ITT weird tech you have seen

Troon Draugur said:
They're... not great. :/ It's a neat gimmick but kind of annoying to use after a while. I'll have to see if I still have mine, I got it from work for £2.00.
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Can't be any worse than those flat keyboards on the newer Macbooks that have to rely on haptics for the illusion of key travel.

In a world where cell phones can 3D model your face and use that for authentication, you'd think a good laser keyboard could be possible

Kosher Dill said:
Yeah yeah, that's nice, but let me know when you're ready to upgrade to a professional Iomega product with up to 230MB of space.

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whjy did they name a computer after the guy from maniac mansion day of the tentacle
 
Pissmaster said:
Can't be any worse than those flat keyboards on the newer Macbooks that have to rely on haptics for the illusion of key travel.
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Much as it frosts my balls to say so, the newest 16" i9-equipped Macbook is actually really good. Just twice as expensive as it should be. I stress-tested the shit out of one recently at work and until I got to silly jobs that aren't really for laptop form factor machines, it didn't even thermal throttle. The only complaint I had was that shitty touchbar, which always was and will be an abomination.

Pissmaster said:
In a world where cell phones can 3D model your face and use that for authentication, you'd think a good laser keyboard could be possible
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To be fair, the one I have(had?) is a few years old, they may have improved substantially but at the time, it was strictly for "hunt and peck" style typers.
 
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Pissmaster said:
I've always wanted to try a keyboard like that



I had several, they were designed to be bendable but would short out if you bent them more than a couple of times

what pieces of shit they were

oh also i had a radio you could plug into the game link port of a GBC, it actually worked and was powered from there but ofc sound fidelity wasn't great. kind of a neat idea but I never used it more than like once

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I think I had one of these.

Weirder to me is the subtle details of this older style blister packaging. Those fucking ridges man. 11 year old me cranking down on the scissors to try and bust through that big-ass seam. The hard plastic digging into your hand when you think you’ve cut it enough to start tearing.

I’ve never seen a picture that I could feel before.
 
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I'v seen this beuaty:
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it's an 80's era specialized computer for desktop publishing, called Poltype. It came with a huge-ass keyboard with various characters needed in DTP.
I think it was produced in very small numbers, because there's almost no pics or information about it on the internets, and the rapid progress of personal computers capabilities in the 90's made specialised machines like that obsolete, so AFAIK the company making those folded quickly
 
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I was bored and paging through an old office manual to find one of these things staring back at me. The one in the book was actually even older and even more primitive. I'd take a picture of the book but unfortunately I gave it to a friend who does office work as a novelty gift. I imagine having one of these things on hand was probably a blast back in the day, but I would never be able to use this thing now.
 
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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.
sDB_LTO8-Drive-LFOneTape_mobile.jpg

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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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.
sDB_LTO8-Drive-LFOneTape_mobile.jpg

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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Honestly, speed isn't an issue for tapes. Its primary use is for backups where Longevity and Reliability is more of a concern (even more so in regulated industries such as healthcare where records are to be kept for close to or exceeding a decade by law).
 
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stupidpieceofshit said:
Honestly, speed isn't an issue for tapes. Its primary use is for backups where Longevity and Reliability is more of a concern (even more so in regulated industries such as healthcare where records are to be kept for close to or exceeding a decade by law).
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Education says hi. Having to keep every record of every student for ONE HUNDRED years means you wind up with tape libraries straight out of a 1980s sci fi movie, and room upon room of paper backups filling old buildings "just in case". Moving those records can be a weeks-long process and lord help you if a tape goes missing.
 
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Rarest/weirdest I've used was a very early pre-VR handtracking device named the Viber that I can't find any images of online. Imagine two analog sticks with tensioned strings on reels inside them and wrist cuffs on the end of the strings. This is mounted in a giant suitcase/amp looking device that sits on the floor. You stand over it with the cuffs on and it tracks your hands' positions by the tension on the strings and which direction the sticks are being pulled. The thing hooked up to an Amiga and I don't remember much more about it, just that it was really cool to early-teen me back in 1994ish. Given how simple the tech was it worked well for the limited usage case of one-directional handtracking without orientation.

Daddy's Little Kitten said:
Those are cute, but I doubt they sound good.

How do you hold this?
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I had one of these in highschool. They're worth $150+ nowadays for whatever reason.

You hold it with your hands much lower than you'd expect because there are four double-rocker switches on the back of each grip. Typing on the thing isn't that difficult after an hour or so and you get used to it pretty quickly, but what you don't get used to is that fucking trackball which is so bad it will kill your interest in using the thing before you even learn to use it.
 
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ducktales4gameboy said:
Rarest/weirdest I've used was a very early pre-VR handtracking device named the Viber that I can't find any images of online. Imagine two analog sticks with tensioned strings on reels inside them and wrist cuffs on the end of the strings. This is mounted in a giant suitcase/amp looking device that sits on the floor. You stand over it with the cuffs on and it tracks your hands' positions by the tension on the strings and which direction the sticks are being pulled. The thing hooked up to an Amiga and I don't remember much more about it, just that it was really cool to early-teen me back in 1994ish. Given how simple the tech was it worked well for the limited usage case of one-directional handtracking without orientation.
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I remember trying a kick-ass SGI VR system in 96-97 at a job fair and it was really, really impressive. Not only six degrees of freedom but room scale as well, I remember walking around then getting down on my hands and knees to look at the underside of a couch. Then sticking my head through a wall just to see what would happen. It was meant for visualization, to get a feel for what architecture would look like if you as a customer or designer were looking at the final product. Really impressive, at the time it was such a novelty that I didn't even wonder how they managed the tracking.
 
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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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Hundreds of terabytes? The highest capacity I'm aware of for a single tape cartridge currently in production and actually available to buy is LTO-8, at 12TB per cartridge. LTO-9 (18TB) is supposedly "released" as of September 8, 2020, but I can't find any drives or tapes for sale yet.

LTO-8 isn't particularly slow. Uncompressed read/write is claimed to be 360MB/sec (LTO-9 is 400MB/sec).

It's expensive as fuck, though. Refurb LTO-8 drives are ~$3k, new ones are ~$4k+, and LTO-8 tapes are about $100 each. This keeps magnetic tape storage out of consumers' reach and essentially the exclusive purview of mid- to large-sized businesses.

Can't wait to see how ridiculous the prices are on LTO-9 drives and tapes once they start shipping. LTO-10 is announced but not finished yet, but is planned to hold 36TB per cartridge and have read/write speeds of 1,100MB/sec(!).
 
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