Polaroid film as we know it has seen over a half-century of twists and turns as it fights to keep its place inside our beloved cameras. Where once Polaroid maintained a global network of factories around the world, it has since contracted to relying on one building in the Netherlands to maintain the survival of Polaroid. In this special episode, we explore the factory’s hallowed halls, as everyone from chemists to shipping coordinators work as one organism to supply the world with film.

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The early web was a different place. People built websites about their cats, their favorite TV shows, their rock collections. There were no algorithms deciding what you’d see. No engagement metrics. No content strategies. Just people sharing what they loved with whoever happened to stop by.

That spirit never fully went away. There are still people out there hand-coding HTML, tending personal sites, and linking to each other through webrings, blogrolls, and link pages. But finding those sites has gotten really hard. Search engines bury them under commercial results, and most people have been convinced that the only way to have a presence online is through someone else’s platform.

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(via MeFi)

(via BoingBoing)

(Direktlink, via Neatoroma)

Der Käufer war ein Sammler, der mittlerweile 80.000 Dias zusammengetragen hat. Warum auch immer. Ich hatte mir letzte Woche extra noch einen Projektor besorgt, den ich selber nicht hatte, um zu sehen, was genau ich dort zum Verkauf angeboten hatte. Dann saß ich hier abends allein und klickte mich durch die Erinnerungen eines mir völlig fremden Menschen. Urlaub in Marokko, Urlaub in der Türkei, in Afrika, die Berliner Kantstraße und der Potsdamer Platz in den 1980ern. Irgendwie faszinierend, dachte ich und hatte den Teil der Antwort auf ein Warum?

Der Technikjournalist Posy mit schwärmenden Blick auf alte Diaprojektoren und den dazugehörigen 35-mm-Bildern. Und der damals als langweilig besetzte Begriff der Dia-Show hat sich bis heute noch gehalten.

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(Direktlink, via BoingBoing)

Playing the 1998 song „Olson“ by Boards of Canada through four control panel light bulbs of a 1959 DEC PDP-1 computer using Peter Samson’s 1962 Harmony Compiler and 603 bytes of music data.

(Direktlink, via Zwentner)

(via BoingBoing)

Wer erinnert sich noch an die Zeit, als es die ersten Tastentelefone auf den Markt kamen? Damals telefonierte man am besten nur am Wochenende oder im „Mondscheintarif“ am Abend, weil die Gebühren sonst zu hoch waren.

Aus dieser Zeit (1983) stammt der Filmbericht aus dem damaligen „ARD-Ratgeber Technik“ und informierte über Neuigkeiten rund ums Telefon.

(Direktlink)

The sound of dial-up at some of the most common speeds, including 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14,400, 33,600, and 56K. As noted in the video, the sound of a V.34 connection at either 28,800 and 33,600 will be the same, and both were common around the same time, so I’ve only included the 33,600 connection.

Note that this isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of all speeds, but a sample of the most common ones. There are many other speeds and protocols, including but not limited to 75, 110, 4800, 28,800, etc. Also note that this video includes a V.90 56K negotiation, which is the one that people are most likely to find familiar. With that said, if it doesn’t sound quite right, remember that V.90 deprecated the X2 and Flex 56K standards, which sound quite different.

(Direktlink, via BoingBoing)

(Direktlink, via The Awesomer)

Hergestellt in Deutschland von der Karl Ketterer KG. So bisher auch noch nicht gesehen. In Aktion sieht das Ding dann so aus:

video Restoration Process:
FPS boosted to 60 frames per second
Image resolution boosted up to HD
Improved video sharpness and brightness
Colorized only for the ambiance (not historically accurate)
added sound only for the ambiance
restoration:(stabilisation,deinterlacing,denoise,cleand,deblur)

Please, be aware that colorization colors are not real and fake, colorization was made only for the ambiance and do not represent real historical data.

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(Direktlink, via Doobybrain)

Das Spectra Futura Stereo System ist ganz ohne Zweifel das wichtigste Kultprodukt der Firma Nordmende. Alle Künstler lieben es! Es ist das Ergebnis der Zusammenarbeit der besten Ingenieure der Firma und des weltweit bekannten Designers Raymond Loewy.

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VWestlife hat sich ein PlayTape genommen, das innenliegende Band herausgeholt und auf eine herkömmliche Kassette gespult. Nur um zu sehen, ob das funktionieren könnte – und irgendwie tut es das auch. Ein bisschen.

PlayTape was an endless loop audio tape cartridge format that was briefly popular in the late 1960s. A variant of it was also used by the Hipac cartridge in Japan in the 1970s. The tape is the same width as in a cassette, so can you take the tape out of a PlayTape and play it in a cassette player? Let’s find out…

(Direktlink)

I stopped in today just to make sure they still used them, and the gracious young lady working helped me out by taking some updated close-up pictures! She said the one on the right is a "new" one, so they are still actively maintaining hardware. pic.twitter.com/I2DlYgvmcl

— D L (@louksd) December 16, 2024

(via Zwentner)

Sieh dir diesen Beitrag auf Instagram an

Ein Beitrag geteilt von David Wellman (@xtr3m3z)

(via Zwentner)

(Direktlink)

Hunter Irving hat sich einen noch viel älteren Mac genommen und ihn mit modernem Internet gefüttert, dass das Gerät vorher noch nie gesehen haben dürfte. Und auch das funktioniert. Wenn auch etwas eingeschränkt.

Browse the modern web on vintage hardware with MacProxy Plus! (available now on GitHub). Even though it was developed with early Macs in mind, it should work to get other computers online, too…

(Direktlink)

This is a sound collage recorded on tape, but not quite what my Nagra was tuned for—LGR50 instead of BASF911.

It’s a mixture of various artificial and generative birds, a distant beach among redwoods, a sunny meadow in rural Portugal, a night atmosphere, and other natural sounds.

Each tape features a 45-minute generative piece, all created with my own M4L devices.

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Ein Beitrag geteilt von Alexey Seliverstov (@grayskiesforever)

„Best photos and technical documentation of retro computers, TVs and digital watches that are part of my collection. I document them as my time permits.“

Bildschirmtext (kurz Btx oder BTX; in der Schweiz Videotex) war ein interaktiver Onlinedienst. Er kombinierte Funktionen des Telefons und des Fernsehgeräts zu einem Kommunikationsmittel.

BTX wurde in Österreich im Juni 1982 eingeführt, in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland ab dem 1. September 1983 bundesweit. Durch die Konkurrenz des offenen Internets verlor Bildschirmtext seine Bedeutung später wieder. Inzwischen wurde der Dienst in allen Ländern eingestellt, in Deutschland 2007.

(Direktlink)

Remember manual typewriters? Heck, remember pens and pencils? They may be obsolete someday. We’ve gotten to the point where there is some computer or high-tech gadget that will do just about anything we need to do. It can be easy or hard. Fun or frustrating. Tonight, we begin a two-part look at the changes technology has caused in our lives. We call it High Tech 101.

(Direktlink, via Zwentner)

I thought it would be a fun challenge to do a cover version of New Order’s Blue Monday using only vintage consumer-grade Casio instruments. This is an edited and compressed adaptation. I left out some sections of the song and combined a few things to make a shortened rendition.

What you see me playing in the video are the actual instruments I used to make this multi-track recording. I layered different keyboards for most parts. I didn’t do anything to significantly change the sound of the instruments. I only used basic effects, such as equalization, reverb, delay, chorus, compression, etc.

I programmed the main drums using the built in rhythm programmer of the HT-700 keyboard and supplemented them by playing along on the DP-1 drum pads connected to the MT-500 keyboard. I used the SS-1 drum sticks to strike the pads, but you can also connect these sticks directly to the MT-500 and trigger drum sounds by striking anything or even waving the sticks in the air.

New Order sampled the Kraftwerk song “Uranium” for the choir-like sound in the original song. I also sampled ”Uranium” with the SK-1 keyboard. This is the only thing I sampled.

Here is a list of the instruments I used (in order of their first appearance):
HT-700 keyboard
MT-500 keyboard, DP-1 drum pads, SS-1 drum sticks
VL-1 mini keyboard/calculator
MT-400V keyboard
Casiotone 1000P keyboard
DG-20 digital guitar
SK-1 sampling keyboard
PT-7 mini keyboard and Casiotone M-10 keyboard
DH-200 digital horn
Casiotone 201 and MT-40 keyboards
MT-65 keyboard
KX-101 and CK-500 keyboards/cassette players
Casiotone 701 keyboard
MT-35 keyboard
MT-52 keyboard

(Direktlink, via Laughing Squid)

„Daisy Bell“ was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892. In 1961, the IBM 7094 became the first computer to sing, singing the song Daisy Bell. Vocals were programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum and the accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews. This performance was the inspiration for a similar scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(Direktlink, via Book of Joe)

(via Zwenter)