

"Whatever happened to...?" The odd fates of 25 legendary tech products. - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2009/03/26/whatever-happened-to/

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jpd
Amiga, Inc./Hyperion VOF has already released Amiga OS 4.0, and it's sequel
Amiga OS 4.1. It runs on the Sam 440ep, as well as the classic Amiga, and
AmigaOne computers (and Pegasus now as well if I recall correctly). The OS has
been rewritten from the original version to support the PPC platform, but it
appears to need a separate release for each individual platform (driver
reasons maybe? I don't know.). As of now, it doesn't support any modern high-
speed CPUs and the newest graphics card it seems to support is the Radeon
9200. It is not a secure machine; memory protection is merely an option which
individual programs can decide to opt-in only if they want to.

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jwilliams
It's sad to see that era gone, but as you say, it's still kicking around... I
can still remember the thrill of popping open my A1000 and seeing all the
signatures on the inside of the lid.

[http://www.amiga-
hardware.com/download_photos/a1000signature...](http://www.amiga-
hardware.com/download_photos/a1000signatures.jpg)

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jballanc
Oh man, so many memories... I still remember my first interaction with a
bubble jet printer. Back in the day, the electronic card catalog machines at
Ball State University's library were hooked up to these early bubble jet
printers. I remember what was distinct about them was that they held on to all
of the old dot matrix conventions: the head was mounted horizontally and in
front of the roller, and the paper was still fed by sprocket wheels. The speed
was pretty decent too!

One that I would have liked to see under the hardware section is thermal paper
fax machines. I still remember working in my parents office as the "gopher"
when I was in grade school. One of my jobs was to make photocopies of all the
faxes so that they could still be read after the thermal paper faded.

...good times...

~~~
katz
Thermal paper faxes is still very much in use. Thermal paper is also replacing
dot-matrix printers in cash registers.

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avinash
I think this is an excellent article and it's clear that the guy who wrote
that did a lot of research.

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cturner
Article mentions dot matrix printers.. I've thought a few times that if there
was an easy way to get a daisy wheel printer I would. There are situations
where it would be neat to be able to set one up as a permanent record and as a
fax substitute. I have multiple homes, and it would be an easy way to send a
message to non-technical people living in the houses that I have servers
sitting in where I might be in another country for years at a time.

In this book (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)>), Stoll
talks about hooking up unix terminals to daisy wheel printers so he can review
input later on.

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michael_dorfman
Why would you use a daisy wheel and not an inkjet or laserjet?

I used to have a daisy-wheel back in the day, and the thing sounded like a
machine-gun. I can't say I miss it (although the print quality was nice.)

~~~
jedberg
The answer was right in the article -- tractor feed paper. 10s of thousands of
pages without having to refill a tray.

~~~
michael_dorfman
In that case, a dot-matrix would do as well as a daisy-wheel.

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PonyGumbo
I loved MiniDiscs. It was as close to a DAT machine as I could get with my
budget. Unfortunately, I think all of the surviving records of my band are on
MiniDisc...

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SingAlong
All most of these products didn't just snatch a part of history, but each one
also has it's own failure lesson along with it. Nice read.

If computer games are considered in this category of '25 legendary products',
then a lot of them would have been there. Dave, Prince, Doom and Wolfenstein
for sure. And people haven't stopped loving them, a lot still play it.
Wolfenstein is now on iPhone also. Anyone's got any idea abt it's sales?

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HeyLaughingBoy
I'm amazed that Zilog is still selling Z-80s. Must be a lot of legacy products
out there. I'm still hanging on to a few tubes of Z80, Z80-CTC and Z80-SIO in
case anyone needs to make an emergency buy in 10 years :-)

~~~
crabl
You bet! In fact, they are in the hands of pretty much any modern high
schooler: the TI-83 and TI-84 graphing calculators both use Z80 chips :)

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tdavis
This was worth it just to remind me of After Dark; I remember owning that
program. I loved those damn toasters...

I'm surprised they didn't mention Voodoo. I still have a few of their graphics
cards lying around.

~~~
graywh
You mean 3dfx. Apparently their assets were bought by Nvidia.

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forinti
Dot-matrix printers still have a large market in Brazil, were they're needed
to print out receipts. But because only businesses buy them, they cost about
three times more than the latest inkjets.

