ITT weird tech you have seen

[Toolbox]

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(!).

As far as I can tell the claims of multi-hundred terabyte storage have entirely been from incredibly expensive generations of LTO or from purely not yet existing ones that have simply been put on the development roadmap. Even then that storage is typically only shown in the most extreme of possible compression.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

At a school I went to they bought a fancy solution with a "tape robot". It retrieved and deposited tapes and kept track on what was on which one while a piece of software decided what would be on tape and what would be on hard drives, it was meant to massively expand storage. Sometimes part of your network share had been swapped to tape and it suddenly took five+ minutes to open a file. It used tons of DAT tapes, or DDS to be correct.

 

[moocow]

As far as I can tell the claims of multi-hundred terabyte storage have entirely been from incredibly expensive generations of LTO or from purely not yet existing ones that have simply been put on the development roadmap. Even then that storage is typically only shown in the most extreme of possible compression.

Yeah, the compression claims are always complete horseshit. The only numbers that matter are the uncompressed capacity and uncompressed read/write performance. Cost too, of course. You can certainly get into the petabyte realm with current tape tech, but it involves robotic autoloaders and that sends costs through the roof.

LTO-9 is the latest "released" generation of LTO, though I haven't seen any drives or tapes in the wild yet. It might just be limited to "partner channels" for now or something. For lowly people without personal account reps at Quantum or HP, LTO-8 is still the newest generation that can be had.

Whether newer (not yet developed) generations actually hit their claimed numbers is always a crap shoot, and so is their development timeline. Even that chart you posted got it wrong; it claims LTO-9 is 24TB per tape, but it's really only 18TB per tape. It was probably created before LTO-9's actual working specs were finalized. We can pretty safely treat the specs of unreleased LTO generations to be "wishful thinking by the marketing department" until they're ready to demo real working hardware.

 

[Disco Inferno]

these God forsaken things.
They didn't even play a whole song. Just 30 to 60 second clips.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

No idea what Fairchild was thinking with those controllers

 

[seri0us]

Spoiler: horrible cases

View attachment 1586605View attachment 1586606

More weird cases. What do you think of them kiwis?

They look like average-sized gayming cases bred with motorcycles but in a couple years it'll turn into metal jello.

 

[Sperghetti]

I hope "USB flash drives" doesn't become an entry in this category. I don't like the idea of storage "going to the cloud".

I like keeping stuff on SD cards because I want to make a little floppy disk box for them that looks like this.

these God forsaken things.
They didn't even play a whole song. Just 30 to 60 second clips.

Even better: They actually made a recordable chip at one point (with two whole minutes of space!) that was, for some reason, branded by Yahoo.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

these God forsaken things.
They didn't even play a whole song. Just 30 to 60 second clips.

And they were the worst possible format with the worst possible quality, as if these existed purely to make a fuck-you statement to kids or something.

"what are you too poor to afford or too stupid to understand MP3 players?"

 

[Gamepad]

 

[L50LasPak]

I could shit up this whole thread with novelty landline phones but I'll do the only one that my family ever owned. At some point when I was a kid my dad got this thing as a gift from one of my relatives:

Never plugged it in. I imagine the sound quality was shit.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

RGB underwear.

Spoiler: Spoiler just in case

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

You know what, that's not gaudy enough to be a real RGB product aimed at gamers.

 

[potato fan]

these God forsaken things.
They didn't even play a whole song. Just 30 to 60 second clips.

I remember seeing that in a high end toy store. I wasn't old enough to care about music that much, but was mesmerised by the formfactor- so much smaller than audio casettes, it looke like something out of sci-fi movie.

My dad had one of those old school organisers

I remember it being very sleek, made of very high quality materials (it's plastic felt nicer than the ones used in my current day laptop or smartphone), and in early 90's it was futuristic af
I wish this formfactor made a comback

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

You know what, that's not gaudy enough to be a real RGB product aimed at gamers.

I'm sure Razor is working on gaymer underwear. RGB bras, thongs, tighty brighties, boxers, panties, programming socks, even long johns. Something for everyone.

 

[Least Concern]

Oh, are we talking about weird keyboards itt?



The Tap Strap. A device you wear on your hand and then make gestures with your fingers to type or make mouse gestures. It's intended to be used with mobile devices where you'd otherwise have to use a touch screen but it can work with full computers too. From the reviews I've read, there's a definite learning curve before you can get up to a normal typing speed, but it does actually work. I really want to try one, but at $200 apiece they're not cheap.

 

[Toolbox]

Oh, are we talking about weird keyboards itt?

View attachment 2638778

The Tap Strap. A device you wear on your hand and then make gestures with your fingers to type or make mouse gestures. It's intended to be used with mobile devices where you'd otherwise have to use a touch screen but it can work with full computers too. From the reviews I've read, there's a definite learning curve before you can get up to a normal typing speed, but it does actually work. I really want to try one, but at $200 apiece they're not cheap.

Sounds like something that would probably cause hand strain faster than just using a keyboard. I'd rather learn how to use one of these.

 

[Billy Beer]

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!"

 

[AmpleApricots]

I have one of these:


It was the early 80s, you wanted a mobile computer capable of dialing in and this is what you would get. I found it in a company I briefly did contract work for standing in it's original bag forgotten for decades in complete mint condition, probably forgotten by whoever bought it. (Guy owning the place: "Yeah, just take it, didn't even know it was there") The battery in it's battery compartment leaked a little, the mainboard buffer battery luckily didn't. Worked fine. The screen is only really visible from the angle of sitting right in front of it and yes you look on it from the side as it's completely flat. Somehow it does work and the screen is actually big enough to do writing on it with I think 40x8 with the inbuilt font. It runs with the CMOS version of an intel 8085, a CPU from the 70s running CP/M with I think 16kb of RAM.

What's also cool is that you can address every single pixel of the screen in the inbuilt BASIC and can optionally add something to it's video port to connect it to a proper screen, also serial and parallel ports and a 300 baud modem if you have to call corporate's HQ mainframe. It's a very well built unit and, even with the old parts, very low power. If the battery runs low the red low battery LED would come on but you still had the internal battery as a buffer for the RAM so you wouldn't lose your stuff, or just run it from mains and save your programs to cassette. As it was with early 80s power stuff, it's power infrastructure is pretty inefficient and I was briefly considering upgrading it with modern voltage regulation and battery tech on which you could run this baby basically forever but you know, what for? At this point it's an antique and I think screwing with it would be shitty.

So yeah these existed for a hot second. Never really saw them in the wild.

 

[Xarpho]

Remember those "worm" LED lights that one could plug into that original GBA model with no backlight? Also GameBoy Camera?

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.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

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.