
Our favorite "forgotten tech" - sp332
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/our-favorite-forgotten-tech-from-beos-to-zip-drives/
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fusiongyro
Oh man. I went through like four MiniDisc portables and had that awful Sharp
MD component that could dupe a CD to MD at 4x. I can't tell you how many hours
I spent spinning a dial to choose alphabetic characters so all the tracks
would be properly titled. My dream for years was to get an in-dash MD
receiver. I wonder how much longer I would have used them if I had actually
managed to do that. They were just so cool. A terrible waste of space and
technology, but really damn cool. I actually thought about getting another one
last year, just for nostalgia, but wound up not--even though they can be had
for like $20-40 on eBay.

Around the same time I was trying to run BeOS as my desktop. I would have
liked to have developed for it, but at the time I was just barely grasping
Python and C++ with threading really wasn't within reach for me. I'm happy
Haiku has been getting press and may try to run it in a VM (haven't had much
luck with that in the past) but there was something really liberating about
running an OS on the metal that booted in ten seconds. Everything was so
snappy. Of course, you couldn't do much with it, but what you could do, you
could do really well. :)

~~~
ben1040
I knew a DJ who had a MD dash unit in his car. It seemed like the coolest
thing ever.

I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was the
one pictured in the article. I dumped the component quite some time ago. I
can't bring myself to throw the portable away -- I've got tons of archives of
my old college radio show on MiniDisc in a closet.

That particular portable depicted in the article was one of the last MD
portables at all before Sony decided to pack it in; I think it came out in
2002. It had a USB input, and you could use your PC to push music onto a disk.
It suffered from the classic Sony problem that they own a record label and
they also make stuff that can copy music, so they made using it a complete
pain in the ass in some misguided effort to protect their own interests.

You had to use the bundled NetMD software, which would transcode MP3s to the
proprietary ATRAC compression format. Then you had to "check out" the songs to
the device, in which case they could not be put on any other device until they
were checked back in. It encrypted the stuff as it sent it down, and you could
not get any digital audio back off the device -- USB was only one-way and it
had optical SP/DIF in but not out.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I bought a MD device for sermon recording under the misguided notion that it
was a digital device that connected via USB and that live recordings would
thus be simply drag-dropped from the device. It cost me many hours in real-
time playback of recordings in to my computer. But for that one missing link
I'd still use the device now. At the time I should have purchased a slightly
more expensive MP3 device.

------
T-hawk
[http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-T-CL13-TrackMan-Marble-
Wheel/...](http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-T-CL13-TrackMan-Marble-
Wheel/dp/B00004L8IG/)

Trackballs. Back around 1996, optical trackballs came onto the market, a few
years ahead of optical mice. Using an optical trackball was a smooth dream
compared to the clunky hair-clogged mechanical rollers of mice. And the
unfamiliar device was a great deterrent for college mates trying to grab and
use my machine, heh.

Trackballs still exist, but are about as unsexy as any piece of computer
technology these days. Logitech and Microsoft haven't made any significant
updates in years. Trackballs are seen mostly as lame mouse alternatives for
RSI sufferers or some such. And a laser mouse is faster than a trackball for
desktop usage, but for lying down on the couch with a laptop, there's no
pointing device that can match a good thumb trackball.

On another topic, the article mentions the NES and its odd cartridge slot. Do
folks here know why that came to be? The design was to make the NES look less
like the older Atari and Intellivision systems (which had just endured a
famous industrywide crash) and more like the form factor of the nascent and
successful VCR.

Finally, in the software category: DesQView. I spent many hours running
DesQView for DOS multitasking, with a BBS download going in one window, an
offline mail program in another, and a MOD music player in a third.

~~~
kip_
I wish they would remake this. I've been forced to use their wireless model
[http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-
pointers/trackballs/wirel...](http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-
pointers/trackballs/wireless-trackball-m570) , which isn't bad, but is a
little small.

Trackballs are especially useful in a cramped desk space situation.

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tmh88j
How is the TI-83 forgotten technology? Go to any college or high school
classroom and you'll find plenty of them, albeit the 84 and 89 are becoming
more common.

~~~
protomyth
I have no clue why they consider that forgotten. Particularly, in a world
where the HP-16C is no longer sold.

~~~
mvzink
I understand everyone's HP-10 series nostalgia, but to replace the TI-83 on
that list would have to be the HP-48 series. Full graphing and programming
capabilities, released 3 years before the TI-83, and of course using the all-
but-forgotten RPN.

~~~
jbl
I always wanted an HP-48 in place of my TI-83.... so much so that I ran an
HP-48 emulator under Linux. If I was working from a campus lab, I would VNC
into my own machine just to run the emulator.

~~~
bane
There's a great HP-48 emulator for Android in the play store (and some great
TI-8x emulators too).

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DavidAdams
My favorite forgotten tech is the Garmin iQue, which is a PalmOS-based
handheld GPS unit. Because of its color screen, its battery life wasn't great,
so it wasn't suitable for backcountry use, but as a dash-mounted GPS is was
great. While other GPS units at the time required you to navigate through
confusing menus to enter an address or find a point of interest, the iQue
allowed me to use Grafitti handwriting recognition, which was a lot faster.

<http://www8.garmin.com/products/iQue3600/>

------
peterwwillis
Floppy disks, of the 3.5" variety, were way more useful than Zip disks to me.
You could get huge packs of them for cheap and distribute your files with zip
or rar, and every computer had the drive. With Zip you'd have to lug around
your dad's lone drive with parallel port cable to use it on general computers
and wait a year to copy your files. Sure I could carry around Zipslack in my
pocket, but where could you boot it?!

Developing on floppy disks also taught me about embedded applications and
operating systems. I built some weird stuff. Floppy routers, floppy X11 net
terminals, memory-resident openMosix clusters, voice-activated car
entertainment and navigation systems, rescue disks, minimal network packet
filters, system management daemons, even CGI applications in C (which turns
out to be a horrible idea).

~~~
slantyyz
Speaking of floppies, in junior high, one of my buddies ran a BBS system off a
pair of 8" floppies. Yeah, 8". I don't know where the hell he got them,
because 5.25" floppies were the standard at the time.

Once we went to high school, he had upgraded to a 10MB Cider HD, which at that
time cost like $1K.

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jonhohle
This reads like my life 10 years ago. Running BeOS with a zip drive sneaker
net. Apple had the hot swappable bays much earlier than 2000, I remember using
them as early as '98; compaq had the feature as well (floppy drive or LS120).

The one thing in that list that I'm sad to have missed was minidisc. It still
sets off my nastolgia meter.

What about dial-up modems, IRQ settings, and serial ports?

~~~
sp332
I don't think anyone misses IRQ settings :)

~~~
billswift
NOW I don't, but while setting IRQs was annoying, some of the weird stuff that
sometimes happened in the earlier days of plug-and-play was worse.

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smacktoward
The Vadem Clio was brilliant! Glad to see it getting some love here.

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johnchristopher
> Alas, WASTE never caught on, in large part because it was disavowed by AOL
> shortly after it acquired WASTE developer Nullsoft.

Does the author imply that Nullsoft was acquired after WASTE's release ?
Because I am almost certain Nullsoft was already a part of AOL at that time
(and that the waste source code was online for a very short time before being
pulled of).

Confirmed by wikipedia: Nullsoft was acquired in 1999 and WASTE released in
2003 (Justin Frankel left Nullsoft/AOL that same year).

------
awayand
lets not forget the palm. combined with intellisync it was truly the best
thing on earth.

~~~
smacktoward
Along with a Stowaway folding keyboard:

<http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm>

People used to be amazed when I showed them how much real work you could get
done with a Handspring Visor and a Stowaway keyboard. It kind of amazes me
that today we have portable devices that are a thousand times more powerful
than the old PalmOS devices, but only feel really useful for consuming media,
not creating it. Shows you the importance of input devices in the creative
process, I guess.

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spitfire
My Favourite forgotten technology is the dialup BBS. It's like facebook, if it
wasn't designed by your accountant.

There were dozens in any medium sized city, all with different flavours. They
hosted ANSI art, message boards, walls(!) and online games. Exactly like
Facebook, but 20 years earlier.

They disappeared in the late 90's as the internet became popular.

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kstenerud
MO disks caught on and remained popular in Japan for decades. Their popularity
has only started to wane recently.

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briannewman
Can't say I miss zip disks that much.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death>

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aw3c2
Full title is 'Our favorite "forgotten tech"—from BeOS to Zip Drives', much
more descriptive than what sp332 submitted.

~~~
sp332
I was trying to start a discussion here on HN about our favorite forgotten
tech. The examples in the article were just to get the conversation going.

