Technology and things that withered on the vine. - No grapes, just whine.

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

A complement to the "tech you miss" thread.

SED immediately comes to mind, it's the acronym of surface-conduction electron-emitter display, it was a CRT in flat screen format. The problem with CRT was that they didn't scale in size very well, they mainly scaled in weight, SED solved that. Or would have solved that, this is a reportedly working 36" prototype Toshiba/Canon showed off in 2006.

Yeah, TVs were ugly as shit back then, it was still pretty early in the life of reasonably priced flat screens for the masses.

Sideview, it looks to be as thick as the CFL lit LCDs of the time.

The potential benefits of this type of CRT over LCD/plasma is obvious, the color reproduction would have made graphic designers stop bitching, the latency would have stopped gamers from bitching, viewing angles would have stopped me from bitching. It seemed really nice.

The main competitor was expected to be OLED, another technology that had been just around the corner since the late 90's, but in 2006 Toshiba SED screens up to 55" had a firm release date: early 2007, it was just around the corner again. It was delayed to late 2007, a predictable delay at that point.
They both looked more and more like vaporware as the years went by and I didn't have much faith left in OLED when all the SED efforts flickered and died towards the end of the 00's.

edit: god damn spelling errors, thanks @The Mass Shooter Ron Soye

 

[Splendid]

How about 3D tvs in general? New models are no longer being designed.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

How about 3D tvs in general? New models are no longer being designed.

If you want 3D, you can put on a VR headset. Time will tell if that technology will die on the vine, but it seems to be doing better.

Edit: What spelling error did I fix?

 

[Sperglord Dante]

The potential benefits of this type of CRT over LCD/plasma is obvious, the color reproduction would have made graphic designers stop bitching, the latency would have stopped gamers from bitching, viewing angles would have stopped me from bitching. It seemed really nice.

Shit man, that sounds dreamy. A screen you can play all your 2d games the way they were meant to be, with low input delay *and* it doesn't weight a ton!?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Shit man, that sounds dreamy. A screen you can play all your 2d games the way they were meant to be, with low input delay *and* it doesn't weight a ton!?

It sounded like it was too good to be true and marching through the years that was what some were waiting for. In the late 90's when articles started appearing it seemed like the logical next step, good screens were CRT while LCD screens were garbage fit for mobile devices and unwieldy laptops, even into the early 00's they were crap plagued by heavy ghosting.
Around the same time, in the 90's and early 00's, they started touting OLED as a super thin screen that could be rolled up like a poster or even folded!
SED seemed like the safer bet, CRT was tried and true, organic leds seemed far out there.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

If you want 3D, you can put on a VR headset. Time will tell if that technology will die on the vine, but it seems to be doing better.

Edit: What spelling error did I fix?

With that post saying vine instead of wine like in the title, I knew it didn't feel right. Thanks! I blame the linux community.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Dual GPU setups immediately spring to mind. In the mid to late 2000s they were all the rage. They got started with 3DFX in the 90s experimenting with dual 3d accelerators, which allowed for 1024x768 resolution with 32 colors, WOAH:

Then it progressed into some rediculous setups in the late 2000s. Dual 9800GTX, dual x1950s, dual 4870s. These builds allowed for gamers to push ever higher resolutions, like the then new 900p and 1080p, at ultra details and 60 FPS, then 75 FPS as 1080p75 became the main benchmark, and 1440p60 near the death of SLI. The most ridiculous were the quad SLI rigs, AKA dual GTX 590s/6990s:

850+ watts right there!

Unfortunately, with DX11 dual GPU was much harder to implement, devs stopped putting in the effort and support from nvidia and AMD slowed down. More games didnt support it full stop. DX12 really put the nail in the coffin. Today, outside of benchmarks, dual GPU support is a fucking joke, and we see super expensive cards like the 2080ti becoming popular because dual GPU has just been totally dropped, as resolutions and framerate targets climb ever higher, with 1440p144 being the new mainstream enthusiast target, and 4k144 not far behind. Some like me still ahve their 1000+ watt PSUs left over from that era, begging to feed dual cards again, but only left with table scraps.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Anyone remember ZIP disks and other high capacity magnetic storage media?

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Anyone remember ZIP disks and other high capacity magnetic storage media?

Zip disks were popular in the US, but the Japanese never really used them. In Japan, the superior M.O. drives were used for a similar utility, but they had much better storage capacity,

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Anyone remember ZIP disks and other high capacity magnetic storage media?

I had big hopes for the LS-120. 120MB capacity, backwards compatible with 3.5" disks, cheaper, not made by the hacks at Iomega.

A format that is completely forgotten is the Panasonic PD(phase-change dual, sometimes called the PowerDrive for some reason). It looks like a MO disc but it's actually an optical format. Came out a couple of years before CD-RW and it wasn't that bad.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Anyone remember ZIP disks and other high capacity magnetic storage media?

I miss magnetic storage media. Zip and floppys had their issues, but the tactile feeling of thumbing through a stack of floppy disks, the mechanism whirring and buzzing, the ker-thunk of an ejected media disk, and the feeling of holding software you just purchased in the palm of your hand bring back fond memories of my windows 98 PC days, big box PC games and making copies of disks for backups. 750MB ZIP disks were amazing, and with 120MB floppies on the horizon, I was hoping we would see multi GB ZIP disks, perhaps in 5.25" format, something I could write gigabytes of music to for a car without the fragile scratch prone nature of CDs.

I dont miss their unreliability.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Shit man, that sounds dreamy. A screen you can play all your 2d games the way they were meant to be, with low input delay *and* it doesn't weight a ton!?

Yeah, it sounds superior, it's a shame it didn't take off.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

M.O. drives

I just looked that up. Too bad something like that never caught on in the West.

I had big hopes for the LS-120. 120MB capacity, backwards compatible with 3.5" disks, cheaper, not made by the hacks at Iomega.

Those would have been really convenient had they caught on.

The standard floppy drive could have lasted longer before obsolescence.

I dont miss their unreliability.

That reminds me of when I had a floppy disk in my backpack (or was it a binder?) - long story short, the disk contents were erased because it got squished. That was BS.

Also quite a number of old floppy disks are likely corrupted by now as they are not shielded.

 

[Rei is shit]

Dual GPU setups immediately spring to mind. In the mid to late 2000s they were all the rage. They got started with 3DFX in the 90s experimenting with dual 3d accelerators, which allowed for 1024x768 resolution with 32 colors, WOAH:

View attachment 1137665

Then it progressed into some rediculous setups in the late 2000s. Dual 9800GTX, dual x1950s, dual 4870s. These builds allowed for gamers to push ever higher resolutions, like the then new 900p and 1080p, at ultra details and 60 FPS, then 75 FPS as 1080p75 became the main benchmark, and 1440p60 near the death of SLI. The most ridiculous were the quad SLI rigs, AKA dual GTX 590s/6990s:

View attachment 1137667

850+ watts right there!

Unfortunately, with DX11 dual GPU was much harder to implement, devs stopped putting in the effort and support from nvidia and AMD slowed down. More games didnt support it full stop. DX12 really put the nail in the coffin. Today, outside of benchmarks, dual GPU support is a fucking joke, and we see super expensive cards like the 2080ti becoming popular because dual GPU has just been totally dropped, as resolutions and framerate targets climb ever higher, with 1440p144 being the new mainstream enthusiast target, and 4k144 not far behind. Some like me still ahve their 1000+ watt PSUs left over from that era, begging to feed dual cards again, but only left with table scraps.

As someone who had multiple sli/crossfire systems I'm actually glad this died. The microstutter was SHIT and there was no way to avoid it. What is the point of getting 90+ fps when every few seconds it hitches. Plus even back then lots of games didn't support it.

8800gt SLI was fucking insane perf/dollar though.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Physical buttons are going to be the next loss on smartphones and I can tell because of how inherently uncomfortable they make the power and volume keys now. Apparently you can pop out the Samsung Galaxy Note 9's power and volume keys like Legos independent from taking apart the frame.

You have Meizu forwarding the exceptional teardrop phone with no buttons or ports.

 

[ForgedBlades]

I wasn't around for it, but the story of the CED is pretty interesting. Shit withered on the vine for about 30 years before it even made it to market. Technology Connections did a five part series on it that I can't recommend enough.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

As someone who had multiple sli/crossfire systems I'm actually glad this died. The microstutter was SHIT and there was no way to avoid it. What is the point of getting 90+ fps when every few seconds it hitches. Plus even back then lots of games didn't support it.

8800gt SLI was fucking insane perf/dollar though.

The original SLI with Voodoo 2's was fantastic because it actually doubled performance. The original SLI stood for Scan-Line Interleave, the graphics cards seamlessly rendered every other scanline, the perfect kind of scalable multi-threading. But pre-D3D8 and pixel shaders things were much simpler. I have no idea what the later attempts of SLI/Crossfire meant but in the beginning of Nvidia's new SLI they had a couple of alternative rendering methods, like the one that split the screen horizontally between the GPUs. That meant that a game, like a driving game, would have one GPU kick back and relax because it's mostly rendering the skybox.

 

[Coolio55]

Physical buttons are going to be the next loss on smartphones and I can tell because of how inherently uncomfortable they make the power and volume keys now. Apparently you can pop out the Samsung Galaxy Note 9's power and volume keys like Legos independent from taking apart the frame.

You have Meizu forwarding the exceptional teardrop phone with no buttons or ports.

They're killing headphone jacks and already killed removable batteries. I fucking hate this world.
Might even get a MEGAPhone when (If, haha) they come out just to spite the cunts. I'm currently hanging on to my circa 2015 galaxy mini 2.


Also, anyone remember the Sinclair QL?

TL;DR: Bumbling old autist who hates computer games decides to make the next big computer from his mostly game profiteering company a business machine directly competing with IBM and also not backwards compatible (And also just shoddily designed in general with the horrible media format "Sinclair Microdrive" and the graphical specs being poo. You could write a whole book on how crap it was)

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

They're killing headphone jacks and already killed removable batteries. I fucking hate this world.
Might even get a MEGAPhone when (If, haha) they come out just to spite the cunts. I'm currently hanging on to my circa 2015 galaxy mini 2.


Also, anyone remember the Sinclair QL?

TL;DR: Bumbling old autist who hates computer games decides to make the next big computer from his mostly game profiteering company a business machine directly competing with IBM and also not backwards compatible (And also just shoddily designed in general with the horrible media format "Sinclair Microdrive" and the graphical specs being poo. You could write a whole book on how crap it was)

Linus Torvalds used one as a kid

 

[Martys_not_smarty]

Speaking of dual graphics if you go back and find pictures of the prerelease PS3 from some of the expos it was featured at you'll notice it had a pair of HD ports for what reason who knows maybe they were dabbling in dual screen capability.