ITT weird tech you have seen

gangweedfan said:
So it seems magnetic tape is still a thing in 2021. it can hold hundreds of terabytes of data and is much cheaper than hard drives and solid state drives. The only downside of course is that its slow as hell.
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Pic related is a magnetic tape cartridge and and reader. I wont lie it looks pretty nice, like a big cassette tape player.
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I actually own an LTO-5 drive - you can sometimes get lucky and get a used one for like $50 on ebay, but you really have to act fast when you find one, they get sold pretty quickly.
The write and read speed is about as fast as your typical HDD. It's the SEEK speed that is the problem - LTO is a linear storage format, so even if you have LTFS support (a filesystem that makes these tapes act like proper hard drives, only LTO-5 and latter drives support it), if you try to start up a file directly from tape (like a movie or something), it will rewind for like a whole minute searching for it before even loading it.
So yeah, while it's good for archival purposes (I have all my shit backed up on tape monthly), don't expect to use it as a HDD replacement. Unless you don't mind your filedump being that slow.
 
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Back when I was a little kid I had this LCD Barbie barcode scanner toy where scanning barcodes would unlock pets and objects to use when interacting with the aforementioned pets. Kinda like a hybrid between a tamagotchi and those barcode toys that boys had where scanning barcodes would unlock monsters that would battle each other and stuff.

Also as a small child growing up in a tiny house with very little privacy I thought the Girltech voice activated journal was cool as fuck, even if the voice recognition was Hey You Pikachu tier. It has a pretty interesting backstory as well, the lady who invented it really had to fight to get Girltech up and running since most of her colleagues were sexist douchebags who didn’t think girls would want to use technology at all even if it was marketed towards them (because Tamagotchis were just flukes I guess), and then when she tried to sell her one of her oh so terrible girls tech toy ideas to another company that would actually be interested they suddenly felt threatened, claimed she stole the idea from them and had her fired. So then she made Girltech and it was a very successful company, their stuff was super popular in the 2000s before Internet/smartphone use was widespread.
 
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Xarpho said:
They had one for GBC too (the Wormlight), I still have mine somewhere. They were pretty crap, they obscured the screen from above, created a sharp glare directly from above, and the rest of the screen was dark. In no situation I can ever remember having no other light to play Game Boy with except on a road trip where we were leaving at like 6 am, and even then, it felt like more trouble to work with than just to nod back off to sleep watching the lights of your city disappear as you got out of town and use it when it was daytime, you had breakfast, and your brother was up to talk with.

But as for Game Boy Color accessories, the Shock N Rock was the thing that was usually connected to the Game Boy Color, basically gave it a rechargeable battery, rumble that never worked right, and a slightly better speaker. It also felt like a "real" controller, especially to a 10-year-old. I got the image from Reddit, basically looked like this without the Pikachu and Pichu graphics on the system itself.
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The only good rumble on the Gameboy Color was Pokemon Pinball, tbh
 
My friends uncle has a bluetooth toaster not sure its weird but its very soy and cringe.
 
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I had my first encounter with one of these. I found it in a box of tech crap I was cleaning out and legitimately though it was a novelty flashdrive. Turns out its a book light, which I discorved when the damn thing just about blinded me, and that long stalk is flexible to allow you to bend the light up and over your keyboard.

Every single thing about these just seems awkward and pointless. The light is very strong though so I can't complain about that, but does anyone really use these to read by or to light their keyboard before the advent of cheap backlit keyboards?
 
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IamnottheNSA said:
I actually own an LTO-5 drive - you can sometimes get lucky and get a used one for like $50 on ebay, but you really have to act fast when you find one, they get sold pretty quickly.
The write and read speed is about as fast as your typical HDD. It's the SEEK speed that is the problem - LTO is a linear storage format, so even if you have LTFS support (a filesystem that makes these tapes act like proper hard drives, only LTO-5 and latter drives support it), if you try to start up a file directly from tape (like a movie or something), it will rewind for like a whole minute searching for it before even loading it.
So yeah, while it's good for archival purposes (I have all my shit backed up on tape monthly), don't expect to use it as a HDD replacement. Unless you don't mind your filedump being that slow.
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I found this thread specifically by searching for LTO. I find this stuff fascinating. I heard that a standard T-120 NTSC VHS tape holds 2.2 GB of data. I wonder if anyone ever made a VHS data drive?

I wonder about the practicality of LTO for personal use. I don't question the longevity but things that you must keep for many years (medical records, tax records, will, etc.) can probably fit on a DVD-R (or even a CD-R) that anyone who is into LTO probably has a 100-count spindle of sitting in their closet.
 
Shroom King said:
I wonder if anyone ever made a VHS data drive?
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Well, not the drive itself, but there were some data converter boards on the market that could use an already existing normal VHS as a data backup system - like Russian-made ArVid or Danmere Backer (LGR made a good video on it).
Shroom King said:
I wonder about the practicality of LTO for personal use. I don't question the longevity but things that you must keep for many years (medical records, tax records, will, etc.) can probably fit on a DVD-R (or even a CD-R) that anyone who is into LTO probably has a 100-count spindle of sitting in their closet.
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LTO tapes can keep data for about 30 years without it degrading, but it's really more useful for mass storage (as in when you have tens of terabytes' worth of archives).
I'm somewhat of a data hoarder, so it's good for me, but I don't think a normalfag would need that much storage. Furthermore, if you buy a used drive, it's likely going to be a SAS drive, so you'll need a SAS controller as well (luckily you can get a used one for cheap too).
 
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So I have something that I thought about recently because I was talking a buddy about crypto mining:

About 2005 to 2007 I was using a program. I think it was called RC75??? (Not sure really) it had a comic version of a cow head as logo and it was basically connected to a certain university server. This program then would download packages and open them, trying to find a key.
All while doing this your pc was quite busy because of the calculations (my pc wasn’t that powerful to say the least).
If it didn’t find a key it would download more packages if you wanted it to.
A group from the US found the key and got 10.000$.

Maybe there were other programs like these going for hidden keys but this was the only time I encountered something similar to mining, in which robuste your pc hardware to find something specific valuable.

Maybe someone here knows that program too.
 
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Billy Beer said:
I wish this thread was 1000 pages long. Old tech is ace and mental old tech is the best humanity has ever offered. The thoughts and ideas behind some of the stuff is inspiring. "How do we make a portable powerful computer that is also fun for the family, in 1980?" "I know, let's strap two amigas to a tandem bicycle, but make the bike look like a stealth fighter!"
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Modern technology is consumed by minimalism. There is zero imagination in its design. Screen? Bigger. Bezel? Smaller. Sufaces? Featureless and made of glass. It's easy to be drawn to the old because a lot of it had whimsy and innovation. Nothing is innovative anymore, it's all just "smart phone". I'm not even that old and I'm drawn to tech from my childhood or even before my time.

Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
For a while I had a portable trucker 3.5" CRT TV with radio, over the air antenna and the usual cable inputs plus a handle to carry it. I assume it was a trucker thing because I got it from one. It was like a beefy NES in size, knobs and dials took up the left side of the front and the screen was on the right side. It was pretty cool and I could lay in bed, place it on my stomach and watch tv or play SNES just for the novelty of it and the cable hell involved with doing that was acceptable for the time. It weighed maybe 4-5kg and anyone that grew up with beefy barn cats will be used to that weight laying on you in bed. The handle made it easy to put it on the floor when it was time to sleep.

Only seen one of those things once, I don't even know what to google to find a picture of a unit like that.
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Portable CRT TVs were a thing for a while, the smallest ones were super cool. I had a black and white one that looked kind of like this and stretched the definition of "portable". It took something like 6 D batteries but could also be plugged into the wall. I had too much junk though and when I moved I had to get rid of some stuff, the old not-so-portable black and white TV I never used was among those things.
 
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A Barbie-themed computer. My sister begged my dad for one way back in the day. Don't have a picture ATM. It was as nauseating to look at as it sounds like and the actual machine was laughably underpowered.
 
God's drunkest driver said:
Portable CRT TVs were a thing for a while, the smallest ones were super cool. I had a black and white one that looked kind of like this and stretched the definition of "portable". It took something like 6 D batteries but could also be plugged into the wall. I had too much junk though and when I moved I had to get rid of some stuff, the old not-so-portable black and white TV I never used was among those things.
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I had one of those(the type, not that model) for a while, truckers used them a lot and I got it from one. It had radio and an antenna for OTA TV as well as cable inputs so I used it to play Super Nintendo in bed.
 
ditto said:
Sounds like the Barbie / Hot Wheels computers that LGR repaired a while ago
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It's sort of neat that they look a children's O2, which in itself was the junior of the Octane.
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spastic_bag said:
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After making the sleek, elegant ETA 80 telephone, Iskra somehow managed to churn out this.
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Speaking of phones, I don't know how popular these were in the rest of the world.
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They might look like a gentleman's pleasure aide but they were good.
 
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