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

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."

Comments

Synths

[Monte]

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

[cei]

Don't know about the Curtis chips, but PAiA 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...

Re:Synths

[sgant]

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.

Re:Synths

[Monte]

Indeed they do, but alas, they ain't cheap. Until I get the scratch together for a Voyager I'll just have to content myself with my venerable MultiMoog.

Re:Synths

[littlerubberfeet]

I have my first order going to PAiA around christmas...Hopefully, I can build a P9700S Package, and get a bunch of independent study credit for it...

My school has a Moog 55 in semi-working condition...built way before my time.

Oh yeah, RIP Mr. Moog

Re:Synths

[bjb]

Yeah, I sometimes regret selling my Moog Liberation and my Oberheim OB-8, but really, they were a pain to keep in tune...

Though my current band doesn't require them, I've got no plans to ever sell my Moog Taurus pedals. A fat, rich bass that just can't be found anywhere else. There is just no substitute for old analog technology for certain things.

Re:Synths

[jimm]

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 KNOBS. LOTS AND LOTS OF BIG, ROUND, BLACK KNOBS. Direct physical control over each and every sound parameter. Yum. Yeah, I know there are some newer synths out there with lots of knobs. I can't afford 'em right now.

Re:Synths

[ShieldW0lf]

Commodore computers, particularly the Commodore 64... C64 + 5 1/4 floppies = Pirates Wet Dream.

Robotix, like Lego with motors... these are great for robot wars, stick all the pieces in the middle, everyone takes turns picking a piece from the pile till they're all gone, 15 minutes to build your robo-gladiator, and last robot standing is the winner.

Armatrons, one of which I recently scored for free when a buddies GF decided it was time to clean house. My daughter loves this one, we play a game where one of us uses a remote control robot to try and steal small objects from the Armatron, and the other uses the Armatron to try and catch the "thief" by grabbing it and lifting it off the ground. We take 3 turns as each robot, and whoever scores the most loot wins :)

Potato guns. Ok, they're not very technological, but with hundreds of shots from a single potato, you had to love them.

Re:Synths

[op00to]

LOTS AND LOTS OF BIG, ROUND, BLACK KNOBS.
 
We know what you meant here, but .. umm .. yeah.

100 Minute Cassetes

[gambit3]

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...

Re:100 Minute Cassetes

[sporktoast]

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.

Re:100 Minute Cassetes

[Gleng]

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.

Re:100 Minute Cassetes

[Dogtanian]

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.

Really? I recall reading warnings against C-120 cassettes in several manuals, but I *never* had any problems with them I didn't have with the shorter lengths.

My guess is that in the early 1970s when cassettes were becoming very popular, the materials used for tape (and possibly just quality of manufacture) weren't as good. By the late 1980s, they'd probably improved both by quite a lot (I reckon materials technology is one of those things that doesn't get anything like the credit it deserves, particularly as many of the improvements are hidden). But the "don't use C-120!" paranoia remained....

Personally, I would have liked 120s to be much more common; there were a few albums in the 1980s which I couldn't fit onto a normal C-90, and by the 1990s, even a C-100 wouldn't have been long enough for most CDs. It's a moot point now anyway; I stopped using cassettes altogether a while back.

Re:100 Minute Cassetes

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, what?

As I remember it, the typical duration of a vinyl album was around 15 to 20 minutes per side, with very few making it far beyond 22 minutes because the quality would suffer if you packed the grooves that tightly. Even at 22 minutes for each side of a vinyl album, 44 minutes comes in just under one side of a 90 minute tape. Even a gatefold double-album of maxed-out vinyl should fit on a single 90-minute cassette. You'd have to be talking about something like Neil Young's 1977 retrospective "Decade" which was a 3-LP triple gatefold, or else some huge classical collection like Wagner's Ring Cycle.

I remember CDs pushing the limit slowly up from below 74 minutes to around 78, but many of those longer discs had trouble in some players. Bob Dylan got "Blonde on Blonde" over 74 minutes, and Elvis Costello pushed "Get Happy" to just under 78 minutes. But in each of those cases, they fit into a 90 minute cassette with room to spare. So I just can't understand what you mean when you say that "by the 1990s, even a C-100 wouldn't have been long enough for most CDs." If you are referring to box sets, like Sting's "Bring On The Night", perhaps... But that's hardly "most CDs".

Re:100 Minute Cassetes

[Dogtanian]

I should have made clear that I was referring to fitting the recording onto one side. It's annoying and stupid to waste a C-90 onto a 55 minute album; apart from the fact it requires a whole cassette (and hence costs more in money and space terms; actually, the latter isn't true, as C-120s were disproportionately expensive...); the most annoying thing is that you either end up with 80% of the album on side 1 and the remainder on side 2 (ruins the flow); or if you have the break at the side-change (on vinyl) or halfway point (on CD), you have tons of tape to wind through to the start of the next side.

A C-60 has this problem to a lesser extent; but it's still preferable to either have the whole thing in one, or use a near-perfect match for the album length (which pre-recorded tapes would do).

Simple Games!

[Goalie_Ca]

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.

Re:Simple Games!

[rvw14]

I agree. PC games like Sopwith, Flightmare, 3Demon, Spacewar, etc.

Re:Simple Games!

[hubie]

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.

Re:Simple Games!

[bhtooefr]

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...

Re:Simple Games!

[hubie]

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!

Re:Simple Games!

[murky_lurker]

Spacewar! I was looking blankly at that name for about 30 seconds... that damned planet..

Merlin, Turbo Grafx, oh my

[VermifugeRT]

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

[renehollan]

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.

Re:Osborne I luggable

[VermifugeRT]

I have two kaypro portable computers myself. i have one in blue and another in grey.

Re:Osborne I luggable

[renehollan]

Along the same theme, there was the Compaq, and a whole slew of "lunchbox" computers, before the clamshell laptop designs, and modern thin laptops. A side branch on that evolutionary tree was the TRS 100, IIRTMC (if I remember the model correctly): a keyboard with small LCD for a display.

But the Osborne and Compaq stood out. (Not to disrespect the Kaypro or anything).

Capsella

[alta]

I remember this fun toy... a geek's dream
http://www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html

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.

Re:Capsella

[Syrae]

I drowned my poor motor more than once with those. I loved the air bubble addons, and I kept trying to make boats. Unfortunately they were top heavy, tended to flip over, and then I had to rescue the motor from the swimming pool and hope I didn't bork up the batteries or motor too badly. (Which, of course, I did.)

I vaguely remember getting some of the pieces stuck together really badly from time to time. Especially those damned small connectors. "Get, *OOF!* off!" *THUCK-BANG!* "ARG!! MY HAND SLAMMED INTO THE TABLE!!!" *wimpers*

Re:Capsella

[dman123]

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.

Re:Capsella

[The Cydonian]

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 found Capsela expensive back then. :-)

Re:Capsella

[littlerubberfeet]

I did one worse as a kid....old enough to be dangerous, but yound enough not to have any grasp of the conceptual difference between AC and DC current, and voltage for that matter.

In my kit, the batteries were in one 'bubble', and the motors in another. I noticed that the power cord from some old radio fit in the Capsella motor plug, so I plugged it in. Then I plugged it into the wall. My little 'car' made a nice pop and went the fastest three feet of it's (short) life. Oops.

Re:Capsella

[RomulusNR]

I noticed that the power cord from some old radio fit in the Capsella motor plug, so I plugged it in. Then I plugged it into the wall. My little 'car' made a nice pop and went the fastest three feet of it's (short) life.

I think you're my new hero.

Re:Capsella

[RomulusNR]

Especially those damned small connectors. "Get, *OOF!* off!" *THUCK-BANG!*

Which is why mine had so many little dents in them. From teeth.

Just like most of my old Legos did, come to think of it. Stubborn little f**kers.

(And also probably why I ended up with assorted little chips in my teeth. Bah, the price you pay for a productive childhood.)

Re:Capsella

[SirTwitchALot]

I actually lost a (baby) tooth in just this manner.

Re:Capsella

[TFGeditor]

Did something similar once under the misguided concept that "electricity is electricity." The 9-volt battery for my 2-way radio was out of juice, so I connected an AC "suicide cord" to the terminals and plugged it in. Rather than explode, the battery first started smoking, then REALLY smoking, then burst into flames--amazingly BIG flames--then started spewing sparks to rival a Roman candle.

I was suitably impressed to such a degree that I did it again to get the fireworks show for a chum to see.

Re:Capsella

[Syrae]

Heh, now that you mention it... I do remember some tooth marks. Grab the bubble in your hand, and hold the connector with your mouth and pull!!!

Re:Capsella

[quamaretto]

I remember having some Capsella! That stuff was pretty cool. I especially liked making things that floated.

I also recall FisherTechnik, which was really fun. I got one of the basic "Lots of pieces" sets when I was 9 or 10. I never did get into the upper levels of it, but it looked really exciting. Damned expensive, though. (It looks like now they don't even sell the plain set I had with lots of plain old bricks and gears and chains and stuff. They just sell the candy coated, 'applied' stuff.)

this

[nocomment]

10 print "Derek likes Lisa!! ";
20 goto 10
run

ahh the joys of elementary school in the 80's. :-)

Re:this

[KodeK]

Is that...a...semicolon?

Re:this

[Monte]

Of course that's a semicolon, indicating the computer should not force a newline at the end of printed list.

Ah, BASIC. Is there nothing it cannot do? ;)

Re:this

[Usquebaugh]

Turing complete?

Re:this

[Monte]

Eliza's fooled her share :)

Re:this

[eamonman]

If you used an Apple, you'd put:

10 print "Derek likes Lisa!!^G ";
20 goto 10
run

That way everyone would look ;)

Re:this

[Deanasc]

10 print "Radio Shack Sucks! ";

20 goto 10

run

Re:this

[Dachannien]

You can implement a Turing machine in most forms of BASIC. This article describes what is required. The original Dartmouth BASIC supported IF, LET, GOTO, and the array data type, and a Turing machine can be constructed from that.

Re:this

[Gleng]

So, did things ever work out with Derek and Lisa?

Re:this

[`Sean]

Wow. I thought I was the only one that did that! :)

Re:this

[Dogtanian]

10 print "Radio Shack Sucks! ";
20 goto 10

run

SYNTAX ERROR at line 10. What the hell is that colon thing?! You think this is one of those posh multiuser UNIX systems??! Ooh, C. You damn spoilt little git, BASIC not good enough for you, is it?

You'll be wanting structured programming next. Damn, kids today make me sick. Signed, your friendly Radio Shack Computer.

Re:this

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Semicolon in most forms of early basic, when on the end of a print statement, meant "Supress carriage return".

Re:this

[Jonner]

I'm sure you could do just about anything with BASIC, by why would you want to?

Well, I always thought the digital watch was...

[ase]

... a pretty neat idea!

(Obligatory Ref)

Still do, though I don't generally let that on in public.

tech/games I miss...

[rogabean]

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.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Philip K Dickhead]

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.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[MBCook]

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 me, and the games were great.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[bleaknik]

The Sega CD Add on for the Sega Master System? I must have missed that one. Let me tell you, though. The rerelease of the Sega CD on the Genesis rocked though! ;)

Re:tech/games I miss...

[knewter]

There was a boxing game for the Sega CD - can't recall the name, and no way will I spend my time googling for it, but it was pretty neat. The most enjoyed SegaCD game in my home...

Re:tech/games I miss...

[rogabean]

brain not working. my only excuse.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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!)

Re:tech/games I miss...

[ClosedSource]

I assume you didn't run a true Unix directly on the Apple II. That would be quite impossible.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[egarland]

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.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Wonko]

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, most convienent, best SSH client I've ever used on any platform, which is sad considering it's a Windows app.

What are the advantages over Putty on Windows? What are the advantages over OpenSSH?

Re:tech/games I miss...

[nickos]

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...

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it Prize Fighter?

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Phreakiture]

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?

Re:tech/games I miss...

[markimusk]

Yeah, you probably were, seeing how it was for the Genesis...

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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 reconnection, discarding spare packets and assembling it's file correctly. Just try to do THAT with a TCP protocol like FTP).

Re:tech/games I miss...

[Wonko]

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 overhead of zmodem's error correction when you already have perfectly good error correction. If you want a more robust way to copy files than sftp and scp (I never mentioned ftp) you should really use rsync instead of zmodem. rsync will have no problem resuming downloads, and it will be able to syncronize files that changed.

It is a much more advanced tool than zmodem.

Re:tech/games I miss...

[egarland]

You don't, by some chance, work for NYISO, do you?

Nope.

Cameras made from glass and metal

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

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.

Re:Cameras made from glass and metal

[TFGeditor]

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 ELF with a real CRT!

(sigh) I miss them all.

Re:Cameras made from glass and metal

[sporktoast]

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 (or Talentmaker) up there with the things that need to be found and listened to.

Re:Cameras made from glass and metal

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

I was sorely tempted to mention Mellotron. I was describing it to a young engineer last week. He sat there with his mouth open. The designers must have had balls the size of an elephant....

Re:Cameras made from glass and metal

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use a Pentax K1000. I'm just starting to think about getting a digital for snapshots, but I still won't give up my Pentax K1000 for more 'serious' photography. It's got to be older than me, and built to last. The joy of beautiful pictures and understanding how they got that way..

My grandfather plays the organ and has an electric one in his house. I don't remember the kind, but some of my best memories of him are him playing the organ.

Re:Cameras made from glass and metal

[Frumious Wombat]

I miss the Real film. Agfapan 25, Panatomic-X, Kodachrome 25, and Ektalure G. (ok, so the last was a paper). For speed and grain, there was 2475 recording film in B&W, or 3M 640T in slide. Just wild stuff; looked like you'd made a picture with colored sand.

Of course, Delta-100/TMax-100 are probably as fine-grained as any of the above, and the Kodachrome was always a pain to print, but I have some nice negatives from those days, and to mis-quote Tom "Son of MonkeyBoy" Cruise, "I feel ... a need... for No Speed!".

Apple II+/IIe

[ase]

My first serious education in programming and electronics comes from the way too many hours I spent learning and working with applesoft BASIC and the guts of my old II+ and later the IIe. I learned alot about assembly language and really enjoyed wire-wrapping my own interface boards for things like a robot arm and a remote controlled race car.

I remember with particular fondness my first (hardware!) voice synthesizer. That was very exciting for the time. "Do not teach Sweet Talker naughty words" would be uttered every time during start-up. You would have to string together phonemes to get words out.

I really miss how accessible everything used to be. I would say that things were simpler back then, but of course that's to be expected, and it is debatable as to whether that made them better.

Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[fallacy]

The Amiga

Re:Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[Phreakiture]

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 HDD, but also from zip or tape.

Ultimately, I had a 14.4kb/s modem attached to the 2000, and I did a sort of batch download of usenet from my ISP (I had a shell account) by tarring up all of the messages and using ZMODEM to send them to my Amiga. With modem compression enabled, I saw transfer speeds as high as 3890 chars/sec. (forgot to mention, I had an aftermarket serial board with a max. throughput of 115.2kb/s, which my modem could talk to)

True plug and play. These machines were sweet for their time.

Re:Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[Gleng]

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

Re:Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[spaceyhackerlady]

I remember go on a shopping trip with my girlfriend to buy a computer for her office.

I was impressed as hell by an Amiga 500. That was good enough for her; she bought one.

Haven't seen an Amiga in years. Haven't seen RS in years either (living in different towns will do that). Sigh.

...laura

Re:Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[Dogtanian]

The Amiga

Amiga doesn't mean 'girlfriend' in the English-language sense. It simply means friend; in Spanish, the word for friend is gender-sensitive (amigo/amiga).

I mean, you didn't think guys describing each other as "amigos" were all gay, did you?

Re:Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I mean, you didn't think guys describing each other as "amigos" were all gay, did you?

Not just for that- but also for all of that machismo crap and oneupsmanship that permeates such cultures. Any man who claims to like women but still treats them like throwaway crap is hiding something.

Re:Everyone's favourite girlfriend...

[fallacy]

And 'girlfriend' doesn't necessarily mean 'a female which whom you have a sexual-type relationship' in the English-language sense. It also stands for a female companion, a friend who is female etc.

Of course, all of this wouldn't be an issue if the Amiga had been called Novia...
And yes, all of my "amigos" are gay - in the happy sense. Don't you just love the English language?

Analog Magtape Walkmans

[Julian Morrison]

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.

Re:Analog Magtape Walkmans

[Grab]

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.

Re:Analog Magtape Walkmans

[bjb]

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 referring to the fact that early (1989-1994) portable CD players typically didn't have skip protection. This feature was eventually added under the title of "safe for playing in your automobile" usually for an additional 10% in price.

Re:Analog Magtape Walkmans

[goon]

'... 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. ...'

Data storage: I remember tapes. I loaded my first programs off tape into my Sinclair ZX. Still use them. Currently listening to a TDK D60). Before disk drives (think Woz with Apple 2e who made a diskdrive without ever seeing them), tapes ruled for storing data on PC`s.

Music: I even have a retro SONY sports Walkman (WM-BF58) that I use to play recordings from the 1990. I just started it up and it works fine, radio and player. Compare this to the Creative PA-20 that is sitting on my desk. I need a USB enabled PC, with Win32. (Must do a search for *nix software).

'... I have great respect for the technology companies involved in forging tape standards and tape players. They are cheap, durable and just work. ...'

Simple, durable and cheap: The thing I like the best is the simplicity. Tapes are simple. Rewind them with pencils, after kiddies work out theres some shiny brown stuff inside them. The sound is acceptable. Sure there are downsides but I`m sure the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

300 baud modem, CGA color

[DougInthezoo]

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

[daviddennis]

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

Re:300 baud modem, CGA color

[Directrix1]

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.

Re:300 baud modem, CGA color

[bradbeattie]

[I] was driven nuts by the people who would choose totally illegible color combinations on their computers.

Hate to break it to you, but this problem still exists. On a daily basis, I see people using yellow on red, blue on magenta. Makes me wish I couldn't see colours at all.

Re:300 baud modem, CGA color

[daviddennis]

True. I really like the idea behind myspace, but perhaps they give a little too much freedom to their users. Pick a random girl's profile and the odds are that it will be "pimped out" with illegible colour combinations and a background image completely at odds with the text color.

But it's a little better now because at least we have high-quality monitors.

D

haa

[BlackShirt]

In the beginning of nineties - terminal computer. So it's not a suprise that these might come back in the form of thin clients. It's been only ten years.

GRID Computer

[torpor]

SGI

DEC ..

Atari.

Old computer games

[Syrae]

They were so simple, and yet, so cool.

I remember playing the original Leisure Suit Larry (when I could sneak on). For some reason my grandparents password protected that game. Then there was Tapper. Later there were great games with awesome graphics like X-Wing and The Day of the Tentacle. Of course none of that compared to Oregon Trail. :)

Windows 3.11 was so... weird. I loved the Disney screensaver that ran on it, though. Goofy actually managed to accidentally start a program once. Heh, I guess the programmers never checked to make sure that he didn't accidentally open a non-folder.

Of course, nothing beats the text-based internet. now that was fun. I mean, I cannot take a Star Trek quiz without thinking of that old text page loading so slowly with these new fangled radio buttons!!!

Wizardry for teh win!

[measlymonkey]

late nights playing Wizardry on my old AppleII... utilizing the 'Identify Item 9' hack to build super characters...

i recently found a site that has an emulator so you can play it on any old PC... of course WoW now holds most of my attention, but those days when their servers go down, im all about the old school...

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[cei]

Agreed. I still put the original Wizardry as my favorite computer game of all time. I tried to get it running on an Apple ][ emulator under OS X not long ago, but ran into problems... the boot disk needed to be write protected. It was their form of copy-protection, that, at the time, could be overcome with a piece of tape. Now, though, write-protecting a disk image isn't as easy as that...

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[measlymonkey]

http://www.lava.net/~jh/wizardry/

this is where i got mine. you have to mess with the disc drive settings a bit when loading it, but its pretty simple to get up and going.

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[Wonko]

Now, though, write-protecting a disk image isn't as easy as that...

In my world it would be "chmod -r". I know it works in some of the emulators I have used in the past. YMMV, of course, since I don't have a Mac.

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wizardry is available on Windows. No emulation needed.

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[iamlucky13]

That was a great game. I actually never played in until sometime around 2000 (ie: after Diablo 2 became all the rage), when one of my high school teachers gave me a PC copy. I still have it and play it from time to time. Only beat it once, but my code wouldn't work in Wizardry 2 to import my characters, and apparently the identify item-9 cheat was removed on the version I had, because it definitely never worked.

PS - Werdna can kick Trebor's butt!

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[mokomull]

Wouldn't that be "chmod -w"?

Re:Wizardry for teh win!

[Wonko]

Wouldn't that be "chmod -w"?

Of course it would be, my mistake. A non-readable file would be quite useless, eh? :)

One Word

[D.A. Zollinger]

PONG!

Re:One Word

[Jorkapp]

PING?

Re:One Word

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

TI Hex, Octal, Decimal calculator

[TFGeditor]

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

[cei]

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.

Re:Tech and replacements

[bill_mcgonigle]

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, yeah.
Send.... ...
"How do I open this?"

-or-

insert paper
2024562461
send

Many years ago I had an HP Digital Sender. Insert page, type in e-mail address, hit send.

Beautiful device. Did PDF, did greyscale, could do LDAP lookups. $4000. Looking now, they're still over $2000.

This is really a $300 ADF scanner with a WRT54G and a cheap keyboard. OK, maybe it's higher quality but that's not what the mass market is after. It would sell quite well for $500.

Re:Tech and replacements

[cei]

I guess my thought was that since almost all print documents now days are generated on the computer, you could cut out the middle-man. I know we haven't reached "paperless office" by a longshot, but still...

Re:Tech and replacements

[bill_mcgonigle]

Fair point. I guess most of what I still FAX today I don't have electronically or needs a signature.

Pagers

[D.A. Zollinger]

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!"

More laughing...

[Otter]

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.

Ignore alien orders

[Monte]

Sorry, my bad, I was thinking of the Turing test.

Genuine, no-fooling teletype

[TFGeditor]

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.

Nudist Beaches!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in about 79 (around when I was 16 or 17) I found that there was a nudist beach (Sunnyside near Melbourne) about 5Km down the road from home. Man that was a fun time, and I got a lot of exercise riding my bike there in the summer.

Sure beats the hell out of anything technical ;-)

Calculator

[Anne_Nonymous]

T.I. red LED calculator

Re:Calculator

[Ann Elk]

My parents bought one for my older brother for his high school graduation. I don't remember the model number, but it was a very early, very basic four-function TI. It cost about $100. Back in 1973. Ouch.

Re:Calculator

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

TI-30. Just a super calculator in it's day. I had one that I had mounted a DB-25 connector on the front behind the display. It wasn't connected to anything, but it sure started lots of conversations.

Re:Calculator

[tchdab1]

HP 45. I still have it, but the batteries are of course shot. I quickly grew to love RPN.

1K of awesome power!

[Deanasc]

Sinclair ZX81

Re:1K of awesome power!

[The Cydonian]

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. :-)

Re:1K of awesome power!

[carndearg]

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 really know what goes on at gate level.

Thank you Sir Clive and your team, you gave me a career!

Re:1K of awesome power!

[Gleng]

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. :)

Re:1K of awesome power!

[mabinogi]

And the ZX81 came with a manual bigger than the machine itself - a complete introduction and reference for BASIC on the machine including example programs, and even schematic drawings of the PCB!

You're lucky if you get 20 pages with a new machine, and 18 of them are translations anyway.

DOOM? Wrong decade!

[Baloo Ursidae]

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...

HP-65

[ratboy666]

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

Re:HP-65

[Anonymous Coward]

3 to 2 prong plug cheats

Hey, I still use those on a daily basis!

Yeah, ghetto house built in the 70s.

5 Pound Cell Phone

[pipingguy]

[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.

Hypercard was the balls

[rczik]

Great piece of software. I wrote a Hypercard like engine that ran on X (in a Lisp environment) for my Master's thesis. Very cool.

All before the web.

r

Re:Hypercard was the balls

[dave1212]

Hear, hear.

Also SuperCard, which allowed a whole lot more to be done.

So many stacks.

I want a Stack Player for OS X.

Re:Hypercard was the balls

[rczik]

If you find one, let me know. Do you know of any for Windoz XP or 2K?

r

Free porn

[Ratbert42]

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.

Re:Free porn

[Anonymous Coward]

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica

Still going strong, and nowhere near as spam ridden as it got in the nadir pf the mid-90s.

Re:Free porn

[Anonymous Coward]

> alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.

This still exists. Check out www.usenetbinaries.com (not work appropriate)

Re:Free porn

[witte]

It's funny, cause it's true.

Re:Free porn

[Anonymous Coward]

teens2.gif! I was talking about old porn with a friend and told him about one I liked called "teens2.gif" and my friend had that exact image too!

Back in the BBS days.... ahhh....

Re:Free porn

[Anonymous Coward]

nope. costs 9.95 a month. Thanks for nothing.

Sir Sinclair's

[Tamerlan]

ZX Spectrum

Re:Sir Sinclair's

[VAY]

I got a Speccy in my early teens. My mother, in her forties and not at all technical, acted the martyr, saying it was for the rest of the family and that she would get no benefit. She then spent hours playing Hungry Horace, and wouldn't let anyone else have a go.

Being an F1 fan, she also got "us" a racing game. She thought she was playing pretty well on her first go out of the box - until we pointed to the corner of the screen, which indicated that she was in Demo mode.

We never let her live that one down...

HP-11C

[xTown]

I got my HP-11C in 1987. I still use it.

Re:HP-11C

[IvyKing]

I've got an HP-45 as a Christmas present in 1973, only stopped using about two years ago (replaced by grpn).

Also have a K&E slipstick in the garage.

Re:HP-11C

[alansz]

Me too!

Commodore 64

[bursch-X]

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...

not small...

[zogger]

..big. Always loved Vans. Vws or detroit iron. -> Hippie girls. I mean,for real, games or girls...hmmmmm

50's and 60's don't count according to the criteria, but if they did I would add monster tube radios, the first portable transistor radios (oh MAN was that cool when you could actually carry around a PORTABLE RADIO that fit in your pocket kinda sorta or at least lug around easy), and color TVs. Reel to reel and making copies from the OTA radio or from the "HiFi". Good times...

OK, one more gadget from back then was uber cool-heathkit walkie talkies.

And 8 tracks ALWAYS sucked. ALWAYS. No one liked them, but the doofuses still made and sold them. Early DRM more than anything else from das "moozik industry". Only saving grace was it was hard to miss the insert-slot-to-play no matter your "condition".....

LCD Games

[labal]

What about all those cool little LCD Handheld games? The ones where you rescue falling babies from burning buildings, dodge oncoming cars and barrels.

Sure there were only around 4 positions on each screen, but when I was a kid I can remember spending hours playing the damn things, constantly trying to break my own high score. (or that of my evil brother......)

Re:LCD Games

[smellystudent]

then some bugger'd take the battery out and lose the precious precious score :-(

Dungeon!

[gregwbrooks]

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 server a couple years ago and *still* play the damned thing.

My drafting table.

[XNuke]

I was a teenager but I had a drafting table with a full set of manual drafting tools in my bedroom. I would never go back to it over CAD, but there really was something about applying geometry in real time...

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[AvitarX]

Gas was less than a dollor around when I got my car (late '97 early '98). In inflation adjusted it kicks your .88 ass.

What plant product do you currently buy at less than a dollor a gallon that you are using as an estimate for biofuel costs by the way?

The internet has always been here, right?

[JavaRob]

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.

Re:The internet has always been here, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haf n emale adres n I stil dont no how 2 spel!

Anything Ronco!

[zymurgy_cat]

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....

Greyscale magic

[jayed_99]

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.

KIM-1

[Anonymous Coward]

So whats a KIM-1 worth ? Only ask 'cos I fished three of 'em out of a skip at my university :-)

KIM-1

[Anonymous Coward]

So whats a KIM-1 worth ?
Only ask 'cos I fished three of 'em out of a skip at my university :-)

I'd have to say...

[amliebsch]

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.

Basic and Populous

[Sahi]

I remember my grandmother teaching me to program Basic (at least I think that was the full name). Drawing circles and squares on the screen. I never got as far as she did, but I spent quite a few hours on it. I'll never forget that house my grandmother made. With curtains closing and going up, and all kinds of other moving things. And then I also loved visiting my uncle to play Populous on his Atari. I recently bought the game for the PC. It's not quite the same, despite the prettier graphics.

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[Anonymous Coward]

biodiesel isn't that much cheaper.. it's available on some stations in europe. it has a chance of being used if it's not taxed at all(and even then replacing all of drilled oil is a fantasy for now - biodiesel doesn't just come out of thin air either).

but 88 cents gallon? no friggin way.

for the record, gas is around 1.3 euros per litre(a little under 5 euros per gallon).

Hewlett Packard 100/200LX

[xtal]

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 now. :(

My HP48 is still ticking though, although the keys are finally starting to go. Someone re-release it please too!

The Amiga 500/1200

[nickos]

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.

Re:The Amiga 500/1200

[cowbutt]

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?! ;-)

Commodore!

[Grab]

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.

Solidbody, amp, fuzz box, & wah-wah

[I_M_Noman]

Oh, dude...in high school I had this old Baldwin sold-state amp. 2 x 10", about 60w RMS, 2 channels, reverb, tremolo. Nice, clean amp. Of course, it wouldn't distort worth a shit until I blew out the speakers (but that's another story). Loved that amp, especially after I got my first fuzz box (a Ross Distortion).

Then once I got to college I bought a Polytone Mini-Brute II and a DOD Phaser 201. The combination of the Mini-Brute's built-in distortion with the fuzz and the phaser made for some trippy Adrian Belew-like feedback.

After freshman year I bought a guy's Kustom 1 x 12" and his Cry Baby and Big Muff. This was heaven! I used this setup (Gibson SG-200, Polytone, Kustom, Big Muff, Cry Baby, phaser) from 1981 to a couple of years ago when I moved into my new place. Limited space (and the wife) forced me to downsize to the Gibson and a Pignose.

Good times.

VINYL!

[Phreakiture]

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.

Newvicon Tube.

[Phreakiture]

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 performance of Sunday Bloody Sunday shot around 1982 or so. It was clearly shot with a Newvicon, because the torches that were in the stage setting left streaks whenever the camera panned. The motion captured, otherwise, was super smooth.

Re:Newvicon Tube.

[rjw57]

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.

Re:Newvicon Tube.

[InfiniterX]

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.

Re:Newvicon Tube.

[Phreakiture]

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 because it was a discontinued item and the floor model at that. It shot on full-sized VHS casettes, and I used it for about eight years before its autoexposure and white balance went haywire.

I replaced it with a Sharp 8mm, which was pretty good, and I've since replaced that with a JVC DV, which is fantastic. The Sharp was par with the Panasonic, but just didn't have the same feel to it. The JVC also doesn't have the same feel. It's kind of like the relationship between vinyl and CD.... they're both good, but just feel different.

The JVC shoots very nice video. It is just that sometimes I long for that newvicon feel.

It would be wicked cool if someone introduced a Newvicon HDTV camera. It would be kind of on par conceptually with using tube amps for audio.

Pinball

[xsbellx]

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!

Re:Pinball

[larien]

Ah, yes, pinball... I'm not very good at it, but there's something so much more fun having something physical to play with (you in the back, stop sniggering!!).

Hardly see them these days; it's usually the shooting arcades that get the space...

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[Baloo Ursidae]

Gas was less than a dollor around when I got my car (late '97 early '98). In inflation adjusted it kicks your .88 ass.

Only if you automatically assume that $1.40 What plant product do you currently buy at less than a dollor a gallon that you are using as an estimate for biofuel costs by the way?

Waste vegetable oil goes for $20 barrel on wholesale, $0 on retail (and they're glad to be rid of it).

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[Baloo Ursidae]

but 88 cents gallon? no friggin way.

You are limited by your perspective. Waste vegetable oil is available under $20 for 50 gallons, usually free. That's most of what biodiesel is. The rest of what's used in the process are cheap household products you can pick up for a couple dollars at any decent grocery store. Cost of production is just under 70 cents/gallon on average, and doesn't change much (feel the power of renewable resources).

Ahh, memories...

[WestonP]

BBS'es and slow modems... I once spent an hour and a half downloading a 1.5MB DOS game from a local BBS with a 2400 baud modem. I felt horribly behind the times, because a "modern" 9600 baud would have done it in only a little over 20 minutes. And today, I can do that in less time than it takes for me to sneeze. I also remember the Internet being an almost unobtainable thing, just because of the lack of ISPs with local numbers in my state (Colorado).

Old Macs were pretty cool. I remember getting a lot of enjoyment out of that 512x384 B&W screen. Things like Hypercard, ResEdit, and Appletalk games bring back memories. It sure blew the boring PC's of the time out of the water. It was pretty neat to get software for my PC to read 1.4MB Mac floppies, but I had to wait a few more years for the Macintosh emulators to let me run those old games on my PC. I was actually so anxious for that that I wrote the Win32 port of vMac.

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[AvitarX]

And how much waste oil is there?

Is there even enough for 1% of our fuel needs?

If demand goes up (due to it being provided as a fuel) waste oil will be expensive, probably the same price of fuel, which would go down ever so slightly by the increased supply.

Even at $20 dollors a barrel by the time the distributers get paid and the filterers get paid and the retailer gets paid it will cost more that a dollor.

Old technology.

[Rod Beauvex]

There's a lot of thinsg I Any old electronics devices. They were cooler looking and always functioned better. I love old electronic stereos, clocks, VCRs, TV's ect. Especially when they have the colorful Tokyo by night designs and lots of buttons.

And Don't forget FM Synthesis. Best musical sound of the 80's.

Toys?

[modi123]

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 TAMAGATCHI!" Morons ! :)

How about LOGO or just good ol' ClarisWorks? God knows how many times I had to use those in 4th grade!

Another missing item from years ago (rather low tech though) - card catalogs at libraries! How fun were those! I mastered it quickly, then the next year bam - computer indexing! Booo!

AOL 1.0: The digital porn foundation! Using a nice 1400 baud external Hayes modem and giggling with glee as my buddy and I started email lists from chat room names and watched the porn flood in. I swear we might have invented spam!

My most missed was Nike Pumps. The genius that added inflatable balloons inside shoes was a true man of genius!

*sigh* The good old days!

Precursor to the PSP

[Anonymous Coward]

That little handheld football hame with the 4 red LEDs marking the players and the sound clip immortalized in Supertramps' "Logical Song"

Atari 2600, Atari ST

[quamaretto]

Two unrelated: The first game system I got was an Atari 2600. This was in 1991 or thereabouts - I had an NES and eventually an SNES, but I never did catch up with the rest of the world until I got an N64 in 1998 or thereabouts.

Anyway, I think the Atari was just something my dad had in his closet and gave to me. My favorite games were probably Pitfall and Frogger.

The Atari ST is a bit of a different story. My dad bought it for doing computer-aided synthesizer work in the late 80's sometime. It eventually passed on to me, with that 30 MB hard drive. It had a text adventure game that we could never really do very well at, some game where you shot things at a bubble, and Daleks. (And BASIC.)

And, of course, the inevitable 486 with the Turbo button, and the shareware games. Oh, the shareware games! Commander Keen comes to mind, but there were tons of others. And wondering why our 230 MB HD was getting so full, and finding out that my family was recording 2 MB .wav files of my little brother singing and other such wasteful nonsense.

TI-57 programmable calculator

[FreeBSDbigot]

Learned programming on it around 1977 or 1978. It belonged to my brother, and he'd challenge me to program Euclid's algorithm or display the Fibonacci sequence using the limited space of 50 program steps.

Games

[NotWorkSafe]

My favorite game from my childhood days was "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?". That and "Oregon Trail".

Prodigy and Dot Matrix Printers

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Prodigy? One of the first things I remember with computers at home (around 6th grade or so) was sitting with my mom at the computer and exploring Prodigy for the first time. I don't remember much of it, I just remember that my first experiences with the interent, outside of Prodigy were so different.

Dot Matrix Printers! Yes they suck, but the noise is fun. My first typed paper I turned in to school was printed on one. It was an autobiography I still have. Two years later my brother had the same project and his is nice and pretty with the top of the line (at the time) ink jet printer. Although mine looks longer. :)

Of course, my favorite thing from childhood was in no way a tech item. I loved the scip-it. My friends and I were so dispointed when our school banned them.

Slide Rule!

[aquatone282]

No batteries required!

Etherhose

[jhines]

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.

HP-65 Calculator

[Ed Almos]

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

Hey, I work for Technicolour!

[chrestomanci]

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

Hey, I work for Technicolour! and it still exists,
...though it has now been swallowd up by Thomson creative services.

Technicolour is still in the film busness. Where I work cans of exposed film arrive all the time from film studios, and the rush prints are dispatched out again. The factory also makes prints for showing in the cinema. For example, at the moment, the warehouse at the London site is full of prints of Pride & Predudice for dispatch over the next few days

Colours in film have changed because of improvements in process technology. Modern film makers (usualy) want the image on screen to match what they filmed as closely as possible, so as the technology has improved, the colours have become more realistic.

Re:Hey, I work for Technicolour!

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

You might work for Technicolour, but you're not using the original 3 matrix dye-transfer process. And that's what I'm talking about. But if you know anything about the history of the company (and you should), you'd know that.

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicol or6.htm

Wrong, Ping *was* the game

[Dogtanian]

Ping isn't a game, it's a network test. Pong is the game

Ping was the British name for the 'Pong' game. Presumably because 'pong' sounds like a nasty smell.

Re:Wrong, Ping *was* the game

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The British had fun finding out how many milliseconds it was to the next server?

Still, I believe you- but was it the same game or a clever software-based version? (the original pong, surprising as it is, was done entirely in hardware).

Re:Wrong, Ping *was* the game

[Dogtanian]

I believe it was the same game; I remember hearing that somewhere, but I can't find supporting evidence on the web, so don't take it as gospel.

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The problem is when it's done for profit instead of as a hobby. Biodiesel may cost only 70 cents per gallon to make, but when you add road taxes, wholesaler fees, distribution fees, retailer fees, and that infamous supply vs demand scam that most capitalists play, the average price of B100 in Portland, OR at the pump is $2.76/gallon- which still beats petrol all hollow, but not by much.

Mac Classic Fun

[Remerico]

Back when I was in elementary in the early 90's, I loved our Macintosh Classic, running System 7. It only had 4mb of memory and 300mb of hard disk space, but we had lots of fun with it, specially with classic Mac games like Cliff Johnson's 'At the Carnival', Armor Alley, Load Runner, and more.

Sigh.. good memories... Lots of good stuff back then.. :)

Green monochrome monitors.

[SharpFang]

They are wonderful for reading. Better than best Color or any other Mono CRT. Better than LCD. Better than Plasma etc. More: Better than paper. After 3-4h of reading a dead tree book, your eyes are getting tired. I can read an e-book from such a monitor for 6-8h straight.
Just for figures, you can get more for a 14" used green monitor, than for a 17", flat screen, color CRT one.

You're kidding, right?

[itomato]

"your friendly Radio Shack Computer."

Even the Trash-80 allowed use of a semicolon (from 8bit-micro.com):

If you end your PRINT statement with a semicolon, the next PRINT statement (or INPUT statement) will continue on the same line, rather than starting on the next line. e.g. PRINT"HELLO ";:PRINT"THERE" will print the message "HELLO THERE" on a single line.

You can also combine PRINT statements with the semicolon. For example A=3:PRINT"A=";A will print the message "A= 3 ". (There is a space between the equal sign and the 3 as that is where the sign would go if the number were negative.)

Not to mention the use of a comma on the end with the C64 print statement. Way better machine for PRINT hackery, with the graphic characters and colors at your fingertips. Plus, '?' was much quicker to type than 'PRINT'.

--
Cold busted..

Re:You're kidding, right?

[Dogtanian]

Damn... I think my Atari 800XL did that as well. I'd forgotten that.... it's very vague in my memory, I think because it got so clearly overwritten by the C-derived meaning in my memory.

Re:zmodem

[WhiteDragon]

I use zmodem myself all the time. For me the best reason is not the error correction/detection or the ability to resume transfers, but because it is end-to-end rather than host-to-host. For instance, where I work, there is a fairly complex firewall, and every site has their own firewall as well. So a typical session might be:

connect from my pc to the local telnet gateway
connect from local telnet gateway to the telnet gateway of the remote site
connect from the remote telnet gateway to the remote system that I want to work on.

keeping in mind that all these systems have their own passwords, etc. Transferring files from the remote system to my pc with ftp/scp is a major pain, because I have to basically do the same process, and it is sometimes not even possible (for instance if some of the intermediate systems don't have enough disk space).

So, I uze zmodem. The fact that it is end-to-end means that once I do get connected to a remote machine, regardless of the intervening systems or the transport type (DECnet, tcp/ip, serial links, etc.), I can still transfer files directly to my pc.

BBSes

[WhiteDragon]

I loved calling up BBSes with my modem. I had a 2400, and I still remember when I got a 14.4... what a blazing fast speed! I did eventually get a 28.8 and a 56k, and they were great too, but by then I was starting to use them for internet (SLIP, btw) instead of just BBSing.

I mainly loved door games (trade wars 2002 and Land of Devastation were my favorites, but I also loved BRE, SRE, sysop wars, LORD, etc.) but I also spent a lot of time on file transfers. I used to use QWK and BlueWave offline readers, so I could spend most of my minutes playing door games, and still read the message boards.

mechanical typewriter

[Anonymous Coward]

I was six in the 70s when I used to play with a mechanical typewriter in my dad's office and learned to type all by myself. It would easily jam, but I learned the inside and out about the typewriter by just trying anything on it and observing how things work.

The typewriter was my first toy, and I was able to handle computer keyboards and word processing without problems many years later.

HP 11C Calculators and Reel to Reel autoloaders

[Frumious Wombat]

The HP, because with RPN it made it practically borrow-proof. Just watching people try to use it, and get expressions like they'd blown a neuron was worth the experience.

While I may not miss having to use them, there was a certain romance to the old DEC TU-78 tape drive and LP-26 line-printers. The whirring sounds of the tape loading, then the soft "pfffff" as it vented at the end, and the hammering and flapping paper sounds of the line-printer made it seem like you were actually doing something. Too bad it was frequently creating Line-printer art, or printing Life patterns.

I also kind of miss analogue mass-spectrometers, because it was easier to see the metastable peaks, but that's more of a specialized taste. I do not miss Disco, Bell-bottoms, or Donny-Osmond hair.

Incandescent Lights

[copeland3300]

I have a feeling that we're going to be saying how much we miss incandescent bulbs in a few years when LED's start to become more common in household lighting.

ZX Spectrum (Zilog's Z80 CPU)

[drgonzo59]

That thing is what got me interested in computers since the age of 13. Tons of great games (IKARI, Exolon, The great escape, fairlight, saboteur and others), easy to hack, easy to pirate, easy to program (assembler, C, Pascal and BASIC of course). That thing rocked!

I used to have a Russian variant made in the early 90's called "BYTE". It was the cheapest ZX Spectrum compatible that my parents could afford, we didn't even have a color TV. 48K RAM and about 3Mhz it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. But that machine had a rubber keyboard that stopped working couple of months later, but that didn't stop me. I remember when I cut out the keyboard with a saw and individually soldered some keys I scavanged off of an old Soviet-made fax machine. The keys where similar to the old clicking IBM keyboards, it took me a whole night to solder but by morning my creation was ready, ugly as hell, but nice to the touch and working again.

I remember the nights I spent compiling little programs in Z80 assembler

LD A,10
LD B.20
ADD A,B
etc..etc...
Ah, the good 'ol days.

Re:ZX Spectrum (Zilog's Z80 CPU)

[Gleng]

It's obviously too late now, but it's nice to know that you can now buy new, replacement ZX Spectrum keyboard membranes. The people making them generally advertise on eBay if it helps. :)

Hewlett Packard used to rule

[yuri benjamin]

My trusty HP48s calculator and my HP LaserJet 4 Plus with JetDirect card are two solid work horses that I still use daily.

Some of the newer HP printers look a bit flimsy IMHO, but their older stuff rocks.

HP 200LX

[CaptKilljoy]

The HP 200LX would be my favorite piece of tech nostalgia. A tiny 80x86 based PDA from the mid-90's, it had excellent PIM software and Lotus 1-2-3 in ROM, plus ran DOS programs at CGA resolution.

Coupled with the DOS version of Derive, a symbolic mathematics package not unlike a cut down version of Mathematica, it beats the HP-48GX hands down.

Re:DOOM? Wrong decade!

[kobach]

88 cents a gallon in 1988? you mean 1998?

Greyscale Displays

[dave1212]

and monochrome as well, of course!

The games designed for monochrome screens for early Macs were the best. Dark Castle, Uninvited, Shadowgate, Colony, Loom, and Falcon. Also, Beyond Dark Castle, Crystal Quest, Shufflepuck Cafe, and the Monty Python Hypercard stack ruled too.

The bitmapped art from then is great as well, I still have all my pict files of Bloom County characters and clip art given out on user group floppies.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I think we'd be better off without colour monitors.

ANSI BBSs and external modems

[GWBasic]

I miss ANSI BBSs and external modems. Web message boards simply just don't do the trick.

Vinyl Records

[nurb432]

Cant beat the sound of an analog vinyl LP.