What devices or equipment you own or had that doesn't have much use in the modern world anymore?
What devices or equipment you own or had that doesn't have much use in the modern world anymore?
When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
I have a large collection of VGA cables and proprietary phone charging cables.
i bet that motorola cable is gold. : D
Me too! A whole milk crate full! Everyone thinks its a waste of space until I bust out the exact obscure/ancient cable they need.
I have an old 6 volt lantern that uses a battery that is 6 inches wide, 4 inches tall, and 3 inches deep.
If I turn it on it gives you almost enough light to actually see where you are going and the battery lasts for about 2 hours.
With two 18650s I could replace that battery for a package 2/3 the size of a pack of cigarettes and run that light for a day or so.
If I replace the bulb in it with an LED equivalent I could probably stretch that out to nearly a week.
Ouch I remember thouse fat 4.5 volt battery who had like 2 long tongues, going into those old flashlights, glowing in the dark at best with a super small incandescent lamp.
These?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4,5V-AA-battery.jpg
I'd forgotten that they existed. I used to use them for something, maybe powering a Lego or meccano motor.
Its important to consider amperage discharge too. Can the two 18660s put out the same current as the big rectangle one?
Replacing the old halogen with led would be a big difference. Ot would need basically no amperage. At that point you can attach usb male to alligator clips, clip the ends of the lanterns battery pack connectors to supply 5v 2.4a of power directly with a power bank.
I use a 5 volt led bulb that plugs into regular usba slot. It works with small power banks and ast forever on larger 20ah batteries.
High discharge 18650s can provide 20-30 amps, doubt the lamp needs that much current if it's powered off older battery tech
My record player has the ability to record cassette audio onto USB.
Mine too!
Sliding ruler for doing multiplications (1). Still have it for nostalgia or post-apocalyptic scenarios.
TI-89 graphing calculator
There's an app for that now
Same, but different calculator: I own an HP-48SX, but now I just use HP-48GX emulated in an Android app.
I still have to use the calculator when taking exams. If I pull out a phone it's an automatic fail.
Rewritable CDs? Technically I can still use them, but I don't really expect to use them and I wonder if they are still worth keeping.
I got rid of mine with my most recent move. Why bother bringing them with me.
I still have a couple hundred and a couple usb cd/DVD burners. Maybe someday I'll use one again...
Depending on their age and how you stored them they might not even work anymore
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
If you are interested in fixing those I might be able to help.
The most common reason is the internal CMOS battery exploding or needing replacement.
Of that era, it could well be capacitor plague.
literally the same combo here, but my reel to reel is a rebranded "viking" telefunken unit
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
Birmingham Alabama has a zeppelin mooring building.
Pretty cool! I’ve actually been to the site where the Hindenburg went up in flames. There’s a small museum there with pieces of the actual blimp in it, including a tiny piece of the Nazi flag that was painted on the tail portion. Felt pretty odd for me to see that in person.
Mooring to the top of tall buildings didn’t generally work well in practice
Maybe they kept it around in hope of making it a flying saucer dock, as in old Popular Mechanics cover art.
Chicago has one, but it’s never been used
Reminds me of another thing: you see these boot scrapers all across european cities (1) They're usually victorian era, and were used to clean horse shit from your shoes before entering a house.
My hometown did, too! Even Chicago still has a couple.
In Amish country, you'll see horses hitched up at Costco.
I have an ISA soundcard around here somewhere.
You will only take my Gravis Ultrasound Max from my stiff cold dead hands.
Not before.
I moved heaven and earth to find and buy one back in the day. We will never part ways. I don't have had a system to put it in for the last 22 years. I dont care. It's resting in its box untill.. I dont know, the rapture or something. It's mine.
I had one!
my old ISA graphics card would like a word. :p
I have an old dial telephone from the 1940s. A couple years ago I saw an Arduino project to make them dial digitally, but it's not the top item on my bucket list.
Film canisters. People saved the plastic canisters photo film came in because they were so well made, waterproof, airtight, and ubiquitous. They were used in all kinds of DIY designs. I've heard some companies still make them, without the film, for people who need them for crafts. I still have some in the junk drawer.
I used to keep weed in them
If you have a local photo shop that still develops film they will gladly give them to you for free. I have about 20 sitting around and rhey do come in handy. The shops just throw them away anyway.
A coat with a phone pocket. If you have something shaped like a Nokia 3210, you can actually use that pocket. Modern phones are the exact wrong shape to fit in there.
A Minidisc player. First, music went to mp3 players and then it went completely online. Fortunately I sold that thing while it still had some value.
A battery powered GPS device. It’s just for navigating in the forest, and nothing else. It doesn’t even have a map, so it’s pretty useless while driving.
What does that GPS display? A direction?
Here’s one way you could have used it. You drive your car to a remote location. You grab your rifle and your dog, and go hunting. You mark the location of your car on the GPS and start walking. In the evening, you can use the GPS to find your way back to the car. You could also go hiking and use the GPS to find your way back.
The whole point is to mark locations and later find your way back those locations. In the era of geocaching you would have made a custom point of interest and input the coordinates manually before actually visiting the location.
This device actually shows you lots of information you rarely need these days: direction, speed, distance, coordinates, signal strength, just to name a few.
Scientific calculator.
I got a graphing one from TI. It was really expensive and was marginally useful during college. Then I had a cheap one that just did numbers.
And those were way better than sliding rulers.
Jaz drive (and the isa scsi card) and several tapes.
Thanks for reminding me that I can’t trust my own memory and that they were NOT called Jazz drives
I have a sheet of foam with 40 or 50 old 7400-series chips - mostly simple logic gates. I could probably make some fun retro led blinky things.
It's crazy what the talented engineers in the 1970s were doing with those 7400 series logic. It's a lost art these days, just throw a 10c microcontroller on your board and control everything with code.
Code is my preference, having spent a whole career as a software dev - I do a lot of messing around with Arduino and ESP. But I remember back in the 70s when a college prof let me play with a bunch of chips he had acquired but didn't have a curriculum put together yet. He let me do a little demo for one of his classes, which was pretty cool. I explained how binary numbers worked, how to step through a counter by pressing a button a bunch of times, read out the count on leds, use the number as an address to a memory chip and other things. He mentioned that the next new thing was going to be a "microprocessor" - a whole computer on a single chip - imagine that! If my school had had an electronics program I would switched my major on the spot, based solely on how fun it was.
I have a stereoscopic viewer. Like a desk version of Google Cardboard. You tape down two photos taken from different angles and view them in 3d. It has an adjustment knob like binoculars for your pupil distance, and some legs to hold it parallel to the desk. It’s made for aerial photographs. Maybe I could turn it into a VR viewer.
Afaik they still use these professionally -- it was in my class on remote sensing
I have a sony mini cassette video camera. Got a new battery for it and works like a dream. Really fun to record modern events in that format.
I also have a Sears VHS video camera. Working on getting a battery for that.
A functional electric Smith Corona typewriter
8mm slide projector
Too many CRTS
It's a good time being a Junkman
I've got a film negative scanner. I've also got a big pile of old negatives. I keep telling myself that someday I'm going to scan all those old negatives. We'll see.
I have my dad's old Pentax camera and accessories, as well as a Super 8mm film camera, unused film cannisters, and a projector with a screen. It's all still functional, and I could still film stuff with the 8mm. I could use the Pentax but I would need to go out of my way to get film for it. Shit probably costs way more now than it did when I first got into photography.
I also still have one of those CD/DVD repair things. Put a scratched CD in, run it, and it smooths out the scratches and, most of the time, makes an unplayable disc perfectly fine again.
My wife has her old Canon with a few nice lenses. It probably wouldn't be super hard to convert it to digital, I've seen projects like that on Hackaday.
Analog photography is also on a bit of a resurgence. As long as it takes 35mm film there shouldn't be any issues getting film or having it developed somewhere (apart from the high prices).
It's become a bit of a hobby for me lately. Analog photography requires more commitment when taking pictures and the images also have this lovely analog aesthetic. In a weird way it's also fun to have to wait until you see your images. Once you're finally through a roll and have it developed, you're taken back to all the memories you've photographed in the past weeks/months.
All those repair things ever did for me was scratch my discs in an interesting pattern
A tone dialer. Like this
https://images.app.goo.gl/fbdmckv44BY7fdWw9
Not for phone phreaking, just for speed-dialling.
I would make international calls frequently. I would buy calling cards. The process was: dial the 800 number on the card. Enter the id number on the card to use some of its credit. Dial the number to call. Their service would then connect me at a low rate to another country(probably making a voip call).
So I'd set up the 3 speed dial buttons with those. For each new card I'd only have to change the card's unique number.
I was a phone phreak, and I still have my last old-school brown Radio Shack tone dialer which I'd been planning to make into a red box. Ultimately I was too lazy to swap the crystal in it, and it sat in my junk drawer for years while red boxing died. Now it's a curiosity that sits on my shelf of hacker books. Maybe I'll still do the crystal swap someday for the sheer hell of it.
I got a Toshiba music centre like this..
Keep it in good shape.
My modular synthesizer.
I love it and I've poured far to much money into it for something that doesn't come close to the power of making music in a DAW. But I do love it, and it can do some cool stuff that I've not been able to reproduce in a DAW - like random triggers and probability. It's also nice to get away from my computer.
Please share at [email protected]
I wish I had the budget for modular. I'm stuck with Cardinal in the meantime.
The initial investment can be steep, but if you stick with buying second hand modules and look for deals, it's easier. Plus the spending only really goes down over time, at a certain point you realize you have all the modules you need, and you find yourself only buying a module or 2 a year.
Also modular stuff holds its value really well. If you buy second hand, you can basically sell a piece of gear for what you paid for it, so if you get something you don't love, you don't lose much.
Having said that, cardinal and vcv rack is great, vcv rack is where I started and I used that for a few years before taking the plunge
An iPod. It's still the same iPod I got for my birthday 20 years ago. It probably still works... If I'd be able to find a cable for it.
I have used a dedicated MP3 player during the workout just few years back - I found carrying my entire almost 200g phone during the workout extremely inconvenient. In the end, I ended that for the benefit of bluetooth headphones which were not supported by the dedicated player.
I found my old TomTom GPS in a box last year. I struggled to find a reason it might be worth keeping. In the end it got recycled.
I had a large collection of antique computers and adjacent technology. Although I lost most of it in a natural disaster 😭. But I still have my commodore 64, vic-20, and 90/00s apple computer collection.
LGR???
lmao na this wasn't recent.
We still have a landline (technically VoIP) phone. There's also a list of important phone numbers written on the fridge. Good for emergencies.
There are few things more nerve wracking than frantically trying to find your cell phone and the number for poison control after your kid just swallowed something they shouldn't have.
It's fortunate where I live that poison control just uses the standard emergency services number.
I can't imagine how hard it must be to recall the number during an emergency where time is a factor. Particularly if the number is like 0118 999 881 999 119 725… 3
I hope your kids are okay
Audio modem. I think I have one in the bottom of my spare cables box.
Was it shaped like a sports car? Those were radical.
My dad had the sports car VHS rewinder.
He also had a device that would turn the house antenna so that you could modify the reception you're getting for the TV. I've never seen anyone else with a device that like that. The VHS rewinder just jogged my memory about it because they were next to each other.
I remember it being more industrial looking.
I own plenty of Libreboot computers without Intel Management Engine (2006-2009 era). For the average user in today's world, I don't see many people using them unless definitive proof came out that the government uses the IME to spy on them. These 2006-2009 era desktops/laptops can have the entire IME firmware removed, along with a 100% free BIOS. I collect as many as I can.
I have a handheld analog radio scanner. Once upon a time it was fun to listen to local police frequencies, air traffic control, cell phones and cordless phones and so on.
Everything is digital now, except for the air traffic control so once in a blue moon I might listen to that.
I can do one better than that, I have a battery powered handheld TV that only works with analog NTSC broadcasts and does not have a composite input on it. It's therefore damn difficult to get it to display any kind of picture at all these days. The only way is to broadcast at it with one of those short range toy transmitters, or hack up your own.
paper maps
I'm actually trying to buy some for my area. I'm trying to learn how to use a compass.
When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
Once I have seen an offer on eBay for a similar device, but for DVD's.
Yes, really. It was that time, and it was almost serious ;)
My older brother still jokes about the time that when he and his wife first got a DVD player they watched a movie on it and once it was done he asked her to get up and rewind the movie and she ended up spending 2 minutes while he was doing everything in his power not to laugh at her trying to figure out how to rewind the DVD.
DVDs had been out for quite a while at this point they were just late to the game.
Like putting side 2 on for the CD...
I have a few PDAs from between 2001 and 2006 lol
I have an old PCI TV tuner card. It predates the digital TV switchover so I have a card that can't be plugged into modern motherboards for which no signals are broadcast. Plus I'm sure there are no 64-bit drivers ever made for the damn thing. At this point it's ewaste.
I still have a modded WD TV Live Plus media box in the back of a drawer somewhere.
2 Garmin GPS, one handheld and one for the car. I've been using my phone for directions now for years, but I suppose I'll hang on to both units for a bit longer.
Tape device so you can plug your phone into car stereos that don't have Bluetooth. Some cars just have cd deck/player and no aux input, no Bluetooth. Really new cars will have Bluetooth for phone control. Really old ones with cassette players you could use the tape gadget. Not so much in between.
Old flash drives, that were only like 1gb when that was supposedly sufficient back then.
Headphones with audio jack because most new phones have usb-c ports only now. Although I bought an adapter for only 10 bucks.
A/V cord consoles and devices.
I had a VHS rewinder too. Also that reminds me I had a mechanical "crank" playing card shuffler which would probably be an antique now. Lol.
I have a Blackberry Playbook on my desk that I am trying to figure out how to crack. I also keep my Sharp EL-50 scientific calculator around. We had to buy that specific model because it didn't have a persistent memory. We could turn it off and on in front of the invigilator and they would know there was nothing stored in it.
We've got at least 7 or 8 old remotes for items we don't even have anymore.
If I dig down into the drawer with several layers of old iPhones I can find my palm pilot at the bottom right next to the Treo that replaced it.
I have a rotary dial. It was made as a spare part for an analog telephone.
I have a 2RU HP DL380 Gen8 server. Which is under powered and uses too much power for modern compute purposes.
I am going different on this one.
An awl on a utility knife.
Nowadays, 99% of camping, hiking, and "survival" equipment is light weight composites that can be better fixed with glue, tape, small needle and thread, or a patch with one of the above. There are very few alternative uses for it that aren't better with a different standard tool.
Radio w/ cassette player, still use the radio tho
I have my old laserdisk player and a few LDs.
