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
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PDA: I loved my Palm Pilot and I can still write using that script (was quite nice when I noticed my Android keyboard supported it)
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Raspberry Pi: this feels weird to be on this list! I still have one in the living room running Kodi
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No to the others, although I did have one of these beauties:
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I’m in my 20s and I’ve had most of those lol
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.
And the sounds! The articulated clamshell that popped open to receive the MD (where you could see all these miniature mechanisms), the slightly rattly plastic sound of putting the MD in the player, just chef’s kiss. I had a couple in my last years of high school that I ordered from a Japanese importer. Seemed sooo futuristic. Almost forgot the inline remote! iPods had those for a minute years later but everyone gave up on inline remotes it seemed like.
That signature KaCHUNK and spinup <3
I had a Palm IIIe, and a couple Handspring Treos including the thin all aluminum one and a Compaq PDA that took full sized PCMCIA cards where i connected an Orinoco Silver Ethernet card. Also got a Nokia linux PDA, can’t remember the model, and sadly it was too slow.
DVD recorder i got off of Woot back when they were a good service. CD player that was the size of a VHS. A VHS player while my best friend had BetaMax. Oh and one of those Toshiba rear projection big screen TVs.
No webtv or 3d.
Tons of Pis
AnonRadio on sdf.org. i have old time radio playing at home over Ice cast and mpd which also connected to VPN so i can stream stuff from anywhere.
Also got a Nokia linux PDA
I had the Nokia N810. Still one of the most satisfying bits of industrial design I’ve ever seen on a piece of Tech, but yeah, it was a bit of a slowpoke for the things I wanted it to do, and smartphones pretty quickly got good enough that I couldn’t justify keeping it around for anything mobile.
I never owned a WebTV, but I do remember the first time I saw a Usenet post from a WebTV user. It was the start of the Eternal September.
PDA: Had a Palm Treo 90. Also owned a second-hand Nokia N810.
DVD Recorder: Obviously had DVD burners in my PCs, but not as a standalone device.
WebTV: Technically Yes, but got it for shits and giggles at a Goodwill and never had service.
3D TV: No. I don’t even like it in theaters.
Raspberry Pi: I have a 3B+ running OctoPi for my 3D printer. I also have a couple of Picos, one in use in a handwired keyboard, but I don’t they count.
Internet Radio: No, but my wife bought an early streaming device, a Muzo Pebble I think. It was annoying and never got used much.
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.
Many PDA’s, a few DVD recorders. No WebTV or 3d TV. A few Raspberry Pi’s and my car’s head unit can play internet radio.
Out of that list I only owned a PDA. I had a HP Ipaq 214 that I used as a digital dictionary to look up Kanji by written input when I studied Japanese at university. It was right before the dawn of the smartphone and it was truly remarkable technology.
I had a Hairy Palm II
I had a Handspring PDA. Still in a box in my garage in fact, alongside my Nokia 770 “internet tablet”.
Raspberry Pi doesn’t quite seek to match the rest. What’s so strange about that? I have two, a 1b PiHole and a Pi400 that I use as a Steamlink.
My parents had a WebTV when I was in highschool. They kept it for a very long time. it was awful.
I also have a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Pi Hole on my network. I don’t think raspberry pi’s are as unusual as some of the other things here. I know a lot of people who use them for various things.
Didn’t have any of these, did have a dvd burner and TV tuner card so I guess I could have had a dirty dvd recorder back then but at the time I just saved the shows I wanted to HDD, watched them and then deleted it and the burner was for movies ripped with handbrake
About a decade too young for this, but - the only one of these I had was a dvd burner. I used it in high school to make video projects. Video projects were extremely popular assignments, and I had a lot of fun with them, too. I did a lot of stop-motion animation, claymation, etc. I had shitty software that I didn’t even know how to use properly so I did things like play music from my ipod into the camera speaker instead of mix an audio track in “post.” Haha. Was a lot of fun though.
I believe OP is talking about a DVD recorder that plugs in to your tv and records live tv to a dvd, not a dvd burner on your computer.
ohhhh haha no but my parents had a vhs recorder still that they used when I was a kid
