15th Mar 2018, 10:31 pm | #41 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Bygone tech.: d.c. mains is an obvious choice. So are 2 v. lead-acid batteries in a glass jar. 'Fridges that ran off street-mains gas. (When I was a kiddie, we had one in the kitchen - made by Electrolux, strangely.)
Brownie box-camera. rho-detectors: an R.F. device. 3 ports: one for one for the reference resistance, one for the unknown Z and one which produced a d.c. voltage. Was used as a crude impedance measuring device. (I even have one in my collection of 'bits-'n'-bobs'). The high-pressure steam engine, invented by Richard Trevithick, as used for pumping water from Cornish tin mines. And dare I add carbon-paper? Al. Last edited by Skywave; 15th Mar 2018 at 10:38 pm. |
15th Mar 2018, 10:38 pm | #42 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
I always felt it was a shame that they didn't have a series of identical but overlapping signs. David
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15th Mar 2018, 10:57 pm | #43 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Wasn't there another duplicating process called Roneo?
I think they had a factory in Norwich.
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15th Mar 2018, 11:04 pm | #44 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
They also produced a peculiar odour - a mixture of ozone and hot wax, but quite unlike a vintage TV! |
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15th Mar 2018, 11:22 pm | #45 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
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I believe Roneo were taken over by the Vickers corporation - certainly, small offset litho machines (another vanishing technology) were produced under the Roneo Vickers banner. |
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16th Mar 2018, 12:53 am | #46 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
The duplicators were electric powered and worked by sucking ink from a "toothpaste" type tube. You could even get ones that could print using coloured ink. The process was simple, quick, clean and easy to use. All you had to watch for was paper jams and over inking. Cured by slowing the printer down. We used to use one for a monthly community newspaper printed on three sheets of American foolscap two thousand copies. Generally we had the lot printed in a day. |
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16th Mar 2018, 1:10 am | #47 | ||
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
Once they had enough subscribers you could nominate them for all toll calls, so 050 disappeared except for the 0508 toll-free numbers which are still around. CLEAR got bought out by Telstra to become TelstraClear, and then eventually by Vodafone NZ. Quote:
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16th Mar 2018, 8:25 am | #48 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
You can still get copiers that use a drum and master system I had one a few years ago.
Risograph make them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risograph John |
16th Mar 2018, 10:10 am | #49 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Thinking of obsolete photocopier-type technology, there was a precursor to the Fax-machine called a Fultograph: it used a chemically-treated paper which contained starch and something (potassium iodide?). The paper was slowly drawn across an earthed metal platen (providing the vertical component of the 'scan') while an electrode was moved back and forth horizontally across the surface. Applying DC to the electrode caused the dissociation of the chemical releasing elemental Iodine, which stained the starch in the paper.
I know it was used in some WWII-era ASDIC-type systems as the display, because CRTs of the time didn't have the required persistence to display several minutes of the classic "PING!.....pip.........PING!.....pip........PING!. ....pip" as you chased your U-boat. It also reappeared in the 1950s as "Mufax" by Muirhead&co. this time with the paper wrapped round a rotating drum, and was used extensively to transmit weather-maps to airfields etc. I remember seeing one in use at Manchester airport some time in the mid/late-1960s (other family members were more interested in trying to see The Beatles who were flying in that day). |
16th Mar 2018, 10:57 am | #50 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
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16th Mar 2018, 11:01 am | #51 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Telex (Teleprinters)...
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16th Mar 2018, 11:22 am | #52 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
A social club I belonged to had a manually-operated Gestetner for printing its monthly newsletter. it was kept in a spare room at my house for a while until we discovered the joys of offset litho: no more taking turns at turning the crank on bulletin evening! I remember the toothpaste-type tube of black ink it had to be fed with. I still have a bottle of the correcting fluid you could use to make corrections to the stencils somewhere.
AFAIR dot matrix printers are still being manufactured, and now cost several hundred pounds. It was mentioned on a thread on this forum some years ago that they were being used by tattoo artists for making stencils. The Roneo works at Romford have long since disappeared, but the name lingers on: the road junction it was on a corner of is still called "Roneo Corner". |
16th Mar 2018, 12:18 pm | #53 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
They used to have a factory at South Marston just outside Swindon for this sort of thing: a bit of a comedown from the days when the same factory was churning out Spitfires! [Vickers having taken over Supermarine some time in the late-1940s: to this day the South Marston rugby-club is still called "Supermarine RFC"]. What was the Vickers factory is now a general industrial-estate, but there is a "Supermarine Road" there to remind people of its past. |
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16th Mar 2018, 12:43 pm | #54 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Electronic Organisers now, like so many other things, replaced by the Smart Phone.
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16th Mar 2018, 1:25 pm | #55 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Filofaxes.
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16th Mar 2018, 2:16 pm | #56 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
8-track
I know - somebody loves them, but they were never really good enough to bother with. David
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16th Mar 2018, 2:25 pm | #57 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
And those desktop rotating alphabetic file-index things people used to have to store their phone-numbers and customer/supplier data in.
Rolodex? Yes, thats what I remember them being called. You turned a knob on the side and the cards flipped-over like the flaps in the old mechanical-electric digital clocks Another bit of now-utterly-obsolete technology: Book-style Encyclopedias! Redundant now, along with their 1990s replacement, "Microsoft Encarta". Who also remembers Autoroute? Made obsolete by the appearance of satnavs (themselves being rapidly displaced by the ubiquity of GPS-enabled phones). |
16th Mar 2018, 2:30 pm | #58 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
One my my college tutors used to work installing computers in offices.
He mentioned daisywheel printers normally needed acoustic cabinets or put in a separate print room as they were so loud in operation. 8 tracks had the odd advantage of being a standard for quad recordings, which used a number of matrixing systems, which meant users were either tied to releases using one method, or buying a lot of expensive equipment. |
16th Mar 2018, 2:44 pm | #59 |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Widening that out a bit, I have a Kindle Ereader and run a Kindle app on my PC's and Smart Phone. There's nothing to beat the feel of a book or even a sheet of paper in your hands though.
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16th Mar 2018, 2:59 pm | #60 | |
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Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.
Quote:
Chris
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