been born 50 years earlier? Even 10 years earlier? I can't even imagine it.
  • Ronco record cleaners. Ronco pocket fisherman. And the best, the Ronco glass froster.

    When I was little, I always thought the glass froster was the best thing. What if you had guests over for a party and you ran out of frosted glasses? Ronco glass froster and ozono-depleting CFC's to the rescue. Thanks to the power of Ebay, I have one....with the ozone-depleting CFC cartridge....man, those were the days....
  • Hypercard and Macintosh System 6 and Oracle 5 (or maybe it was 6) -- just beautiful.

    You could make actual databases that real people with little tiny desktop computers could use over a network AND you could do a lot of it by dragging boxes around on a screen.

    It was just amazing.

  • The speech synthesizer chip in the Speak 'N' Spell toy. (The TI-designed TMS5100 chip, I believe.) Every time I hear it, it takes me back to a more innocent time, when talking computers were futuristic, and sounded like talking computers instead of retarded humans.
  • Best palmtop there ever was.

    320x200 LCD large screen, beautiful reflective

    Real clicky tactile feel "old hp" keys

    Ran "Derive!" for portable REAL symbolic math and solution solving

    Based on DOS 5.0 (or dos 3?)

    Single Serial Port

    Weeks on two AA batteries

    PCMCIA socket for a modem (although adios battery)

    "right" sized.

    Sigh. I would drop $1000 tomorrow, no questions asked, if someone came out with a linux version of that device. I used mine until the keys started getting flakey and then sold it. I regret selling it
  • I'm surprised no one's mentioned them yet, but what about the Amiga 500 and 1200? Lovely lovely machines with a great operating system and cool custom chips. It was fun to program too because you didn't need to use a hardware abstraction layer since all machines were essentially the same.
    • It was fun to program too because you didn't need to use a hardware abstraction layer since all machines were essentially the same.

      Ah, so you were the one writing games that wouldn't run on my A500 with 68020 accelerator and non-AutoConfig 32-bit memory?! ;-)

  • The Commodore 64 was *the* gaming system of its day - like PC, X-box and PlayStationX all rolled into one. Nothing else (Spectrum etc) came close, not even consoles, for a long time.

    I also have a soft spot for the venerable Amiga, being the first WIMP system I started using. It was also a great games machine as well - it was the first system to really make 3D work for things like flight sims.

    Grab.

  • VINYL! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Phreakiture ( 547094 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @09:09AM (#13453346) Homepage

    I still have a good-sized collection of 80's and 90's (and some 70's) vinyly records. Some of them are a little scratched, but most of them sound great.

    Actually, my collection has been growing in recent years as people are ditching their collections at yard sales.

    Let me head off the likely next comment, though. Vinyl doesn't sound better than CD's, neither does it sound worse, for the most part. It sounds different. I have a good turntable, though, and that makes a big difference. The highs seem a tad crisper on my sound system from vinyl than from CD, but the noise floor is higher, and there is more frequent distortion on the vinyl.

  • Most probably don't recognize what a Newvicon tube is; it is the predecessor to the CCD, and was used to make video cameras.

    These cameras produced a stunning picture. Even at SDTV resolutions, the details were crisp and the colours were vibrant.

    The place where the Newvicon tube fell down and the CCD did a better job was when it came to high-motion footage (e.g. sports). The Newvicon tube tended to blur the motion a tad.

    A couple of years ago, I saw, on VH1 Classic, some footage of U2 in a live perfor

    • You see this a hell of a lot on old BBC sitcoms or dramas. Not only do you get this fun effect bright flashes or squibs also leave a tell-tale after image for a few frames.
    • I totally forgot about the old Quasar video camera my family had bought around 1983, which utilized a Newvicon tube.

      I miss that camera -- with it being big enough to sit on your shoulder, your videos weren't nearly as shaky as they are with camcorders small enough to slip into your wallet.

      • I totally forgot about the old Quasar video camera my family had bought around 1983, which utilized a Newvicon tube.

        > I miss that camera -- with it being big enough to sit on your shoulder, your videos weren't nearly as shaky as they are with camcorders small enough to slip into your wallet.

        Amen to that! I had a Panasonic camcorder that I bought in 1986 or 1987, I don't remember exactly when. It was one of the last models they offered with a Newvicon tube, and I bought it at a severe discount

  • Pinball (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xsbellx ( 94649 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @09:44AM (#13453701) Homepage
    Flippers, steel ball(s), tilt, blinking lights and ringing bells. Few things are more fun than being able to shake a machine just the right way to keep that ball bouncing between two or three bumpers or making that backhand shot (right flipper shooting the ball up the right side of the machine) for a free ball.

    Ahh to have the days of three-games-for-a-quarter back!

  • Toys? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by modi123 ( 750470 )
    Here's some other items to muse on:

    When the Tamagatchi craze hit I was working in Target's toy department. I was constantly being harassed by customers (parents more so than kids), and bounced anyone who thought they could wander in the back stock room. I had a fist full of complaints against me when people asked me (for the millionth time) "Where can I find a Tamagatchi?", I would point behind me and reply "Over there - the empty shelves in the shadow of the three foot by four foot sign that says TAMAGA

  • Thick wire Ethernet, from when real men ran heavy coax wire for their networks, and drilled holes to tap in to them.

    Then came thin wire, over standard RG coax, and networking took off.
  • My old HP-65 Calculator. Real keys, an LED display instead of an LCD, and the ability to program the thing using magnetic cards.

    And of course, it used RPN.

    Ed Almos
    Budapest, Hungary

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