Our favorite "forgotten tech"
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Around the same time I was trying to run BeOS as my desktop. I would have liked to have developed for it, but at the time I was just barely grasping Python and C++ with threading really wasn't within reach for me. I'm happy Haiku has been getting press and may try to run it in a VM (haven't had much luck with that in the past) but there was something really liberating about running an OS on the metal that booted in ten seconds. Everything was so snappy. Of course, you couldn't do much with it, but what you could do, you could do really well. :)
Unlike the article's love of ZIP drives. I liked ZIP drives like my first car, it got me places I couldn't go before and left me stranded there multiple times. ZIPs were not very reliable.
I had another Rio that played off SmartMedia as well.
At one point I refused to get an iPod because it didn't have gapless playback so I got a Rio Karma instead. It was pretty good, but it has literally disintegrated while in storage.
--
Went through way too many PDAs also. Several paper Daytimers (which were pretty expensive at the time), Sharp Wizard clamshell, Casio Windows CE, Palm, Handspring, and a Toshiba e800. The e800 was an interesting disappointment - it was the first to have a VGA screen, but it was also crippled by a horrible Windows Mobile OS.
Extending the PDA thing, I went through a couple of Windows Mobile phones, an Audiovox SMT5600 and an HTC Excalibur. Good devices hampered by a crappy OS. On a side note, I've been quite impressed by the Windows Phone OS.
The iPhone is probably the first PDA that I have used consistently for an extended period of time.
--
EDIT: I forgot that I actually had the original Newton message pad and one of its successors too. I remember buying the original Graffiti software from the company that would eventually become Palm. Holy crap, I bought a lot e-junk in my lifetime.
I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was the one pictured in the article. I dumped the component quite some time ago. I can't bring myself to throw the portable away -- I've got tons of archives of my old college radio show on MiniDisc in a closet.
That particular portable depicted in the article was one of the last MD portables at all before Sony decided to pack it in; I think it came out in 2002. It had a USB input, and you could use your PC to push music onto a disk. It suffered from the classic Sony problem that they own a record label and they also make stuff that can copy music, so they made using it a complete pain in the ass in some misguided effort to protect their own interests.
You had to use the bundled NetMD software, which would transcode MP3s to the proprietary ATRAC compression format. Then you had to "check out" the songs to the device, in which case they could not be put on any other device until they were checked back in. It encrypted the stuff as it sent it down, and you could not get any digital audio back off the device -- USB was only one-way and it had optical SP/DIF in but not out.
Trackballs. Back around 1996, optical trackballs came onto the market, a few years ahead of optical mice. Using an optical trackball was a smooth dream compared to the clunky hair-clogged mechanical rollers of mice. And the unfamiliar device was a great deterrent for college mates trying to grab and use my machine, heh.
Trackballs still exist, but are about as unsexy as any piece of computer technology these days. Logitech and Microsoft haven't made any significant updates in years. Trackballs are seen mostly as lame mouse alternatives for RSI sufferers or some such. And a laser mouse is faster than a trackball for desktop usage, but for lying down on the couch with a laptop, there's no pointing device that can match a good thumb trackball.
On another topic, the article mentions the NES and its odd cartridge slot. Do folks here know why that came to be? The design was to make the NES look less like the older Atari and Intellivision systems (which had just endured a famous industrywide crash) and more like the form factor of the nascent and successful VCR.
Finally, in the software category: DesQView. I spent many hours running DesQView for DOS multitasking, with a BBS download going in one window, an offline mail program in another, and a MOD music player in a third.
But they were fantastic. I loved them.
Trackballs are especially useful in a cramped desk space situation.
TBH the Nspire CAS is large, clunky, complicated, unintuitive, eats batteries and is not a whole lot faster or more functional than a TI89.
I still however, use a TI86 all the time out of choice as the stat graphing is great (I mainly use it for regression analysis), it does base-N very well, has conversions built in, has a good solver and the programming language is simple enough to fit in my head.
I have a fairly large set of programs I've developed for the TI86 as well for dealing with navigation/triangulation/mapping.
To do a linreg on some data and project that past the extents of the dataset requires...
NSpire: create document, create spreadsheet, enter data, create stats plot, analyse->regression->linreg, create graph, plot stat func, set zoom constraints, whack X value in, read Y.
That's just shit, student or not.
TI-86: {1,2,3,4}->xStat, {3,6,8,10}->yStat, catalog->LinReg, Graph, zoom, enter X, done.
Probably right about it not being the right tool.
Anyone want to buy an NSpire CAS? £30 including delivery to the UK :)
Stuff that does maths doesn't really get old or forgotten.
I still consider it a ripof, considering that it bash about 7mhz and just a few kilobytes of ram.
Developing on floppy disks also taught me about embedded applications and operating systems. I built some weird stuff. Floppy routers, floppy X11 net terminals, memory-resident openMosix clusters, voice-activated car entertainment and navigation systems, rescue disks, minimal network packet filters, system management daemons, even CGI applications in C (which turns out to be a horrible idea).
Once we went to high school, he had upgraded to a 10MB Cider HD, which at that time cost like $1K.
The one thing in that list that I'm sad to have missed was minidisc. It still sets off my nastolgia meter.
What about dial-up modems, IRQ settings, and serial ports?
We used to use a minidisc recorder and a pair of PZMs to record all our rehersals - It then took about a week to rip and burn them onto CD, but a few good ideas were saved/salvedged in this way.
+++ ATH
Does the author imply that Nullsoft was acquired after WASTE's release ? Because I am almost certain Nullsoft was already a part of AOL at that time (and that the waste source code was online for a very short time before being pulled of).
Confirmed by wikipedia: Nullsoft was acquired in 1999 and WASTE released in 2003 (Justin Frankel left Nullsoft/AOL that same year).
http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm
People used to be amazed when I showed them how much real work you could get done with a Handspring Visor and a Stowaway keyboard. It kind of amazes me that today we have portable devices that are a thousand times more powerful than the old PalmOS devices, but only feel really useful for consuming media, not creating it. Shows you the importance of input devices in the creative process, I guess.
There were dozens in any medium sized city, all with different flavours. They hosted ANSI art, message boards, walls(!) and online games. Exactly like Facebook, but 20 years earlier.
They disappeared in the late 90's as the internet became popular.