Old tech found in drawers...

[BuzzBravado]

Bought this with my very first pay packet.



Used it everyday until MP3 killed off the format.

[S10GTA]

BuzzBravado said:

Bought this with my very first pay packet.



Used it everyday until MP3 killed off the format.

Had one of those too.

Still got a NES, and a SNES (and N64 & Gamcube).

[thatsprettyshady]

BuzzBravado said:

Bought this with my very first pay packet.



Used it everyday until MP3 killed off the format.

13 year old me had one of these for about a week until the opening mechanism broke.
13 year old me didn't now anything about warranties or SOGA
13 year old me regretted wasting his savings on that piece of crap

It still boggles my mind how these things just sit in drawers unused now, so much cash spent on bugger all.

[blueg33]

I have one of these on my desk in its docking cradle. Battery is so dead it only works in the cradle. But I still use it occasionally as it allows me to create labels for Christmas card lists very easily on my old XP laptop. It also has a good MP3 player.

When I bought it, it was the very latest gadget. I had previously had the original PalmPilot and then a PalmIII

[thatsprettyshady]

Just had a little dig around...



Remember when AOL used to send you free trial CDs? Well before that they were on floppy disk, whatever happened to Pipex?



Video camera which takes VHS tapes, for that authentic 80's porn feel



Back up to iCloud? How about back up to you're handy tape drive, which weighs a tonne and sounds like a jet engine... 60% of the time, it backed up everytime!

Somewhere among the Commodore C64's and Amiga 500's in the loft I've got a minter Compaq laptop with detachable keyboard and 7" monochrome screen, how it could be called portable Ill never know.


EDIT : Pics are wonky, deal with it.

[boyse7en]

Only this morning I looked at the JVC Nicam Stereo Video recorder under the TV in the bedroom and thought, I really ought to get rid of that.

I haven't used it in years, and imagine it will never again be used.

But it works perfectly, cost a lot of money back in about 1995 when I bought it, is immaculate and just seems too good to become landfill.

The same goes for my Marantz SD62 Cassette Deck...

[paulrockliffe]

I tend to clear stuff out rather than keep it, so I don't have much left. I had mini-disc, hugely under-rated at the time, but I had the version that couldn't record on the portable player, which was pretty much twice the thickness of the disc and no bigger. One of the best things I've owned I reckon. I had a separates deck that did 3 CDs and could record to MD that was really neat.

I had an XDA II smart phone when they came out, really wish I'd kept that now. Windows Mobile! Don't think it even had WiFi. I had various XDA phones until Windows Mobile was canned.

The one thing I do have, on my parents loft, is a Texas Instruments calculator that was rescued from a Ministry of Agriculture skip when they moved offices; it takes a magnetic strip to run programs and has a thermal printer dock that prints on till roll. I think there's a load of strips for running various agricultural calculations if I ever go for a change of career.

[Zod]

I have about 15 different Nokias, including 2110, 8110 banana and various Communicators, Psion Series 5 and 7 (that must be rare), Compaq and HP iPaqs and my 1980 Apple II+ with two floppy drives and Mictrovitec colour monitor.

[Otispunkmeyer]

thatsprettyshady said:

13 year old me had one of these for about a week until the opening mechanism broke.
13 year old me didn't now anything about warranties or SOGA
13 year old me regretted wasting his savings on that piece of crap

It still boggles my mind how these things just sit in drawers unused now, so much cash spent on bugger all.

I remember saving up and buying the mac daddy MD player from Sony at the time after previously having some chunkier version in a gay purple colour which had a really chunky remote because it contained gubbins for an FM radio.:



That thing was a beauty though.

[Otispunkmeyer]

blueg33 said:

I have one of these on my desk in its docking cradle. Battery is so dead it only works in the cradle. But I still use it occasionally as it allows me to create labels for Christmas card lists very easily on my old XP laptop. It also has a good MP3 player.

When I bought it, it was the very latest gadget. I had previously had the original PalmPilot and then a PalmIII

Now thats a good one. A friend of mine had one in college, proper geek tool.

[Zod]

Oh, I also have two MiniDisc Walkmans, an early one and a tiny one and a MemoryStick Walkman. The latter was rubbish; despite having no moving parts, its battery life was worse than that of the MiniDisc machines. As for the Sony music management software, it made iTunes look like a dream interface and copying was realtime for MiniDiscs!

[Cfnteabag]

I have a gameboy advance and a gameboy colour, both useless as they have no back light.

I have a megadrive set up in our bedroom.

My stepdad still has all of his old mobile phones, including one attached to a box the size and weight of a car battery! I remember him having an argument in a phone shop around 2000 because all he wanted from a mobile phone was to make and recieve calls. The teenager serving him couldnt understand why he didn't want the latest camera or the ability to send longer text messages.

[Truckosaurus]

Slightly more recent but still pretty much obsolete, I have a pack of CD-Rs in my desk unused for many years since USB thumb drives and the likes of Dropbox have come along.

[boxst]

Cfnteabag said:

I have a gameboy advance and a gameboy colour, both useless as they have no back light.

I have a megadrive set up in our bedroom.

My stepdad still has all of his old mobile phones, including one attached to a box the size and weight of a car battery! I remember him having an argument in a phone shop around 2000 because all he wanted from a mobile phone was to make and recieve calls. The teenager serving him couldnt understand why he didn't want the latest camera or the ability to send longer text messages.

I have way too much stuff: Apple Newton, Gameboys, Centronics cables, RS232 cables, RAM sticks, floppy disks etc...

I gave one of my gameboys to a friend (along with a 3DO, SNES and N64) and he fitted a backlight. For the Advance, have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL52H3mnHpI

[Guvernator]

My dad still uses the phone I passed onto him. It's a Nokia Carbon Arte, a special edition 8800 series slide phone made from, stainless steal, titanium and carbon fibre! Despite the exotic materials it still weighed more than most phones at the time but it was absolutely solid as proven by the fact that it's still going strong 10 years later with only the battery needing replacing a few years ago. They even used special ball bearings so the slide action was and still is as smooth as butter. They don't really make them like they used to, I'm lucky if my current phones last 3 years. Oh and they are still worth about £600 second hand on ebay for genuine ones (lots of fakes about)



I've also recently found at my parents house

1) Sony mini disc player in a draw, was a great technology at the time
2) Aiwa (whatever happened to them) cassette walkman, the unit is barely bigger than the cassette itself and again solidly constructed, I bet if I put batteries and a tape in it, it would still work.

[Roy Lime]

I've got this and an old car radio on Ebay ending soon. Old tech is worth a fortune - they're currently at two quid.

[Cotty]

I should have a Palm V knocking around somewhere

[Disastrous]

Zod said:

Oh, I also have two MiniDisc Walkmans, an early one and a tiny one and a MemoryStick Walkman. The latter was rubbish; despite having no moving parts, its battery life was worse than that of the MiniDisc machines. As for the Sony music management software, it made iTunes look like a dream interface and copying was realtime for MiniDiscs!

Agreed. I used to love my MD and one of the later ones with Sony's awful software that worked over usb.

I got it just before the rise of the iPod IIRC, and I remember being utterly baffled as to why Sony insisted keeping the software proprietary, so that you had to use it to manage content on the disc. If they had just allowed you to use the disc as effectively a removable drive, and bosh a load of MP3s on to it, I think it would have lasted a lot longer as it was a brilliant format in so many other ways.

[Guvernator]

I also have a first gen Ipod Nano still kicking around somewhere. I know that the ipod came first but that thing was huge, this tiny slick player was the first one to really sell me the idea of a portable mp3 player, such a simple and elegant design.



Just a shame then that it was the first Apple product that introduced me to the wonderful world of itunes. What a hateful hateful piece of software.

[BuzzBravado]

thatsprettyshady said:

Video camera which takes VHS tapes, for that authentic 80's porn feel

Admit it...at some point when the house was empty you slung this badboy on your shoulder and focused in and out on the sofa whilst telling it "yeah yeah, thats it, yeah yeah, thats the money shot".