Old tech you'd love to get a hold of

[Chester Rigby]

Floppy disks. I know they were kinda bad as storage units, but I totally love its appearance. And the vaporwave fad increased that love.

SSDs or external hard drives shaped like floppys would be cool.

 

[Ascendancy0]

One of these watches.

 

[Sperghetti]

This thread is making me appreciate the fact that I'm some kind of weird hoarder, particularly when it comes to technology. I guess my main wish is that we hadn't given away the flat-screen CRT, and that it was easier to find someone who could properly repair a few old film cameras. And maybe a functioning battery for my old clamshell iBook.

Floppy disks. I know they were kinda bad as storage units, but I totally love its appearance. And the vaporwave fad increased that love.

SSDs or external hard drives shaped like floppys would be cool.

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I've always wondered why nobody ever made labels for SD cards that would make them look like little floppy disks. It would be cute.

 

[murgatroid]

Dont forget both the PS2 and Gamecube had something like this.
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Yeah, except those all sucked ass. The lcd that was packaged with the new model PS1 was designed specifically for the console and was made my Sony so it wasn't a complete piece of washed out crap like the copycats.

 

[Pee Cola]

One of these bad boys.

 

[murgatroid]

I was a huge fan of the Gameboy Pocket but loathed the terrible screen. Still have my Gameboy Pocket to this day. They released a backlit version in Japan only called the Gameboy Light that had a backlight color similar to the ones on those watches that could light up.

I always watched them on Ebay looking for a deal but either never found one or it wasn't worth the price for me. I remember in recent years ones in OK condition being around $80 and great condition ones $100 and up but I never bit the bullet and bought one.

 

[AmpleApricots]

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.

Lots of these are actually seriously slow, too slow for some more modern ncurses (and the like) based interfaces that were written without there being a bandwidth in mind that permanently redraw parts of the screen for no reason whatsoever. I know because I use an ARM computer as sort of server with various old computers as Terminal and many of them only get up to about the speed of an original VT100. Otherwise some of that software is quite feature-rich .For 68k Macs there's even software that supports sixels and for the Amiga and those old Mac there are a few programs that support drawing tektronix style line drawing, which to this day still works with gnuplot. xterm is the only modern linux software terminal I know that can do both sixels and tektronix style drawing and has support for a big color palette. Linux' kernel console is pretty rudimentary re: features really. It's a pity because using a computer away from graphical enviroments is quite possible and can be pretty productive even.

There are projects that do a hardware Terminal via Microcontroller and give composite/VGA output and support an USB or PS/2 Keyboard. if it's mostly about the CRT feeling you could get one of these and hook them up to an old CRT TV or Monitor which still are a dime a dozen (if you don't want a specific one) and probably in better condition than any terminal from back then. Some are only very primitive VT100 style emulation and don't support even color at all though. I use such an approach to have graphics for an Z180 based computer I clobbered together.

 

[Distant Stare]

Spoiler: Prussa Mendel 3D printer from the early 2000s

 

[tehpope]

One of these bad boys.

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Was Sir Clive ahead of the curve with this? The 8 Bit Guy said he's imported one of these things from the UK, so I guess we'll see.

My dad had got me this Franklin Bookman electronic Bible as a Christmas gift when I was a kid. It's a pretty primitive e-reader, but I thought it was great back then. It's easy enough to track one down, I've just been in that mindset of wanting an old nostalgic piece of tech, but not wanting it enough to spend money on.

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I remember the local Chistian store we had in town had a few Wisdom Tree games for rental. One of them being the King James Bible on Gameboy. Its really not interesting as you can see when AVGN looked at it in his final Bible Games video.

 

[Pee Cola]

Was Sir Clive ahead of the curve with this?

In some ways, I believe so. Although the biggest issue Sir Clive had was that he tried pitching the C5 as a serious commuter vehicle rather than as a fun recreational vehicle; much in the same way that e-bikes are marketed today. Had his ambitions been a little more realistic, the C5 may have fared better IMHO. Sir Clive had a major bug up his arse about being taken seriously, most likely as a result of his rivalry with Chris Curry of Acorn Computers. The BBC Micro was seen as a serious computer whereas the ZX Spectrum was seen as a toy (albeit a highly entertaining one).

The 8 Bit Guy said he's imported one of these things from the UK, so I guess we'll see.

Sounds like Dave from EEVBlog has also managed to get his hands on a C5. Apparently they're still relatively easy to find in the UK, but shipping stuff from Britbongistan to the Colonies can be a bit of a killer.

 

[tehpope]

Sir Clive had a major bug up his arse about being taken seriously, most likely as a result of his rivalry with Chris Curry of Acorn Computers. The BBC Micro was seen as a serious computer whereas the ZX Spectrum was seen as a toy (albeit a highly entertaining one).

I've heard that. Ironic that Alan Sugar knew the CPC was going to be used as a gaming machine and did setup Amsoft to produce titles. He did also try and pose it as a work machine as well. Ironic since he bought Sinclair up once the c5 and QL flopped.

 

[Officer Eradicate]

whilst not very old, It would pretty cool to have that Resident Evil Chainsaw controller

 

[Pee Cola]

I've heard that. Ironic that Alan Sugar knew the CPC was going to be used as a gaming machine and did also try and pose it as a work machine as well.

The best bit about the Alan Sugar connection is that Lord Sugar himself used to buy Sir Clive's rejected components back in the Sinclair Radionics days. I'm not sure how much of an impact this had on Amstrad's rep for producing some of the shittiest non-Chinese "hi-fi" gear ever made, but it can't have helped.

Ironic since he bought Sinclair up once the c5 and QL flopped.

The QL was Sir Clive's attempt to be taken seriously as a computer manufacturer. For extra irony, Acorn nearly went under when they tried to compete with the Speccy with the (belatedly released) Electron. IIRC Olivetti stepped in and bought up Acorn in the same way that Amstrad bought up Sinclair ... and if Olivetti hadn't done that, the ARM chip probably wouldn't exist (another few hours worth of sperging there).

"Micro Men" is worth a watch. It's a dramatised retelling of the Sinclair vs Acorn wars of the early '80s.

Edit: found a link to Micro Men

 

[Get_your_kicks_with_30-06]

I'd love to get my hands on a mechanical calculator either the old hand crank ones or the electrically driven ones that were competing with digital calculators.

There is something profoundly amazing and inspiring in a machine that does arithmetic with a variety of gears, levers, and a drive shaft.

This guy collects them and has some cool vids on them:

 

[A Grey Cat]

It's not much but I'd love to get my hands on a genuine 1980s boom box with a tape player inside. Like the one my namesake kicked over in part 8

 

[Pickle Dick]

I've lately been interested in collecting and messing with old computers, in spite of their relatively slow speeds even on the oldest of operating systems.

-powerlevel start-

Case in point, I've recently purchased an eMac (basically a larger iMac G3 with a flat CRT instead of a curvy one) from an eBay auction for just $50 including shipping. It has a 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 processor, and fit with the most ram it could have (2 GB). I've been using it for a while now and have enjoyed messing with several old apps (especially since its running Tiger, which provides support for pre-OS X apps), and the fact that some school might've used it long ago.

-powerlevel end-

That said, any recommendations for other neat vintage computers I could possibly get?

 

[Exceptionally Exceptional]

A Cray X-MP supercomputer. Yeah, I know it'd probably be shittier than my phone, but it'd still be badass to own one.

 

[Pee Cola]

any recommendations for other neat vintage computers I could possibly get?

A C64 is pretty much mandatory (assuming you don't already have one). My understanding is that they're cheap and easy to find at yard sales, thrift stores, Craigslist etc.

 

[Pissmaster]

whilst not very old, It would pretty cool to have that Resident Evil Chainsaw controller
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I actually have one, that very model. The Gamecube ones are yellow while the PS2 ones are orange.

It's supposed to do something special when you actually play it with RE4 PS2, but I never actually tried it, I didn't actually own RE4 on PS2 for some time. I eventually did get a copy, but never did bother checking out exactly what it does, since the controller's pretty hard to put back in its display box.



The chainsaw itself has a jack on the bottom for an included male-to-male PS2 controller plug, which is stored in that little drawer on the right. The drawer is JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUST the perfect size to squeeze that cable in there and absolutely nothing else, so you have to pack it back up just right to get it to close. The chainsaw blade itself also has a little loose piece of foam to keep it in place where it sticks out of the box, so that's something you also have to carefully wedge back in, or else it'll rattle around if you move it and might scratch the blade. The controller part, well, works, but you can imagine how it's not exactly comfortable. The buttons are a little stiff, but clicky and nice. You can also pull the ripcord, and I think it acts as a special input only RE4 recognizes (not sure though).

I wish more novelty controllers like that would be produced.

 

[Kosher Dill]

That said, any recommendations for other neat vintage computers I could possibly get?

The answer to this is always going to be "Whichever one you care enough about to keep the cartload of hardware around for and collect a significant amount of software for". Unless you're going to set aside an entire garage for retrocomputing, it's probably more practical to do a VM, emulation, or an FPGA rather than keeping all those aging single-purpose parts around in most cases.

My personal boondoggles are a Pentium-100 and a P3-800 that I play with old or foreign operating systems on, and the peripherals are mostly interchangeable between those two. You can just about fit it all on a desk. But if it's, like, one of those old Japanese PCs that I just want to play one game on, I'll emulate.