What is the oldest tech you use?

just replaced the TV I bought in 1991. not because it was broken or anything, but to get the right screen shape and built in cable/satellite. might just plug the Atari in to it just to say I still use it (and Atari into a 42in widescreen might look a bit “odd”), otherwise that only qualifies as the oldest tech that I’m not using any more.

have broken several newer TV’s. all of which didn’t even last 5 years. don’t make them like they used to.

When you peel back the onion, the similarities emerge. Other than SMP, has the Linux kernel really radically changed much over the last twenty years? We’ve been time sharing since PLATO II and CTSS in 1961 and Multics (without which there would be no UNIX) in 1964; your UNIX-like desktop or laptop may only apparently have one user logged into it (you), but the myriad of service/system users doing stuff in the background mean you’re always just one user on a multi-user system.

Yeah, sure, the DE looks purty and all, but fire up that terminal window and you’re back in multi user land!

Dunno. I suspect a kernel person would say yes, but I don’t know enough about the kernel. However, a fair amount of how userland works has changed. Sure, you run “ls” and it runs basically the same way it did in 1976. But starting and running background jobs is now done with systemd (or upstart until it goes away), the kernel has dbus in it, your filesystems are completely different, stuff you run now stores its config files in a standard place (.local/share or .config, not ~/.appname), devices are managed completely dynamically rather than being hardcoded in /etc, /sys exists, and so forth. Certainly if you picked up a Unix sysadmin from the early 80s and sat him (it would almost certainly have been a him, back then; things are better now) in front of a virtual console of an Ubuntu 14.04 machine, or a full-screen terminal of OS X latest, he’d find it pretty familiar, but that doesn’t mean that it works the same way; it’s just presenting a similar UI.

Oh how exciting. The motherboard on the cnc machine I mentioned went bad. Just swap another board in there, right? Well, the thing uses a proprietary isa board. Finding a motherboard with isa slots was just loads of fun. You ought to try it! :smile: There are new ones made, but are very expensive, at least for our little shop.

Found a used one with a 266mhz Pentium cpu (upgrading from the 75mhz 486 cpu). This thing should run blazing fast now, eh? No. I had to disable all the cache so that the cpu wouldn’t run faster than that stupid isa board could get it data. But, it’s up and running.

Yep, things are exciting around here!

I make coffee with a french press. While my specific french press is new, the tech itself is quite old. Does that count?

Only if you use organic coffee! :smile:

Most of the time I drink Wicked Joes. Its Wicked Good.

That looks good. I’m going to have to try that someday. I’ve been using Deans Beans for a while, and have really enjoyed it.

This stuff is what makes the magic of me being awake enough to DevOps happen.

Right now I’m playing a bass guitar, the tech in this is older than me for sure

That Thunder of God coffee is fascinating. It says that it is “hand roasted”. That must be what their picture shows. They must have amazing talents or hands made of asbestos. :smile:

1 Like

Human torch got tired of being a super hero. Now he makes coffee

1 Like

Not sure if this truly counts as technology, and I wish I owned this but I am in the very lucky position to have exclusive use. A much more successful musician than my self though admittedly not a worldwide household name has recently leant me his grandfathers mandolin. A Gibson F3, circa 1903.

Does this count? It is certainly one of the possessions I am most proud about and I will be using it to gig this year.

Will that be as a traveling minstrel? :smile:

I have my grandfathers zither. Unfortunately, we were told that trying to tune it might break the sounding board, being that it is probably around 120 years old or more.

Possibly, I play mainly folk music and playing mandolin sometimes is a nice change from the guitar I play most of the time.

Sounds fun. I just hope you don’t end up as Sir Robin’s minstrel.

It is interesting how minstrels were important in conveying news and such before literacy and use of paper was widespread.

This sounds like the America Trump will bring back.

1 Like