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Old 28th Mar 2018, 10:19 am   #181
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Also the infra red sensitivity allows you to quickly
check if a remote control is working.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 10:25 am   #182
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Originally Posted by russell_w_b View Post
A picture paints a thousand words. Taking numerous, sharp, exposure-perfect pics in holes, dark corners and out-of sight of one's eye that can be blown up and printed out all-but-instantly makes digital photography a perfect tool for repairing anything, and augments the traditional notebook-and-pencil method!
Agreed: must admit that I've largely given up taking paper notes when working on 'stuff' - a macro-shot is so much quicker/easier than writing down which colour-combinations of wires go to which pins on a multiway socket, for example, or recording the way a tortuous dial-cord is threaded.

Lots of photos, from lots of different angles.....
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 10:33 am   #183
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Aah, the good old DACS, not! When I worked on the overhead lines they were a pita, you used to get them quite often in rural areas, they'd run a 2 pair cable to feed a couple of properties, then someone would want another line, so in went a DACS. they caused murder when you were fault finding if you were not aware it was there, also there was a specific way to disconnect them or they were ruined. Fortunately, a lot of them were housed in a grey tube and attached to the pole,so you could usually see them. I still have the engineering manual for dealing with them somewhere.
Perhaps I have a musical ear or something, but I was always aware if the line was provisioned via DACS, by the slightly raspy sound of the dial tone and NU tone.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 10:37 am   #184
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The Dictaphone Ultravox and similar dictation machines that used a flat sheet of magnetic film wrapped around a roller for recording. Fun to play with because you can hold the head still and scan the same bit of sound over and over as a loop, or pull the head across the roller and speed the sound up without altering the pitch. Now useless because you can't get the magnetic sheets.

Carbon paper is still useful stuff for tracing purposes.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 10:47 am   #185
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I used to use carbon paper with the dot matrix printer of my pcw8256 . It worked OK with 60gsm paper.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 6:40 pm   #186
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A little later, when digital cameras were new and priced beyond most individuals, borrowing the company ones over the weekend became popular. Not everyone realised it was possible to undelete pictures.....
I've heard of someone buying a new digital camera from a certain catalogue shop only to find some "nude reader's wives" styles photos still left in the memory.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 8:44 pm   #187
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Quote:
Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by russell_w_b View Post
A picture paints a thousand words. Taking numerous, sharp, exposure-perfect pics in holes, dark corners and out-of sight of one's eye that can be blown up and printed out all-but-instantly makes digital photography a perfect tool for repairing anything, and augments the traditional notebook-and-pencil method!
Agreed: must admit that I've largely given up taking paper notes when working on 'stuff' - a macro-shot is so much quicker/easier than writing down which colour-combinations of wires go to which pins on a multiway socket, for example, or recording the way a tortuous dial-cord is threaded.

Lots of photos, from lots of different angles.....
That is a sore subject with me, the number of clients I deal with who have taken something to bits then can't remember which wire went where, "why didn't you take a few pictures before you stripped it?" I ask, "oh I didn't think of that" said the client, as he's trying to talk to me and update his status on facebook.
They think thy're so clever, using their phone to tweet, facetime, e-mail etc, yet they haven't the sense to use the same phone to take a picture of something before they strip it down!
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Old 29th Mar 2018, 2:27 am   #188
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I sometimes take photos of mechanisms and then draw a diagram, because a good diagram can explain how the components fit together, or show you the inside and outside at the same time.
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Old 19th Apr 2018, 11:55 am   #189
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3M desktop thermal copiers "Scotch Copiers", heat provided by one or two high wattage incandescent bulbs, and used themal sensitive paper. These were sold for home/small office use in the 1960s/1970's possibly into the 1980's.
I had one in use until about 1982 when the special paper became either unobtainable or prohibitively costly.

IIRC these used a hybrid photographic and thermal process, involving an intermediate sheet of paper or film, pink in colour.
The initial exposure was I believe a dry photographic process that used a high powered lamp.
The lamp was controlled by a simple run back timer so as to control the exposure time.
The second stage was a thermal process in which the pink intermediate film and the white paper were passed between heated rollers and the invisible image held on the pink film thereby printed on the white paper.

Although the lamp got very hot, I do not believe that this heat was relevant to the process, it would be too variable according to room temperature and also how many copies had been made.
The heated rollers were presumably under thermostatic control to give consistent results.
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Old 19th Apr 2018, 1:10 pm   #190
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I remember going to a demonstration of one of those copiers when I was a student in the late 1960's. The only problem for us was that the only paper available was an American size (I can't recall if it was US letter or 8" x 10") and the stuff we might need to copy was either A4 or Foolscap.

The engineering department's copier was a Kodak wet-process one that produced a tone-reversed image, meaning that you had to use the first copy as a negative if you wanted proper copies. It coped quite well with continuous-tone and coloured images, unlike the contemporary Xerox copiers that were completely blind to blue and unable to cope with images.
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Old 19th Apr 2018, 1:34 pm   #191
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I remember that blue blindness, when did they overcome the problem? And how?
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Old 19th Apr 2018, 1:39 pm   #192
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I'm wondering if we're reaching the end of days for the analogue (i.e. not class d) audio amp. Obviously the audiophile brigade will keep almost any old tech alive to some extent but in terms of mass-market consumer products they seem to be moving into history.
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Old 19th Apr 2018, 2:09 pm   #193
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I'm wondering if we're reaching the end of days for the analogue (i.e. not class d) audio amp
We are, the class D jobs are a lot smaller and power efficient. Oddly enough in the last two weeks I have made an analogue amplifier for home (using a TDA 7292 chip) and a digital amplifier (for work), the whole PCB of the digital one is smaller than the TDA chip alone.
 
Old 19th Apr 2018, 4:03 pm   #194
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Since a Class D amplifier is basically a special kind of variable switched-mode power supply (much like a class AB amplifier is a special kind of variable dissipative voltage regulator), are we ever likely to see ICs combining the power supply and amplifying functions; meant to be powered from rectified mains, with optically-isolated audio inputs, and using the switching transformer to provide isolation for the speaker?
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Old 22nd Apr 2018, 4:32 pm   #195
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I still have a Polaroid 104 model Land Camera (including the armpit clip - if it was cold you put the metal clip in your armpit to warm it up then put the exposed film in the clip to develop!!), umpteen film cameras (Ashai Pentax etc), turntables and of course a ZX81 in it's original box up in the loft. I am just wondering WHY? LOL.
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Old 22nd Apr 2018, 5:36 pm   #196
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Music players on the top deck of double decked buses.
We had them playing in South Yorkshire. I think they might have been 8 track machines, or something with a tape on a continues loop. It played easy listening music such as Don Mclean Castles In The Air and had adverts and jingles. Such as "sounds in motion in stereo".
The idea was that it would cut down on vandalism on the top deck of the bus. I suppose it worked to some extent.
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Old 22nd Apr 2018, 8:14 pm   #197
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I bought a power amplifer a couple of months ago, one of these-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003UHO4Q6/

Pure analogue, even the power supply which is your standard toroidal, bridge, pair of caps job. Maybe it's my age, but I don't trust using a switched mode power supply as an audio amplifier. It feels somehow against nature to do so. Especially considering the sheer amount of noise cheap switched modes fling out into the luminiferous aether.
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Old 22nd Apr 2018, 8:27 pm   #198
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Originally Posted by PSValves View Post
I'm wondering if we're reaching the end of days for the analogue (i.e. not class d) audio amp. Obviously the audiophile brigade will keep almost any old tech alive to some extent but in terms of mass-market consumer products they seem to be moving into history.
Likewise the landline telephone.
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Old 22nd Apr 2018, 8:32 pm   #199
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The technique described by HKS sounds more flexible. How was the burning process controlled though?
It was around 1964 but from what I can remember the machine had two revolving drums side by side.

The sheet you wanted to copy/duplicate was wrapped around the first drum.
The 'screen print master' was placed around the second drum.

The machine was then activated and the drums [may have been one long one] revolved. The original was scanned, the master was pierced by a tiny point by an arc of which could be seen varying in intensity.

The master was then taken off the main machine and placed around the drum of the printer. Ink was squeezed through the tiny holes producing high quality prints/copies of the original.

That is about all I can remember. An expensive palava! The scanning took around 20 mins per A4 sheet. John
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Old 22nd Apr 2018, 9:08 pm   #200
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From a search of this thread, it appears that surprisingly nobody seems to have mentioned the imminent demise of the fluorescent lighting, particularly the compact form, just scant years after the governments tried bullying everyone into using them. The ones in my home are only in use until they fail and will then be replaced with LEDs.

Effectively they're already obsolete but just hanging on.

Regarding Scotch Copiers, around the age of 10 I spent a phase desperately wanting to own one as I'd started drawing my own comics and wanted to "print" them

I remember them being hopelessly expensive at something like £50 each.
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