When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.
A large reel to reel tape recorder.
A few early pentium laptops that no longer turn on.
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.
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.
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.
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 got a Toshiba music centre like this…
Keep it in good shape.
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.
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.
My phone still has an SD card slot. So I can put my 64 GB SD card inside and have more music offline than my 4 GB iPod could ever have.
The iPod is a nice little piece of almost antique tech. But I’d still be using my phone over it.
Yes… But still… Especially when running… I find these things completely ridiculous.
No one can argue that 64gb of storage holds more music than 4gb of storage but 4gb still holds hundreds of songs.
Depends on the compression. Yes, you could fit 500 songs on a 4 GB iPod, as the adverts constantly loved to remind everyone about. But it was the early 2000s, so the quality wasn’t good, and then we’re still talking about a pretty high compression even back then.
You can quite easily convert ipods to flash storage. I have a 256GB ipod mini with bluetooth and a taptic engine instead of the clicker.
Interesting. Most interesting. I take it it would need some soldering? I don’t have the tools, but could you send me a video of some instructions on how to do that? Could be a fun future project.
Depends on ehat kind of ipod you have. The mini is probably the easiest to mod with flash. The taptic and bluetooth are a bit harder to do.
Audio modem. I think I have one in the bottom of my spare cables box.
Not mine personally, but my town still has some hitching posts and mounting blocks
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.
There an app for that now.
At least, there is on the Flipper Zero.
I have a rope lighter.
It’s like a normal lighter but it uses a flammable rope instead of gas.What an oddity - I never even heard of those.
They were used on boats and in WW1 trenches where matches weren’t reliable due to water, wind or mud.
Some kid I knew had a weird little matchbox-size box with something like a nail sticking out of it, which he called a permanent match. He would pull out the nail and it would be on fire - he might have struck it on the side of the box, I forget. Presumably the nail was coated with some flammable substance from the box. Seemed like the simplest thing in the world - no mechanics like a lighter. I don’t know why those didn’t catch on but I’ve never seen another one.
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.
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.
We also had the antenna motor! That thing was awesome. I could pick up stations from Canada!
Haha, that’s funny because we used it to pick up stations from the US!
I think in some cultures that means we’re married now.
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.
