Years ago I worked at an electronics store and have seen some very interesting products over the years with some being very useful.
Not sure how to do a poll on here but wanted to see how people matched on the ownership of some of these useful devices .
Have you ever owned a My (answers)
-PDA? Yes, I had a Palm IIIe
-DVD-Recorder? Yes. Successor to VCR sure didn’t last long… 😖
-WebTV? No. Interactive TV in the days of dial-up. 🙂
-3D Television? No
-Raspberry PI? No but I want to.
-Internet Radio Player? No This would be fun especially if it also had am/FM tuner
30yo here. I’ve only owned a Raspberry Pi. I got one in college after a friend won in a contest and didn’t know what to do with it so she gave it to me.
I did have a few toys growing up that were basically PDAs for kids.
I had a Hairy Palm II
Dvd recorder, raspi sn 3DTV (still my tv. It’d a 4K LG one)
How about a Colecovision console, or a Laserdisc player?
LaserDisc goes back go the early 80’s I didn’t go back that far and I’ve never heard of a Colecovision console before…?
My older brother had a Colecovision. The arcade ports were obviously SO much better than the hand-me-down Atari 2600 in my room. It died though, when he was playing it while our dad yelled at him and then yanked it out of the wall and chucked it across the room… The two of them, they, uhhh, didn’t always get along.
I still have my laserdisc player… i have been unable to get rid of it. Everytime i look at it, the nostalgia knocks me off my feet.
PDA: XDA EXEC and some others I can’t recall.
3D TV: no but I did setup my PC for 3D with Nvidia 3D
Raspberry Pi: setup a bunch of the gen 1 units as TVs at a children’s creche
Internet radio: skipped that went straight to streaming
I need to check my processor/motherboard specs to make sure I can set up 3d . Sounds like a blast.
PDA: I had a Compaq iPAQ which I never really got the hang of using.
DVD-R: For a while this was a great way to back things up, before large flash storage was a thing.
- PDA - yes. Palm Pilot and even an Apple Newton
- 3d TV - Yes, but I never used it
PDA: Had a Palm Treo 90. Also owned a second-hand Nokia N810.
DVD Recorder: Obviously had DVD burners in my PCs, but not as a standalone device.
WebTV: Technically Yes, but got it for shits and giggles at a Goodwill and never had service.
3D TV: No. I don’t even like it in theaters.
Raspberry Pi: I have a 3B+ running OctoPi for my 3D printer. I also have a couple of Picos, one in use in a handwired keyboard, but I don’t they count.
Internet Radio: No, but my wife bought an early streaming device, a Muzo Pebble I think. It was annoying and never got used much.
PDA: I had a Palm Pilot I rescued from a scrap bin at work and installed an open source OS on. I used it as an ereader until the eye strain from reading on that small screen started giving me headaches.
DVD recorder: No. I gave up on broadcast TV when I was 17 and the amount of advertising time hit 25 minutes per hour. I watched everything on rented DVDs until video streaming and adblockers became a thing.
WebTV: No. It was never available in my country.
3D TV: No. I was waiting for the format to get more support, then it went away entirely.
Raspberry Pi: Yes! I could never get wifi working on it, which limited its usefulness. Still fun to play with until I somehow broke the HDMI out.
Internet Radio: Kinda. That’s what I used the Pi for after breaking video.
Many PDA’s, a few DVD recorders. No WebTV or 3d TV. A few Raspberry Pi’s and my car’s head unit can play internet radio.
Out of that list I only owned a PDA. I had a HP Ipaq 214 that I used as a digital dictionary to look up Kanji by written input when I studied Japanese at university. It was right before the dawn of the smartphone and it was truly remarkable technology.
I had a Handspring PDA. Still in a box in my garage in fact, alongside my Nokia 770 “internet tablet”.
Didn’t have any of these, did have a dvd burner and TV tuner card so I guess I could have had a dirty dvd recorder back then but at the time I just saved the shows I wanted to HDD, watched them and then deleted it and the burner was for movies ripped with handbrake
My parents had a WebTV when I was in highschool. They kept it for a very long time. it was awful.
I also have a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Pi Hole on my network. I don’t think raspberry pi’s are as unusual as some of the other things here. I know a lot of people who use them for various things.
Raspberry Pi doesn’t quite seek to match the rest. What’s so strange about that? I have two, a 1b PiHole and a Pi400 that I use as a Steamlink.
