Why I love old tech (rant + pictures)

Over the years I've collected quite a bit of technology that's before my time: floppy drives + disks, CRT television, VCR, Palm Pilot 3, and an analog oscilloscope. They're not just collecting dust on a shelf, either, I use them (sometimes). 

So... why do I bother? These items are very much obsolete, even I would admit that. Hundreds of thousands of people work every day to advance technology, which makes our lives better and less frustrating. Aren't we supposed to be looking forward as a society if we want to make progress?

Looking back at technological history broadens my perspective, because there is a whole timeline of great (or crappy) designs where the engineers had to solve many of the same problems that still exist today, and they may have had a unique way of doing it which has been overlooked. 

Sometimes the design philosophy is often more insightful than the core technology itself. I can still use these older items today because they were built to serve their users for decades, and as a user I feel respected by the designers. The engineers were free to write detailed user manuals because they trusted you. And I do mean free, because anyone passionate about their project will love the opportunity to write about it. 

So the reason why I love old tech, if I had to boil it down... Modern mainstream products, though superior on a technical level, fail to give users the respect they (we) deserve.

Anyway, pictures!

My scope measuring the analog video signal going from the VCR to the TV. It's basically a real time chart of voltage changes over time. The TV screen is split up into horizontal scan lines, and the video signal is the sequence of lines from the top to the bottom of the screen. On my scope's screen there are four scan lines visible at a time. What's funny is the scope actually has a bespoke setting to sync up to this signal!

It's kind of amazing that full colour video can come across on one yellow wire; you'd think you'd need three for RGB video (that concept came later with Component and VGA). There's a base brightness signal (for compatibility with black-and-white TVs) and a high frequency signal for colour information (which is why the signal looks like a bunch of rectangles) overlaid on top. Looks a little boring because it's just the colour blue. The colour signal was compared to a reference waveform, and the alignment and strength of the signal along the scan line pretty much corresponds to hue and saturation of the colour in that spot. So with some analog signal processing and math, you have HSV colour which is translated to RGB. One wire!!

 He is a friend :)

Lotsa floppy disks and drives collected from workplaces of people I know. Yes, the 5.25" fella is plugged into my PC. Had to use a separate controller for that one since modern motherboards don't exactly have the hardware to interface with ancient drives, and nobody makes USB ones! Who would have thought! It's really meant for archival purposes though, just get the files off before data rot inevitably takes hold.