Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers

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I'm not that old, I'm more of the hard drives were the size and weight of a lead brick, the ancient full height 5 1/4" bay occupants, and came with a handwritten label on them for the bad sectors so you could manually enter them. The only thing I miss about that shit is how they sounded like a jet engine revving up.

That was another giveaway, the telltale sound of endless swapping. That could wreck a drive in a few months so was worth keeping on top of. Or something beeping constantly that is supposed to beep only periodically, or something that is usually noisy but is now suspiciously silent.

Indeed. Still have respect for those guys who came up in the days when 'computer operator' meant 'guy who could perform mechanical fixes on a room sized dot-matrix printer that lusts to crush your hand at 3am'.

Philips probably have the patent and I don't know how long it lasts, I first saw their Ambilight TVs in 2007 so they have been around for roughly 15 years. Pretty decent.
They sell kits with strips to mount behind the screen so any screen or TV could get ambilight.

Bizarrely, I've seen ads lately for some kind of Xiamei overscreen lighting doohickey that is supposed to synchronize to the actual colors being shown on the screen? I'm sure it's not a patent violation because it's exactly the opposite of what anyone would do to enhance contrast. I suppose if you're just showing eye-safe colors on your screen at night, it would automatically show an eye-safe hue... but you could just get a red lamp? Bizarre.

 

[talk talk talk]

I'm not that old, I'm more of the hard drives were the size and weight of a lead brick, the ancient full height 5 1/4" bay occupants, and came with a handwritten label on them for the bad sectors so you could manually enter them. The only thing I miss about that shit is how they sounded like a jet engine revving up.

The eras of tub drives and bricks overlapped. We had a bank of these HP 7920s at work:

And I had a souped-up Sanyo clone of a PC at home with an ST-506 in it at the same time:

 

[AnOminous]

The eras of tub drives and bricks overlapped. We had a bank of these HP 7920s at work:

I've seen but never had to interact with those things. They were covered under a vendor warranty where the vendor would show up and fix it 24/7.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Old unattainable tech turns into dusty crap in second hand stores is bummer, like seeing your old favorite artist strung out and sleeping on the side walk.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I have an old 5.25" full height SCSI drive. It sounds like a chainsaw. (I wanna say 10.000 RPM but actually I think it's not likely for the age of the drive and I honestly don't remember.)

Flash is awesome. Even the reliability problems people early on were worried about don't seem to quite materialize. Yes, there's basically a counter running down on every flash drive ever until it's junk but that counter starts at a very high number and tbh I'll take a counter over "made unhealthy noises and then stopped working when I turned on the computer one day" any day.

 

[FrigginWeeb]

T Mobile, please bring back the sidekick.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Flash is awesome. Even the reliability problems people early on were worried about don't seem to quite materialize. Yes, there's basically a counter running down on every flash drive ever until it's junk but that counter starts at a very high number and tbh I'll take a counter over "made unhealthy noises and then stopped working when I turned on the computer one day" any day.

And when you take a look at the numbers, the max terabytes written, and turn it into what that means per day then there's no concerns about regular use. The tradeoff is instead of hearing the alarming sound of a sudden odd spinup and repeated random writes(bad clusters) it will just be dead one day.

 

[The Last Stand]

The authoritarian state of the Internet has made social interaction WORSE. Cancel culture, censorship, DRM, regulated text chat, fly-by social media, misinformation.

I remember times when the Internet was like a superhub of readily accessible information. Communities were diverse and plentiful in forums, sites, comment sections. Most of all, it was self contained. You'd go on the computer, find something, log off, go on about your day.

Nowadays, everything is connected. People sharing everything about themselves 24/7. That's on them. You'd think with terabytes of potential storage, it'd be a massive opportunity to archive and preserve all kinds of media or history. Nope. Just post and upload a whole bunch of nothing.

That's not even getting into the toxic mentality of "cancel culture" over a presumably innocent Tweet or a story that goes against the current social zeitgeist.

 

[I Hate Anime Avatars]

Small PL but I find it really annoying that more and more test and measurement equipment no longer comes with GPIB/IEEE 488 as standard. There is absolutely no good reason to abandon it, so much irreplacable equipment uses it. Leagcy support is a no brainer in engineering. Keysight especially are really trying to push LAN/LXI and USB and while I'm actually in no way opposed to them, particularly USB makes things much easier since no adapter is needed when you want to use a laptop or something, it just annoys me that they are trying to force people's hands giving them fewer options.

There just something so satisfying about it, so easy to set up and works perfectly every single time.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Small PL but I find it really annoying that more and more test and measurement equipment no longer comes with GPIB/IEEE 488 as standard. There is absolutely no good reason to abandon it, so much irreplacable equipment uses it. Leagcy support is a no brainer in engineering. Keysight especially are really trying to push LAN/LXI and USB and while I'm actually in no way opposed to them, particularly USB makes things much easier since no adapter is needed when you want to use a laptop or something, it just annoys me that they are trying to force people's hands giving them fewer options.

View attachment 3307432

There just something so satisfying about it, so easy to set up and works perfectly every single time.

That is completely beyond me but it reminds me of the nightmares of parallel port dongles for software used on modern laptops. Some companies are like liches, they are so old and beyond death that nothing can kill them.

 

[I Hate Anime Avatars]

That is completely beyond me but it reminds me of the nightmares of parallel port dongles for software used on modern laptops. Some companies are like liches, they are so old and beyond death that nothing can kill them.

So to explain briefly GPIB or IEEE488 is an old parallel bus used primarily to link together automated lab equipment (back in the 1970s & 80s it was also sometimes used to connect printers and disk drives to computers but has long been replaced by parallel ports for that) that is just really straightforward to use. You can daisy chain a bunch of devices together and I've not once had a problem with it. Mostly we use old PCs with PCI cards but if you are using a laptop or a more modern PC you use a USB adapter like the one in the picture. More and more manufactures only have it as a option now which is silly because it's still so widely used. It's nice to have LAN as an option but it's more complicated to set up, not all devices support it and there can be latency issues.

 

[StopSneeding]

I miss overclocking LGA 775 and to a lesser extent 1155 versus modern processors. Miss my old Q6600 and cranking it up to 4ghz+. Had a lot of fun overclocking my old i5-6600 on a motherboard with an external BCLK generator. Still running my 6700k at 4.6ghz @ 1.376V.

I feel like modern overclocking has little headroom on most processors and the gains don't justify the temps and power usage a lot of the time. GPU/CPUs seem very locked down these days and there's not really any opportunities to do any volt modding. Can't even flash custom BIOS on most GPUs now. On my 1080Ti I was able to flash firmware of a different manufacturer with much higher clocks and power limits, but can't do much else.

It's good that Ryzen actually competes with Intel now. I was sick of every new Intel generation having the measly performance improvement of ~3%.

 

[Boingo'd Oingo'd]

I miss overclocking LGA 775 and to a lesser extent 1155 versus modern processors. Miss my old Q6600 and cranking it up to 4ghz+. Had a lot of fun overclocking my old i5-6600 on a motherboard with an external BCLK generator. Still running my 6700k at 4.6ghz @ 1.376V.

I feel like modern overclocking has little headroom on most processors and the gains don't justify the temps and power usage a lot of the time. GPU/CPUs seem very locked down these days and there's not really any opportunities to do any volt modding. Can't even flash custom BIOS on most GPUs now. On my 1080Ti I was able to flash firmware of a different manufacturer with much higher clocks and power limits, but can't do much else.

It's good that Ryzen actually competes with Intel now. I was sick of every new Intel generation having the measly performance improvement of ~3%.

One of the popular mods with the C2Q chips was putting a small piece of tape on one of the pins in order to bump the FSB a little, right? Those things were legends, the later ones still being useable well into the 2010s. In general, I miss CPUs being easily moddable, aside from the slight headaches they gave every now and then.

 

[StopSneeding]

One of the popular mods with the C2Q chips was putting a small piece of tape on one of the pins in order to bump the FSB a little, right? Those things were legends, the later ones still being useable well into the 2010s. In general, I miss CPUs being easily moddable, aside from the slight headaches they gave every now and then.

Yup overclocking via LGA 775 BSEL was very popular on boards with locked FSB. The last interesting CPU hardware mod was delidding. I bought a 3d printed mold for all chips and put it to use. Delidding my i7-6700k brought temps down by 15C+ under load after CoolLaboratory liquid gallium application. There were some slight variations between models with Haswell requiring a bit of liquid electrical tape application to prevent shorting transitions below the die. I'd like to think it was Intel just being cheap and not wanting to spend money on real solder, but it also just so happened to cap overclocking speeds for many due to temps. Hence their more expensive and higher clocked i5/i7s looked more appealing.

I believe Intel pivoted to solder for connecting die to IHS for Kaby Lake. Delidding still yielded some gains, but they were far more meager and not usually worth the hassle. After the delidding fiasco I believe most if not every chip since has been soldered to the IHS.

Intel has always seemed to have a "some but not too much" attitude towards overclocking. I had an i5-6600 that I was overclocking with external BCLK generator. After ASRock implemented SkyOC, many other manufacturers allowed it. Intel freaked out and pushed patches through windows update and IME to disable it and forced motherboard manufacturers to remove the option. With BCLK I was able to take an i5-6600 up to 4.8ghz easily.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Intel has always seemed to have a "some but not too much" attitude towards overclocking.

Mostly after the legendary Celeron 300A. That was a massive mistake on their end in so many, many ways.

 

[thejackal]

One of the popular mods with the C2Q chips was putting a small piece of tape on one of the pins in order to bump the FSB a little, right? Those things were legends, the later ones still being useable well into the 2010s. In general, I miss CPUs being easily moddable, aside from the slight headaches they gave every now and then.

There was actually an AMD chip circa 2007 that you could unlock the "crimped" cores on (it was a quad core they were selling as a dual) by soldering or removing a pin, something like that.

I hate liquid coolers. Or moreso I guess I hate the needless application of them in so many stock builds. Is liquid cooling objectively the best cooling? No, not for every application. Liquid coolers have pumps that go bad. They have fans that wear out faster. They have controllers that shit the bed. And you've added all those potential failure points into your cooling to...run your prebuilt at stock speeds?

 

[AnOminous]

That is completely beyond me but it reminds me of the nightmares of parallel port dongles for software used on modern laptops. Some companies are like liches, they are so old and beyond death that nothing can kill them.

Tech I don't miss: when you had a batch of identical-looking RS-232 cables but like two or three of them were null modem cables instead with pins 2 and 3 reversed (and 4 to 6 and 7 to . And you had a breakout box so it would have been trivial to check but you didn't and now you put a fucking null modem cable on something that needed to be straight through and somehow, you don't consider this for hours and realize you're retarded when you do. And then you check it and it's a null modem and then like an utter moron you pull out another cable and throw the Trojan null modem right back in the same bin.

(Yeah I know your example is a parallel and this is a serial but you could also do something similar with parallel cables.)

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Tech I don't miss: when you had a batch of identical-looking RS-232 cables but like two or three of them were null modem cables instead with pins 2 and 3 reversed (and 4 to 6 and 7 to . And you had a breakout box so it would have been trivial to check but you didn't and now you put a fucking null modem cable on something that needed to be straight through and somehow, you don't consider this for hours and realize you're retarded when you do. And then you check it and it's a null modem and then like an utter moron you pull out another cable and throw the Trojan null modem right back in the same bin.

(Yeah I know your example is a parallel and this is a serial but you could also do something similar with parallel cables.)

LGBTQ+ ports and dongles still haunts me.

 

[Dissapointed Grandma]

LGBTQ+ ports and dongles still haunts me.

What do you mean I can't get a male to female adapter paid for by tax payers while I sit at home and coom on reddit all day?

 

[A-Stump]

I miss old water heaters. You know, ones that could get water so hot you'd legitimately get a second degree burn if not careful. Sure you can fuck around and make it hotter than safety regulations allow but then you void the warranty. I just want a skin blisteringly hot shower. Is that too much to ask for?