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Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New?
New submitter thereitis writes "Looking over my home computing setup, I see equipment ranging from 20 years old to several months old. What sorts of old and new equipment have you seen coexisting, and in what type of environment?" I regularly use keyboards from the mid 1980s, sometimes with stacked adapters to go from ATX to PS/2, and PS/2 to USB, and I'm sure that's not too unusual.
Here's all the components I can think of using in the 80's, and what their function or lack thereof would be today:
3.5" floppy - still used for some driver diskettes
5.25" floppy ?? have not used one of these since 1995
Keyboards - usable with adapters
Mouse - same as above
LPT Printers - DB-25 still shows up on many new motherboards
Serial DB9 - I can still make these by hand! Definitely useful for many console RS232 equipment ports
IDE Hard Drives - useable if you really had to, but why?
IDE CDROM - same as above
10Base-t Ethernet - 10 MB back in the day, but still compatible (although they might be only half-duplex)
Cat3 Cable - good for phones, digital or analog, or 10base-t
Cat5 Cable - Good for home PC or connecting internet-facing equipment
Modems (v21/v22) - Doomsday is sure to come, always have a tinfoil hat, and dialup number at the ready
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
but college girls' equipment stays the same age.
I have a few old devices I keep by my modern equipment for perspective. You know, a sundial, a vcr, and an iphone 4.
I can get a new keyboard at Big Lots for $8, so no need to keep them for decades. I do use older top-of-the-line enterprise equipment, though. Raid cards that were $750 new can be found for $35, old IP KVMs that were $1200 new are actually BETTER than current models because don't require proprietary software. The other day I used a serial cable to transfer files from an Win98 laptop that didn't have USB mass storage drivers.
Today's telephone networks are a random mix of old and new technology. The modern phone backbone is fiberoptic digital, but when wired to your house, it's made to emulate good old Bell. You can plug in an 80 year old phone rotary phone, and when someone calls you, it'll ring, and you can answer it! You can have one of these ancient devices right next to your DSL modem on opposite ends of that filter the phone/internet company gives you. In some area, pulse dialing will still work! And touch-tone phones is also an old technology. When you call on your cellphone, the numbers you dial don't get sent as tones. But in a call, when you call up one of those annoying phone robots, your cell phone will send tones, emulating the old signaling technology of the 70's or 80's or whenever the tones were invented. Plus, add in VOIP and the IP phones I use at work, and it becomes apparent that the modern telephone network is a continuum of technological anachronisms.
Well my 26 year old IBM Model M keyboards I use everyday beg to differ.
Plus it can quickly be converted into a rather effective cudgel, all the better for bludgeoning AC's with no appreciation of history.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I have an Apple II+ that I program on at least once a week. It's a fun exercise to see what I can get the old machine to do. I don't have any disk drives, so I use the cassette interface. But I don't have a cassette deck either, so I use my brand new laptop as the storage by plugging the Apple into its audio ports. So I have 33 year old tech not just co-existing, but working in tandem with, brand new equipment.
I have the worlds only 80386DX connected to the internet. I have an IBM Model 80 with an Ethernet card and a 9Gb Full height SCSI hard drive running OS/2 Warp 4 Fixpack 5 and Mozilla Firefox version 3. It works for most sites that don't require Flash.
Nathan
My parents got a color TV in 1976. They kept that thing for 29 years. It worked with one of the early Pong games. It worked with an Atari 2600. It worked with an Atari 800. Later it was connected to cable TV (with remote control that was connected by wire to a box on top of the TV). It worked with VCRs and DVD players. Near the end of its life it was using satellite TV. That old thing went through a lot. Halfway through its life the channel changers on it were largely forgotten. That was a good television.
:P
When I bought my first VCR I bought the same brand assuming that they made good stuff. I had to replace it within a couple months and ended up buying a Japanese brand
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I have a lens made for a 1930s Leica which, using an adapter they started making in the 50s (when the current bayonet mount was introduced), will work happily with any of their later rangefinder cameras, including the latest 2012 digital model (if I could afford it). As a bit of a long shot, I emailed the company a few years ago with a technical query about this lens, and got a prompt response with a request for the serial number so they could check their records! The standard flash/accessory shoe used today is also the same size as the one Leica was using as early as the 1920s, as is the 35mm cassette (so you can stick modern film in that antique Leica).
35mm itself (packaged differently) is basically a 19th century movie film standard, and we're also in the third century of several other common tech standards - the D cell battery goes back to 1898, the 1/4 inch audio jack is a 19th century phone switchboard plug, and the Edison screw lightbulb dates from the same era. Any others?