Tuesday, February 25All That Matters

So much vintage tech is dying. ….

29 Comments

  • This is so sad. We need to store examples of retro tech in a salt mine or in a vaccum or something to preserve them. I’d hate to see entire generations of tech just disintegrate over time.

  • Retro gaming communities deal with this stuff a lot, it’s not as bad as the video makes out. People are regularly using consoles and CRT TVs from the 80s. Getting on 40 years old now and still working fine.

    As mentioned capacitors are the main problem – but easily and very cheaply replaced.

    good thing about old tech is it is infinitely repairable.

  • I have a green third* gen iMac complete with keyboard and mouse. Still works. The plastic on the mouse is a bit sticky though. I fear that one day the hard drive will die, but at least it’s easier to work on than modern day ones

  • i just found a pile of my original cell phones and a few other random electronics. i was surprised how many things had turned sticky. i was able to power them all up except for my old mini razr flip that needed an “authorized” charger.

  • Man, when that 90’s ThinkPad popped up it brought me back. My dad worked for IBM at the time and he brought one of these things home. I couldn’t believe there were laptops with COLOR screens!

  • Ran through this with…. film. My in laws had these old film reels that were a little over 100 years old and I Googled it and it can last up to 70 years. And that’s only if they are stored in a low humid environment like a freezer. They had them stored in their basement which had flooded twice. They wouldn’t let me just toss them. As a proof of concept I had to repair the projector that came with it (enough so that it’d work for 30 seconds) and show them what the film reels looked like (which is just blank frames). And then there’s the VHS tapes that in perfect conditions will be almost unwatchable after 25 years.

    Technology just deteriorates so much faster than one would expect. A person would think just storing something you don’t use would mean it’s the same quality forever.

  • > I met a traveller from an antique land

    > Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

    > Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand,

    > Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

    > And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

    > Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

    > Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

    > The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

    > And on the pedestal these words appear:

    > “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

    > Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

    > Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

    > Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

    > The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    > — Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition

  • Thia reminds.me, I found my gen 1 iphone a couple of years ago, powered it up and it still runs. I was able to get all my photos off it, but what I wasn’t able to extract were the text messages. Apparently that first gen had a unique messaging app.

    I’ve tried several programs to try and extract those messages but none seem to be able to go back to gen 1.

    So it’s a shot in the dark, but does anyone here have any idea how I might bable to dl those messages?(mostly for nostalgias sake).

  • I turned on an old fujitsu siemens laptop recently and found that the previously perfect display had started to fail. It was always stored in a cool dry place so I’m not sure what when wrong.

    Another thing to look out for is the degradation of CDs and possibly also DVDs. I think I better take a look at the boxes of old floppies as well…

  • This guy has a massive humidity and heat problem with his storage situation and either doesn’t know it or, more likely, wants to deny is exists on video so he can get views. Humidity and component leakage can definitely kill machines, and rubberized plastics do break down, but what he’s showing here with that rust and separation in materials on the screens is something extreme that is atypical for properly stored devices. The fact that he has so many examples just confirms it.

    I repair/resell vintage electronics and collect old tech, and have done so for many years. There are plenty of good working examples of all of these machines shown all over the world with none of these problems, including several in my own collection.

  • I’ve got a stack of old hard drives that no longer work, i know 2 of them have some amazing stuff i’d love to recover, and would pay a pretty penny to do so.

    I was just an idiot though, and didn’t label them, so have no idea WHICH 2, and don’t want to foot the bill for data recovery of random drives i successfully migrated from.

    Its a shame, some of them have some cool stuff from the 90s, the bbs days, stuff from high school, some of the first digital picturesscans i took, stuff early in my career, old email’s id love to read again, etc.

    About once a year i’ll grab the adapters and try and get them to spin, but never have any luck.

  • Scheduled instigated dev expiration on suppression and releasure of tech generation. Just like updating with rollbacks and using the same OS over and over again and adding 1 or 2 bad things and making it sound like good things oh and data compression ratio on transfer being inflated sent then counted on and as decompression.

  • This video looks like this dude is literally killing old tech himself. All my old computers and crap still boot up because I keep them stored in a cool, dry place. This guy looks like he keeps all this crap in a shed in Florida.

  • Not quite what I was expecting. Was expecting some demonstrating that vintage tech was dying, not somebody announcing they neither nor how to prepare these old devices for storage nor can maintain proper storage conditions.

    I was amused when he said replacing an iBook HDD was an “involved process”. lol no wonder you’re having issues.

    It being stored in a “cool dry place” like he says and these devices having mould literally growing on them are mutually exclusive.

    Very little of what is described here is “vintage tech dying”. Plastic degrading? Plastic isn’t really “tech”. Besides, you are the doofus that retrobrited it probably. Youtubers love doing that shit to everything. No need to make the connection that the plastic turned to cheddar cheese 8 years later. I’m sure it’s totally unconnected to stripping out all the UV stabilisers with a strong oxidizer.

    Batteries swelling and leaking can cause vintage tech to “die” but that’s the case for new tech too. It’s not some unavoidable thing.

    “let’s take a look at a couple G3’s that I’ve never tested or powered on before”.

    Old stuff has known issues relating to the batteries. he knows it. It’s strange that he gets these into his collection but then just leaves them sitting around. Earlier in the video he mentioned that he never opened another older Macintosh so doesn’t know if the battery is still in there. Just casually. despite him clearly knowing that they cause significant corrosion issues that destroy the machine. It’s so absurd. Same for the G3’s. And you know if he opened one of those and there was battery damage he’d just add that to his “inevitable vintage tech failure” checklist, instead of maybe reinforcing that you need to actually prepare/check stuff before shoving it into storage (which, based on the issues he has, must be a shelf in a sauna)

  • Meanwhile my NES from 1989 is still kicking. It’s hooked up and my kids play it to this day. TV is one of the last Sony WEGA flat CRTs from the mid 2000s (the peak of CRT technology and still modern enough to have every analog input you can think of).

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