ITT: Technologies of the past that are just really neat from a technological point of view
Falling into your wing while paragliding is called 'gift wrapping' and turns you into a dirt torpedo pic.twitter.com/oQFKsVISkI
— Mental Videos (@MentalVids) March 15, 2023
It never came to me that CDs are obsolete.
I keep buying albums in CD forms so I can play them in my car, becasue I don't have Spotify
>I don't have Spotify
Yes you do, everyone has Spotify. It's free. You are just choosing not to use it.
Not on mobile. The ads and shuffling are a hassle.
I mostly listen to 3-4 albums on a daily basis and not getting to choose the tracks is suboptimal.
Keep in mind, I said 'car'
wifi hotspot+laptop in the car
what are you, a bitch?
add a controller, a headset and Mixxx and we're off to the races (or any motorway). it's easier to have a passenger do this but people don't accept free rides these days. anyways music that stops is gay and you might as well just listen to silence if you're into that.
the last time i used spotify it told me i was going to get 30 minutes of uninterrupted ad-free music then proceeded to play 3 full minute ads between every song.
>dude lmao liek... liek EVERYONE has an interent data plan running on their phone... liek are you dumb or what xDDDdd
Why are you using may may arrows as if what you "quoted" wasn't true?
You do live in the first world, right anon?
>check my provider's site
>not a single plan available without internet that has unlimited data
>even the slowest one at 5Mbit/s is more than enough to stream music
I literally have no option shitty enough that Spotify wouldn't work. Never used it though.
>I'm so fucking retarded I can't even comprehend downloading the music I want while on wifi at home
>ads
I refuse to use it.
>GET LE PREMI
No.
Youtube and playlists are top tier forever.
>forever
I fear it might not be the case, but I completely agree with you. I'll be downloading mp3s and storing them in folders until I die.
I'll stick to a basic non-android modern Walkman that can't do anything but play music. As well as storing all music in digital format that can't be randomly removed by someone else.
does it respond to input in a timely manner
Yes?
What are the best non android Walkmans. Would like to go backwards in the music area. Sick of streaming services.
I think the 2018/2019 model is the best. It's the last one before they switched to Android.
Sony NW-A45
Sony NW-A55
great, thanks.
How it is called?
I'll try to find it in my country. I was considering to use a symbian phone to replace my necessity for a simple offline music player.
>oops you just ran out of your skip limit! Pay for premium if you want to skip more songs.
I'll stay with my CDs and FLACs
Spotify is free as in beer. not Freedom. Neither is buying a license of a copy of data on a physical medium for that matter.
>Spotify is free as in beer
That's called free to anyone who goes outside, anon.
I don't have Spotify, anon, but I do have Apple Music. IMHO a much better service.
Include me in the screencap!
your brain on cato institute kike propaganda
you have to go back
You can literally fit a million tracks onto a $10 microSD card. Why does spotify even exist?
zoomies don't know how files work
>because this million tracks you just loaded on your SD card is not as neatly organized
>because Spotify has 100 million tracks and not just 1 million
>because your SD card has no algorithm and no playlists to make you discover new music
Who are you quoting?
>a million tracks
Let's assume you're encoding this as 64kbps opus and each track is approximately 3 minutes (180 seconds) long.
Size in bits is thus roughly 11520 gigabits or roughly 1341.1045 GiB. Where can you find a $10 MicroSD card that stores 1341GiB?
Take notes - this is an interesting and honest window into the mindset of the zoomer eurasian negroid techno-cattle race of the future.
There are many CDs that have music that is not available on Spotify. CDs will always be relevant.
its really strange to think that this is technology of the past at this point. Cassette tapes might as well be something found in archeological digs.
Just like you have that one U2 album... and facebook... Why the fuck would anyone have spotify?
Reminds me of that episode of Cowboy Bebop where they go on a long adventure to find a VHS player which is basically an ancient long forgotten tool at that point.
Which is already happening.
Two decades ago they were in literally EVERY household but now if you have some important VHS tape you need to watch for some reason, first you have to find a working machine on craigslist or ebay and hope it is indeed working.
I don't have Spotify, I know how to use youtube-dl
GASP
BUT THINK OF LE AUDIO QUALITYRINOS
These. They are purely mechanical, a marvel of engineering, work still after 100+ years if you put a new ink ribbon in. What modern component will work after 100 years?
In 2018 somebody broke into my shitbox and stole my CD's. The only one left was "Nightmare Libido".
>What modern component will work after 100 years?
The C64 most likely will.
after you replace the caps
This
It's a neat piece of tech but alas, all electronics have a shelf-life. Unless you invent caps that can survive a thousand years.
>What modern component will work after 100 years?
Most solid state electronics probably will.
I meam Voyager has been in operation for almost 50 years. And it is space too, an environment not particularly hospitable to electronics.
>Blocks your path
And you own them. Unlike those millenial and gen z idiots that are just paying money to the music israelite for rental music.
Anon, copying songs from CD to portable music devices has been around for decades. Or better yet, set up a jellyfin server and host your own spotify
You should not assume that I wasn't aware of this. My car only has a CD player so that's what I rely on. Otherwise I don't listen to music when I'm on the go.
The Jellyfin tip sounds very useful, Thanks!
Not using an app to download music off spotify.
Always though laserdisc was cool.
Yeah.
Basically anything involving fucking LASERS is instantly cool.
They they are super cool.
Just one of my friends had one at home.
His dad owned a chain of Hi-Fi stores so he had all the best stuff and we were all impressed but none of our parents even bought that kind of stuff.
It's 100 years old and literally the oldest electronic instrument but still the most futuristic looking of them all
What is the name of this instrument?
that's a woman
Theremin
It's also the only musical instrument you can play without touching it in any way.
i found out last week there were vinyl movies. Around VHS quality movies on fucking vinyl. They were so fragile they came in a cartridge that you loaded and the player would remove the disk and play it.
what in tarnation
You mean CED
CED. Shame it didn’t come out when it was prototyped, the whole thing sunk RCA
Funny in my younger years first thing I did when I got another car was upgrade the sound system. Speakers and head unit. Fast forward 15 or so years. I don't even bother anymore. For one swapping out the stereo and speakers on a modern car is a bitch. For another it's only a 15 min drive to the office from the house. So yeah why bother with music. (v.s 15 years ago when it took me over 45 min to get to work)
If you have quality discussion on the radio, it's not worth it imo
Literally anything featured on the CuriousMarc YT channel like this tiny atomic clock.
>CuriousMarc
The video about the text "graphics" lewds lurking on punchcards from the late 60s was awesome.
Link?
Regular coffee makers and rice cookers are great engineering because they are dead simple, but required some cleverness to make them that way.
HDDs are complex and cool too. The tolerances are insane, and require constant controls to keep them from fucking themselves when you move them.
thumbnail looks like a puking beluga whale
lel
soviet soyuz navigation computer. all electro-mechanical. google 'Globus INK soyuz'
cool
>soyuz
surprised this doesn't get filtered to onionsuz
heh
Doesn't change the fact that they are a thing of the past.
>came out in 1982
>has been massively fading out for over a decade by now
As cool as CDs are they were always a pain in the butt
>can easily scratch
>even slight scratches might make some of your files unreadable depending on where the scratch is and how good the reading hardware is
>most delicate part of the CD is actually the reflective layer which usually is not well protected at all since it's on the side you write with your marker on and most people don't even know that it's the most vulnerable side
>reflective layer can corrode away, making the CD/DVD COMPLETELY unreadable even if you babby'd it all these years
Even tape drives are more dependable for long time storage
i recently tried to get some photos off a cd that was burned in 2000. drive read errors all over the place, i got some of them but not all
Exactly
>Even tape drives are more dependable for long time storage
if people had used the high quality metal tape or casettes, sure. but since most music didn't come on those and barely anyone copied shit to quality tape the day they bought it as good as no good tapes survive. whatever isn't rotting due to faulty storage has been stretched up by at least a full note. probably most quality tape that's been produced is just laying empty somewhere in some warehouses never to be used by anyone.
>whatever isn't rotting due to faulty storage has been stretched up by at least a full note.
lmao the literal fuck are you talking about?
most of my tapes from the 90s sound almost the same they did back then. at most a bit noisier and/or a bit muffled and those tapes are not dolby/metal, none of that. the cheap ones. in some cases I can even test this since of some tapes I did recordings to wav back in 2001 and comparing those digital files with the current state of the tapethere's barely any difference.
I have a feeling over the years it's more like people's memories of tapes have degraded more than the tapes themselves.
they did sound great IF you had proper tape machines and if not they were a completely mixed bag. you have to SERIOUSLY fuck up somewhere to make your tapes sound audibly worse. dust and dirt alone doesn't make them sound bad. maybe if you stored them on top of a tube TV or in the car trunk for 3 decades.
a CD may fail completely very easily with your shit completely lost. tape is much more forgiving.
I still miss the CD-ROM whirring noise, very relaxing
>relaxing
Mine sounded like the PC was about to liftoff and if the CD was some cheap shit it additionally sounded like it was about to disintegrate.
Sometimes it annoyed the piss out of my especially when it was deep into midnight and I just wanted some small txt file from the disc or forgot the CD in the drive and Windows decided it was time too spin up the drive for no reason at all.
It still amazes me that we had telephones 100 years before being able to send basic text
Night vision wins hands down. It's an analog technology relying completely on rare magic rocks with extremely low yield rates that transform photons hitting into the secret magic rock tube into 30,000x more electrons and shooting them at a phosphor screen much like a tube tv that'll appear as an image to the user. There's only a handful of companies in the world that can produce proper image intensifiers and the variance between individual units is so high that often times every single tube is sold with its own spec sheet. Yet a single AA battery will power a device for dozens upon dozens of hours. It's like an enchanted item out of a fantasy setting or mmorpg
$8k-$12k per unit btw for the very best stuff and don't look at anything too bright or you'll burn an image onto the tube
Yet this old analog technology still reigns supreme and digital night vision still lags decades behind and is completely impractical to actually wear and use
damn
What's the concrete difference between night vision and thermal imaging? I get that it is different, and that night vision is just much better for some stuff. But to my retarded brain it seems pretty similar, even w.r.t the technology it uses. I read the wiki, but I couldn't tell what's different (a part from being more capable, and more accurate than regular thermal imaging). So is it just non-IR thermal imaging?
I don't understand how the technology works but isn't it like this:
Night Vision makes you able to see better in the dark but it doesn't highlight "warm" things in particular.
They see different wavelengths of infrared. NV is more towards near infrared which behaves more like visible light. "Thermal" is farther from visible light and penetrates more barriers, but is far less "bright" and and more difficult to detect.
There are many types of night-vision technologies. Some of them don't rely on IR at all, but just amplify what's there in the visual spectrum (or close to it), eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_intensifier
The key is to understand that heat is just part of the electromechanical spectrum. After Newton discovered that white light is made up of multiple colors using a prism, another scientist named Herschel went ahead and tried to measure the temperatures of those colors. He found little difference in the rainbow, but found massive differences below it. This puzzled the ever loving fuck out of most people and it was proposed that the invisible heat be called infrared, which literally means below red (cuz the heat was found under the red of the rainbow). Near infrared you can see part of with your own eye. That's why night cameras have a very dim red glow, but far infrared you can't see. But you can feel it, because it's shed off of anything hotter than it's surroundings.
TLDR; NVGs amplify nearly invisible light, Thermals say fuck that noise and detects invisible heat light.
i still burn discs
I always thought CRT TVs were cool. They’re so reactive. They have a convex screen and if you touch them sometimes you get a little shock. Put a magnet near it and see pretty colors. If you get close enough you can see pixels the size of skittles. Plus the high pitch whine is cool. Just cool all around.
>4:3, matte
>translucent keys that permanently smelled really good
>crazy looking led ring around the charger
>literally appears to be breathing when left on sleep
>chonky but somehow makes it work
>lid has to be released by pressing a button
>still looks kinda cool even today
also they had the courage to do USB and Wifi as standard
also, PPC instead of x86 garbage
most timeless portable mac. not as comfy to use as the PowerBook G3 'Pismo' but that one did also look like ass. G4 iBooks can run Mac OS 9, MorphOS, Linux, OS X or any BSD you fancy. Anything past PowerPC isn't a Macintosh to me and I always thought OS X was kinda 'meh' after the big hype train. BeOS/Haiku captures that 90s Macintosh feel a lot better than anything Apple put out in the past decade.
Damn, ANon, I feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel those words you're sayin. Come on, that's what I want those fools to hear.
Apple really had a wonderful design philosophy for a while, Those first gen unibody macbooks were also amazing for their time. Still the best quality laptop Ive ever owned, that thing was an absolute tank
minidiscs look fucking cool
Yup.
Those machines look like the future. Look at the shit we're having right now. It looks like literally nothing. Slabs of glossy nondescript plastic. It's like we derailed at some point and future left without us.
Parents have had this since before I was born and always kept it safe. I love it almost as much as they do!
hivemind.
Also, there's something sexy about retro-futuristic optical media in a caddy.
I know right? Retro futurism is a beautiful aesthetic. I think that Minidiscs were ahead of their time tbh
ITT zoomers baffled by technology without touchscreens
Y2K was the peak, after that it went downhill.
Memphis was peak.
They really all just suck, don't they? It all went downhill long before the 80s. You pretty much need to go back 100 years or more before consumer design even starts to approach anything sane.
really neat
we can't afford lavish things built to a human scale, anon! We need to save on materials in a race to the bottom!
imagine an alt 2000 where BeOS took off and kicked windows 2000 in its butt
>Memphis
Absolute peak of SOVL
>Y2K
Serviceable but tacky
>Frutiger Aero
Cool, classy, well conceived
>Flat Design
Does the job, but lacks emotion
How can you top this?
for the love of god take me back
technology went backwards
god colored clear plastic looks like fucking garbage, I can't fathom how this ever took off other than for cost cutting reasons. And you corpo loving losers just ate it up.
I still use CD's to store backups.
I used to do that, then went to DVDs. Now I use a USB HDD dock + 6-8tb internal HDDs to make backups
I don't trust external drives.
Invented in the 20's but still used over hf radio due to it's incredible robustness.
Got all this yesterday at a neighbor's garage sale for $50
How do i go about tinkering with this...?
You can start by testing it all, of course. It looks like the turntable is missing the stylus. You can just replace the whole p-mount cartridge for about the same price, though. https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-AT85EP-Turntable-Cartridge/dp/B077QG5QSJ/
Yeah noticed the missing needle a bit to late yesterday
Thanks for the zon link brother
There is something really classy about early digital
1980's digital japan is peak design
>1980's digital :I
>1980's digital japan :O
i wish they still made computers with this form factor and aesthetic so bad
hey look a touch mouse on your calculator
you might light this tbh
thats my everyday phone, got mode shift buttons which is neat
Physical disciplining of your women, childen, and animals.
Wooden and stonen clubs.
Ooga.
Grug like old rock , flat and pleasing to touch and look at. New sharp rock good for do thing with but not pleasing to touch and look. Grug miss old rock sometimes and good old days.....
I've actually considered shaving with a rock. Problem was finding a suitable one. The crystalline structure of most is unsuitable for sharping on a whet stone, and chipping away at jade like the chinks 3000 years ago isn't gonna happen without any jade lying around.
Anyway, rocks are nice, definitely more durable and reliable they any soft- or hardware released these past 4 decades.
>shaving with a rock
Do you brush your teeth with branches?
Obsidian can take a very sharp edge and it's pretty cheap
always felt really cyberpunk
Mostly because film makers LOVED to use similarly looking props as data media in scifi movies.
MDs are really technical looking.
It's strange to see how electronics got more and more visually minimalist just to not scare the npc.
Look at how fucking STUFFED with buttons and especially descriptions/tags 80's electronics were, especially the ones from Japan. I love that look and am actually sad that this will never ever return for "normal electronics ". It's basically only a thing anymore on industrial/work equipment.
what's really interesting, looking back, is that in the 70s (or whenever) they shot a vinyl record with records of human voices, pictures, etc. into space, hoping that one day an intelligent alien race might find it.
but like, vinyl records are so outdated now that even most humans don't have the technology to play them anymore.
i wonder if any alien race, no matter how advanced, would know what to do with a vinyl record if they held one in their hands. they might think it's a frisbee lol
it has a very abstract 'manual' of how it works. if they have an atmosphere (thus acoustics) and can travel galaxies I'm sure they can figure it out.
forgot pic. the record with it's instructions drawn on itself.
What times those, nowadays everyone is shitting bricks with the idea we live in a Dark Forest universe.
millipede memory
Only a retarded zoomer would think shooting a laser at a mirror is ultra-neato my dudebro.
"Like wow man we can spin this metal fast, and measure the difference in a 10 micron pit to count binary"
The tech is older than your whore mother.
nigga i'm high as fuck
These things. I don't own nor know how to play them - but it blows my mind whenever I listen to the array of sounds they can produce. And purely analog, too.
Didn't those were used back in the 80s?
Give a few gadgets to some motivated kids and they will start making works of wonder.
Comfy as fuck