Classic technology products

Snickers Man

Is there any hi-tech product or gizmo that you recognise as being obsolete and superseded by superior more advanced products but that you still love and would continue to use?

Either because of the way it does what it does, or some cool little feature that the marketing people decided was not worth retaining for the latest product release or just the way it looked?

People still love classic cars for various reasons,although nobody seriously doubts that today's saloons are vastly superior to their counterpartsof 30 years ago.

But can you reasonably expect people to hanker after old technology products?

Me, I loved my old Accompli 008 smart phone but it's now too old to be called that. It's a 'wise' phone if anything, verging on the edge of senility. Largely due to having been dropped once too often and its touch screen is scratched to a level of desensitivity that renders it unworkable by the prolonged use of alternatives, like pens, mathsticks etc, to the stylus that I kept losing. I thought about replacing it but Motorola have phased it out long ago and never bothered upgrading the model.

So now I have a V3 mobile. Sure, it's slinky and fits in a shirt pocket and it's got a colour screen and an annoying ring tone and OK I can take crap pictures that I wouldn't want to keep anyway but there are a few things I can't do with the new device that I thought I could.

I could do them on the Accompli, though. Things like keeping a full address record for everyone,including home and office addresses. Or scribble notes or keep handy bits of information. Like the alarm code to the office that I set off rather badly a while back. Or even a POP3mail account that I could use in extremis to collect short text e-mails. It couldn't do attachments and struggled with files of any size.

I feel that I am not alone. A quick glance at e-bay shows that there is a healthy trade going on in second hand Accomplis. People are paying around 50 euro for SECOND HAND versions of these things which remember are quite bulky by modern standards, have monotonic ring tones, no camera,no predictive text, no voice recognition, no Bluetooth and the software while extensive could certainly have been improved.

I think it's a huge shame Motorola didn't just upgrade this model to absorb things like Bluetooth and predictive text and just tighten up the software to make it a bit more user friendly.

But it's their product and they know best. The fools.

Anybody else got a favourite piece of old technology that they would still use if only it worked?

hopeful

Snickers Man wrote:

Anybody else got a favourite piece of old technology that they would still use if only it worked?

My brain.
Its really on it's last legs these days.

EireRoadUser

I have the first type of playstation that came out ,all the output connections and serial connection ,I just like it.
Also I would love to own an original atari console with ping pong ,for those sentimental evenings .

A computer from my old primary school that I did my first drawing of a house on. Remeber typing in all the numbers and the computer would draw your house in front of you .

Maybe a spectrum ,the little black thing.

riptide

EireRoadUser wrote:

I have the first type of playstation that came out ,all the output connections and serial connection ,I just like it.
Also I would love to own an original atari console with ping pong ,for those sentimental evenings .

A computer from my old primary school that I did my first drawing of a house on. Remeber typing in all the numbers and the computer would draw your house in front of you .

Maybe a spectrum ,the little black thing.

That wasn't called something like 'LOGO' was it! The drawing software?

melekalikimaka

on acorn computers for me... fw 100 , L90, fw 125, learning to make windmills....ah memories

EireRoadUser

riptide wrote:

That wasn't called something like 'LOGO' was it! The drawing software?

Can't remember ,only thing i can remember about it is that we all enjoyed it even though it's now the equivelant of actually thinking hard.

netwhizkid

Gateway 2000 with win 95 & Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) My favourite pieces of classic technology.

SouperComputer

PSION, the mutts nutts

Atari lynx and some other old school stuff.

Looking at buying pong from ebay, now that's retro.

matrim

My old iRiver h120

I had a problem with it and was given a h10 as a replacement. It isn't half as good as the 120

zilog_jones

I still have my first PC in the cupboard - sometimes I get it out when I'm really bored ^_^

A 386DX-25 (the "25" means 25MHz for those not in the know), with an amazing FOUR MB RAM, a 1MB graphics card, Sound Blaster 16 (a later addition to the system - yes, had to wait 4 years to get sound!), and my wonderful Western Digital Caviar 80MB hard disk - it may sound like a wind tunnel, but it's still spinning after 14 years!

Creamy Goodness

my iriver h140, sure it has a mono-chrome screen, doesn't play videos but it does what any protable audio player should do and that's play a wide range of file formats and not just mp3's wav's m4a's (coughipodcough)

EireRoadUser

zilog_jones wrote:

I still have my first PC in the cupboard - sometimes I get it out when I'm really bored ^_^

A 386DX-25 (the "25" means 25MHz for those not in the know), with an amazing FOUR MB RAM, a 1MB graphics card, Sound Blaster 16 (a later addition to the system - yes, had to wait 4 years to get sound!), and my wonderful Western Digital Caviar 80MB hard disk - it may sound like a wind tunnel, but it's still spinning after 14 years!

I've still got the best part of my olivetti 286 ,use to dial up on it with a US robotics 14.4K modem . I use to love the US robotic modem it was black and slim ,never forget that feeling of dialing up with the ATDT command.