18th Mar 2018, 4:30 pm | #101 | |
Dekatron
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/...ad.php?t=70065 For something completely different, I suppose this little fellow is a piece of bygone technology, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. The world hasn't nearly gone paperless yet, a frequent requirement is to provide or renew the staples of a folded pamphlet, but the usual sort of stapler can't do it and a cumbersome long-arm variety is required. Turn the mechanism around 90 degrees, though, and you get one of these: German, dating I think from the 1930s, and if there are any modern machines of this configuration I've yet to meet one. Paul |
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18th Mar 2018, 4:35 pm | #102 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Ah, that triggers a memory!
Those stylus-played discs were read capacitively. Quite different to their laser-toting competitors. It was seen as a lower cost lower tech alternative. At those densities I felt that videodisc playing ought to be a non-contact sport. David
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18th Mar 2018, 4:39 pm | #103 |
Pentode
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Back when I worked in consumer electronics repair, I was gently ridiculed for having a workshop full of audio test gear, wow & flutter meters, distortion analysers etc, not much wow and flutter in the digital age. Pretty much obsolete now. Wouldn't dare measure w&f on a Dansette
Seth |
18th Mar 2018, 6:45 pm | #104 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Not only do I remember them, but I have the one that went with my single-channel Band I only television set originally bought by my grandfather in 1950 (the television, that is). The only trouble is that my only 405-line television source is a band I channel 1 Domino standards converter. If I ever get round to buying an Aurora, I will set it up to output on Band III, then I can use the III->I converter to switch between two programmes.
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18th Mar 2018, 6:51 pm | #105 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
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18th Mar 2018, 7:01 pm | #106 | |
Heptode
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
It was an available size in the UK, but it had the name because it was popular in the USA. I doubt the American's called it that. |
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18th Mar 2018, 7:04 pm | #107 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
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18th Mar 2018, 7:21 pm | #108 | |
Octode
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
http://www.neumann.com/?id=about_us_...part_4&lang=en with a little more info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teldec |
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18th Mar 2018, 7:50 pm | #109 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
If you want strange, look at the German "SABAmobil" tape-cassette system from the 1960s.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU-iSTj2cTY It didn't catch on. |
18th Mar 2018, 7:51 pm | #110 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
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18th Mar 2018, 8:33 pm | #111 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
US legal photocopier paper used to be available about 15 years ago.when we got a Brother plain paper fax to replace a thermal paper roll model. It came with two trays, a 500 sheet one for A4, and a 100 sheet one that took either A4 or US legal. We used to get a lot of documents from the US on US legal which was not a problem with the thermal paper roll model, but took 2 pages of A4 per US legal sheet, so I got our office supplies to get us a box of US legal. The fax automatically detected the length of the original and selected the paper tray accordingly.
When I tried to get some last year in connection with my bookbinding hobby (a sheet of US legal was just right for making replacement end papers for some books I am re-binding) I couldn't find any UK suppliers. I have therefore had to guillotine A3 sheets to size : wasteful, but a more economical option than importing some from the US! Getting US letter paper is no problem as that is the size of tractor feed computer listing paper. What are now considered to be US paper sizes were at one time widely used in many mainland European countries until the 1960's (other than Germany, where I believe the "A" to "D" series of rationalised 1 : √2 proportioned sizes were first used). I did once have to search for some technical information in the old SRIS Foreign Patents Library in Holborn in the days when the only alternative to paper was microfilm and microfiche, and noticed that until the 1960's the official French and Belgian patent gazettes were printed on US letter size paper, as were some of the older reference manuals issued by the UK Patent Office. |
19th Mar 2018, 1:17 am | #112 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Does anyone remember the BBC Doomsday Project that involved schoolchildren, an Acorn BBC Master computer and a Philips Laservision disk?
Granada Microcare who I worked for had the maintenance contract for the hardware. There was a "real" helium-neon laser in the machine as I remember.
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19th Mar 2018, 3:02 am | #113 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
US "legal A4" paper sizes are widely available in the Philippines, more so than A4 !
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19th Mar 2018, 5:34 pm | #114 |
Nonode
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
I remember at college having trouble printing a onto simple sheet of A4 as the settings had been left on the default of USA & would only offer American paper sides, messing up the margins.
I couldn't change anything as I didn't have the permission on my logon! I heard early CED discs suffered from pressing problems, often whole batches were unplayable due to slight glitches while being made, or being stored in the wrong condition. |
23rd Mar 2018, 10:16 am | #115 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Did anyone here ever come across the CueCat?
It was a sort-of handheld barcode-reader you hooked to your PC and by swiping it across barcodes printed in magazines, catalogs, on products etc. it took you to the relevant website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat A bit like the ubiquitous QR-codes do on phones these days. As an idea it never caught on and the people behind it filed for bankruptchy after a couple of years. |
23rd Mar 2018, 10:20 am | #116 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Another bit of now-useless stuff: the "pluscodes" that used to be printed in listings-magazines so you could set your video-recorder to record a particular program by typing in a string of digits rather than the start/finish times and channel-number.
Totally useless since the demise of analog TV. Also had the major disadvantage of assuming a particular assignment-order of TV stations to tuner-presets: not everyone had BBC1 on preset-1, BBC2 on preset-2 etc (most people I knew had BBC1 on preset 1, ITV on preset-2, a second ITV channel on preset-3, channel-4 on 4, channel 5 on 5...) |
23rd Mar 2018, 10:55 am | #117 | |
Nonode
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday There are still working original systems in a few places: I think the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge has one. Chris
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23rd Mar 2018, 1:07 pm | #118 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
I bought one for next-to-nothing from an ad in a magazine when they'd been discontinued, thinking it would be useful and fun. It turned out to be neither http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/d...Pocket-Reader/ Nick |
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23rd Mar 2018, 1:18 pm | #119 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
While I like the idea of that pocket reader, I doubt I'd ever have a steady-enough hand to keep it centred on a single line of text across a whole page!
Thinking of document/data-capture, another 'thing' which never caught on was the Microwriter: a 'chorded' keyboard where you pressed different groups of keys at the same time to represent the different letters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter |
23rd Mar 2018, 1:53 pm | #120 |
Hexode
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK.
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
I shan't miss the thermal printers used for receipt etc. After a month or so they've faded to the point where they are no longer readable, fat lot of good that is if it happens to be the "guarantee"....... Filament lamps have made quite a big come back as "vintage bulbs for decorative lighting", bit of a loophole in the EU ruling there methinks?
I was glad to see the back of golfball/daisy wheel & line printers, all a mechanical catastrophe just waiting for an excuse to dismantle themselves with malice aforethought!
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