StarHalo
Flashaholic
Post some awesome but little-known older tech gadgets!
Sanyo Sound & Game (1983)
It may look a bit goofy now, but the idea of adding a game to your portable music player technically makes this the conceptual forerunner to the iPod; it probably wasn't a good idea to make the game digital and the radio analog, and it was predictably poorly received and discontinued almost immediately.
Hewlett-Packard 95LX (1991)
It's a palmtop - 8088 processor, 1MB RAM, MS-DOS 3.3, PCMCIA slot RAM card data storage, software in ROM (Lotus 1-2-3, calculator, planner, telecom [serial port], etc), powered by a pair of AA batteries. Sold for $700 new, can be found for ~$10 used today.
Toshiba Toscal Desktop Calculator (1965)
In the 60's, $1,700 could buy you this amazing new piece of technology, a 38 pound desktop calculator; 14-digit Nixie tube display, rotary dial decimal placement, one number memory (180 bits capacitor RAM), and "silent operation". But the kicker is what's inside - not a single IC chip in the entire case, just rows and rows of hundreds of transistors, capacitors, and resistors, all painstakingly arranged into the logic circuits needed to make calculations. It doesn't always work, as the machine can't compute very large numbers reliably, can't do negative numbers, but it can attempt to divide by zero if you ask it to; "Division by zero puts the machine directly to the task of calculating the incalculable, with all of the decimal points flickering across the display, likely as a result the machine making a futile attempt to shift the (non-existent) dividend to the high-end of the register. The only way to stop the machine's fruitless attempt to resolve the impossible is to press the [C] key to reset the machine and return it to normal operation."
Sanyo Sound & Game (1983)
It may look a bit goofy now, but the idea of adding a game to your portable music player technically makes this the conceptual forerunner to the iPod; it probably wasn't a good idea to make the game digital and the radio analog, and it was predictably poorly received and discontinued almost immediately.
Hewlett-Packard 95LX (1991)
It's a palmtop - 8088 processor, 1MB RAM, MS-DOS 3.3, PCMCIA slot RAM card data storage, software in ROM (Lotus 1-2-3, calculator, planner, telecom [serial port], etc), powered by a pair of AA batteries. Sold for $700 new, can be found for ~$10 used today.
Toshiba Toscal Desktop Calculator (1965)
In the 60's, $1,700 could buy you this amazing new piece of technology, a 38 pound desktop calculator; 14-digit Nixie tube display, rotary dial decimal placement, one number memory (180 bits capacitor RAM), and "silent operation". But the kicker is what's inside - not a single IC chip in the entire case, just rows and rows of hundreds of transistors, capacitors, and resistors, all painstakingly arranged into the logic circuits needed to make calculations. It doesn't always work, as the machine can't compute very large numbers reliably, can't do negative numbers, but it can attempt to divide by zero if you ask it to; "Division by zero puts the machine directly to the task of calculating the incalculable, with all of the decimal points flickering across the display, likely as a result the machine making a futile attempt to shift the (non-existent) dividend to the high-end of the register. The only way to stop the machine's fruitless attempt to resolve the impossible is to press the [C] key to reset the machine and return it to normal operation."
oo:
