#oldschooltechnology — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #oldschooltechnology, aggregated by home.social.
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As AI grips world, the thrill of collecting #VintageComputers is growing
By TERRY CHEA
Updated 12:27 PM EDT, August 10, 2026
Comments 9MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — "Software engineer Josh Dersch loves old computers. He spends countless hours tinkering in his garage, trying to coax decades-old machines back to life. He estimates he owns more than 200 vintage computers and devices in his Seattle home.
" 'It’s always been fascinating to me to see the origins of things,' Dersch said. 'It’s a fun challenge to debug and repair. You can understand the entire system from top to bottom.' "
#SolarPunkSunday #RightToRepair #NoAI #OldComputers #ReuseRestoreRepair #OldSchoolTechnology
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Why Nothing Works Anymore
#Technology has its own purposes.
Ian Bogost, February 23, 2017
"The contemporary public restroom offers an example. Infrared-sensor flush toilets, fixtures, and towel-dispensers are sometimes endorsed on ecological grounds—they are said to save resources by regulating them. But thanks to their overzealous sensors, these toilets increase water or paper consumption substantially. Toilets flush three times instead of one. Faucets open at full-blast. Towel dispensers mete out papers so miserly that people take more than they need. Instead of saving resources, these apparatuses mostly save labor and management costs. When a toilet flushes incessantly, or when a faucet shuts off on its own, or when a towel dispenser discharges only six inches of paper when a hand waves under it, it reduces the need for human workers to oversee, clean, and supply the restroom.
"Given its connection to the hollowing-out of labor in the name of efficiency, automation is most often lamented for its inhumanity, a common grievance of bureaucracy. Take the interactive voice response (#IVR) telephone system. When calling a bank or a retailer or a utility for service, the IVR robot offers recordings and automated service options to reduce the need for customer service agents—or to discourage customers from seeking them in the first place.
"Once decoupled from their economic motivations, devices like automatic-flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself. In so doing, they make that uncertainty feel normal.
"It’s a fact most easily noticed when using old-world gadgets. To flush a toilet or open a faucet by hand offers almost wanton pleasure given how rare it has become. A local eatery near me whose interior design invokes the 1930s features a bathroom with a white steel crank-roll paper towel dispenser. When spun on its ungeared mechanism, an analogous, glorious measure of towel appears directly and immediately, as if sent from heaven."
Read more:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-nothing-works-anymore?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
#OldSchoolTechnology #Gears #Steampunk #Luddite #BuiltToLast #AI #SmartAppliances #Waste #PlannedObselence #NotSoSmartTechnology