What are some of your favorite vintage technologies

Post some of your favorite “old school” hardware and tell us why you liked it. You can also mention why they were discontinued if you happen to know… things like old motherboard specific technologies that didn’t catch on, discontinued cases with a great look, tell the forum what it is and why you like it… There’s a jungle of these things out there and I think folks would find it interesting to hear about them.

I’ll start. One of my favorite old technologies is AMD Hyper-transport. The achievement of getting ram to run at the full CPU speed was very cool. I don’t know what it was replaced with. My guess is something that didn’t tie the hands of CPU capabilities in order to retain that speed, maybe. In any case, it was pretty slick stuff.

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I cut my teeth on CP/M micro’s back in the day and loved working with the CLI.

But I think my favorite tech was the Commodore Amiga,.

The 16-bit 68K CPU and AmigaDOS was the shiznit.

You basically had a great GUI and CLI to work with.

Also the first OS I remember using the right-mouse button until Windows 95 came around.

As a side note, remember to turn your old MAC mouse upside-down to use the single button in right-mouse emulation mode :stuck_out_tongue:

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Hehe, right on! Yea, I’ve def never heard of any of that stuff before! Cool, thanks for sharing.

I miss computer parts without RGB.

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Nixie Tubes!

The orange glow is a nice aesthetic.

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I hear ya, I’ve never been so big on those either. But on balance, I do miss the HD lights that went away on the super minimalist laptops these days. Feels like being blind sometimes, lol.

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Weird and unexpected… Nice share!

I also miss CRT monitors but not the freaking weight :stuck_out_tongue:

Side Note, the old name for CRT was: KINESCOPE

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MP3 players and flip phones, with physical buttons.

Smartphones and touch screens are the symptoms of a doomed species.

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Lol, they sounded like such a good idea at first but now they seem to come with too much baggage.

Yeah. Trying to do everything requires a powerful cpu and shit battery life, in addition to every piece of software going to psychopathic lengths to exploit every flaw found in the human mind, turning these things into a portable addiction boxes.

It’s the same concept as “keep work at work and home at home”. Mixing multiple forms of entertainment, communication, function computer software, and commercial exploitation was a perfectly logical mistake that hurts people more than they realize.

I hate touch screens because I have to look at them to do anything. On my sansa clip I can change artists without even looking.

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Hah, never thought I’d ever say this in my life. I agree with all so far.

I miss when hardware wasn’t called Gamer something, where you paid good money for good hardware, without an added 20% just for it to be called Gamer crap.

I miss when hardware worked well for more than three years.

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I hear ya, there are certainly ethical questions.

What’s required to deal with that is called discipline and critical thinking. Maybe it’s just reached the point where it’s time to say, enough is enough.

I take at least half an hour, every day, where I just exist, takes some getting used to. I don’t think about work, money, family, Todo lists and whatever else might worry or take space, just sit there and let my mind wander in whichever direction it wants. Key is, no entertainment or distractions.

Mainstream listeners just use streaming services and their phones, but they still make standalone music devices. They’re aimed at audiophiles and tend to focus on high-def lossless formats, but they still make 'em with buttons. :slight_smile:

Search for “DAP” instead of “MP3 Player”.

RAM Drives.

Atari 800, or just a large list of computers from the mid 90’s going backwards. Wish I still had my 286, was a pain in the ass getting anything done on that thing.

Don’t miss using a TI-99/4a at all, fun to play with but really hard to get work done with it. If you have most the accessories for it it probably wasn’t but only had the tape drive and a couple basic books. Most basic games you kind of knew how to solve and beat them because you just typed in the whole damn game in the first place.

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I love Laser Disc. So many classic movies before questionable special editions and color correction messed up the films.

To this day, they still have excellent audio quality and if you are hard core Muse Laser Disc were Hi Def back in the 90s.

Lots of neat special features that have been lost to time too.

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This thing, that I’ve been owning since it came out. 5 alarms, auto backlight on wrist rotation, minimal time drift, all kind of useful and less useful stuff. Love the mix between the 80s features and the 90s styling.

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Right on, yea TI calculators are lots of fun :slight_smile:

Nice, I think my physics professor in high school used one of those in class. Those were pretty slick.