#oddware — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #oddware, aggregated by home.social.
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This is a neat device I bought in a value village. When I saw it I distinctly remembered seeing it featured in Popular Science when I was a boy. It is a fun but fatiguing device, it works, but just barely. I could see the industrial and commercial uses for large wall identified buttons, but the delicacy of a keyboard didn't translate well (literally?)
It works on Bluetooth and just shows up on any host as a keyboard. The screen shows the last three letters typed and the battery and pairing. It charges with micro USB.
#oddware #oddtech #lasers #lasertechnology #accessibility #bluetooth #keyboard #LASERKEYBOARD #popularscience #technology -
The Magical 2010s VOIP Dongle From Goodwill™ (magicJack PLUS)
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Some NOS #OddWare: Olympus "Flash Path" SmartMedia-to-Floppydisk adaptor.
Poor man's LS120 SuperDrive of the time..?! 😅
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Long before #USBC was pushing out 3½mm #headphoneJacks, #HTC had already tried the same with for instance their #TyTNII aka Kaiser. (Whose form factor with slide-out keyboard and tiltable screen I still kinda miss...)
Today I came across my 3-in-1 USB adapter I got for it at the time: #MiniUSB plug on one end, and on the other end ports for a 3½mm headphone, mini-USB for power/transfer, and HTC's own headphone jack. -
Btw, this is the "webcam" that goes with it. Good we had CRTs back then, because that thing is large and heavy. 😅
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Did not expect to get the full package when I bid on this, but that's what just arrived. Let me present you some forgotten odd-ware:
The Intel ProShare Conferencing Video System
Consists of a i750-based video capture card to connect a camera to, as well as an ISDN card with mwave audio. Quite beefy with those DSPs. And software, lots of software. 😆
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A very early example of flash memory storage aimed at the consumer market: a so-called "Miniature Card" from Olympus with 4 MB (the standard itself was developed by Intel in 1995). This one is from 1996 and even pre-dates the Multimedia Card.
It saw use in a few digital cameras, voice recorders and PDAs. It was quickly forgotten, though.
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Ever heard of a #LaserCard? Probably not. But what if I tell you that this was the first-ever optical storage medium that allowed the user to write data to it? Way before PD and CD-R. And you would be even more stunned to learn that it did exist in mid-1984 already - before even the first CD-ROM drive.
The format was developed by DREXON and later continued by LaserCard Systems. Storage capacity was between 2.8 and 4.1 MiB (with/without EDAC).
The first two pictures show a LaserCard from my collection. These were samples given out at SYSTEMS '91. Last picture is from Computer Chronicles (May 1984) with Stewart Cheifet showing a card. Fun fact: almost all pictures you find on the web show sample cards.
Why I write all this? Well, after many years, I just scored a LaserCard drive to read/write those! 🙂 While a complete flop in the consumer market, they were very successful e.g. for access control and used 'til the early 2000s. The last drives even had USB.
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Not sure if I posted this here already or if that was still on Twitter, but anyway... this is my weirdest PC game in my collection so far: Bubble Memories by Taito for Windows 9x/2000/XP, "Not for Sale" promo from Korea. No idea why this even exists. 🤔 The game was never released to retail for Windows.
ps: It's not a native Windows port but runs the arcade roms instead.
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Nice little thing I find, I think it's 8 MB or 20MB.
#linux #retrocomputing #embedded #storage #industrial #oddware
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TIL (or am reminded) that Microsoft made IE for UNIX using MainSoft IDE tools. I remember using them for some cross platform COM stuff. Ironic that they pushed the cross platform vision of that further than MS did.
♲ @[email protected]:My video on exploring Internet Explore for UNIX is up. This is a wild one, since the idea of Microsoft having IE on UNIX is weird, this port wasn't even done by Microsoft themselves.
youtu.be/_AoyQeUzbEU
#retrocomputing #oddware
