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

If I had to pick a place to store very sensitive data for decades (with the rule that the storage space is inside a comfortable climate and never encounters extreme temperatures or excessive moisture) I'd pick tape. (honestly, any tape.)
I wouldn't mind experimenting with VHS tape-based data storage one day. That said, tracking down a VHS data storage interface could be tricky.
 
Eizo still makes good square ones, they're pretty expensive new but sometimes you can get them for next to nothing off ebay because people generally don't buy these monitors.
I remember Radius used to make a monitor you could pivot sideways and it would automatically reset the resolution and mode.
 
I remember Radius used to make a monitor you could pivot sideways and it would automatically reset the resolution and mode.
This is so trivial to do, I wonder why it isn't a standard feature in every monitor with a VESA mount. Actually, I don't. It's reserved for "professional" product lines, because it's something they can charge extra for without incurring any significant cost.
 
I wouldn't mind experimenting with VHS tape-based data storage one day. That said, tracking down a VHS data storage interface could be tricky.
Are you talking VHS or those LTO ultrium tapes? I was looking into them a while back and you can find used tape drives fairly easily for a decent price and the tapes themselves are stupidly cheap compared to hard drives or ssds.

I dont have enough data to justify getting even a used drive but would like to pick one up one day to mess around with.
 
Are you talking VHS or those LTO ultrium tapes? I was looking into them a while back and you can find used tape drives fairly easily for a decent price and the tapes themselves are stupidly cheap compared to hard drives or ssds.
LTO ultrium hadn't even crossed my mind. Thanks for the heads up on those.

I was thinking along the lines of VHS tape with a special interface, mainly to back up vintage stuff. Something along the lines of the Danmere Backer, as demonstrated by LGR.

 
I wouldn't mind experimenting with VHS tape-based data storage one day. That said, tracking down a VHS data storage interface could be tricky.
Used to work at a place which used that with an Amiga, worked pretty well even though kinda hit and miss with the errors sometimes. Needed a faster CPU though, the default 68k in the old chipset machines couldn't quite cut it reliably. You'd connect it to the serial port which is gimped on the Amiga anyways (no UART, it's stuffed into the same custom IC that does the sound and floppy disk drives in the Amiga, serial speed is very CPU bound there) so maybe you could get away with less on machines with "proper" serial. You could store like 80 MB per hour of tape with the program they used iirc which was a whole lot for that time and very cheap storage.

The theory behind it isn't hard and as long as you can track down a working VCR and some tapes it wouldn't be difficult to build the dongle yourself. If you'd google around a bit, I'm sure you even could find schematics. The encoding/decoding algorithm in software is the real magic.

I remember Radius used to make a monitor you could pivot sideways and it would automatically reset the resolution and mode.
You gotta love that old-school high-end video hardware. Don't know about rotating screens but remember seeing their portrait mode screen that could display a page. I still think that idea was decent, as second monitor or some such. Doesn't quite work well with 16:9 IMHO, it's just too tight. 68k Macs seem downright forgotten compared to other 16/32 bitters (if you ignore the earliest Mac models) which I think is a pity. It's a pretty comfy platform, the later 32 bit CPUs have actually enough omph to do stuff and I'd do more with my full 040 33 Mhz Performa if I could think of a way to quiet down that infernal fan without compromising the case or the cooling. (The fan really reverbs through the case and the way the air "cuts" along the metal shield cutouts make it even louder)

I don't know if it's a false memory but I'm pretty sure my first Samsung LCD I ever had in the mid 00s detected rotation too.
 
wow internet on a smartphone or tablet sucks

It takes 3 times as long (and easily as many attempts) to type or get something done. The (tiny) awkward touchscreen the fingers block. The lack of "fine control" one has on a normal computer.

Being stuck with one of those to surf the internet would suck.
It's mind blowing when you consider this is the only way the majority casually browse the web in 2020.
 
Maybe that's why people are going so crazy now?

:thinking:

But really, it does explain why web design has gone to shit and is full of soy - it's to "accommodate" all the smartphone users.

As soon as websites started to make things for the first iphone everything went out the window for computers when it came to the web.
Its also a major part of why forums have died.

Fuck the mobile web, it was better when there were dedicated apps for websites, but that didn't really last a full iphone generation before "her der lets hamper the normal web for normies".
 
iPod classics. Seriously they were probably the coolest and coolest looking tech to come from Apple at the time.

There hasn’t been any tech trends that I “hate” but I the one I like the least is the modern PC gaming market. Does every bit of hardware have to glow? They also aesthetically look so pretentious and douchey.
 
Reminds me of that "2007: The year the Internet went to shit." infographic thing. 2007 was also when YouTube began monetizing.
2007 was Eternal September 2: electric boogaloo

iPod classics. Seriously they were probably the coolest and coolest looking tech to come from Apple at the time.

There hasn’t been any tech trends that I “hate” but I the one I like the least is the modern PC gaming market. Does every bit of hardware have to glow? They also aesthetically look so pretentious and douchey.

The ironic thing is that the LED bull shit would have fit in great in the LAN party era where showing off your PC was part of the culture/thing of a LAN party, and now that LAN parties are all but a faded memory for older gamers are LEDs and glass panels a thing.
 
2007 was Eternal September 2: electric boogaloo



The ironic thing is that the LED bull shit would have fit in great in the LAN party era where showing off your PC was part of the culture/thing of a LAN party, and now that LAN parties are all but a faded memory for older gamers are LEDs and glass panels a thing.
It would've been like street races back in those days where the rich asians would come swagger around their porsches and subarus. I just don't understand the point with higher end PC tech other than just to show off.
 
The pouplarity of touchscreen HVAC controls has somewhat dialed back since its peak in 2013. The logic manufacturers went through boils down to two key points:

1. They could save money on soucring, assembling, and installing physical HVAC buttons, instead opting to lump them all into the existing touchscreen.
2. It was the style at the time.

Everyone once thought the glass-cockpit car interior was super slick, so intereiors were designed to meet that demand. It looks nice on promo shots that will draw people in, but now consumers realized that actually drilling down through on-screen menus just for defrost WILE DRIVING is an enormous dick chafe. To the manufacturers' credit, they recently picked up on this and gave you the HVAC basics (where do you want it? how hot do you want it? and how much do you want?) on physical buttons. Camaros in particular have a neat thing where the temperature dial is set into the bezel of the vent itself.


Now with all that being said, what really fucks me up about cars is how manufacturers deliberately fuck with maintainability by slowly including parts that are not serviceable by the owner. Tesla is probably the most severe offender seeing as how they go out of their way to seal off every part of the fucking car with glue, or use wild ass DRM measures to "marry" a digital screen to the car so it cannot be replaced by anyone else but the dealership. They're the Apple of the car world. Fuck 'em.

Even domestic brands are getting in on this with non-serviceable transmissions. What does this mean? Basically the manual tells you that the entire transmission is "sealed", and should last throughout the lifetime of the car. How long is that lifetime? 90k? 150k? fuck knows! You can't even run a dipstick into the tranny to check the fluid for levels and discoloration, which will give you important information that it will grenade soon.

I like to work on my own cars, so I dont generally like a lot of tech in them. Right now, its kind of a pain, but I can tolerate it. I can see my breaking point being hit as manufacturers keep tryin to fuck people like me over, and also as the sum of the parts becomes "the internet of things" within the vehicle.
Fuck those things. I refuse to buy a car with a non serviceable tranny. The benefit of going with some enthusiast options like the DCT volkswagens is that the fluid by design must be changed regularly, so they cant pull this shit.
I like cartridges. Easy to store, easy to print, more space opportunity compared to optical media.

I think gaming could've worked if games were stored in USB drives or something along those lines. There are thumb drives that can have several GBs in them. Why not bring cartridges back in that vein with the advantages of modern technology?
USB drives use NAND storage, whose cold storage is measured in weeks. ROM carts use different chips, and those are much larger and much more expensive then USB drives. Even the ROM cart used for the switch is currently limited to 32GB.

Square monitors.

I used a Surface laptop recently and it immediately felt more comfortable to use. 3:2 is so much better an aspect for a lot of types of work. I know if you really search you can still find the odd square monitor but they're not well supported and they're not high quality.

What I wouldn't give for 3:2 ratio to come back to the desktop.



Install Telegram. You'll have push to talk that works great.

Assuming you can actually get your friends to use it, too. :/
I had a gorgeous 1600x1200 dell monitor back in the day and treasured that thing. Sadly the control board died and I never could find a replacement, not sure what happened to it, but I dont think I own it anymore. It was great, I far preferred having more verticality.

Now I have a 1920x1200 that I will never let go of. I just cant with 16:9 displays.
 
Going through some old phones, I saw a Samsung Galaxy S.

1609214719216.png


It was a touchscreen smartphone with a keyboard attachment. Why don't they continue with that idea? It made texting and Internet searching a breeze.

Touch screen keyboards can be unresponsive. The swish form of typing makes it better than typing each key one by one, but even that has its problems.
 
Going through some old phones, I saw a Samsung Galaxy S.

View attachment 1815779

It was a touchscreen smartphone with a keyboard attachment. Why don't they continue with that idea? It made texting and Internet searching a breeze.

Touch screen keyboards can be unresponsive. The swish form of typing makes it better than typing each key one by one, but even that has its problems.
There's still a few phones doing this, mostly from small companies trying to sell to traveling businessmen. Some still even market them as PDAs.

 
Last time I used a walkie talkie, I ended up overhearing someone's Burger King order. For some reason, the Burger King drive-thru was on the same frequency.
As a kid I used to have a cheap toy laser pistol with a loudspeaker on the side, so it could go pew-bang, it also had an analogue trigger to fire it. If the trigger was held in around half-way the speaker played police radio, at another point it played other EMS.

I remember Radius used to make a monitor you could pivot sideways and it would automatically reset the resolution and mode.
That used to be a feature on the old Dell Ultrasharps, I had one of the later models and was surprised when it didn't report the switch back to Windows. It was one of the old features of 'tilt'.
Used to work at a place which used that with an Amiga, worked pretty well even though kinda hit and miss with the errors sometimes. Needed a faster CPU though, the default 68k in the old chipset machines couldn't quite cut it reliably. You'd connect it to the serial port which is gimped on the Amiga anyways (no UART, it's stuffed into the same custom IC that does the sound and floppy disk drives in the Amiga, serial speed is very CPU bound there) so maybe you could get away with less on machines with "proper" serial. You could store like 80 MB per hour of tape with the program they used iirc which was a whole lot for that time and very cheap storage.

The theory behind it isn't hard and as long as you can track down a working VCR and some tapes it wouldn't be difficult to build the dongle yourself. If you'd google around a bit, I'm sure you even could find schematics. The encoding/decoding algorithm in software is the real magic.


You gotta love that old-school high-end video hardware. Don't know about rotating screens but remember seeing their portrait mode screen that could display a page. I still think that idea was decent, as second monitor or some such. Doesn't quite work well with 16:9 IMHO, it's just too tight. 68k Macs seem downright forgotten compared to other 16/32 bitters (if you ignore the earliest Mac models) which I think is a pity. It's a pretty comfy platform, the later 32 bit CPUs have actually enough omph to do stuff and I'd do more with my full 040 33 Mhz Performa if I could think of a way to quiet down that infernal fan without compromising the case or the cooling. (The fan really reverbs through the case and the way the air "cuts" along the metal shield cutouts make it even louder)

I don't know if it's a false memory but I'm pretty sure my first Samsung LCD I ever had in the mid 00s detected rotation too.
16:9 is a horrible ratio for anything that isn't cinematic like movies or games. Texts and documents of all kind isn't cinematic though, the same goes for everything else in the A format of print. Imagine working on a poster on your(probably) 24" 16:9 screen and how much space will go unused, imagine a one page PDF even - the scaling is the same. Turn the screen to make it 9:16 and it starts to make sense.

5:4 is the greatest.
 
I find 2560x1440 to be a worthy successor to 1920x1200. The vertical resolution matters more than the exact aspect ratio, I think.
But by the time you get up to 4K you're probably just scaling everything up.

That is true, but I've got so many wallpapers over the years specifically meant for 1920x1200 that I saved from now-defunct Deviantart and Tumblr accounts. It's not that big of a deal in the scheme of things, but it would be nice to make use of them without having to shrink/zoom it ever so slightly.
 
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