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Old 17th Mar 2018, 5:13 pm   #81
Dave Moll
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

I have started a new thread on the Rabbit with a reply to the above* to avoid taking this too far off topic.

*edit: this refers to the post from G6tanuki
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Last edited by Dave Moll; 17th Mar 2018 at 5:19 pm. Reason: Rambo1152 posting while I was composing
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 5:15 pm   #82
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

It is, of course, dangerous to speculate on what is bygone or useless. Not so long ago, one would have thought that the portable record player had been seen off by digital media of one sort or another for the mass market, and by 'proper' turntables for the few remaining vinyl fans - but look what happened!
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 5:31 pm   #83
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Quote:
Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
However with fax there's no guarantee that it was ever received *by the person you sent it to*! I remember in the 90s an office where there was a big problem with junk-faxes: sometimes 50 a day, and it was quite common for a 1- or 2-page document they *wanted* to receive to be discarded in amongst the pages and pages of junk-faxes.

Equally, faxes are not encrypted, so anyone with access to the receiving fax-machine can read what's been received, and even take it away, with no kind of audit-trail. A few years back there was brief but potentially hazardous confusion over my medical-records when it turned out that a fax relating to someone else had been received by my GP only minutes after the fax relating to me, and both had ended up in my case-notes!
There a feature specified in the fax standard (Group 3 standard maybe?) that all the early fax machines that I delt with had available, even the lowly British Telecom CF9 portable had it, but at some point all manufacturers seem to have dropped support for it.
It was called "Voice Contact"
You as the calling party, could press the "voice contact" button and a light showed on the other party's machine indicating they should lift their handset and speak to the other party before the fax exchange began.

Of course it's obvious this would only work well in a small number of disciplined circumstances, so perhaps it's not surprising it was dropped.
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 5:37 pm   #84
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Originally Posted by dseymo1 View Post
It is, of course, dangerous to speculate on what is bygone or useless. Not so long ago, one would have thought that the portable record player had been seen off by digital media of one sort or another for the mass market, and by 'proper' turntables for the few remaining vinyl fans - but look what happened!
Yes but look on the bright side, those new record players make the surviving Dansettes sound positively Hi-Fi
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 7:37 pm   #85
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

That topic was raised today in our local specialist vinyl shop.
That a decently fettled "old school" record player had a much more pleasant sound than the present day portable tat.
Not "hi Fi" for sure but nothing less than nice to listen to in its own context.

A.
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 8:18 pm   #86
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Obsolete but not totally-useless: the "Super-Audio CD" SA-CD.

http://audiophilereview.com/cd-dac-d...cd-failed.html

These were an audio half-way between a normal CD and a DVD: they promised better reproduction than could be achieved by normal CDs but got stuck in that classic tehcnological deadly-embrace:

1] Nobody releases significant content on the medium,

so

2] Nobody buys the players capable of playing what little content there is available.

3] GOTO 1

Most of what *did* get released on SA-CD was esoteric stuff that even the hardened Radio3-listening completist would not really be interested in. To my knowledge there were never any in-car SA-CD players offered: I'd have thought the promoters could at least have got a few middle-to-upmarket car-makers like Mercedes, Lexus, Range-Rover interested?

Why do I say it's not totally-useless? Well, thankfully for those who paid through the nose to buy content on SA-CD, most such offerings were "hybrid" - in that they had a normal CD-readable version of the content recorded on the disc alongside the SA-CD. So they should be able to listen to the things in boring CD-quality even if they no longer have/never had a SA-CD player.
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 8:34 pm   #87
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

I bought a new CD player 6 years ago and the one I liked was a Sony, it also is supposed to play SA-CD but I wouldn't know about that. I've never even seen an SA=CD disc. I' not sure about dead technology, I don't think it was ever alive!

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Old 17th Mar 2018, 9:46 pm   #88
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

VCD Video cds
I still have a stack , but watching a film usually means changing the VCD about three times for a long film.

934Mhz CB Radio, very expensive , no one used it , and eventually the Government reassigned the frequency for something else thus making them illegal to use and obsolete.

Stylophones, remember the fad for these little battery operated organs promoted by a certain disgraced Celebrity.
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 10:18 pm   #89
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Stylophones, remember the fad for these little battery operated organs promoted by a certain disgraced Celebrity.
Superseded by the Casio VL-1 I guess.
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 10:30 pm   #90
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

http://www.techmoan.com/blog/category/retro-tech has a variety of items including LED watches, Nixie tubes and several obsolete audio and video formats.
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Old 17th Mar 2018, 11:54 pm   #91
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Superseded by the Casio VL-1 I guess.
The Stylophone is alive and well, available for £19.99 on Amazon and other places too I'm sure. Admittedly it has been updated, but is still pretty much the same form and function.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 12:18 am   #92
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

LaserDisk players with there cumbersome 12 inch not so compact disks.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=la...Yn96z-MzBKC_M:
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 3:11 am   #93
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

But DVDs are essentially using the same underlying technology as laser video discs. Just with compressed digital data now; which -- thanks to a large memory buffer -- allows "trick" play on CLV discs.

Some fanzines in the late 1980s were produced using a dot-matrix printer -- without a ribbon, and with the "impression" pot turned right up -- to cut stencils for the old hand-cranked Roneo printing presses, which some schools were abandoning in favour of photocopying technology as the latter became less expensive. Such systems usually were driven by either a BBC Micro or an Amstrad PCW8256, and remained in use for as long as the equipment lasted. Some of the fanzines might even still be going today, in the form of websites .....
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 9:54 am   #94
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Mention of Laser Disk discs/players reminds me that, IIRC, there was also a Videodisc system (Hitachi, I think),in which the discs were played with a stylus. I've never actually seen one, but recall them being advertised.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 10:03 am   #95
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RCA apparently, though Hitachi made players too. There's a video about it in the Techmoan site I linked to above.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 12:00 pm   #96
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

I have several of these machines, Hitachi and McMichael branded plus a hundred or so discs.
The replacement stylus are almost impossible to obtain, and the belts also perish too.
We used to sell these machines at Rumbelows alongside the Philips laservision range, but the carrot which was dangled to buy a CED player was the inclusion of 20 discs in the price to start you off.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 12:13 pm   #97
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Another dead technology that's now useles: DIVX - which was an idea to let you 'rent' a DVD and watch it once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

There was another attempt at the same idea - Flexplay/Spectradisc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay

which involved a 'DVD' which was sent to you in an airtight envelope and which started to degrade once the envelope was opened and the disc exposed to the air.

In both cases the concept being that after you'd watched the movie you didn't need to take the DVD back to the rental-store.

Both failed spectacularly - along with the whole concept of physical video-rental stores - when streaming/download services like Netflix came on the scene.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 12:29 pm   #98
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Originally Posted by ITAM805 View Post
What about 'modern' useless digi tv set top boxes that went redundant overnight because of the tuning capacity farce?
The first, and possibly nicest Digital Terrestrial tuner I ever had was an ex OnDigital Sony DTU500, which went from working perfectly to completely broken overnight due to some kind of permanent change in the transmission format. I was pretty mad about that.

And yet we have an even older Grundig 'Arganto' CTV with an integrated digital tuner which is still working with all SD DTV transmissions.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 3:30 pm   #99
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

The same was true of my first digibox (branded as Pace). Early DTV transmissions used, I believe, a cut-down version of the DTV specification, and many early boxes only supported this version. Once transmissions started using a full implementation of the specification, these promptly failed to find them. There was a discussion here about this at the time, and what I have said above was based on what I recall of that discussion.
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Old 18th Mar 2018, 3:48 pm   #100
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Band III to Band I convertors. Remember them?
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