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
How about a Colecovision console, or a Laserdisc player?
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.
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…?
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.
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.
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.
Dvd recorder, raspi sn 3DTV (still my tv. It’d a 4K LG one)
PDA: Palm zire
3D TV: I had one once, but never used the 3D capabilities
- PDA - yes. Palm Pilot and even an Apple Newton
- 3d TV - Yes, but I never used it
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
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
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.
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.
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 - 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)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!
