Obsolete 1990's technology

[9elf]

Big rear projection TV's.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Windows 3.1 and its gussied-up overlay, Windows 95.

Dear Jesus, I don't think I've ever dealt with worse operating systems in my life. Early VAX systems included.

[89911]

Zubaz pants?

[K-Jetronic]

3.6

[tab tanner]

cassette singles, S-VHS, 8mm camcorders, HI-Fi BETA,

[Tim Walsh]

if we're talking obsolete tech, I've still got a acoustic coupler hidden in my desk to blow the new kid's minds, but generally the 9track/reel to reel tapes do that first.

[masraum]

POTS lines are still used a fair amount, so are fax machines (I hate fax and the poopy protocols that it runs over).

[onewhippedpuppy]

Cassette tapes
Bag phones
Big 8' diameter satellite dish, that you had to move to different satellites to watch different channels (yeah, my parents had one)

[masraum]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

Big 8' diameter satellite dish, that you had to move to different satellites to watch different channels (yeah, my parents had one)

My mother canceled hers when my dad passed away 4 years ago! You can even upgrade them to "digital" but it costs a fortune.

I always forget that lots of folks still use dial-up to get to the internet.

[legion]

Originally Posted by cl8ton

Wow, nobody mentioned a 5.25 inch floppy ???
Back in the day them SOB's had a mind of their own

How about 8½" floppies?

Right, those are '70's tech.

[notfarnow]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

Bag phones

They are taking down our analog cell network this fall, otherwise I'd get a bag phone in a heartbeat. They get reception way up river, and way into the woods... very popular with sailors, hunters and woodsmen.

My e300d has an analog cell phone that's integrated into the stereo. Phone rings, radio shuts off automatically. The phone clips into the center console. I was all excited to use it on my boat, but they are dropping the analog system in November so didn't I bother hooking it up.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by bell

Pagers

Some of us hope that the 1-way pager never dies.

We've got nothing else.

We're of the sort that works where guards show up whenever a cell phone rings. Not even 2-way pagers for us.

That said, the 1-ways are beyond cheap and rarely live for more than 3 months. Crap spreads once the market passes you by.

Mike

[jyl]

I picked up a old portable typewriter for my kids at a junk store. They were amazed, it was the most fascinating thing they've ever seen. They like to type notes to their friends on it.

[Mule]

air cooled automobile engines

[Pazuzu]

I miss my Brother brand word processing machine. Weighed about 45 pounds, have a 3 inch green screen, room for about 50 pages of text (no formating mind you), and a 3.5 floppy drive. It DID however print as well...daisy-wheel style. I wrote many a paper in high school on that, then spent 30 minutes carefully tearing each page apart, and taking the side strips with the holes off.

[rammstein]

Wow- I had forgotten about the perforated sheets with the side-holes.

Get this- we had a COLOR dot matrix printer.

I used it once to print a .jpeg of a naked chick I had spent 6 (SIX) hours downloading on the new, high-speed Z-Modem download protocol from a BBS site in Texas that my friend had found out had a nudie pic on it. My 6th grade hormones forgot to tell my brain that my father might notice the 6 hours of long-distance to Texas. Oh man.... that was an event.

[VincentVega]

6 (SIX) hours downloading

That's the biggest change to me. Rather than gopher and 96/14.4/28.8 and an overnight download of multiple files that need to be reconstructed, now I have fiber at the house.

modems, slip/ppp software, 2nd phone line for the computer, aol

[Z-man]

- Dot-matrix printers

- Networks based on cable (not cat-5 cable)

- "High speed" 56 kbps phone modems

- The adapters that plugged into the car cassette deck to allow you to listen to your CD's playing on your portable CD player

- Dual mode (digital / analog) cell phones.

- Non-cell, non-email LCD based PDA's. (Palm, Casio Wizard...etc)

- Dolby Digital (non 5.1) "surround sound"

- Monochromatic plasma screens (IT folks know about there)

- Playstation (1), X-Box (non-360), Gamecube, Sega system

- Benzi box radios (not detachable face - but ones where you remove the whole radio from the car to prevent theft)

- More the the IT folks: ESCON mainframe connectivity, fiber cable with SC connectivity (vs. lc), 1GB HBA's, disk drives without RAID, 10/100 ethernet cards, token ring networks

That's alot of junk in the closet!!
-Z-man.

[legion]

Originally Posted by Z-man

- Dot-matrix printers

I had one of those in college, everyone else had ink jets. It took 9 hours (all night--thankfully I didn't have a roommate at the time) to print out a 30 page paper. 9 screaching, whirring hours.

Originally Posted by Z-man

- Networks based on cable (not cat-5 cable)

I set up one of those networks for my dad. You couldn't let the distance between two nodes get too long or too short, or let the cable coil or double-back on itself. Real PITA.

Originally Posted by Z-man

- The adapters that plugged into the car cassette deck to allow you to listen to your CD's playing on your portable CD player

I was using one of those up until 2000. I didn't get my first in-car CD player until I bought my first new car that year.

Originally Posted by Z-man

Non-cell, non-email LCD based PDA's. (Palm, Casio Wizard...etc)

I had one of those up until two years ago. Now I have an HP iPaq, and I hardly use the POS. The Palm was much stabler and I could go a whole weekend on a battery charge. Now, I can go 30 minutes.

Originally Posted by Z-man

- Dolby Digital (non 5.1) "surround sound"

Still have it. Haven't bought a new receiver in ten years...

[rusnak]

A lot of this stuff being mentioned is 80s technology.

Like Nintendo Donkey Kong, or Flight Simulator.

Windows 3.1 is 90s tech, but Windows itself was launched in the 80s.

Fax machines are definitely 80s, as are Stairclimbers and Bowflex.

Yahoo and Google would be 90s tech.