- the umd drive was for me what killed it. a brand new storage medium available no where else. and they want us to buy media in this format? when vcd was becoming increasingly popular at the time never mind dvd.
sony makes beautiful hardware, some of the best. but they destroy it with bad practices like cd players that can't read cd-rs. digital music players that weren't mp3. they became about protecting their copyright and not doing what their customers wanted.
- casio heli-fighter was the one i had. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK0pbTxdwVk
it wasn't great as to fire you had to press both buttons at same time.
- reminded me of the song someone made from cosmos footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
- i remember dos 5.0 fondly. we had been stuck on 3.30 forever. 4.0 had come but had used to much memory that i never encountered it in the wild. 5.0 was just so much better. edit, qbasic, freed up more memory for applications.
- you have 0 messages(s) :-)
- my psion 3a was better than win3.x :-)
i could have spreadsheet, database, agenda and word processor open and swapping between docs instantly while my win3.x desktop lurched and trashed disk with just 1-2 windows open. also win3.x at the best of times was pretty crashy. a few reboots a day was quite common.
plus memory. some programs wanted expanded, some wanted extended so you ended up with multiple boot configurations, some for games, some for windows, some for dos apps.
- The Psion 3 series used 8086 processors, so they could have released a standalone version of SIBO for IBM-PCs with relative ease.
In fact, Psion did release a SIBO "emulator"* for DOS which seems to be basically a PC port. It's intended for developers, and hews to replicating the mobile devices rather than taking advantage of the PC hardware, but you can imagine polishing it a step further.
- i remember using procomm with the first modem i used, a hayes compatible modem at the super fast speed of 2400 in 1990 or so. it came with the modem i think. and as more modems came along i stuck with it because it was familiar. i think i finally replaced it in dos when the modems got faster than 14400. i can't remember what i replaced it with though.
- same as the 1980s so. made maps during class in maths exercise book from memory. really passed the time.
- the number of engineers and geeks i know that are using hardware that was out of date when they hunted down and bought obsolete hardware is constantly growing.
sometimes it's for a better keyboard (apple), sometimes it's for a better build (ibm thinkpads v lenovo), sometimes it's for a fondness of hardware they had prior to their current hardware.
new hardware just doesn't excite the way new hardware did even 20 years ago. with new oses and crapware like minix baked into every intel chip i just want hardware and software that works for me and me alone.
- I'm still running a Samsung Note 20 Ultra which is coming up on five years old. I specifically bought the phone brand new over a year after it came out. I actually had to hunt to find a new-in-box unit. The reason is it's the last high-end Galaxy that has removable storage in the form of a micro SD card. I've replaced the battery but otherwise it looks and works great. I've looked at new flagship phones but they don't have any features I care about. They don't run apps noticeably faster, the battery life isn't noticeably better and the camera doesn't take meaningfully better photos. Yet I'd have to spend a few hours getting it all configured and then learning and dealing with the new model's inevitable quirks.
One reason people who could buy anything are choosing older tech over the newest releases isn't nostalgia or to save money, it's because a lot of new tech products are regressing as useful features get removed to increase profit margins, enable some trendy style or new business model. Hell, it's getting hard to even buy a TV without built in "smart" features and advertising that can't be disabled.
- i've used opera mini a lot. on dumb nokias, even on an iphone 3g and android. the built in rss reader and data compression made my 50mb quote of data on pre pay 15 years ago go a long long way. i could browse the web all day using rss and text only sites.
when it was taken over by the chinese the rss went away for a few years but it did come back. when stuck in hospital for a few months over the last decade it kept me from boredom.
now that my dumb nokia can't do data i do miss it. last time i was in hospital i used an rss reader on android on hospital wifi. just wasn't as neat and easy to use. the dumb nokia was meant to be used in one hand. android and smartphones need two hands to use.
- I work with people leaving prison and they end up with phones with only about 3GB of transfer a month. They burn it all up in 3 days and then they can't use Google Maps to get around, they can't apply for jobs, can't get their benefits or healthcare.
There are many important sites that have multi-hundred megabyte homepages and it's not as easy to uBlock things on mobile. A sad situation.
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For a while, I had a SONY CD Changer in my car. You ever see the scratched up CDs often sold at flea markets for a buck each or less?
Many computers and players won't read them.
But that SONY does. And not only does it read them, the thing takes a bit longer to buffer due to all the scratches and massive error correction it has to do while buffering...
But once it does all that, it will play the disc flawlessly! Bumpy roads, too cold, too hot, disc too scratched?
All pretty much no problem.
I would gladly buy another. Was that good, but it won't read ANY recordable format.
Bummer.
It went with the car when I sold it. I put some of the very worst discs I had ever seen in it for demo purposes too.
Dude that bought the car loved it like I did. I did not mention CD-R largely because the player was going with the car no matter what.