It's a lovely day here in Madison, and I'd like to go out and take a walk and stop into a café for a little while to work on a writing project, but I can't leave the house, because the refrigerator repair guy is coming "in the afternoon." I can work on my project at home, but there are distractions, like the way something in the comments to that last post sent me looking for my Amsterdam sketchbooks. There are so many places to look in this giant house, and I didn't find the notebooks, but I kept running across ridiculous, unbroken but unusable old electronic things, and that made me want to take this photograph:
Do you know what these two things are?
Are they relic-y enough to be collectible?
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23 comments:
Keep the "Jukebox 3000" if nothing else
I had that exact ebook until I stepped on it.
And I had a similar archos player until it died from being dropped.
My Ipod has so far been MUCH MUCH more sturdy.
Wow. Looks like my house.
It's a Jukebox 6000 and it cost more than an iPod, but we could never get it to work right. We spent so much time fiddling with it and got so frustrated -- all for nothing! When I look at that thing now, I'm still pissed off.
We thought the idea of the Jukebox was great. We were just amazed at the idea of loading all one's music into one player. Not long after the iPod came out. I really regretted being an early adopter. I've bought three iPods since then for myself and others.
NYPundit: Can you believe I've never used eBay? But who wants outdated electronic crap?
By the way, don't you think it's ridiculous that I have four Texas Instruments graphing calculators? And that wasn't any kind of mistake either. It wasn't like I couldn't find my graphic calculator so I just bought another one. Actually, I've never used a graphing calculator and don't know how to use one or even, really, what it's for.
This post inspired me to take a photograph of all my remotes but I'd need a landscape camera and can't find it.
I loved my graphing calculators! In high school the TI-85 was the Gameboy you could get away with having in class. I might have been a success but for the hours spent in the back of the classroom playing minesweeper and pac-man. I bought a TI-89 for college and managed to never load a single game on it. It nonetheless prevented me from ever truly learning calculus. I figured, if the calculator can't do it, neither can most of my classmates, so the curve will take care of me!
We just had a old cell phone collection at work. I forget the name of the charity, but they give them to elderly or disabled folks to call 911.
Seeing the graphing calculators brought back many good memories of playing "Drug Wars" in math class during high school. Anyone else remember that game?
How much would you want for one of the TI-83? Mine was stolen five years ago. I miss it.
Ebay is perhaps the strongest argument in existence for the idea that there is, in fact, a buyer and a seller for pretty much every commodity in the world at pretty much any price.
Oldupai Gorge has nothin' on the Althouse. What an archaeological dig you have there!
Totally unrelated: today a co-worker came to ask me if I had read a post of yours yesterday, but he couldn't remember his question. I attributed it to "Althousezeimer's"!
When did you change your masthead? Are you cleaning house everywhere?
"By the way, don't you think it's ridiculous that I have four Texas Instruments graphing calculators?"
Maybe not. I can't tell for sure but it looks like you have a TI83 and a TI85. These are very different calculators. The 83 is for statistics while the 85 is more of your run of the mill graphing calculator for pre-calc/calc/geometry/trig kind of stuff. It's good to have both. You never know when your going to be in a stats mood or a trig mood. I guess you don't really need two 83s or whatever that other oe is though.
It's funny thinking that even a piece of junk that's been obselete 5 years would be a technological marvel 10 years ago, not to mention 30 or 50.
Ruth Anne: Great -- both the word and the fact that the Althouse blog is now water cooler conversation. And you're the first person to mention the masthead change, other than my son. I was just looking at it at midnight a couple nights ago and decided the description was a combination of unnecessary, inaccurate, and dorky.
Slocum: I think we paid over $400 for that Jukebox! And never got it to work properly! As to the Rocketbook, one day I realized I was losing out on the aspect of my memory that's very good about visualizing the placement of the words on the page. After that I never used it again. Also, it's too heavy. So's the Jukebox.
Evan: I thought the Rocketbook would be great for reading cases and articles from LEXIS, but now I'd use my laptop for that.
Danny: The calculators were all bought for my sons when they were required to have a particular model for school. One year, both were required to have the TI-85.
Anything named "Jukebox 6000" you have to keep for kitsch value.
A Rocket eBook! I've got the REB1100 on which I worked developing the gray-scale interface - it's dead too. I went to work for them (transferred over actually from the on-screen Guide design which had degenerated to on-screen Ad design) after Henry bought NuvoMedia and the other eBook company and made them merge. Most of the hardware engineering staff on both sides left when 900-lb. elephant Thompson stepped in and said they were going to build the units their way with X-feature set. It was a great but small group of people and we were *this* close (pinching fingers) to profitability before the TV Guide Haircut's waffled and pulled the plug. That was a good run, from StarSight to Gemstar to TVG Intl. an the inside-out takeover - a whole 'nother story.
Ann,
If you are trying to get rid of any of those calculator, we are facing buying a graphing (trig) calculator for my daughter as she starts high school.
But then, they don't take up a lot of room, and you apparently have a lot of it anyway in your house. And, they bring back memories, which is often good.
Indeed, I find I have 4 HP calculators lying around. A 12C for either B. School 25 years ago, or when I got my RE broker's license 20 years ago, and almost identical to what is still being sold. Two scientific calculators, and one that is highly programable, and does almost everything, including graphing, but not easily. Couldn't convince my daughter to take the time to learn how to use it, given its complexity. It was useful though in all those engineering classes I needed for the patent bar.
Of the four, I found documentation on the HP website for 2, ordered a CD that includes such from the HP library for a third, and can't find anything for the 4th.
As you may or may not know, the big difference between HP and TI calculators was the use of RPL (reverse Polish) notation on the classic HPs. More efficient, but not as intuitive and harder to learn. Which is why in engineering school, HP users looked down on TI users.
My favorites though are my old computers. I think I have ten right now. I have, at some time, networked seven of them, since I recently added #F and #G. This laptop is #E. Even have a pre-Mac Apple II. ##A-C are in their original boxes, ##D-G are networked and shared via a 4-way KVM, and the other three are just sitting there. I know I need to get rid of some of them, but just don't, for some reason.
I wish they'd made a Rocket E-Book that ran PalmOS... not only would it be a nice format to read from (I use my M125 for that now) but it would have been a convienient size to take notes on in college.
IIRC The eBook was originally designed to do Mp3's - and had a test-version of a Chinese/English dictionary where you could tap the English word you wanted to translate and it would sound out the Chinese. Later versions allowed annotation and note-taking like with a sticky-note. There were a number of other things that didn't make it into the device because of corporate politics.
To the author who keeps on finding outdated junk electronics. I would be interested in taking them off of your hands. the older the better! Old phones, calculators, and computers. You see, I recycle them and keep them out of the land fill. It does cost money to recycle them but I am willing to pay for the cost to recycle them if I may ask that they are donated to me. I take them apart in my spare time and make sure that all of the plastics, glass, metals, etc, go to their respective scrap dealer. It is my way of "Paying it forward",and it gives me something to do when there is nothing else to do, while helping the planet in a green way. Please send me an email and let me know how I can be of assistance! sciarico@gmail.com
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