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Old 27th Mar 2018, 4:46 pm   #161
sortedradio
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Talking of storage, another thing that never really took off was bubble memory, which was predicted to replace the hard drive. I believe that although reliable it was power hungry and difficult to manufacture, therefore expensive.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 5:29 pm   #162
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I've come across two types of CD caddies - in fact I still have lots of the caddies for one of the types as a local library were chucking them out. The drives associated with them seem to be SCSI in the main. Used for both audio and data CDs.

The other type was a little slimmer and was used at my local community radio station in the early '90s. All the station's CDs were supposed to be held in them so the DJs never needed to touch the CDs. But there were never enough, especially for the DJs who needed to bring in their own CDs for eg specialist music programmes. The caddy lid lifted and the CD went in with a sort of scooping action, risking a scraped edge to the disk. The DJs hated them!
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 5:53 pm   #163
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At my first full time job scanned documents were kept on WORM discs that looked like a CD in a caddy, but were some kind of optical storage medium.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 6:01 pm   #164
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

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Talking of storage, another thing that never really took off was bubble memory, which was predicted to replace the hard drive. I believe that although reliable it was power hungry and difficult to manufacture, therefore expensive.
This was used for a short time in the main processors of System X Telephone Exchanges, but wasn't a success.

From what I remember it had PROMs associated with is to identify "loops" which didn't work.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 6:03 pm   #165
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Polaroid film isn't dead, just dead expensive at £18 for 8 shots. Bought a new film for my Polaroid SX-70, brand new (it arrived yesterday), they are being re-manufactured. Not as quick as the original 15 minutes opposed to one or two. All good fun, they* do a black and white version too.

*Polaroid Originals, they bought the name too. A bunch of mad Dutchmen, got to love them.
 
Old 27th Mar 2018, 6:05 pm   #166
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Bubble-memory also had the big disadvantage that it was 'linear' rather than random-access (to read a particular location you had to wait for its 'bubble' to come round in the loop) - the obvious issue here being that the greater the number of addressable memory-locations in the device the longer you have to wait for any individual one to come round to be read/written.

Doubling the latency when you double the volume of data stored is not an easy thing to sell.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 6:07 pm   #167
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Anyone remember the "DC International Cassette"?

Same footprint as the Philips compact cassette but about twice as thick. Wider tape, running at 3 3/4 ips, much better for music was the intention.

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Old 27th Mar 2018, 6:35 pm   #168
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Polaroid film isn't dead, just dead expensive at £18 for 8 shots. Bought a new film for my Polaroid SX-70, brand new (it arrived yesterday), they are being re-manufactured. Not as quick as the original 15 minutes opposed to one or two. All good fun, they* do a black and white version too.

*Polaroid Originals, they bought the name too. A bunch of mad Dutchmen, got to love them.
Think the film cost about £5 back in 1970s. So quite cheap today.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 9:35 pm   #169
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AFAIR the DC international cassettes ran at around 2 ips. No personal experience but in the late 1960`s both systems were reviewed in an amateur cine magazine I used to get .
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 10:05 pm   #170
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We had a PC with one of those caddy CD drives at work in the mid 1990's. I was offered it when we upgraded after the millenium, but declined. It is the only one I have seen.
Sony made caddy CD drives around 1990. They had a proprietary controller, not SCSI.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 10:11 pm   #171
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All good fun, they* do a black and white version too.
I got a Polaroid camera with my birthday money when I was fourteen (1973). It was one of those you squeezed the sides of the shutter button in to get the light-meter to work - a chequered display. Anyway...

I recently ratched out some photos I took with it which had been stored in a suitcase under a bed, and most of them had aged very well indeed, with only very slight fading. Some had lost their contrast though, but not bad considering developing was a matter of counting two minutes (or something) and at the mercy of the ambient temperature on the day.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 10:51 pm   #172
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We had one of those B/W Polaroid cameras in the early 1970s.
After about a year or so the films were NLA and the shop offered a trade in on a new one.
My father rightly assumed that the same would happen again and took the camera back home where it spent many years in the back of a wardrobe.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 11:02 pm   #173
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I have two unused (and probably unusable, expiry date Jan 1979) rolls of Polaroid type 47 roll film, retrieved from the dump at Marconi's in the 1990's. These are the original type of Polaroid films where each pack includes a resealable plastic container with a chemical-impregnated felt strip in a holder that you had to wipe over the print after development to stabilise it. I did open and examine a third one I got at the same time and when I opened the sealed pack, found that, although the wiper was still moist, the pods of chemicals in the roll of sensitive material that had to be burst to develop the image had dried up. Although the wipers are still moist, the ones I still have must have suffered the same fate, and are only kept as a reminder of the many rolls I used to use in oscilloscope cameras in the 1970's.
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Old 27th Mar 2018, 11:27 pm   #174
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'...and are only kept as a reminder of the many rolls I used to use in oscilloscope cameras in the 1970's.'
We had a Polaroid 'scope camera at Kirk o' Shotts (I think it was there) and at Skelton there was a fold-up hood for a camera, but no camera. Not sure if it was a Polaroid device or a HP one.

I still use a camera (digital!) for recording spectral analysis, vector display analysis and oscilloscope waveforms to good effect.

One of our daughters wanted an 'instant' camera when she was about ten, so we got her a Fuji Instax. It got used a few times and is in a cupboard somewhere, waiting for the day when it will become a collector's item.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 12:06 am   #175
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AFAIR the DC international cassettes ran at around 2 ips.
Correct. I have gathered 6 x 120 min & 8 x 90 min tapes over the last 2 years, most with cardboard sleeves and some with a slide-in clear plastic storage cases. Mind you they cost me arm & a leg.

The DC 120's have the original Grundig Price Labels of 35/6 (35 shillings & 6p each), expensive in those days,

I've transplanted new cassette tape into them, from my stock of TDK AD120's but they still run the full 120mins (thanks to the TDK AD120 always having a few minutes longer anyway)

BTW, I have 5 Grundig C100 machines.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 5:52 am   #176
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A couple of decades back there was a 'thing' that was often deployed by BT in rural areas where there was insufficient physical phone-line capacity: if you wanted two phone lines to a premises they fitted this thing to your line - it essentially split the available upstream bandwidth between the two voice-grade lines.

I forget what it was called now, but the big issue was that it totally screwed-up dialup Internet access.

So plenty of people who ordered a "second line" from BT so they could be online and still use the phone found that BT did this cheap-and-nasty fudge which totally crippled their dialup to the point where it just didn't work.

Anyone remember what it was called? It was a sort-of pseudo-ISDN if I remember correctly.
I almost got lumbered with one of those things but I was lucky
The engineer came back and ripped the thing right out again.
They had told the engineer to scramble the line with the dead one that went into the building anyway.

This is the beast.
http://www.telephonesuk.co.uk/shared_service.htm
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.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 6:02 am   #177
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Thank's for mentioning Roneo, who were indeed bought out by Vickers, becoming Roneo Vickers, It brought back memories of the stupid annoying advert they had on TV back in the 80's, a woman with black curly hair (80's perm) in a white dress, dancing around a load of office equipment, to a most annoying tune, "roneo vickers, we've got it right, right around the office, roneo".
I think I'll go for a lie down, hopefully the jingle will have gone out of myhead when I wake up. lol
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 6:19 am   #178
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Analogue Satellite boxes!
They were wiped out when Sky went digital. However when Sky vacated the boxes channels, the German's moved in! Taking over the free space left by them. Of course the stations were in German and they rarely used subtitles on English shows. Everything being dubbed into German. But you could watch several music channels, including MTV, which they don't have to pay for, before MTV stopped showing Music Video's. And of course many of the music video's were in English, even the ones made by the German acts! I watched it for several years, till the dish rusted and fell off during a cold spell!
I don't know if the Satellite is still transmitting. I guess not.

Took me ages to work out what Big Brother was! It hadn't started in the UK at that time.
There was a place near me that was selling these satellite boxes for very little money when they first came out, iirc they had to be pointed at 19.2 degrees east. I fitted my own, then ended up fitting them for all the lads, there was loads of music video's on the channels then, including one rather bizarre one, done I think by a foreign band. I can't remember the song, but the video had these women in it and they looked like they were dressed in tinfoil, it came off piece by piece, they disappeared into the sea as the last piece was removed.

Hands up how many people of a certain age only bought a Polaroid camera so they could take mucky pictures of their wife/girlfriend? When I worked as an electrician doing council work, there was always a small box in nearly every loft you went into, it invariably contained about a dozen pictures of the lady of the house in various states of undress, usually ending with her doing something unmentionable with a large pink buzzy thing.
Those were the days' lol. I had a mate who worked in a development lab for one of the major photo processing firms (they did everything pronto) He said that they used to get "interesting" pictures of women, usually on the end of a roll of holiday film. It was illegal to send pornographic pictures through the mail, so they never sent them back, but apparently they had a wall at the lab that was covered in them.
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Old 28th Mar 2018, 8:36 am   #179
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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.....

Back on topic, cheap digital cameras have largely been replaced by smartphones for the casual user.

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Old 28th Mar 2018, 10:09 am   #180
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Back on topic, cheap digital cameras have largely been replaced by smartphones for the casual user.
If there was a thread that was the complete antithesis of this one, then both digital camera and casual smartphone camera would come top, surely?

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.

A grab-shot of a display, the video feature that enables ancient PLC LED indications to be slowed down for sequence analysis... Perfect!
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