Old tech you'd love to get a hold of

[Niggernerd]

IBM 5100

 

[Some JERK]

I'd sell the souls of several small children for a CRAY-1 supercomputer:


Them benches tho.

 

[Spooky Bones]

I'd like an old school terminal, plug it into the serial port of my Linux box just to screw around with, write some code and play nethack or whatever. I used plenty of them back in the day but not at home...just for the sake of novelty nostalgia it would be kind of cool.

 

[sasazuka]

I Already have ahold of a VHS Camcorder (General Electric Images CG681 to be exact - Yes, a GE Product made when Bob was still working at GE.), but I Really want one of these JVC S-VHS Camcorders just for the novelty of owning one.
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I'd definitely love to get my hands on a Victor Model rather than the JVC Version though lol

I was going to ask if that's the exact same model of JVC videocamera used by Marty McFly in Back to the Future but I suppose it isn't if it's S-VHS which I don't think existed until the early 1990s (if I'm not mistaken). It's the same general aesthetic at least.

I'd like an old school terminal, plug it into the serial port of my Linux box just to screw around with, write some code and play nethack or whatever. I used plenty of them back in the day but not at home...just for the sake of novelty nostalgia it would be kind of cool.

My father had one of those things at home. I remember I actually typed a grade 6 book report using one, although I hadn't yet learned how to touch type so it probably took me a whole afternoon to write a couple of paragraphs. He printed it out at work. Handing in printed assignments in elementary school was pretty rare back in 1987, I have no idea what my teachers thought of it.

 

[Tour of Italy]

Not old, but discontinued: I kind of regret not buying a Steam Controller in 2018 when Valve had them on clearance with a game included. I had literally just bought Hollow Knight on sale but if I hadn’t I would have gotten it bundled with the controller.

Shit, maybe it was a steam link bundle actually? In that case who cares.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I'd like an old school terminal, plug it into the serial port of my Linux box just to screw around with, write some code and play nethack or whatever. I used plenty of them back in the day but not at home...just for the sake of novelty nostalgia it would be kind of cool.

I've got a fairly recent, though well-used, terminal- green phosphor, not quite as sexy as amber. Runs great with a USB-serial unit and very high serial speeds. Nethack is a bit of a stretch, although I am a very poor player even when I can tell a crocodile from a newt.

One can still buy NIB Wyse-65's which are probably the apex of 'normal' terminal engineering, if not that visually appealing. I hate to think what the price would be on something more unusual in good working condition..

 

[Remove Goat]

There's a lot of undeniably neat shit Pamperchu has that I wouldn't mind having myself, but the mere idea of owning something he once did makes me retroactively ill. Ain't enough Lysol and bleach in the world that'd make his shit feel clean.

That Apollo-era memory bank was gorgeous.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

A nixie tube clock and watch

 

[Shibaru]

I was going to ask if that's the exact same model of JVC videocamera used by Marty McFly in Back to the Future but I suppose it isn't if it's S-VHS which I don't think existed until the early 1990s (if I'm not mistaken). It's the same general aesthetic at least.

It is Actually, S-VHS Was around in 1985; the Camera was released in 1984.

i'm guessing it released before they began filming and they thought it would look cool for Marty to have in the movie.

 

[Stasi]

A couple of people have already mentioned but I'd like to nab a cassette player to mess around with for nostalgia. A good Walkman is pretty expensive on eBay though.

I dont know why but I have never seen one in a charity shop, would expect there are a crap load floating around but no. Maybe people just dumped them as soon as CD players got popular. Same thing for games actually here in the UK. Very rare to find anything from the PS1 era in the wild even though it was wildly popular back in the day.

 

[Pissmaster]

I dont know why but I have never seen one in a charity shop, would expect there are a crap load floating around but no. Maybe people just dumped them as soon as CD players got popular. Same thing for games actually here in the UK. Very rare to find anything from the PS1 era in the wild even though it was wildly popular back in the day.

PS1 games are still relatively common in America, but they are drying up. 9/10 of the PS1 games you'll find these days are old sports games now.

It'll be surreal to see the day when that's the case with PS2 games. They're still available in enough abundance to fill several shelves at Half Price Books. Gamecube's already drying up, though.

As for cassette tape players, I think people tended to hold onto them until they broke. They still had a big advantage over CD players in that you could exercise with them attached to your clothes and not have them skip, and they were smaller and lasted longer on batteries. Anti-skip CD players didn't really help that much, either, so there was no real absolute replacement until MP3 players got popular after the iPod in 2001.

edit: I watch TechMoan and am vaguely aware the rest of the world used Minidiscs between cassette tapes and MP3s, to solve cassette's inherent problems while providing CD's benefits, but to this day I still have no idea why Minidisc never took off in the USA.

 

[The Real SVP]

one of these JVC S-VHS Camcorders

For how much do those sell? I still have the JVC version in good condition in a box in the basement. I would not mind restoring it, if I could sell it for more than I paid for it new.

Edit: The ones in your pictures, and mine, are VHS-C, though.

 

[Shibaru]

For how much do those sell? I still have the JVC version in good condition in a box in the basement. I would not mind restoring it, if I could sell it for more than I paid for it new.

Edit: The ones in your pictures, and mine, are VHS-C, though.

They're go for about the Late $200's, Early $300's on Ebay.

 

[sasazuka]

They're go for about the Late $200's, Early $300's on Ebay.

For specifying vague amounts of money, "high $200's, low $300's" is more commonly used. "Late [round number]'s" and "early [round number]'s" is usually used for decades or centuries.

PS1 games are still relatively common in America, but they are drying up. 9/10 of the PS1 games you'll find these days are old sports games now.

It'll be surreal to see the day when that's the case with PS2 games. They're still available in enough abundance to fill several shelves at Half Price Books. Gamecube's already drying up, though.

When I started looking for games at thrift stores in 2011, even Dreamcast games were still fairly common, although nothing too valuable or rare like Skies of Arkadia. I still see the occasional original Playstation game on the shelves

PS2 games haven't yet started to dry up at thrift stores but more of them are ending up in the "showcase" (enclosed display area where they take your item to the checkout) especially JRPGs. I think it'll be another few years before all the PS2 games left on the unsecured shelves are the annual sports titles and various editions of Guitar Hero.

edit: I watch TechMoan and am vaguely aware the rest of the world used Minidiscs between cassette tapes and MP3s, to solve cassette's inherent problems while providing CD's benefits, but to this day I still have no idea why Minidisc never took off in the USA.

I think people in general didn't want to re-buy their albums yet again on another new format only a decade or so after they had already re-bought albums on CD, especially when the sound quality of Minidiscs was supposed to be a step down from CD (even if it's supposedly only in the range that human ears can't hear anyway).

I can't speak for American record stores but I don't think HMV in Canada had much confidence in Minidisc as a format as I don't remember seeing any special Minidisc section at HMV, like perhaps there was a Minidisc rack in a small nook in the store but I think even cassettes still had more rack space at HMV than Minidisc ever got in the mid-1990s. (I'm not sure about the Minidisc selection at HMV in the UK or Japan or any other part of the world that had HMV at the time.)

 

[Pissmaster]

When I started looking for games at thrift stores in 2011, even Dreamcast games were still fairly common, although nothing too valuable or rare like Skies of Arkadia. I still see the occasional original Playstation game on the shelves

PS2 games haven't yet started to dry up at thrift stores but more of them are ending up in the "showcase" (enclosed display area where they take your item to the checkout) especially JRPGs. I think it'll be another few years before all the PS2 games left on the unsecured shelves are the annual sports titles and various editions of Guitar Hero.

Wait, Skies of Arcadia's rare and valuable?

https://www.pricecharting.com/game/sega-dreamcast/skies-of-arcadia

Shieeeeet. I have a (complete) copy of that I barely ever played. Aw yeah.

I think people in general didn't want to re-buy their albums yet again on another new format only a decade or so after they had already re-bought albums on CD, especially when the sound quality of Minidiscs was supposed to be a step down from CD (even if it's supposedly only in the range that human ears can't hear anyway).

I can't speak for American record stores but I don't think HMV in Canada had much confidence in Minidisc as a format as I don't remember seeing any special Minidisc section at HMV, like perhaps there was a Minidisc rack in a small nook in the store but I think even cassettes still had more rack space at HMV than Minidisc ever got in the mid-1990. (I'm not sure about the Minidisc selection at HMV in the UK or Japan or any other part of the world that had HMV at the time.)

Retail minidiscs weren't really much of a thing, they did exist but mostly the format was made for copying your music onto blank ones. So I guess they might not have been much of a thing here due to pressure from the RIAA, maybe? Since in the early 2000s, they were a big ol' boogieman, ready to sue you for millions of dollars per song.

I'd really like to know what happened to those people I heard about that got sued for some enormous amounts of money for just downloading songs on Napster. I remember some really crazy fearmongering stories back in the day. Or if those stories were even true at all.

 

[Niggernerd]

PC 9800 to play aesthetic hentai games

 

[murgatroid]

I miss how in the ol' days you could get varying levels of shitty reception and static but sometimes you could still watch tv through that. Nowadays you either get the channel or it's pretty much unwatchable.

I miss how early non-hd video games looked playing on a tube tv. It's just not the same playing on a modern HD tv with black bars on the sides. Thankfully there's a fad of rereleasing HD versions of old games. Picked up the HD re-releases ico/shadow of the collasus and okami recently.

 

[Niggernerd]

I miss how in the ol' days you could get varying levels of shitty reception and static but sometimes you could still watch tv through that. Nowadays you either get the channel or it's pretty much unwatchable.

[channel unavailable please contact your service provider] pisses me off more than static ever could.

 

[PumpkinSpiceBitchMeringue]

I miss using a typewriter. I can just write whatever without a printer.

 

[ForgedBlades]

A mint Turbo Express.