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Today, i said goodbye to a 25inch Sony TV which my grandma had for 17 years. Throwing it out made me realise how special this tv was to me.

We got it when i was 5 years old (Russia-1995) Some of our relatives who were involved in some shady stuff back then stole this TV from a shipment truck and gave it (or sold it, idk i was 5 years old) to my grandma. This TV was the first modern, non soviet piece of technology my grandparents got at that time. The other 2 TVs we had were Soviet-made from late 70s-80s one of which was a color TV.

The New Sony TV had a radically different design than anything ive seen before (and a really sweet looking design in my opinion) This TV had awesome sound (note large speakers which added to how cool the thing looked) great picture quality and it ended up lasting us a really long time working flawlessley like new, No color loss or burnins or any problems normal TVs exhibit with age. (keep in mind back then, TVs were still made in Japan and not outsoursed to China

My neighbor gave me a 40 inch panasonic also from around early-mid 90s... the colors on that tv darkened terribly over the same time period.

My grandma is Blind now and because of that in the last 2 months she managed to accedentaly knock over the Sony 25" from its table 4 times. There was some cosmetic damage to the plastic case but it still worked like new, perfect picture quality and sound.

But the 5th time she knocked it over the TV just couldnt handle it. Half of the plastic case snapped off and permenent damage to the screen in a form of a large black splat mark in the middle where the screen hit the floor and it wouldnt turn on anymore.

I had to throw it out because i needed to free up the space and when i trew it out i realised that this TV was the coolest TV we ever owned (i had my own sony later but it was small and ugly)

really pained me to trow it away especially after i realised that this model is actually kinda rare and at the time was only sold in Japan with few shipments that were exported. Always enjoyed watching this particular tv as a kid. and since now i picked up interest in old/rare electronic technology, this TV would definatley be the kind of 90s antiquety i would love.
Dosent it just look cool? no other sony TV from that time looks as cool as this one.

I generally had a good day today, but trowing out this TV was the worst part, kinda ruined my day actually. I was really sad when i left it near the dumpsters,
That TV was a huge part of my childhood and life in Russia when i visited my grandparents during summers when came over from the states as well as latest 3 years i lived here. It was sad to let go of something like this.
(kinda sounds stupid giving so much personal meaning to a model of a television set... Well i didnt have a lot of friends back then).

So does anyone remember their first cool/influential piece of technology that was in your house or in your friends place or something?

When I was 7 years old (1963), we got a telephone in the house. It was a basic, black, rotary model that weighed about 10 pounds. They really used to build them back then! Before that, my mother would go to my Aunt Lucille's house next door if she needed to make a call. Now that we had our own phone, it was mostly used by my mother to call next door, but my Aunt spoke so loudly over the phone, that we could all hear her from next door without it!

Anyway, I kept that phone for many years. For a while, I kept it on the dashboard of my work van, and I would pick it up and talk into it while driving down the road. I got some pretty funny looks.

I've since moved a few times and it's gotten lost. I sure wish I still had it.

Brian.

Super Megadrive + NES - SNES and crucially overall influential PLAYSTATION 1 / ONE

Basically because it was what brought me here... EDIT To where I am now... learnignt o develop games and on TGC's site...END EDIT

However my later purchase of my first and last off the shelf personal computer (Win98SE oh yeah baby! Yeah!) [Mike Myers style voice apply here] - consecutive compUters were self builds ever since- solidified my coming to TGC here just last year...

Reason being I always wanted to make my own pc games in 3D specially because of things like 3D MARK 1999 / 2000 and Thief 2 and the like... as well as many other games...

However PLAYSTATION 1 / ONE is my biggest influencer towards my urge and craving to make computer games in general... and a the PC thanks to TGC is easiest to develop for... and most flexible and robust, affordable... (and not having excessive licencing issues and fees - which detoured many developers back then... EDIT I mean Playstation 1 / ONE here END EDIT) was the obvious choice

However thats not to say other consoles were not responsible... like the N64, the long forgotten Sega Dreamcast (yeah SEGA had a console once... I already mentioned another earlier did you notice?)

Anyway... these are the only things I can think of that had any impact on me... I still have a PSONE... sadly not a PS1... loved that model... EDIT oh and still have a PS2 too ^^ END EDIT

Due to my youth life and the often moving around... I never had the chance to get attached to something too much... its a tough life and a tough world as you have seen... I totally understand your feelings towards that TV and am sorry for the loss

Hmm...

EDIT

Now I remember what the hmm above was for...
My first PC was destroyed by a bunch of ameteurs... [mother and step dad] They brought it over from here while I was living abroad in Denmark and tried turning it on themselves... not kowing the cpu heasink had fallen loose [ how can you not spot something like that bouncing around beats me...] this was all without me knowing then they call me and they had fried the cpu it was an intel socket 478 433Mhz... celeron... sadly the ones that did not have built-in thermal control otherwise it would have been fine and just shut down... [please do not turn this into a flame topic lets keep to the topic guys - I am alll tooo aware this is a bait for flame... just dont do it please!!!]

EDIT

Sorry I am using remote desktop onto my main rig and its pretty bad how I am doing it... old laptop and bad keyboard and bad network... please see underlined edits above

Rotary phones are awesome. I had those as a kid too. We had one rotary and another button phone. They actually still make soviet models of rotary phones because they work the best with the ancient analog layers of phone communication infrustructure even at the lowest levels of the really early phone networks. Also they are cheap and friendly to old people. As of now i have an entire box of broken modern rotary phones (there was an unlucky streak of phone problems which resulted in a lot of phones being tampered with (i think i tampered with at least 2 ) so we borrowed/bought a bunch of rotary phones all of which ended up breaking or already broken. so yeah.. i have like 5-6 broken rotary phones in a box...

i traided mine for a gameboy advanced. I deepley regret that decision.

also i decided to buy a PS1 and a PS2 recentley. Kinda late to the party, but those still had tons of games that are console exclusive (and emulators suck)

was it completley hanging loose or was it not snapped in all the way or something. If the second one then i had a thing like that with the retarted p4 heatsinks with 2 levers. at opne point i broke one of the levers and damages the plastic heatsink mount thingy so the heatsink was never fully mounted always leaving a small wedge of space between the heatsink and CPU, yer somehow my 3GHz p4 continued working normally even at about 85c. and for at least a year (even played games on it and it was fine) idk what heappened to it eventually as i gave that PC to a friend

I apologise for getting sidetracked from my own topic lol but yeah we should at least try to keep it near the area of people first piece of tech that was really cool/influential

remember Alex the Kid? we found it by accidently turning it on withut a cartridge inserted (woah cartridges ... I feel sorry for our youth today haha the closest they have to this is a Nintendo Hand Held cartridge but theyre a far cry from what we had haha) and ten we took a closer look at the box and there it was printed on the box haha god I can just about recall the packaging... (nostalgia Idea... a website for ancient packaging? - or a thread lol)

it was prior to the 4 pins setup which I like aside from pins breaking on the reverse side ...
So a meal clip down the middle...

But yeah my first influential piece of tech was indeed the Personal Computer without a shadow of a doubt and running of course running a Windows Operating System

maybe i shouldnt have mixed the idea of "influential" and "cool" Everyones influential piece of tech is a console or a computer or a mainframe. As far as my Sony TV set goes. that was just the first COOL TECH i had in my life since everything else we had was at least 20 years old made in USSR or GDR. At the time any production from the capitalist world seemed radically different, more advanced and alien-looking. My first one happened to be the sony TV, it certainly didnt look like any TV i ever saw. The radical difference of Sonys stuff from stuff people were more familiar with automatically labeled as COOL. It was a little influential yes.

But i think if instead of a TV it was a computer, i think at that time the 5 year-old me wouldnt label a computer as something cool (a game console? maybe)

Since this is a programming forum and mostly everyones influential technology was a computer of some sorts or a game console, i am curios about what kind of stuff people considered COOL? and not necesearly influential

sorry for confusing the topic guys.

How about a Craig Engineering Calculator model 4512.
Check it out:

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/Craig4512_1.jpg

It was cool at the time, but, not very precise.

remember these?

Aww yeah, View Master rules.

Sony Mavica, best digital camera ever!

Umm Caller ID was pretty cool when it came out.

I had a teddy ruxpin and grubby, and the tape recorder.

I was trying to remember the name of the laser gun thing I had as a kid. Had a vest and headgear with removable sensors (about the size of a brick). That was high tech!

Oh, and this VR visor thing. Put on the head gear, a lens covers one eye and you play games through the lens. The games are just in red silhouettes.

I dunno, currently my favourite piece of tech is my X1050 Walkman. It's always by my side, and it makes any music I put on it so very, very enjoyable.

Aside from that, I'm not really sure what else there might be.

My old 12" B&W TV. I got it when I was about 7 years old (about 1980) and only got rid of it in 2006 when I moved country. I didn't actually use it then it was just in the cupboard, but was a little upsetting to leave it behind. Stupid really...

Heh, I remember I used that TV all through my ZX Spectrum years, plus a bit of time with the Atari ST. I got so used to it that I could recognise the colours in a Snooker match and the like

Saying that though coincidentally I remember a friend loaned me a PC with a mono monitor after Uni which I used to code my own program hopefully to sell. The thing was that I made a proper app with estimated colours and when I got a colour monitor it all looked stupid

Cheers