Best comment6

I would like this comment, but then I noticed how many likes it has and didn't have the heart to carry on.

@@Ropetupa let me guess, 42?

I'm so happy to be, if not the 42nd like, the 142nd like on this comment

241th here, cmon one more

If we wait million of years then the counter will return back to 42

Watching a lot of Techmoans videos - I realize that I miss how things used to clunka-clunk/kuchunk-kuchunk type effects... Now a days its just plain soft touch, touch sensor OR really most annoyingly -- plastic buttons with a short travel (example: aftermarket install-your-self car radios, so called "DIN-1" radios.) That plastic button sound is so dreadful and really yucky >_

Andrey Ivanov that being said, movable parts break.

Yeah. I think it's for that exact reason that, at least for players of a certain age, the animation of sticking a Holotape into the player on your Pip-Boy in the first-person _Fallout_ games is one of the most viscerally satisfying things ever put into a computer game.

not to mention less radiation . Healthier gadgets!

This reminds me of a weird dream I had, where I imagined some company making an experimental e-reader prototype (≈ 10" display) that used a board from a regular prototype but without flash storage and was instead modified to run off a 1.8" or 2.5" hard drive, along with a hard drive activity indicator as part of the debug indicators.

I feel like that might have been part of the impetus for the multimedia capabilities as well, since from what I've seen, early computers/games consoles in Japan were often restricted to (one of) their alphabet-analogues, which was still effective enough to communicate fully but did not capture how the language was actually written in normal contexts, since Japanese also has a lot of logographic characters. If you have a device with a screen of a decent resolution that can display arbitrary images, you can sell things written in a more traditional form.

Yeah, but can that resolution show kanjis? Hiragana and katakana may be ok but most complex kanjis would be a mess.

...and thanks to your videos I now know exactly what that means when it comes to the screen geometry.

I was excited to see the old TV too. I never had a Trinitron, but the last CRT TV I ever bought was a 27" Sony WEGA. Talk about an excellent TV! Everyone thought I was crazy spending $600 on a 27", until they saw it. And for years anyone that came over commented on how nice it was. Usually multiple times too. I'm going to check out your channel now. Very curious what Trinitron actually is.

"I never had a Trinitron, but the last CRT TV I ever bought was a 27" Sony WEGA." The WEGA sets were FD Trinitrons though. Essentially a regular Trinitron with a lens on the front that made it externally flat.

Panics Cool. I was wondering that as I wrote it. Makes sense they would stick to what they know best. I've got to get some rest here soon, but I'm going to watch his video on it too learn exactly what the technology is. Can't wait. Thank you for the reply.

Reading you comment on Trinitron, 55 838 hours in operation so far.

Not funny didnt laugh

"ARPANET" might yield better results. The Internet was still a niche thing.

Looks just like electric car of the 90s. It was a round decade. Everyone wanted to rid themselves of the 80s square image.

maybe it reminds you of simpler days? does so for me.

@@Jyeah89 isnt that also what old people said in the 90s

@@Jyeah89 In a way, modern devices are 'simpler.' That is, if simpler means a shorter battery life. The Nintendo Switch only has two hours of battery life. Modern times are so simple, that Sony doesn't even bother making handheld devices anymore.

@@ChanceKearns Young people seem to have said the same thing about dedicated handheld gaming devices. Hence why the PS Vita flopped. Sony gave up after that. The Nintendo Switch is primarily a home console, with merely two hours of battery life as a portable device. It seems modern times are simpler than the past.

I don't think they were killed off, the format simply got upgraded. I have seen a sales pamphlet for the new devices that looks a lot like the one shown in this video

@@yrobtsvt And it doesn't use flash or something, but actual mini-CD's...? I'd love to see the add for this, if you have a link somewhere...

apologies, it's the standard dictionary on flash memory, but the advertising is similar enough that i think the general product type may be similar as far as the company cares

@@yrobtsvt I've never seen ads for ones as bulky as this, but yes general flash memory digital dictionaries are flip-screen. I own 3 myself, those are the ones I'm talking about in the original post.😉

dito that i live work and breath tech and get put to shame by the things i must have missed keep up the good work techmoan

HH Scott you’re obviously just normal. Sorry.

I learned about laser discs and LD players only 5 years ago but it was from AVGN from there got interested in Techmoan, 8Bit etc videos

hey, what do you mean by "while I was alive" ?

I've vague memories of this, had just forgotten about it. It's why I like Techmoan and 8-Bit Guy/LGR/Nostagia Nerd/RetroManCave. So much stuff I'd forgotten about or missed.

Yup, in the 80s-90s Sony really went out their way of created every functional consumer electronics those even regular consumers don't know whether they really need it or not.

Sony had a problem with inventing their own formats and sticking to them long after those formats had been out-competed by something NIH, see Memory Stick M2 vs microSD, oh yeah and ATRAC vs MP3 and AAC. It took the sale of Sony's smartphones to actually tank before they switched over to microSD. That's also why the PSP had Memory Stick slots, not SD slots. Though they did knock it out of the park with BluRay... just in time for everyone to stop caring about physical media.

Hd DVD was superior honestly, but blu ray is still a fine product. Sony tvs are second to none since at least Trinitron. Car audio sucks ass though

Goes to show innovation is gradual. Just got frustrated with sony over time as they would innovate, deploy and then stubbornly stick to their propretary standard or platform. Most of the issues i had with sony was content. PSX for me was their first good content delivery platform, ignoring camcorders and TVs. Guess things moved really fast in the 80s and 90s.

GeoNeilUK let's not forget the Vita having proprietary memory cards (expensive as hell to boot) instead of microSD. Probably helped kill interest in the console.

@@zazzvc memory stick pro duo atleast gave you an option to use an micro SD card in adapter as opposed to PS Vita wanting to devour your pocket without having such adapter. the UMD was neat at the launch but it got slow and loud after time

@@theshankman8682 There are specific adapters for the PS Vita to use a micro SD card in the cartridge slot but you need custom firmware to access it. Not hard to install but simultaneously not intended

They hated having to share profits with Phillips for SP/DIF. There was a surcharge on minidisc players with SP/DIF. I got one of the few models.

@@renakunisaki although, it had much more storage space than early SD cards. The one I have is 1GB.

Often to the detriment of the product they include them on. Just look at the PS Vita, fantastically capable handheld mired by the bone-headed decision to *not* use MicroSD for expansion. Probably one of the things that killed it (along with Sony forgetting that it existed).

I also wondered if it was possible to print multiple 'screens' on one sheet(as it's using a roll of paper), which would make it a lot more useful.

Wouldn't have been any different from any other of these gimmicky thermal printers, see the Gameboy printer. Closest I've seen in person was the TV with a Teletext printer from Philips in the '80s.

I had the printer for my Sinclair ZX81. It worked pretty well except that after a while the print would fade away.

Thermo printers are awful. They were quite common in the early 80s, but every needle printer is far superior (albeit somewhat more noisy). There were some for the C64. Worst were thermo sublimation printer (thermo color printer).

If it would only have integrated with the device in some way to send the whole article/chapter at a time it could have made the Data Discman into a more useful reference gadget.

@@frankschneider6156 None of them beat the Sinclair ZX printer for awful, which charred your program listing onto an aluminised paper till roll using a spark electrode.

Well I think a lot of people were happy because the images were being stretched. The portable data discman had a 4:3 aspect ratio screen.

*TRIPLE JAY:* Surely just because 4:3 is the original output format of the device and therefore doesn't require horizontal stretching to fill the screen? Most modern devices these days output a 16:9 signal but you should switch it to 4:3 to get an accurate representation with an old bit of kit like this data discman or a VHS tape. Remember to change back to 16:9 mode afterwards of course, otherwise everyone on TV will look very tall and thin indeed!!

We had Ecarta in the School library. It was great fun searching for random stuff in the breaks.

I had Encarta put preffered to use my 30+ tomes enciclopedia Británica Haha

I first thought of Encarta too. Probably the first cd used in the cd drive of our new PC. 75Mhz I think its speed was

Encarta was my goto-source for anything school related on my sparkling new pentium 2 333 MhZ

I remember using it at school in the mid 2000s, probably just a few years before wikipedia really made it completely obsolete for the most part. I think we also had a cheap version of it at home around the same time, but I don't remember using that one much.

"But to be fair, much of modern technology had janky and blocky beginnings" Those first Kindles were awful.

The early days of ANY technology can be rather yanky at it. First e-ink screen... not that good. First digital camera, a huge machine for a tiny amount of pixels, But yeah, happy we have very good ebook readers these days. So good that making a better model is harder, once you got the ability to survive in water, automatic backlight and so on what do you need more?

Or once other technologies make your's obsolete. For instance, why would I ever need an ebook reader when I can just load up a huge amount of PDFs on my phone and just read them through Adobe Acrobat?

Jamthis or better yet, just use the web browser, and get books that have new chapters that get published every week, and have a real-time updated discussion forum attached to each chapter.

Pixl Rainbow we get e-books because of the ink screen tecnology that mimics a real page of a book, for me reading on a computer is really really tireing and my head starts to hurt but in an ebook, that doesn't happen at all

Or you could load it on a Kindle or other tablet and get a "Don't Panic" tablet cover.

Jeff, I appreciate the thought, but sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.

Indeed it is. I drove to LA in April, I couldn't care less about LA, it's where Route 66 ends and the journey down Route 66 was what that trip was all about.

Dang it. Now I`m going to have to buy one.... "The techmoan effect"

That's how I wound up with a Gakken World Eye.

Seconded! Nice positivity - On a similar note did anyone else spot the apostrophe abuse from the past in the passage of text shown at 19:02?

Oh Beyond 2000! I was 12 in '92 and used to love watching that show, albeit with high expectations of the future as the year 2000 to a 12 yo seemed a lifetime away. I put it down to movies like back to the future 2, blade runner, total recall etc expecting to see holograms, flying cars and all that widespread, but alas no flying cars. Seems most energy has gone to phones and tablets/computers.

We had that at school. We never had the second disc and half the files pointed us towards the nonexistent second disc. The Oxford Interactive Encyclopedia from 1997 I think was fully featured

Still have a copy somewhere

Perhaps there isn't too much wrong with the old screen. It might have debonded on the conductive glue and just needs ironing on the connector.

The player has the same "sickness" as the printer. Leaky surface-mount electrolytic capcitors. The screen doesn't work since the boost-converter for the high LCD-drive-voltage is dead.

+zapro_dk Now you're talking my language. Nothing gets me more excited than leaky electrolytic capacitors. Btw, what is considered 'high voltage' in this context? Certainly not as high as something like a CRT would use.

-20V seems a fairly common bias voltage for graphical LCDs but a lot of LCD modules will have a bias voltage generator on-board.

+benryves 'Bias voltage generator'? What's that, a transformer? A battery? I do not understand.

I've been thinking about that lately. Might go back to an MP3 player for music, film camera for pictures, and build a cell phone capable of only calls and texts with a Raspberry Pi

I like to think that after 15 years from now people will look at us and said that was stupid

@@johnolson2216 Build it with a Pi and everyone will want to know why it doesn't run Doom. XD I used to really hate single-purpose devices, but I'm starting to see the advantages as I get older. I was wrong about one advantage though. I thought a single-purpose device would automatically be easier to use; the interface would be less complicated. These Data Discmans with their paper manuals are a strong counterexample.

Would you review some of those magical units or know someone who has?

Well I'd hardly call them "magical", not just because electronic dictionaries are quite common here (some people prefer them as opposed to a smartphone app because it has less distractions), but also because there's really not that much to talk about - sure, maybe there's some novelty as regards the actual hardware if you've never used one before, but beyond that it's just a regular dictionary, except that you type your query instead of turn pages to find it.

I actually have some electronic dictionaries. One is Ectaco made (Russian) and it's HORRIBLE, and the company support is horrible, and another is by Franklin and it's actually quite good, except the lid had a stupid 1cm thick 4-function calculator stuck to it - WHYYY. I just had to cut and sand it off, because that's the worst idea i've ever seen. Oh wait, i have a third one, one of these toy $15 ones with 7 languages. No idea where that one is. I bought all of these 20 years ago and the Ectaco was ridiculously expensive - a device produced entirely with painfully unreliable COB chips on FR2, sold for hundreds of dollars, and it's bad, in no way comparable to an actual well-written dictionary. All of these are simple 2-line text display affairs, nothing fancy. Franklin is extensible with a cartridge connected by an anisotropic conductive rubber strip, the rest are not extensible. Also a SONY E-Book Reader with dictionary/reference mode and a touchscreen with on-screen keyboard. And i guess i can use my Psion5 or Casio PocketViewer as a dictionary, though by the time i got either, i didn't really need dictionaries any longer. This is the first time i hear of any using a PCMCIA socket, because that just seems excessively expensive to make, and i'm surprised that it's not just old devices but they continue updating them. I can see the advantage though, that you have a keyboard and they don't eat through batteries, for the same reason one would use a electronic calculator. I'm actually sad to see power-frugal and sunlight-friendly monochrome LCDs go on modern electronics. Wouldn't mind seeing the tech behind them. I guess if i was developing an electronic dictionary, i wouldn't have much trouble cramming the functionality of reading SD-Card and rendering on monochrome LCD into a cheap STM8, STC or Holtek.

Or even just Notepad.

I’m not a massive fan.

I like them

Techmoan, be grateful that they allow you to post your videos on their channel, you are basically just filler for the puppet content.

I can bet that those people who hate the puppets for "being the same joke over and over again" love other shows or reality television for the same reason. #wewantmorepuppets

I think they're hilarious! It gives Mat a chance to vent his frustrations about silly comments and the voices are very! I don't like seeing that Mat isn't a fan though. I've been bugging him to bring them back for the past couple of months and now I feel bad. Almost like I'm forcing him to do something he has no interest in. I know he doesn't do it just for me but my comments are heavily muppet positive so I'll back off on that then. 😉

That's a mostly harmless retort. And you did obey the cover. Could you look up my Joo Janta 2000 peril sensitive sunglasses? Mine have gone all black and I can't see....

you win the internet, good sir, hats off to you

I hear that the new edition expanded on the entry.

Belgium!

Don't Panic!

More like Sony GBA CD.

I just hope you’re not driving.

Techmoan I use public transport :)

izimsi he was on ya!

That hairy bloke needs a KZfaq channel!

bryede he looks like my old Geography teacher.

I think he looks like everyone’s old Geography Teacher. Perhaps there was only one Geography teacher?

TechBeard or BeardMoan? :)

My first thought was "My arse!!"

WikiReader. You'll have to go on Wikipedia to read about it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

A friend of mine had a PDA before touch screen smartphones were big (2004 / 2005, when Windows Mobile and Symbian were wide spread) and he used to download the offline Wiki every Friday.

I didn't particularly care, because by that time, i could just access Wikipedia online on my phone. It just seemed like a great target for hacking and repurposing it, being an open-source device. In hindsight, it wouldn't have been that great. Zipit Z2 would have likely served better, but i didn't get that one either. I did however get a Psion 5 around that time. In fact writing up something to load Wikipedia articles from CF card on that would have been trivial, except i never cared for that.

Just install Kiwix or XOWA on any cheap Andriod tablet with a microSD slot and you are good to go.

I still have one and it is great, a very relaxing device that is not very much up to date anymore, so using the Wikireader means David Bowie is still alive and basically makes me feel like I'm living ten years ago. I think there are some websites that offer updated content, should you get one and prefer living in the present.

A properly cared-for optical disc will last several times longer than solid state storage or a magnetic hard drive disc. It’s the closest we have to stone tablets right now

You're partially-correct. Stamped optical discs, sure, but "burned" discs generally use a laser to darken dyes. Those are nowhere near as resilient. M-Disc is the exception since the laser is used to physically melt a layer of the disc. Granted, I have CD-Rs I burned back in 1999 that are still perfectly fine, not to mention trivial to store via other methods... such as an M-Disc.

Fryode you're completely right. I have some CDs from 1999 which work perfectly fine, others were stored in the same Folder but have visible holes on the reflecting data layer where you can look through the poly carbonate like it was a piece of glass. Guess the oxygen is enough to deteriorate the important thin plastic film. I think DVDs are a bit better as they have two poly carbonate layers and the data layer but it'll take some time until I can see the results, my first DVD I burned in 2004 as I had no DVD writer before.

DVD-Rs are more resilient when it comes to mechanical damage on the top layer. I've never had the top layer flake off of a DVD-R, while it happens easily with CD-Rs. There was a time when I had a CD-R in a portable player I mounted in my car. The player had a clear window in the top. Since I usually listened to the radio instead of a CD, I left the player turned off for weeks. When I played the CD again, it messed up halfway through. I took the disc out and saw a darkened patch in the shape of the window on the data side, except for where the black silk-screened lettering was on the top side.

I was thinking more of a FO Pip-Boy without the wrist cuff.

@@KairuHakubi Its weird why Sony got so late into video games even tho they already had the technology.

@@HaswellCore It would be the Sony Playstation Discman.

Liz Ard what about the ti 83 calculator I messed around with one in class because you could type stuff and mess around

MARK BYRD I didn't know the wonders of the ti yet sadly, that didn't come until high school. Since then though I have wasted a lot of time typing messages to the people next to me and playing with the probability simulator.

I read many books and even wrote a book on a blackberry.

I read on a Casio PocketViewer. Taller screen than early Palms, same resolution. Wouldn't call it unpleasant. As long as the book could be zipped under 1-2MB in size. I liked PocketViewer a lot more than Palm, and yes it's not a viewer, it's a fully programmable PDA.

Read and created ebooks on my Palm Pilot. Great times! Had to carry hella batteries 😜

Pocket Viewer's power consumption was benign, because it had an x86 and barely any RAM at all, the operating system forced the device to sleep basically all the time, and it could sleep with display and backlight on and active. I used rechargeable AAAs and they would hold for a week or two of multiple hours a day of use. My smart charger, AT-1 by IVT Hirshau cost probably an equivalent of $60 or more, i still use it to this day, great device, keeps all my Xbox360 gamepads and lots of other gadgets powered. It's from around 2000.

I had a WinCE device but I had only one 256 MB memory card back then (they were expensive as hell) and would have loved to have the drive attached as storage to put my MP3s and Books on by burning Mini CD-Rs which were quite substantially less expensive than CF/SD-Cards.

Good point actually

As Sony did a MiniDisc drive for PCs also NetMD in the late '90s which allowed direct connection you could have downloaded books to the discs and built your own collections.

webchimp owned, and did just that, even used the hi-md

When I bought my Vaio laptop about 15 years ago I very nearly got the MD drive upgrade (you could hotswap the floppy with MD or a second battery) but it was about £200 more and I was already pushing my budget. I was tempted by Hi-MD (brilliant bit of tech, but too late to market) but ended up with an NW-HD5 instead.

Seems very likely indeed, and I'd assume that the non-working displays are caused by the same problem. Seems wherever Sony used SMD electrolytics in those days, they have generally failed and leaked electrolyte all over the board. Not just Sony, actually, Apple computers are notorious for the same, as well as IBM PS/2 floppy drives.

I don't know how BBC can copyright anything since its owned by the taxpayers, but thats a discussion for another day

@@realmichaud because it's owned by the government not the taxpayers. And it's owned only by the British government. You think anyone around the world should be able to steal BBC material?