Show off your old and retro computer parts

[Bitter]

Someone needs to make a niche product, a retro-style modern motherboard. 1st PCIe port is AGP brown, the rest are PCI slot colors, has serial, parallel, com, gampad, etc built into it or on a riser card via PCIe, vintage ugly retro board colorations, etc. Pair it with a retro style case that fits modern components they might sell dozens of them.

[da na]

4 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Someone needs to make a niche product, a retro-style modern motherboard. 1st PCIe port is AGP brown, the rest are PCI slot colors, has serial, parallel, com, gampad, etc built into it or on a riser card via PCIe, vintage ugly retro board colorations, etc. Pair it with a retro style case that fits modern components they might sell dozens of them.

Industrial motherboards. They're disgusting colors and still have loads of legacy I/O. Two serial ports and two PCI on a Xeon E5 v4 or 8th gen i5, that sorta stuff. 

[da na]

I think you all will appreciate what I found in a flea market: The worst shaped CDs on the planet.

Of course I said "Ugh! That's horrible! Who the hell would buy that!" then proceeded to purchase both spindles. So now I have close to a hundred of these.

Because the actual writeable circumference is so tiny, each disc holds less than 6 minutes of audio or about 54mb.

There is a very good reason that optical media is round. Because if you make it a rectangle, it just doesn't work well. 

I can't imagine what these possibly would have been for. A neat way to release singles, perhaps? But no slot loading drive can play mini CDs to start out with, so making it rectangular won't help. 

Edited April 27 by da na

[Kilrah]

22 minutes ago, da na said:

I can't imagine what these possibly would have been for.

Business cards/trade show giveaways people can put in their wallet.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

 

 

[da na]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

Business cards/trade show giveaways people can put in their wallet.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

 

 

Wow! That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation, never would've guessed

 

Can we stop using BBC as an abbreviation? The amount of things "BBC" can mean seems to grow every day

[Kilrah]

Looks like some had jewel cases, which kinda defeats the point, still smaller I guess

 

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Looks like some had jewel cases, which kinda defeats the point, still smaller I guess

 

Imagine some asshole comes up and hands you their "business card" and it's a tiny CD with 6 minutes of Nickelback.

I'll start stamping these and handing them out at conventions. What a funky little thing.

[Kilrah]

Later came the business card sized "USB drives" where obviously none of the big rectangle serves any purpose other than being a canvas to put your design on but that didn't get cheap enough until the 2010s, CDs it was before that. CD's more fun anyway. Unless you had a macbook, rip.

 

[da na]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

Later came the business card sized "USB drives" where obviously none of the big rectangle serves any purpose other than being a canvas to put your design on but that didn't get cheap enough until the 2010s, CDs it was before that. CD's more fun anyway. Unless you had a macbook, rip.

 

I bought a flash drive in that form factor that was designed to look like a credit card from wish.com once. It arrived and the package had been ripped open and the card was removed from its box. I'd love to imagine someone thought it was an actual Bank of China credit card and stole it. 

[Kilrah]

Looks like some people were creative

 

[da na]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

Looks like some people were creative

 

The house one on the left and the blue CCT one seem absolutely miserable. Those would wobble so much.

[Bitter]

33 minutes ago, da na said:

Wow! That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation, never would've guessed

 

Can we stop using BBC as an abbreviation? The amount of things "BBC" can mean seems to grow every day

Horribly off-topic - One time my ex pops into my work (she's also a customer, we're friendly it's fine), walks over to me, we're chatting while I'm working and then sort of out of the blue asks me if I know what BBC stands for. Of course I do but I give her all the wrong answers first because she didn't give me any context and I wasn't about to go out on that limb to ask about context. Eventually I gave her the right answer, her face lit up with a big OOOHHHHH....that makes sense, then she continued to prattle on about something else.

[Bitter]

1 hour ago, da na said:

Industrial motherboards. They're disgusting colors and still have loads of legacy I/O. Two serial ports and two PCI on a Xeon E5 v4 or 8th gen i5, that sorta stuff. 

Well yes, but we need the cases to match with modern amenities like airflow and less tetanus.

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Horribly off-topic - One time my ex pops into my work (she's also a customer, we're friendly it's fine), walks over to me, we're chatting while I'm working and then sort of out of the blue asks me if I know what BBC stands for. Of course I do but I give her all the wrong answers first because she didn't give me any context and I wasn't about to go out on that limb to ask about context. Eventually I gave her the right answer, her face lit up with a big OOOHHHHH....that makes sense, then she continued to prattle on about something else.

There's a local cafe which is frequently abbreviated as "BBC", I was so confused when I first moved here and someone asked me if I wanted to go downtown for BBC

[da na]

Well after a few years of searching, I finally bought a FireGL v8650. They're around, but they are often crazy scalped and difficult to find for any reasonable price.

The v8650 is the world's first GPU to hit the 2GB VRAM mark. Top Quadro at the time, the FX 5600, was still at 1536mb. Though it didn't hold the title of highest VRAM capacity for very long - a few months later, Nvidia released the 4GB Quadro FX5800 - I'm fully confident in saying this is the highest number of memory chips you'll ever find on a graphics card.

THIRTY TWO memory chips. It's absolutely ridiculous. Looks like someone spilled a bucket of GDDR4 all over the PCB. 

Spoiler

It's also one of the very few graphics cards to use GDDR4. 

Despite having 4x the memory of the HD 2900 PRO it shares a die with but only double the memory bus width, performance takes a hit. Combined with the inherent downclocking of a pro card, it wasn't the highest performer. But oh boy is it weird.

Can't wait till mine comes in. 

[SimplyChunk]

5 hours ago, da na said:

But no trayloading drive can play mini CDs to start out with

These little circles in tray loaders are for mini cds. they also fit those discs you bought too.  I'm sure you even used to get tray loading drives with that specific shape cut out in it

[da na]

4 minutes ago, SimplyChunk said:

These little circles in tray loaders are for mini cds. they also fit those discs you bought too.  I'm sure you even used to get tray loading drives with that specific shape cut out in it

Oops, thanks for pointing out my error - I meant slot-loading.

[SimplyChunk]

53 minutes ago, da na said:

Oops, thanks for pointing out my error - I meant slot-loading.

the wii will slot load gamecube discs

[da na]

1 minute ago, SimplyChunk said:

the wii will slot load gamecube discs

No way. Really? 
I had no clue!

Does the Wii have a CD player like the PS1? Because if so... might be one of if not the only CD player that'll slot load a mini CD.

[Bitter]

I had to remove a mini CD from a car slot load CD player once for a customer, luckily I was able to hook a slim metal wiper blade steel on it and pull it out.

[da na]

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I had to remove a mini CD from a car slot load CD player once for a customer, luckily I was able to hook a slim metal wiper blade steel on it and pull it out.

I wonder if you put one in at juuuuust the right angle and with enough speed, if it'd actually play.

Not sure if it'd trigger the mechanism to push the disc down onto the spindle, different drives have the lever in different places. Theoretically it could happen though

[Erioch]

9 hours ago, da na said:

I think you all will appreciate what I found in a flea market: The worst shaped CDs on the planet.

Way back in the 00's, my mother in law had a digital camera that saved the pictures to a writeable mini cd.

 

It was total garbage but at least it was expensive.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Erioch said:

Way back in the 00's, my mother in law had a digital camera that saved the pictures to a writeable mini cd.

 

It was total garbage but at least it was expensive.

Oh yeah that's the practical application for discs of this size, but... in a round shape so they can actually fit a useful amount of data.

[Bitter]

3 minutes ago, da na said:

I wonder if you put one in at juuuuust the right angle and with enough speed, if it'd actually play.

Not sure if it'd trigger the mechanism to push the disc down onto the spindle, different drives have the lever in different places. Theoretically it could happen though

Well I don't know if it ever played but it wouldn't fully eject. It stopped just in the edge of the felt lips, you could push it in and it would try to cycle but couldn't quite grab the disc. It was trapped in limbo.

[da na]

5 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Well I don't know if it ever played but it wouldn't fully eject. It stopped just in the edge of the felt lips, you could push it in and it would try to cycle but couldn't quite grab the disc. It was trapped in limbo.

I've had to free a couple of those from drives over the years...