'New' technology of the day, that is now mainstream, old school or even vintage?

[OscarFoxtrot]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Apparently the NHS is the UK's largest ongoing user of FAX.

The USA healthbilling industry also use fax a lot

https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTh...you_deal_with/

But yeah, digital faxes. We receive to our email and send from a program on our computer.

Kind of like email, but with call charges?

[OscarFoxtrot]

I don't think anyone's mentioned pocket calculators.

My father had a TI 4-function one with an LED display, which whined in use, which I wasn't allowed to touch.

At school I got the recommended 'scientific' calculator for O Level maths (one calculator paper, one no-calculator paper with a book of tables).

Now there are so many apps which not just solve equations but which are customised to which equation you need to solve - so although a structural engineering and an electronic engineering problem might both use the same underlying equation, you no longer need to know that. Just take a few photos of a valley and a big computer somewhere will email back a bridge design a few days later (well, almost).

[Keith956]

Originally Posted by OscarFoxtrot

I don't think anyone's mentioned pocket calculators.

I recall my Dad bought a calculator in the early 70's that came as a kit and cost around £45 which was quite a lot in those days. Maybe via PE or Wireless World? Anyhow the thing was about the size of a laptop, mains powered, with red LED display. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide and that was it.

My first calculator was one that was an offer from WW in 1975. It was programmable and used reverse polish notation (no not a HP). Wasn't allowed to use it for A levels, in those days it was still log tables only. Others had the Sinclair Scientific, which if you entered a certain sequence of operations would start give a number on the display counting up or down - one of its many quirks (bugs?).

[Dave Moll]

On the subject of calculators, the new-fangled devices to which I was introduced in maths lessons at school looked more like this:

[TonyDuell]

And here are a couple of pictures of mine (badged 'Multo' but an Odhner really) when I was repairing it. Yes I did get it all back together.

The third photo shows something else that is now mainstream. The 3 machines on the left are PERQs, the first commerical graphics workstations (machines with a bitmapped display, a mouse, etc) The one on the far left (brown front panel) is a PERQ1 dating from 1979...

[wd40addict]

A thing that made a big impression on me back in the 80s was the digital storage scope. Some bit of big industrial kit had gone wrong and the manufacturer's came in to sort it. The rep had a Gould digital scope and we watched a particular contact bouncing. In-house we had one of those burn-it-on-the-screen old school storage scopes which required knife edge adjustment of its display. In comparison this was like morse code Vs the telephone.

Within a few months we had our own DSO and a second eureka was when it was connected to a plotter to record the screen - no more Polaroids!

I really liked that DSO, it was a Philips with both analogue and digital in a single chassis and by pushing a button you could flip modes and get the best of both worlds.

[electronicskip]

For me it was Laserdisc, seeing for the first time in action totally blew me away!
We had the Philips VLP600/700 laservision system in the shop on a big display stand running the demo disc .
I bought one myself i was so impressed, but sadly after the first uptake rush it died off pretty quickly.
I still buy laserdiscs if i see them around and still have one under my TV wired up to this day.
I guess DVD/CD was the modern day equivalent to Laserdisc albiet a lot smaller.

[Refugee]

I can remember mechanical calculators. We were shown them even though many students were buying pocket calculators at the time.
I can remember laser disks.
I had got wary of long term access to the media.
I learned to be patient and wait for stuff to catch on before buying.
We learned in the 1970s when my father bought an instant camera only to be told to buy a new one a couple of years later due to lack of film.
In recent times I have used the nickname "electric toothbrush syndrome" in relation to this problem. In earlier times it used to be "poleroid syndrome".

[Welsh Anorak]

What about Kodak disc cameras?
Bought one for my Mum as it was easy to load and use. However the pictures were terrible. I think they were all recalled and ours was replaced free with a conventional 35mm camera that my Mum couldn't load...

[Refugee]

I can remember those disc cameras.
They were fine if you wanted to take half a dozen photos and send them off for processing right away.
I have seen them being used for off screen photos from pipe inspection cameras where there was a need to send the photos off before the next job. 35mm was a bit wasteful on film for the number of shots taken per job.
They did have their uses. They were cheap enough that the crews could carry a spare new in box in the tool kit.

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

What about Kodak disc cameras? ... I think they were all recalled and ours was replaced free with a conventional 35mm camera that my Mum couldn't load...

[my emphasis]

I believe that's know as "progress".

[Richard_FM]

I heard Kodak had their own instant picture camera format, but were sued by Polaroid because of them. Part of the settlement was they had to recall the film packages, and offered a refund for cameras still under warranty as they were now useless.

This was in the form of a voucher that could be used towards buying a new Kodak 35mm or disc camera.

[Ted Kendall]

Two things really stick in my mind - the first time I heard stereo radio and the first time I managed to get a computer to connect to the internet. The former still seems like magic to me, the latter an evil necessity.

[emeritus]

When I was a vacation student working at the old STC Submarine Cables lab at Woolwich, they had an elderly motor-driven mechanical calculator that used to move itself sideways when doing long calculations. If you programmed it with a certain sum it would make a chugging noise like a steam engine accelerating with its train!

One of my colleages at GEC was a patent attorney who had previously worked for Kodak. He said he had spent several months analysing Polaroid's patents in great detail and concluded that the Kodak system would almost certainly infringe most, if not all, of them. The senior management ignored his advice and duly paid the penalty.

[Radio Wrangler]

Mavica was Sony's rather clunky electronic camera. Lenses and shutter were conventional, but in place of film there was a large-ish charge coupled device (aka bucket brigade chip") where the storage capacitors doubled as photodiodes. THe CCD was clocked to move analogue charge data along it and out into an ADC.

clunky, low resolution, but it stored the DAC's results on a 3.5 inch floppy ready to go into almost any computer and be emailed to a news desk in a couple of minutes. That was, they saw, their prime market.

It was pretty much the beginning of the digital camera as a complete product.

It's amusing that the most important bits, the ones that set the limits on performance of a modern digital camera are still analogue! Trades description act, anyone?

Kodak got involved early as well, making very expensive digital cameras by adding their sensor and electronics to modified top-end Nikon bodies. They got quite a lead on things, but blew it by deciding to stop before it hit their film sales! The screw-up with the instant film recall was a disaster, pulling out of digital cameras was monumental. The failure of their company was earned.

My last film camera was a Nikon F5. This included a 1005 pixel digital camera in the prism housing, just as the sensor for light metering. A DSP chip compared the pattern of the low resolution picture with thousands of pre-analysed patterns to decide on points of interest to set the exposure. It could trigger pre flashes from the flash gun and read the effect of it off of the shutter blades to calculate the needed flash power. Then it read the reflection off the film to check it got it right! The image you got at the end of the day came off of the film, but boy was there a lot of electronics used in deciding the exposure!

This technology carried forwards into 'digital' cameras

Polaroid put a lot of electronics for the time into their SX70 camera. It had ultrasonic radar to measure the distance to the subject so it could set the focus. They worked hard on bells and whistles. Shame they didn't work harder on picture quality.

The trouble with megacorporations is that it's all too easy for top management to think they own the world and that tiny inconveniences like laws don't apply to them. Finding out otherwise is usually brutal. But deserved.

David

[wireman]

Originally Posted by TonyDuell

... The 3 machines on the left are PERQs, the first commerical graphics workstations (machines with a bitmapped display, a mouse, etc) The one on the far left (brown front panel) is a PERQ1 dating from 1979...

I'm more amazed by what looks suspiciously like an AMT DAP to the right of it but then I could be wrong...

[G6Tanuki]

Technology moves on: I remember my late father using a hand-held tape recorder [Fi=Cord] to dictate memos while at home - he'd take it into the office the next day and have an audiotypist transcribe it; he'd then bring the script home and spend an evening dictating amendments, which were duly typed-up by a long-suffering copy-typist the next day...

Copy-typists; audiotypists, Pitman shorthand-typists, typing-pools.... all now banished to history. I vaguely remember someone suggesting that optical-character-recognition should be extended to include Pitman shorthand!

[Do crown-courts still have stenographers? I'd be interested in knowing how the parliamentary Hansard record is generated].

Equally - pocket-watches/wristwatches: the last time I wore a wristwatch was back in the early-90s; it was a Casio LCD one which had two separate time-displays - the large one for local-time and a smaller one for 'second timezone' - this was brilliant for when I was working on projects with guys in New York and wanted to know what 'local-time' was over there.

I haven't worn a wristwatch any time this century: time is everywhere displayed - on my phone, on my computers, microwave, cooker, washing-machine, burglar-alarm, bedside radio, car-dashboard, satnav and car-radio, my HF transceivers - I can even shout "Alexa, what is the time in Japan?" and get an answer.

Who needs a wristwatch?

[chriswood1900]

One day in the 1970s a friend of mine managed to get tickets for the demo of new technology coming from Sony, we went through an excellent demo of this exciting new tape system that to rival reel to reel but was so much more convenient like a cassette, it was of course Elcaset and we all know how that worked out!
But it did sound very good.

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by wireman

I'm more amazed by what looks suspiciously like an AMT DAP to the right of it but then I could be wrong...

You are correct. It is a DAP 510 IIRC.

On top of it, BTW are an ICL PERQ AGW3300 (a 68020-based unix box with a strange graphics processor) and an ITEM (Inmos Transputer Evaluation Machine)

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by wd40addict

analogue and digital in a single chassis and by pushing a button you could flip modes and get the best of both worlds.

My daily use scope at work is a Hameg CRT scope exactly like that - essentially a proper analogue Hameg scope with all the loveliness that implies, but with a useful digital storage feature built in as well. There have been several attempts to get me to 'upgrade' to a purely digital LCD scope, wargggh-phut.