Computer history buffs will find this interesting:



It is enshrined at the Boston Museum of Science.

 

^^ safely contained in that archaic and unreadable format--the flappy disk.

 

99 lines hmmmm...

 

That was my thought as well. It's like in some cheesy alien / horror / scifi movie, where the Thing That Will Destroy Everything is kept safely locked up in an elaborate container that can't possibly be opened except by some totally mundane, ordinary thing.




Unrelated: things could always be worse.

 

Bored Jews:

 

was expecting an explosion of money somewhere...

 

 

 

What? No Betamax?

 

Seriously.

 

The future is now?

 

Seriously:







Would you believe that, after it became clear that the original Star Wars trilogy would never be released on DVD in the THX-remastered-but-not-special-edition edition, that I went out and bought a surplus LD player just so that I could buy the movies on LD?

Gave it to my brother-in-law for his birthday a few years ago. Guy's a hardcore fan.



A friend of mine used to have one of this exact model of first-gen RCA CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) machine.




Video played with a stylus in a groove.








This is another very interesting system, which uses film:


Specifically, the film strip is divided down the middle. On one side is a complete B&W image for each frame, and on the other is a frame containing encoded chroma information, used to restore a full-color image.



(This exact same concept is used, in electronic form, by S-Video, and it is fundamentally comperable to modern-day component video).

Inside the player, the film is scanned by a flying-spot scanner and photomultiplier (basically a super-high-res B&W camera), and then re-assembled electronically into a color image for output to the TV.

 

Also, this is a really impressive VCR which used short-length cartridges to store commercials / promos / etc., and play them back automatically.


We used to have several of these at WPIX. Still have some of the old tapes lying around.



EDIT: Frak, no embedding. Click through, it's worth a few minutes if you're into this kind of iron-age video equipment.

 

Miatas are small.

 

Uh, I don't think that's a Miata, dude.

 

I dig that...what is it? Looks Sunbeam-ish.

 

Thats a Lotus Elan you plebs.

I would say that is probably the best single car than you can say inspired the Miata.

 

I knew what it was, but I didn't know if you did or not.

Not usually a good idea to call moderators dumbasses, IMO.

 

Sixshooter would never give me an infraction. Were both Floridians, united in insanity.

 

Who will watch the watchers, are they above the law?