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Comment by jumpkick | Hacker News Reader

Ironic, the picture on this article appears to be AI generated. I thought the Sony CD player looked neat, and I'd never seen one like it before. I thought I might try to buy one on eBay, that's how cool I thought it was. But Google says "Digital fingerprints embedded within the file verify that this is an artificially generated rendering."

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Yeah, bit shameful, I also got curious about the walkman-look-alike, but then I saw the reflection on the CD which seemed out of place, I think it's supposed to reflect the roof of the cover, but instead seems to reflect behind "the camera", kind of gave it away :/

The Walkman D-E220 is kind of close though, so not completely far away, but their CD players weren't so toy-y and rounded it seems.

I (genuinely) want to try the mouse with a giant scroll ball inside its single button.

There are a couple that come pretty close to that among the ones on this page of old trackball mice:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/trackball_history_2.html

There are three different photos on that page, so do scroll down and look at the other ones that are there beyond the first picture.

There’s also links to other pages on the site with even more models and history.

Also, if you’ve never seen/tried a trackball mouse, modern variants exist too. I have two different wireless ones that I bought really cheap on AliExpress that I use a lot and am really happy with. The two I have charge via USB-C and connect via Bluetooth. And even though I bought very cheap ones, the battery goes for many days before I have to charge them again.

The school Macs had the Mighty Mouse with the tiny trackball for scrolling. It was my first time seeing a Mac, but I always thought there had to be a setting somewhere that would let you move the cursor around with it. Spent many computer lab hours looking for it.

My eye went to the labeled floppy disk, since no floppy regularly used for more than a week ever had that pristine of a label on it, and there’s no practical reason you’d use floppy disks over flash drives or burned CDs today. (And why would you write 1998 on it?) Alas, none of us will be able to tell before too long.

It seems plausible, at least, that the floppy has such a pristine label because the kids didn’t end up using it. Even if I was a kid and into retro games I don’t think I’d care to play my parents’ saves. (Not to say I have any strong belief that this is a non-AI image).

I was thinking that the writing is upside down. Very wrong IMHO to write on a floppy disk that way.

He is a technologist as stated.

I thought it was fishy, but the text on one of the CD cases gave it away

Yeah that is a bit of a disappointing mislead with this being an article about retro-tech.

I was hoping it was a display of some of the mix tapes or other peripherals they were using.

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