Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop to effectively act as a scheduled wall timer for a "VCR for tape decks". He used the parallel port to send current to a few signaling contacts on a cassette recorder in order to record Car Talk and a few other radio programs he liked. A patent was considered, but podcasts rapidly became a thing a year or two after he had it working nicely.
Not a bit of that statement that fails to make me feel a bit old.
Early 90s, not 1990...probably would've been around 1993-1996, with the laptop coming after a year or so of playing around. Guessing that AC doesn't remember, but a 10 year old laptop in 1990 was pretty much completely worthless. Would've been a 286 or so in the Pentium era.
Eh... it wasn't really until the mid 90s before laptops or processors had a large difference between generations. 15 and 30 mhz 486s desktops were still common on store shelves in 1995. Sound cards and CD roms were still expensive add ons around then too. A lot of systems were still dos or Windows 3.1 and not only did you have to purchase a web browser, you had to install a network stack just to dial up the internet. I remember being stoked when i upgraded the 9600 baud modem to a USR 33.6k modem for
Sometimes even your hack gets outdated... (Score:5, Interesting)
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"Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop..."
Couldn't have been too fucking old.
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>"Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop..."
>Couldn't have been too fucking old.
The tandy model 100 came out in 1983, so it could have been 7 years old.
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Re:Sometimes even your hack gets outdated... (Score:3)
Eh... it wasn't really until the mid 90s before laptops or processors had a large difference between generations. 15 and 30 mhz 486s desktops were still common on store shelves in 1995. Sound cards and CD roms were still expensive add ons around then too. A lot of systems were still dos or Windows 3.1 and not only did you have to purchase a web browser, you had to install a network stack just to dial up the internet. I remember being stoked when i upgraded the 9600 baud modem to a USR 33.6k modem for