Old Tech thread

[CupofJoe]

 

[mosaix]

Excellent!

 

[Ursa major]

Brilliant!

From Wikipedia:

As of April 2019 there are more than one hundred songs played with the Floppotron in Zadrożniak's YouTube page. The songs include Queen's "Bohemian Rapsody", Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", White Stripes's "Seven Nation Army", Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams", Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and "Song 2" by Blur.

 

[Danny McG]

 

[mosaix]

In the late 80s we were looking for a hand-held that we could program and sell to our customers for their reps to take orders in shops (before the internet) and transmit the orders back to our back-office system over land lines.

The machine had to be fairly rugged. For one demonstration we had the rep threw the thing across the room so it bounced off the floor. It was still working. It was waterproof down to about 5 metres and guaranteed not to emit sparks (so they could be used on oil rigs etc.). Don't think it had any type of disc - just enough memory to store a couple of orders until the next transmission.

Finally, after nine days, remembered the brand name - Husky.

 

[Pyan]

The first Roomba? Miracle Kitchen Of The Future, a display at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow.

 

[Vince W]

The first Roomba? Miracle Kitchen Of The Future, a display at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow.

View attachment 73283

That is sooo much cooler than a Roomba. It looks like it's from the future. A Roomba looks like it came from a toy shop.

 

[Pyan]

Alas, further checking indicates that it's not quite the miracle of science that it seems to be:

(Former RCA/Whirlpool sub-contractor Joe)_ Maxwell, a man now in his 80s, who helped design the Miracle Kitchen in the 1950s while working for the design firm Sundberg-Ferar in Detroit (says)
“They had a two-way mirror with a person sitting behind it that could see the room,” former designer Joe Maxwell told me over the phone. “And they radio-controlled the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher.”

Shame, but they were trying to, and succeeding in, impressing the Russians in the middle of the Cold War, and weren't averse to a tiny bit of cheating.

 

[Vertigo]

That is sooo much cooler than a Roomba. It looks like it's from the future. A Roomba looks like it came from a toy shop.

The really strange thing about everything in that picture is how it manages to look so futuristic and at the same time so sixties (even if it was '59).

 

[CupofJoe]

The really strange thing about everything in that picture is how it manages to look so futuristic and at the same time so sixties (even if it was '59).

Ah... but that is when we learnt what the future would look like.
It was the time when were promised robot butlers, personal jet-packs, trips to the Moon and computers that were no bigger than a piano!

 

[Ursa major]

and computers that were no bigger than a piano

And with, presumably, a proper, full-size keyboard (so a darned sight better than a lot of us use today)....

“And they radio-controlled [...] the dishwasher.”

Radio...?! For a stationary dishwasher that's connected to a power supply over a cable?

Just think: they were one tiny step away from inventing communications over the (domestic) electricity supply.

 

[Parson]

And with, presumably, a proper, full-size keyboard (so a darned sight better than a lot of us use today)....

Indeed! I spent extra on my present laptop so that I could get a decent sized keyboard with a 10 key added to the keyboard.

 

[Biskit]

 

[Wayne Mack]

Just think: they were one tiny step away from inventing communications over the (domestic) electricity supply.

That's actually been done for many years now.

The Best Powerline Networking Adapter

If you have dead Wi-Fi spots in your house, a powerline networking adapter like the TP-Link TL-PA9020P KIT may fix the problem.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Danny McG]

 

[Ursa major]

That's actually been done for many years now.

For some decades, I believe.

 

[mosaix]

That's actually been done for many years now.

The Best Powerline Networking Adapter

If you have dead Wi-Fi spots in your house, a powerline networking adapter like the TP-Link TL-PA9020P KIT may fix the problem.

www.nytimes.com

The problem I have is that, because my house is two smaller houses knocked into one, I have two fuse boxes. The router is on one and the part if the house that would benefit most from the adapter is on the other. The resulting signal is too poor to be of any use.

The two fuse boxes are linked together via live, neutral and earth but this doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Edit: one thing that I did that improved the signal around the whole house was to move it away from a steel radiator. It was on a table at radiator level, it’s now on a window ledge above the radiator.

 

[Danny McG]

 

[Matteo]

View attachment 73617

Mods - please move @Danny McG 's post to the New Tech thread DeLorean Motor Company | New DeLorean Production Update | DeLorean Motor Company

 

[mosaix]

They had a system called the Honeywell 200 series. The system at Honeywell's office in Manchester didn't have a console but a set of buttons and lights on a panel that stood up from the processor.

The machine operated in octal (don't ask) and the lights displayed the state of the system and the buttons allowed entry of commands - again in octal.

Beneath the main set of lights and buttons were two additional pairs of buttons, Halt and Central Clear (basically a system reset) and Power On and Power off.

Yesterday we were watching the six-part DVD version of the BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. In the second episode, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect enter what appears to be a computer room on Zaphod Beeblebrox's ship. Behind them is some kind of magnetic tape drive and on top of it is the control panel from a Honeywell 200 series! It's upside down, I suppose the props department had it donated when the BBC scrapped a 200 and didn't have any idea which way was 'up' - always a problem in space.