Years ago I worked at an electronics store and have seen some very interesting products over the years with some being very useful.
Not sure how to do a poll on here but wanted to see how people matched on the ownership of some of these useful devices .
Have you ever owned a My (answers)
-PDA? Yes, I had a Palm IIIe
-DVD-Recorder? Yes. Successor to VCR sure didn’t last long… 😖
-WebTV? No. Interactive TV in the days of dial-up. 🙂
-3D Television? No
-Raspberry PI? No but I want to.
-Internet Radio Player? No This would be fun especially if it also had am/FM tuner
Missed my favorite obsolete tech, the minidisc player. I Loved that thing. It was superior to CD in almost every way but never took off. Still loved getting 17 hours of music from one AA batt.
How about a Colecovision console, or a Laserdisc player?
LaserDisc goes back go the early 80’s I didn’t go back that far and I’ve never heard of a Colecovision console before…?
I still have my laserdisc player… i have been unable to get rid of it. Everytime i look at it, the nostalgia knocks me off my feet.
Not the target age (mid 20), but I daily drive a Dell Axim X5 with Windows Mobile 2003 on it. Still got a smart phone, but I enjoy using old PDAs as my alarm, jotting in appointments, calculating store prices, taking notes and making lists, and it’s useful for swapping restaurant TVs away from Fox News!
useful for swapping restaurant TVs away from Fox News!
Why did phone manufacturers stop putting IR transmitters in phones? So damned useful it was having one!
Admittedly it’s a garbage means of transferring data xD I once transferred Doom from a HTC phone to a PDA. It took many minutes to do, and I had to restart it at one point xD
PDA: Palm zire
3D TV: I had one once, but never used the 3D capabilities
PDA- yes, plenty of Palm devices over the years. Pretty sure I had an IBM WorkPad 30x, a Zire 71, and a Tungsten T3. They were great devices, absolutely fantastic for the time period.
DVD recorder- yes, both for the TV and DVD burner drives in PCs.
Web TV- not me, but we did get a setup for my grandparents back in the day. What an absolutely terrible way to browse the internet.
3D tv- never saw the need personally.
Raspberry pi- oh yes, been playing with them since they came out.
Internet Radio Player- no, never did. By the time this made sense I was fully invested in the iPod world and had hoarded enough music to not make it worthwhile.
49 year old here. I still own a 3D tv, but I’ve never actually used the 3D feature. I didn’t even buy the TV. My dad gave my his old one when he upgraded.
I bought a Raspberry PI but never really did much with it.
I’ve never owned any of the others.
PDA: I had a Palm Pilot I rescued from a scrap bin at work and installed an open source OS on. I used it as an ereader until the eye strain from reading on that small screen started giving me headaches.
DVD recorder: No. I gave up on broadcast TV when I was 17 and the amount of advertising time hit 25 minutes per hour. I watched everything on rented DVDs until video streaming and adblockers became a thing.
WebTV: No. It was never available in my country.
3D TV: No. I was waiting for the format to get more support, then it went away entirely.
Raspberry Pi: Yes! I could never get wifi working on it, which limited its usefulness. Still fun to play with until I somehow broke the HDMI out.
Internet Radio: Kinda. That’s what I used the Pi for after breaking video.
Had a few Palm Pilots. Had a DVDR.
How come no love for the Mini Disc? What about the Laser disc? Laser Disc was the first porn I saw on a TV! Can’t forget about that innovation.
- PDA - yes. Palm Pilot and even an Apple Newton
- 3d TV - Yes, but I never used it
PDA: XDA EXEC and some others I can’t recall.
3D TV: no but I did setup my PC for 3D with Nvidia 3D
Raspberry Pi: setup a bunch of the gen 1 units as TVs at a children’s creche
Internet radio: skipped that went straight to streaming
I need to check my processor/motherboard specs to make sure I can set up 3d . Sounds like a blast.
Dvd recorder, raspi sn 3DTV (still my tv. It’d a 4K LG one)
DVD recorder - hell yes. I probably ended up with 300 totally legally burned copies of Netflix rentals that I’ve since thrown away because DVD quality now looks like trash.
Raspberry Pi - yes,though underused.
Didn’t have the others cause they didn’t really appeal to me. No major use case, IMO
PDA: I had a Compaq iPAQ which I never really got the hang of using.
DVD-R: For a while this was a great way to back things up, before large flash storage was a thing.
Of this list, I only had PDAs. I had a couple of versions of the Palm Pilot. I remember learning the script using the stylus.
I’m getting closer and closer to my 60th birthday, and still remember my delight at using a mouse on a Mac with one 3.5 inch drive. Inserting and removing program vs storage discs was tedious, but just loving the intuitive interface and how quickly I was able to make the mouse an extension of my hand. So much easier than learning function keys and keyboard shortcuts. And then combining mouse clicks, functions, and keyboard shortcuts to be so much more productive than ever before.
We still have an original iPod that my husband uses in our basement, and I believe we still have a working Atari game console.
I had a Handspring PDA. Still in a box in my garage in fact, alongside my Nokia 770 “internet tablet”.
