"jminer" (jminer)
12/20/2019 at 17:15 • Filed to: None
1
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"jminer" (jminer)
12/20/2019 at 17:15 • Filed to: None | 1
| 31 |
So I’ve been cleaning out my house that we bought 10 years ago and both moved in a bunch of old shit and bought a bunch more. I’ve been in IT support for almost 15 years now and done a lot of work in small and mid-sized businesses until a few years ago. This means I had a lot of old equipment that I replaced in that work and took away to either re- purpose , resell or recycle. I’ve made 5 or 6 e-recycling runs in the last couple months but every once in a while I come across something particularly old or interesting and think - I should share this with Oppo, som e folks there would enjoy it. And then I chuck it in the bin or set it aside to deal with later. Today I’ll be sharing some of the random old tech in my possession that’s about to go to the scrapper! Enjoy my the crap from my closets and basement Oppo!
- A Palm Tungsten E PDA
This thing even had a color screen! I probably last used this thing circa 2007
-Palm Centro cell phone
This thing came out right around the time of the first iPhone if I remember and was an awesome little phone - even had 3g support. If I recall correctly it was replaced with a Palm Pre which was actually an awesome phone and WebOS deserved a better life than being bought by HP then shutdown 6 months later and sold to LG to run their TVs. It was vastly better to use than Android and rivaled IOS (better in my opinion) but HP killed it before it got critical mass. Anyway this thing is hilariously small compared to any modern phone.
- Slot 2 Pentium III Xeon 1.0 Ghz
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
This came out of an old Compaq 6u monstrosity which probably weighted 80 poungs and had two of these and I used a long time ago as my home serve r. I last turned it on probably in 2008 and for some reason moved the damn thing here. I pulled these two processors and the ram out and sent the chassis to the scrapper a few months ago. I kept these because they’re a fairly neat bit of computing history I feel like.
facw
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 17:24 |
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Ooh, my dad had a Tungsten IIRC.
There’s a lot of reasons to believe that in a vacuum, WebOS and even Windows Phone (though not Windows Mobile!) were better mobile OSes than iOS and Android. But being just a little late, and a little feature weak at launch doomed them, along with other dubious business decisions.
benn454
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 17:27 |
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The Youtuber LGR does great videos on older tech like this. You should check him out.
lone_liberal
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 17:29 |
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Neat! I think the best old tech I’ve gotten from work was an IBM branded Windows 3.1 box still in its shrink wrap. I did also have a couple of 8" floppies but they’ve disappeared over the years. I did stumble on my old Zune a while back. The software for it was so much better than iTunes for Windows.
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jminer
> facw
12/20/2019 at 17:31 |
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WebOS timing was great - it actually beat Android to market. Palm was just too small a company to leverage it into great success. HP bought them and released some new hardware including a tablet not long after the iPad and was poised to be great. HP after the tablet being on the market something like 90 days killed the whole product line when it didn’t beat the iPad in sales. It was incredibly short sighted.
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jminer
> benn454
12/20/2019 at 17:32 |
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I ended up going down an old tech rabbit hole on youtube recently - I like him and the 8 bit guy especially.
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jminer
> lone_liberal
12/20/2019 at 17:34 |
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That’s a sweet find for sure. Those early 90's machines are coming back around and are worth something now.
I had a zune too! I loved it with the screwy squircle touch nav pad. Mine was the 8gb small one that was great for working out. I still have a HDD ipod classic but still use it.
The battery in my Zune swelled a while back and busted the LCD and case so it got recycled.
Mid Engine
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 17:35 |
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I coded to a PDP11 in college: A ssembly, Fortan (WAT4), Cobol, BASIC. God I’m fucking old
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jminer
> Mid Engine
12/20/2019 at 17:38 |
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I’m afraid you are. Hell I updated my resume recently and realized half the things listed there are dead technology - it was depressing.
There are still a couple big companies that use Cobol and Fortran - blows my mind. I know a couple kids just out of college that got jobs coding in Fortran, got trained up on the job in it and it blew my mind.
Assembly and Basic are still used in some of the more serious driver/firmware work but it’s nutso the level of detail those guys know it in.
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lone_liberal
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 17:39 |
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Ah, but I don’t have the machine just the boxed software. My Zune was the small one too. It was a cute little thing and having a radio tuner was cool too. I didn’t have a charging cable for it handy so I don’t know if it still works or not.
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jminer
> lone_liberal
12/20/2019 at 17:41 |
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Back in the days of proprietary USB cables. Those were dark days. I have chucked in the recycling bin dozens of specific USB cables that I have no idea what they’re for anymore.
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Mid Engine
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 17:57 |
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I work in semiconductors and for applications that squeeze the last ounce of performance, it’s assembly. Lightweight OS’ are great, but there’s no substitute for bare metal.
Kiltedpadre
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 18:25 |
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I had a palm centro as my first data capable cell phone. I really liked the design even if I only used a small portion of its capabilities.
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jminer
> Kiltedpadre
12/20/2019 at 18:40 |
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My wife and I each had one and they were solid phones for the time. Laughable now though. It my first, that was a Treo, followed by an early windows phone then this one.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 19:06 |
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Remember the Handspring? I still have one in my junk drawer. https://images.app.goo.gl/FDP6Ejf93kDX3bzH8
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jminer
> TheRealBicycleBuck
12/20/2019 at 19:20 |
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I never had one of them, but did have a series of old PDAs. Got rid of most of them, but that Tungsten hung on in a drawer until just now.
Longtime Lurker
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 19:21 |
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What is the screw on the Pentium for?
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jminer
> Longtime Lurker
12/20/2019 at 19:30 |
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For firmer attachment. It levered in using the two clips at the top then you’d push the screw down and tighen it to bring the slot into firm contact with the socket. It actually attaches much like a an old Nintendo cartridge would. But since it’s a server processor it needed a tight contact.
They also made a slot 1 which was smaller and which Pentium I and II chips used (as well as some AMD clones). I used to have several of them but ended up getting rid of them a while back I guess.
BaconSandwich is tasty.
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 19:32 |
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BaconSandwich circa 2005 is jealous. I used to want a Palm Pilot. In ~2007 I eventually got an HP iPaq Messenger (candybar style smart phone). It was still pretty decent, but typing anything long in was a chore.
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jminer
> BaconSandwich is tasty.
12/20/2019 at 19:37 |
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You just reminded me of those iPaq PDAs that had a PCMCIA expansion slot on them you could do things with like add a wireless card with.
Ssfancyfresh
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 19:39 |
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Palm Tungsten! I had the T5. I don’t recall where that falls on the Palm hierarchy . I do know that there was a separate wifi card that was inserted for connectivity to the web
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jminer
> Ssfancyfresh
12/20/2019 at 19:56 |
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I don’t recall either - mine didn’t have wifi and had to dock for any updates.
MiniGTI - now with XJ6
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 21:45 |
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I actually carried a Newton I found in a garage sale for a time around 2003-4.
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BaconSandwich is tasty.
> lone_liberal
12/20/2019 at 21:47 |
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I still use my Zune HD almost every day.
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BaconSandwich is tasty.
> Mid Engine
12/20/2019 at 21:53 |
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I prefer the term “Chronologically challenged”. :P
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BaconSandwich is tasty.
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 22:10 |
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PCMCIA - that's a thing j haven't heard of in a while. K remember my mom's school laptop had a 56k PCMCIA modem. At the time it was pretty awesome.
BadMotorScooter
> jminer
12/20/2019 at 23:05 |
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I had a Compaq iPaq PDA that I hooked up an early PCMCIA (or was it PC card?) wifi adapter and ran an RDP client that would let me do remote server admin. It would even stream video. Worked surprisingly well actually. I think I still have that iPaq somewhere. Did it run Windows CE?
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jminer
> BaconSandwich is tasty.
12/20/2019 at 23:43 |
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I remember having to add on cards into a laptop for both ethernet and wifi. When I stop and think about where tech has come it blows my mind.
My wife was just talking to me the other day about a raspberry pi being faster than the laptops we took to college (by a lot!)
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jminer
> MiniGTI - now with XJ6
12/20/2019 at 23:44 |
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Awesome!
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jminer
> BadMotorScooter
12/20/2019 at 23:46 |
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I think it ran Windows CE yeah - a version of it atleast.
For the time they were powerful machines for sure.
If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent
> jminer
12/21/2019 at 00:44 |
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My mom was an early smartphone adopter due to work and was manning a Treo long before the iP
hone came to market. It’s crazy how quickly Palm faded away after being one of the biggest players in the mobile industry.
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jminer
> If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent
12/21/2019 at 00:54 |
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Yeah the market was Palm and Blackberry - companies that are both dead now. It’s nuts how drastically this landscape has changed in less than 15 years.