I still have an alarm clock from that era that looks like a tiny iMac. It stopped working but I haven't had the heart to toss it out, and I might cram a Pi and a display in it to bring it back to life.
@@gabotron94 The 90s and some of the 80s was all about translucent colored plastics. I honestly miss that. A lot of phones have clear glass backs but they never have an option to not have a sticker on the inside to show off the guts, although it's usually just a battery and shielding anyway so there isn't much to see on a lot of phones.
Dude your so quickly joining my list of channels among guys like LGR or TechMoan - infinitely bingeable, magnetic personality and just the best presentation. Reminds me of local access TV but way way cooler. Honestly after finding your shareware video and watching you sense then - I hope this goes far for ya man. This stuff is awesome.
My thoughts exactly. I got into LGR and Techmoan separately and quickly exhausted the archives. I am stoked every time a new video drops. Glad to add this channel to my list of geeky indulgences! P.s. check out Technology Connections too if you haven't already. More of the same goodness.. just more focus on things like, toasters, Christmas lights, and dishwashers!
This video just reminds me how blessed we are that every device just shows up as mass storage nowadays or if it needs a program, it at least isn't some arcane one-off thing a random company slapped together.
If you'd like to recreate the arcane one-off program a random company slapped together experience in 2022, just buy literally any hardware device designed to work with a smartphone.
@@grahamparks8885 smart home devices, the quickest way to have multiple apps with one more app just to talk to a speaker that can control the other apps
I love that the D-Link webcam was shrink-wrapped, and yet had the UPC cut off the box, no doubt for some mail-in rebate as was absolutely prevalent in those days. Also, iMac-inspired clear plastic enclosures for absolutely no good reason is so peak 1999.
At one point circuit City was selling these fancy for the time touch screen remotes on sale for like fifty bucks. The original price was I think 250 dollars. Turns out you could return the remotes for full price. I know someone who bought their entire stock and immediately returned it. Netted 2000 bucks. It wasn't particularly unusual at the time for sales at circuit City to work like that.
That Handspring Visor is so nostalgic for me. I had a blue translucent Visor as my first handheld personal device when I was in middle school. I absolutely didn't need a PDA (turns out, no one did!) but I did have a camera module for it (They called their expansion cards "Springboards") which took OK photos for the time, which you could preview in black and white on the screen! There was also a pretty good Doom-like FPS for it and a Neko clone, so it had all of the essential software for the time.
At a place I worked, before Y2K, analysts came around putting Y2K OK stickers on approved things. Not just computers but lamps and chairs and staplers. All kinds of things. Ridiculous? Yes, until someone told me it was to identify products from vendors that got Y2K certified. Then it was only mostly ridiculous to me. However part of me does wonder what would have happened if we did nothing. I do think it would have been a pain in the arse. But disaster? Maybe?
Y2K was a real issue, not for lamps, chairs and staplers, of course, but for important computer systems that even back then were running the world and would have stopped it dead in its tracks had they failed. Large organizations like banks, insurance companies, governments, energy providers, telecom, etc. actually spent many billions in the years leading up to Y2K to prevent it from causing serious issues. That's why nothing major happened, why it kind of fizzled out and why people now think it wasn't a big deal. It was because people literally went over every line of code of massive programs that were, at this point, decades old and often written in by then esoteric languages for antique systems, which were however still being used for all sorts of stuff in the background that most normal people never even think about.
There's no question things would be broken and wouldn't fix themselves. Whether that means flight delays while they do things on paper or airlines shut down is an unknown. To give one example.
@@no1DdC I was one of those folks. I was working hard in several different languages and domains. As far as chairs and what not, if Y2K was going to be a big deal, being unable to get supplies would have made things worse. So I kid, but really making sure your suppliers were Y2K compliant was maybe a good idea. The stickers however…..
If _no one_ did anything, it would've been quite the mess. But the important shit like banks, hospitals, power companies, etc. tested and fixed their stuff, so it was mostly a non-event. I worked on systems in that era. While some errors were comical, others were a serious (what-do-you-mean-all-my-money-is-gone) problem.
It does look pretty solid on that Sony monitor, but then again, the capture card that came with it might absolutely butcher all of its potential, even with that hardware encoder chip.
My dad had a satellite radio that had an optional "satellite internet" add-on module, he didn't have it but I read the pamphlet, you could pay a subscription to set up an email forwarder and select some single-digit number of webpages which the company would cache for you each day that you could download from their satellite network, I wonder if that's what the SkyLink service was.
If I had to guess, the EZ Cam games have gotta be doing some riff on the PS2 EyeToy experience. Tracking "motion" just by what pixels change from one frame to the next and using that to determine where you're moving your hand on the screen.
I used to work in the computer department of Circuit City 2004-2006, this brings back memories. We used to take turns cropdusting each others' customers. One time my coworker stole the stair cart away while I was up on the top rack looking for a specific cable (it was one of the newer "warehouse"-style CCs as opposed to the older "showroom" type) and I had to spend the rest of my shift up there. Good times.
TV cards were the coolest thing to have back then. It was The Future™ and you fill your whole hard drive with single episodes of Futurama and King of The Hill and then melt your CPU encoding them with the original DiVX 3.11 codec (or an "unofficial" copy of TMPEGEnc).
1:08 "you can tell the quality of the product by the quality of it's box" Not always, I bought cheap Bludio T5 Bluetooth headphones and they had the best headphones box I had, with textured hardcover cardboard with a magnetic latch. Much better than the cereal box and cheap transparant plastic of the Sennheizer HD598.
Handspring was founded by former Palm developers if I remember correctly. Their goal was to go beyond the palm pilot and create a more connected device. I had a palm pilot and an early handspring, they were very similar.
And then later, didn't Handspring eventually buy Palm Inc. and rename itself Palm? ...Or am I completely making that up? I seem to remember Palm (the company) got passed around in ownership games a bunch in its later years.
I recognized that logo immediately on those two questionable products from InterAct. They were a company that made a ton of clone controllers for various platforms. They were the sort of controllers you handed to someone if you wanted them to lose, because they all had horrible input lag.
If I saw that proprietary USB cable right, it kinda reminds me of a USB "Mini-B 4 pin" cable , or CB-USB5/6/8 cable used on Olympus cameras. It's definitely from that post-iMac USB but pre-micro USB era where everyone hopped on the USB train but were also trying to make small USB plugs for their tiny devices in the hopes that it's massively adopted.
I had one of those 'web meeting 2 go' devices! I don't remember that packaging, and I'm pretty sure I got it out of a scholastic book fair catalog, mid 2000's, so mine might have been some kind of reboxed overstock. Fun little point-and-shoot toy for a middle schooler, but not much else.
I wonder if the 56k modems are “winmodems” these were hell on early adopters of Linux. It was actually quite difficult to find a 56k modem that wasn’t a win modem
That's why you bought external ones. They *couldn't* be winmodems because the defining characteristic of a winmodem was running all the signal processing in software, and a serial port didn't have the bandwidth for that. (Plus, they were apparently more robust in the face of shoddy phone lines for reasons such as "PC internals generate a lot of interferece with analog signals, so better to move it outside the case". Makes sense, given how a $3 no-name USB sound card beat my onboard audio for microphone SNR back before I had a Yeti.)
Great video. I saw (and purchased) a lot of this crap at small computer stores and shows at the time. This channel improves with every upload. It has a "Techmoan meets Tech Connections at LGR's house for brunch" vibe that the kids will come running for.
LOL that mySmartPad thing is wild. I can imagine the whole thing. There was probably a weekly or monthly magazine for the newest inlay (of course you could subscribe to it sending in a postcard.) The magazine opened up with a few random articles, what Britains Royal Family is up to lately, the rest was product placement what you are supposed to order with each button, loosened up with a crossword puzzle in the middle, bad cartoons and jokes on the last page and a full page cartoon for the kids with a returning character called mySmartie and his adventures. One button would order Food Supplements solving all your problems. The next button the best knife sharpener in the world. You pay with your "club card" which has your bank account details directly on the pad.
I graduated from high school in 2000, yeah...I'm old. Watching videos featuring the tech of the past, really brings back fond memories for me. Thanx, CRD.
I remember walking into a CompUSA in Fairfax VA shortly before they closed, perusing the endless shelves of this kind of junk. The whole place just reeked of despair and futility outside of the one well-lit and possibly even hopeful corner showcasing iMacs in prismatic colors. So many bondi blue 3rd party accessories and random knockoffs. Bought a Delorme StreetAtlas on clearance which ended up being pretty decent for pre-internet GPS road navigation.
I know exactly what CompUSA you're talking about. A strip mall near Fair Oaks mall. The store closing sale for that store was pretty disappointing... Good thing we still have one computer store nearby: Microcenter!
The 4-pin mini-USB were common enough that you can still get new ones from most major sources!, it was used on a lot of early devices! If someone actually need one look for USB Mini "Hirose". Hirose was a very big connector manufacturer at the time (still is trading, no idea of current influence/size) and as I understand it they came out with these well before the official USB Mini standard came out so it has the same 4 pins as the original full-sized A/B connectors because that made sense... But the USB consortium had other ideas and added a 5th sense pin on mini & micro A/B connectors for "on-the-go" where you connect two non-host devices (it's complicated). There were other custom small USB connectors but I suspect "Hirose" outsold all the others combined by a large factor and even hung on for quite a while on digital cameras, AFAIK a number of camera manufacturer never used the official USB mini connector but instead waited for the micro connector to come out before switching away from Hirose.
I picked up right away on all the missing UPC codes. These all look exactly like the types of items you'd get with mail in rebates that would need UPCs cut off to send in. I have some pretty fond memories of doing that on Black Friday during the 2000's.
Yep. CompUSA would offer stupidly large rebates on useless crap like this, then find ways to deny the rebates and keep the money you spent on the stuff.
I had one of those weird IR remote trackball things circa '98 - '99, and could never get it working. I even managed to convince my mom to take it to best buy to get their repair center to install it to no avail. 7 or 8 year old me thought the IR receiver tower was just the coolest looking thing ever
I had the 'Web Meeting' cam 2 go around 2002. It was rebranded as the Aiptek Pencam. The pictures where shitty, but as a kid it was great to be able to take digital pictures!
I used to have one too, bought it at a flea market for what would be about 5 bucks in local currency. Absolute garbage quality. it worked just fine under Linux which was also a thing I was really into as a kid
I absolutely loved my Palm Pilot. In some ways it did things better than anything since. It had proprietary "Syncing" with your PC, but even that was quite painless for the time. Once you learned a few special character strokes needed for handwriting (characters that require you to lift a pen (e.g. 't', 'k') were modified to single strokes), even the handwriting recognition was as good as anything now. I used mine constantly for several years and never had an issue.
I have vivid memories of playing those EZ Cam games on a demo PC at Sears (!). It overlaid a ball over the video feed (running about 2 fps), and you could bounce it by hitting it. It felt like Nick Arcade
Oh man. The MySmartPad sent me back to all the smug bloatware you used to find on computers back in the day. The weird dusty hardware you'd find by your friend's basement computer. Good times.
That Web Meeting 2 Go style camera was EXTREMELY common 20 years ago. I think the same mold was used by at least a dozen different companies. The connector on the device end was actually pretty standard for smaller USB devices at the time. I'm not positive, but I think it was actually part of the 1.1 standard.
Ah the camera leeching power off the keyboard connector… Took me back to the Connectix Quickcam I had eons ago, a small B&W ball camera sitting on a weird triangular rubber stand. It got its power the same way.
I HAD that WebMeeting 2.0 Cam! It was my first digital camera, and I took so many low-resolution pictures with it. Mine was branded as Aiptek. I figured out with a few filters on GIMP that it gave it a nice artistic look. Still have a sunset over a beach hanging up somewhere in the house.
You literally have the ENTIRE computer store as I remember it when I was 30 back in the early 2000'ish. Yes - things where built cheesy, weird, gimmicky, flimsy, plastic-fantastic - and of course driver support that lasted about as long as the products themselves, roughly 1-2 years and it was all end-of-life for most of these things. Oh what a time to be alive. The ONLY thing you got there that is actually worthy of fond memories is the Palm Pilot, that thing was a RIOT. I even forked out for the amazing Palm Pilot IIIc (that now is disintegrated) that cost me a whopping 500 dollars - and had a TFT screen, and could play a PERFECT replica of Galaxians!
Definitely want to see what the first cam can do. I'd be happy to watch a whole video on it. The last one was a fun little forensics exercise; gGetting power from the keyboard port tickles me in both my jank and clever sensors. I really enjoyed this format in general. I'd love to see more "Unboxing the year ___" videos. Definitely from a little later than this period (to see how USB implementation was going) but especially from around '97-'99 when crazy, bizarre pre-USB, burgeoning-internet devices roamed the land. I bet if you put out a request for stuff people don't want, you could get a couple more boxes assembled from all over. And thanks to the viewer who sent all this stuff, because it was super fun. I hope his dad eventually found the webcam he was desperately looking for.
I worked at a retail software store in the mid to late 90s just before I went on to work at Maxis. My store in particular had a very high shrink (theft) rate. I started gutting all the product to remove live product from the shelves. Having done so, I handled many of these boxes in the process of gutting and re-shrinking. And I can say that thin cardboard was basically the rule especially for any hardware upgrades. Even the retail packaged high end video cards and large hard drives (name brand) used the same thin card stock. Funny in contrast to the games which often game in nice heavy cardboard boxes that would likely be reused for years (unless it was a re-release or a "classics" series which was often packaged in a thin cardboard hanger style box.
Hi! I worked at Glenayre in Vancouver BC, in 2000. Yes, it's a 2-way pager mated with the Handspring Visor expansion interface. The standalone pager is the Accesslink. I worked mainly on the software for the gateway between SMTP (email) and the paging system (it was called the GL3200). In May of 2001 95% of the company was laid off on the same day! Including me! It turns out that the era of 2-way paging was over.
I think the EZ Cam USB is probably something like the EyeToy for the PlayStation 2, which detects any movement of pixels as motion and sends that information to the game to do something with.
I vaguely remember very early Nokia camera phones (probably other brands too) being equipped with CIF cameras. It was a strange size, but it worked well enough for the passive matrix 128x128 screens.
Netmeeting was amazing, it was ahead of its time, didn't need an online account to work and had multiple features. And in true Microsoft fashion, it was replaced with a shoddy replacement that could never fill the shoes of net meeting (I'm looking at you Live Meeting)
Thoroughly enjoyable video! I worked at CompUSA in the mid 90s and I remember how jealous I was of people rolling out shopping carts into the parking lot full of stuff like this to go with those mindblowing Pentium computers. I am gonna binge watch your content, really nostalgic about these things.
Been binge watchinng your vids since 15 plus hours. I just love the wit, you so sharp and amusing with it too. And to top it off i have learnt so much also. Dont know what i will do with it but I'm cool with that. I gravitate towards interesting and informative people. In my long winded way; I'm just trying to say thank you. 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
I love the explanation at the end of what old computer store experiences would be like!! Thank you so much for that. I also love the sticker on the computer, and thank you for these rad videos. You're really a cool content creator, and I hate it when people talk about forgetting about all the past "junk". I think this stuff is awesome. We still use a ball mouse and other quirky things with even our primary computers, to this day! My partner even does their writing on an old XP laptop they got for free and fixed up!
Holy crap, I used to have the webcam from the Web Meeting 2 Go kit. I even took a picture of the Ballard railroad draw bridge with it that I submitted to Jones Soda and they printed it.
Ah the late 90s - early 00s of computer accessories, where nearly every instance of the letter 'a' in a brand name had to be substituted with the @ symbol, because it's the web! But to be honest I'm just very impressed at hearing someone using the word 'ersatz' nowadays.
I had an early 2000 Logitech webcam that had built in games that uses the camera. One I remember clearly is it would show your face and chest on screen and bubbles would float around your image on screen and you could pop them with your finger and it would keep score. It worked pretty well.
wow!! the cathode ray dude uploaded!!! i am having a rough time, and im really just looking forward to 45 minutes of y2k tech while i wait for the frozen lasagna to finish in the oven. thank you cathode ray dude, i can now distract myself from thoughts.
That handspring Visor device with the skytell modem/cellular service is quite literally the mother of all modern Smart phones. It is an important part of the history of computers and it belongs in the computer history museum. At the time they had no idea how they could merge a Palm Pilot with a Cellular modem successfully. So their hardware genious (a famous guy. U fortunately I can't remember his name off the top of my head) came up with the expansion port idea. This allowed for multiple vendors to come up with modems,cameras, and other accessories some of which worked better than others.
Probably echoing others here, but getting a bunch of computer accessories in the late 80s and 90s, and then working at Best Buy and CompUSA in the late 90s, that thin paper over a slide out cardboard or styrofoam box was absolutely the norm… and oddly memory inducing. You are right, I think Apple was a big game changer there. Great video!
Thank you so much for your channel. I didn't realize I was nostalgic for any of this kind of stuff but wow this is a treat. I am becoming more and more nostalgic for the 70's to 00's style of everything. The older I get the more new old things start to feel .
Seeing Skytel sparked some memories of weird old days where we all had beepers. "Do you know the importance of a Skypager?" I remember the really lucky kids had beepers that let you basically text back and forth. But it was arduous so nobody bothered.
Skytel, for those who don't know what paging is, it was a massive pager service in the NE US and perhaps the world. It also was a primary service for 9/11 to route pretty much 1/3 of all the pagers in NYC to the flex/POCSAG transmitters that existed.
AOpen is a legitimate brand though they are a spin off from Acer. They made tons of stuff too, CD-ROM drives but also whole computer systems (started with Small Form Factor System etc.) some pretty nifty stuff.
I had several of the items you unboxed. The Mouse-systems trackball, the InterCam, and a HandSpring Visor (did not come with the communications module). I'm pretty sure that a lot of that stuff is more like 1995-1998 than 2000, and was purchased on clearance. Kensington was sort of a low-end Targus. Everything they made was cheesy. As far as the Extreme-Mail (CyberMail?) kit goes, I expect the vendor had the capture card that they sold on its own, or more likely, failed to sell on its own, and then the Internet became easier to connect to and they figured "We have this receiver/capture card nobody is buying, lets add a cheap camera (had to be analog, since the capture card doesn't use a digital input), some e-mail software, and festoon the box with stuff to make everyone think it's a trendy product." 1 week later, they printed the outer box, shoved the inventory of video capture cards along with the other parts into the inner box, and sent it off to Circuit City. The scanner card may have been SCSI. There were a lot of flat bed scanners that came with low performance SCSI cards. I have a few of those ISA cards in my collection of old computer parts. There were two things that the father of your benefactor seemed to miss, the Gyro-Mouse, which had gyroscopes in it so you could move it in 3-space (it was wired), and liquid-crystal shutter 3D glasses that plugged into a game port. I'd offer to send some to you, but I sent the ones I had to electronics recycling about 5 years ago.
Kensington do have the pattent on the Kensington lock. That little slot put on a lot of electronic equipment to let you secure them from theft that even Targus sell locks to go into.
I could not help but notice that the boxes, even the unopened ones, all had sections removed from them. "I'm not going to bother using this item, but I'm snagging the UPC/Proof of Purchase anyways." -- Coming to you from Bremerton
Whoooaaah i just can’t believe that most to all accessoires are related to cameras whether webcams,phonecameras or fotocameras etc,, it’s just insane,BUT HOWEVER, I will always miss the year 2000 ,no matter what will happen,nothing will top this off,because to me to year 2000 did felt like a reskin of the 80’s & 90’s with a new layer of sous over it,it felt like a mix of retro and modern mashed up together,it was a time when i was fall in love with a beloved girlfriend,a time when i was still on school etc,,, Everything seemed to be good and fine i seemed to be on my way into a bright future,but in late march of 2001, things felt apart to be never the same again,no matter how i tried to turn things around,no matter how i tryed to recover things up ,i just eventually realized that things would never ever be the same again.
I notice most of those products have their UPC barcodes cut off so they were likely all returns to the store, some of which were re-shrunk wrapped (we had a shrink wrapper when I worked at a computer store in the late 80's).
all this old tech reminds me of the PC my friend had at his house, it was a Gateway 2000 Destination PC, had all the greatest things, you would have loved it
Those webcams might just work on a (older) Linux system so you don’t need to install all the crap that comes with it. It depends a bit on just how old they are.
Indeed - a lot of these pre-class-device USB cameras used bridge chips that worked in similar ways, so they all got collected into a driver called "gspca" (Generic Software Package for Camera Adapters) on Linux. Worth a try. The driver is still maintained, so I'd expect at least some of these cameras to pop right up and work even on a current Linux distribution.
Lead plates in cheap plastic crap is very common with "scameras/trashcams" from the 80s and 90s. Frequently seen with a label stating OPTICAL LENS rather proudly on the front of the "lens".
The Glenayre/Skytel device likely used paging services. There was a brief time in the early 00’s when paging carriers were offering enhanced services such as news/email syndication as well as 2-way paging. This was the market that the early Blackberry devices were chasing.
The mobitex network I think is still operating in the US for mission-critical applications. Early blackberries ran on that before they added voice. It’s actually quite fascinating
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](/img/n.gif)
"SkyTel: A WorldCom Company" There's never been a more Y2K phrase uttered by man.
In 2000, _everything_ wanted to look like an iMac, even clock radios and vacuum cleaners.
I still have an alarm clock from that era that looks like a tiny iMac. It stopped working but I haven't had the heart to toss it out, and I might cram a Pi and a display in it to bring it back to life.
over 100k subs and no check mark youtube doing you wrong my man..
i have to admit I miss those translucent, matte, fruity knockoff plastics
I'm distraught I had to bring your comment's like count to 65, from 64 - the amount of RAM in the original iMac if I recall. :D
@@gabotron94 The 90s and some of the 80s was all about translucent colored plastics. I honestly miss that. A lot of phones have clear glass backs but they never have an option to not have a sticker on the inside to show off the guts, although it's usually just a battery and shielding anyway so there isn't much to see on a lot of phones.
her: "i bet he's thinking about other girls"
him: "is skytel a worldcom company?"
great video CRD, you're knocking them out the park lately
He has a bf
@@rudeskalamander So, one slight change and the joke still works.
@@rudeskalamander I think he recently talked about his girlfriend in a video so I guess he's no longer with his bf.
Dude your so quickly joining my list of channels among guys like LGR or TechMoan - infinitely bingeable, magnetic personality and just the best presentation. Reminds me of local access TV but way way cooler. Honestly after finding your shareware video and watching you sense then - I hope this goes far for ya man. This stuff is awesome.
My thoughts exactly. I got into LGR and Techmoan separately and quickly exhausted the archives. I am stoked every time a new video drops. Glad to add this channel to my list of geeky indulgences! P.s. check out Technology Connections too if you haven't already. More of the same goodness.. just more focus on things like, toasters, Christmas lights, and dishwashers!
@@OriginalRitz Don't forget about The 8 Bit Guy, VWestlife, and ElectroBOOM!
This video just reminds me how blessed we are that every device just shows up as mass storage nowadays or if it needs a program, it at least isn't some arcane one-off thing a random company slapped together.
If you'd like to recreate the arcane one-off program a random company slapped together experience in 2022, just buy literally any hardware device designed to work with a smartphone.
@@grahamparks8885 truuuuuuuuuuu
@@grahamparks8885 smart home devices, the quickest way to have multiple apps with one more app just to talk to a speaker that can control the other apps
I love that the D-Link webcam was shrink-wrapped, and yet had the UPC cut off the box, no doubt for some mail-in rebate as was absolutely prevalent in those days.
Also, iMac-inspired clear plastic enclosures for absolutely no good reason is so peak 1999.
If you buy hardware on discount for $15, but there was a $20 mail in rebate, you could acquire hardware and they would pay you for it.
I was waiting for them to mention that, but was disappointed when they didn't.
@@rich1051414 thank you for explaining this!
At one point circuit City was selling these fancy for the time touch screen remotes on sale for like fifty bucks. The original price was I think 250 dollars. Turns out you could return the remotes for full price. I know someone who bought their entire stock and immediately returned it. Netted 2000 bucks.
It wasn't particularly unusual at the time for sales at circuit City to work like that.
"for absolutely no good reason" um, excuse me, aesthetic is a perfectly good reason
Here's to a speedy recovery, for both yourself and your newly virus-ed computer. :)
That Handspring Visor is so nostalgic for me. I had a blue translucent Visor as my first handheld personal device when I was in middle school. I absolutely didn't need a PDA (turns out, no one did!) but I did have a camera module for it (They called their expansion cards "Springboards") which took OK photos for the time, which you could preview in black and white on the screen! There was also a pretty good Doom-like FPS for it and a Neko clone, so it had all of the essential software for the time.
At a place I worked, before Y2K, analysts came around putting Y2K OK stickers on approved things. Not just computers but lamps and chairs and staplers. All kinds of things. Ridiculous? Yes, until someone told me it was to identify products from vendors that got Y2K certified. Then it was only mostly ridiculous to me. However part of me does wonder what would have happened if we did nothing. I do think it would have been a pain in the arse. But disaster? Maybe?
Now I wish I’d nabbed a sheet of those stickers. I definitely would send them to you.
Y2K was a real issue, not for lamps, chairs and staplers, of course, but for important computer systems that even back then were running the world and would have stopped it dead in its tracks had they failed. Large organizations like banks, insurance companies, governments, energy providers, telecom, etc. actually spent many billions in the years leading up to Y2K to prevent it from causing serious issues.
That's why nothing major happened, why it kind of fizzled out and why people now think it wasn't a big deal. It was because people literally went over every line of code of massive programs that were, at this point, decades old and often written in by then esoteric languages for antique systems, which were however still being used for all sorts of stuff in the background that most normal people never even think about.
There's no question things would be broken and wouldn't fix themselves. Whether that means flight delays while they do things on paper or airlines shut down is an unknown. To give one example.
@@no1DdC I was one of those folks. I was working hard in several different languages and domains. As far as chairs and what not, if Y2K was going to be a big deal, being unable to get supplies would have made things worse. So I kid, but really making sure your suppliers were Y2K compliant was maybe a good idea. The stickers however…..
If _no one_ did anything, it would've been quite the mess. But the important shit like banks, hospitals, power companies, etc. tested and fixed their stuff, so it was mostly a non-event. I worked on systems in that era. While some errors were comical, others were a serious (what-do-you-mean-all-my-money-is-gone) problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if that little analog camera would beat some of early webcams into the goung picture-quality wise.
It does look pretty solid on that Sony monitor, but then again, the capture card that came with it might absolutely butcher all of its potential, even with that hardware encoder chip.
@@no1DdC it's not a hardware encoder at all, the bt878 is an uncompressed capture chip, it's a frame grabber with a comb filter nothing more
@@Mister_Brown Thanks for the correction!
My dad had a satellite radio that had an optional "satellite internet" add-on module, he didn't have it but I read the pamphlet, you could pay a subscription to set up an email forwarder and select some single-digit number of webpages which the company would cache for you each day that you could download from their satellite network, I wonder if that's what the SkyLink service was.
I think you’re right. I faintly remember that service.
If I had to guess, the EZ Cam games have gotta be doing some riff on the PS2 EyeToy experience. Tracking "motion" just by what pixels change from one frame to the next and using that to determine where you're moving your hand on the screen.
Couldn't have, it predates EyeToy.
@@G_FRE EyeToy didn't invent this, they just brought it to console. Of course it could predate EyeToy.
That was my first thought. Everyone forgets the EyeToy...
Yes, that’s what I think as well.
It's not gonna work well then. Eyetoy barely worked at times, imagine how bad pre-eyetoy eyetoy is.
I used to work in the computer department of Circuit City 2004-2006, this brings back memories. We used to take turns cropdusting each others' customers. One time my coworker stole the stair cart away while I was up on the top rack looking for a specific cable (it was one of the newer "warehouse"-style CCs as opposed to the older "showroom" type) and I had to spend the rest of my shift up there. Good times.
Cropdusting? Like farting?
@@youreperfectstudio4789 Correct.
TV cards were the coolest thing to have back then. It was The Future™ and you fill your whole hard drive with single episodes of Futurama and King of The Hill and then melt your CPU encoding them with the original DiVX 3.11 codec (or an "unofficial" copy of TMPEGEnc).
My dad had one in his pc. Ironically we hooked the Ps2 up to it a few times (we had the Ps2 adapter that allowed it to send the video through coaxial)
1:08 "you can tell the quality of the product by the quality of it's box"
Not always, I bought cheap Bludio T5 Bluetooth headphones and they had the best headphones box I had, with textured hardcover cardboard with a magnetic latch. Much better than the cereal box and cheap transparant plastic of the Sennheizer HD598.
Handspring was founded by former Palm developers if I remember correctly. Their goal was to go beyond the palm pilot and create a more connected device. I had a palm pilot and an early handspring, they were very similar.
And then later, didn't Handspring eventually buy Palm Inc. and rename itself Palm? ...Or am I completely making that up? I seem to remember Palm (the company) got passed around in ownership games a bunch in its later years.
I recognized that logo immediately on those two questionable products from InterAct. They were a company that made a ton of clone controllers for various platforms. They were the sort of controllers you handed to someone if you wanted them to lose, because they all had horrible input lag.
If I saw that proprietary USB cable right, it kinda reminds me of a USB "Mini-B 4 pin" cable
, or CB-USB5/6/8 cable used on Olympus cameras. It's definitely from that post-iMac USB but pre-micro USB era where everyone hopped on the USB train but were also trying to make small USB plugs for their tiny devices in the hopes that it's massively adopted.
I had one of those 'web meeting 2 go' devices! I don't remember that packaging, and I'm pretty sure I got it out of a scholastic book fair catalog, mid 2000's, so mine might have been some kind of reboxed overstock. Fun little point-and-shoot toy for a middle schooler, but not much else.
The packaging style of minimum viable cardboard covering a plastic blister takes me back to working at Staples in 98-99.
I wonder if the 56k modems are “winmodems” these were hell on early adopters of Linux. It was actually quite difficult to find a 56k modem that wasn’t a win modem
That's why you bought external ones. They *couldn't* be winmodems because the defining characteristic of a winmodem was running all the signal processing in software, and a serial port didn't have the bandwidth for that.
(Plus, they were apparently more robust in the face of shoddy phone lines for reasons such as "PC internals generate a lot of interferece with analog signals, so better to move it outside the case". Makes sense, given how a $3 no-name USB sound card beat my onboard audio for microphone SNR back before I had a Yeti.)
Oh lord, memories! I spent ungodly amounts of time trying to get various winmodems to work on Linux. I even succeeded, once!
Having a composite camera with a capture seemed as a plus. The camera worked on that Sony monitor eons later.
Agreed, it's a hidden benefit assuming this thing didn't cost like $400
Honestly, the denim jacket just contributes to the aesthetic here,
Great video. I saw (and purchased) a lot of this crap at small computer stores and shows at the time.
This channel improves with every upload. It has a "Techmoan meets Tech Connections at LGR's house for brunch" vibe that the kids will come running for.
LOL that mySmartPad thing is wild. I can imagine the whole thing. There was probably a weekly or monthly magazine for the newest inlay (of course you could subscribe to it sending in a postcard.)
The magazine opened up with a few random articles, what Britains Royal Family is up to lately, the rest was product placement what you are supposed to order with each button, loosened up with a crossword puzzle in the middle, bad cartoons and jokes on the last page and a full page cartoon for the kids with a returning character called mySmartie and his adventures.
One button would order Food Supplements solving all your problems. The next button the best knife sharpener in the world. You pay with your "club card" which has your bank account details directly on the pad.
Holy hell his joke about the chest cam and the denim jacket.
This dude owns his nerdship so hard. I love it.
The EZCam II just looks like an early concept version of the EyeToy for the PlayStation 2 that came out some years later.
I used to have one, and it was a lot of fun. I used to believe it was a Logitech, but it had the same games.
I graduated from high school in 2000, yeah...I'm old. Watching videos featuring the tech of the past, really brings back fond memories for me. Thanx, CRD.
You've earned a subscription. Looking forward to your inevitable future growth. Greetings from DE
I remember walking into a CompUSA in Fairfax VA shortly before they closed, perusing the endless shelves of this kind of junk. The whole place just reeked of despair and futility outside of the one well-lit and possibly even hopeful corner showcasing iMacs in prismatic colors. So many bondi blue 3rd party accessories and random knockoffs. Bought a Delorme StreetAtlas on clearance which ended up being pretty decent for pre-internet GPS road navigation.
I know exactly what CompUSA you're talking about. A strip mall near Fair Oaks mall. The store closing sale for that store was pretty disappointing...
Good thing we still have one computer store nearby: Microcenter!
The 4-pin mini-USB were common enough that you can still get new ones from most major sources!, it was used on a lot of early devices! If someone actually need one look for USB Mini "Hirose".
Hirose was a very big connector manufacturer at the time (still is trading, no idea of current influence/size) and as I understand it they came out with these well before the official USB Mini standard came out so it has the same 4 pins as the original full-sized A/B connectors because that made sense... But the USB consortium had other ideas and added a 5th sense pin on mini & micro A/B connectors for "on-the-go" where you connect two non-host devices (it's complicated).
There were other custom small USB connectors but I suspect "Hirose" outsold all the others combined by a large factor and even hung on for quite a while on digital cameras, AFAIK a number of camera manufacturer never used the official USB mini connector but instead waited for the micro connector to come out before switching away from Hirose.
I had that AverMedia TV card! Was really cool back in the day and watch live TV on my computer blew my friend's minds back int he day.
I picked up right away on all the missing UPC codes. These all look exactly like the types of items you'd get with mail in rebates that would need UPCs cut off to send in. I have some pretty fond memories of doing that on Black Friday during the 2000's.
Yep. CompUSA would offer stupidly large rebates on useless crap like this, then find ways to deny the rebates and keep the money you spent on the stuff.
I had one of those weird IR remote trackball things circa '98 - '99, and could never get it working. I even managed to convince my mom to take it to best buy to get their repair center to install it to no avail. 7 or 8 year old me thought the IR receiver tower was just the coolest looking thing ever
I had the 'Web Meeting' cam 2 go around 2002. It was rebranded as the Aiptek Pencam. The pictures where shitty, but as a kid it was great to be able to take digital pictures!
I used to have one too, bought it at a flea market for what would be about 5 bucks in local currency. Absolute garbage quality.
it worked just fine under Linux which was also a thing I was really into as a kid
I absolutely loved my Palm Pilot. In some ways it did things better than anything since. It had proprietary "Syncing" with your PC, but even that was quite painless for the time. Once you learned a few special character strokes needed for handwriting (characters that require you to lift a pen (e.g. 't', 'k') were modified to single strokes), even the handwriting recognition was as good as anything now. I used mine constantly for several years and never had an issue.
I have vivid memories of playing those EZ Cam games on a demo PC at Sears (!). It overlaid a ball over the video feed (running about 2 fps), and you could bounce it by hitting it. It felt like Nick Arcade
Oh man. The MySmartPad sent me back to all the smug bloatware you used to find on computers back in the day. The weird dusty hardware you'd find by your friend's basement computer. Good times.
That Web Meeting 2 Go style camera was EXTREMELY common 20 years ago. I think the same mold was used by at least a dozen different companies. The connector on the device end was actually pretty standard for smaller USB devices at the time. I'm not positive, but I think it was actually part of the 1.1 standard.
I remember going to "computer shows" that had vendor after vendor that were all selling table after table of stuff like that.
Ah the camera leeching power off the keyboard connector… Took me back to the Connectix Quickcam I had eons ago, a small B&W ball camera sitting on a weird triangular rubber stand. It got its power the same way.
I HAD that WebMeeting 2.0 Cam! It was my first digital camera, and I took so many low-resolution pictures with it. Mine was branded as Aiptek. I figured out with a few filters on GIMP that it gave it a nice artistic look. Still have a sunset over a beach hanging up somewhere in the house.
You literally have the ENTIRE computer store as I remember it when I was 30 back in the early 2000'ish. Yes - things where built cheesy, weird, gimmicky, flimsy, plastic-fantastic - and of course driver support that lasted about as long as the products themselves, roughly 1-2 years and it was all end-of-life for most of these things. Oh what a time to be alive.
The ONLY thing you got there that is actually worthy of fond memories is the Palm Pilot, that thing was a RIOT. I even forked out for the amazing Palm Pilot IIIc (that now is disintegrated) that cost me a whopping 500 dollars - and had a TFT screen, and could play a PERFECT replica of Galaxians!
Definitely want to see what the first cam can do. I'd be happy to watch a whole video on it. The last one was a fun little forensics exercise; gGetting power from the keyboard port tickles me in both my jank and clever sensors. I really enjoyed this format in general. I'd love to see more "Unboxing the year ___" videos. Definitely from a little later than this period (to see how USB implementation was going) but especially from around '97-'99 when crazy, bizarre pre-USB, burgeoning-internet devices roamed the land. I bet if you put out a request for stuff people don't want, you could get a couple more boxes assembled from all over. And thanks to the viewer who sent all this stuff, because it was super fun. I hope his dad eventually found the webcam he was desperately looking for.
I worked at a retail software store in the mid to late 90s just before I went on to work at Maxis. My store in particular had a very high shrink (theft) rate. I started gutting all the product to remove live product from the shelves. Having done so, I handled many of these boxes in the process of gutting and re-shrinking. And I can say that thin cardboard was basically the rule especially for any hardware upgrades. Even the retail packaged high end video cards and large hard drives (name brand) used the same thin card stock. Funny in contrast to the games which often game in nice heavy cardboard boxes that would likely be reused for years (unless it was a re-release or a "classics" series which was often packaged in a thin cardboard hanger style box.
I feel like his dad was addicted to buying garbage🤣🤣🤣
My Microsoft Basic Mouse had some weights in it. Took 'em out, now it's light as a feather and I love it.
"Amazon six-letter brands" is an extremely succinct description, and an expression i will defilntely steal, thank you!
Hi! I worked at Glenayre in Vancouver BC, in 2000. Yes, it's a 2-way pager mated with the Handspring Visor expansion interface. The standalone pager is the Accesslink. I worked mainly on the software for the gateway between SMTP (email) and the paging system (it was called the GL3200). In May of 2001 95% of the company was laid off on the same day! Including me! It turns out that the era of 2-way paging was over.
I think the EZ Cam USB is probably something like the EyeToy for the PlayStation 2, which detects any movement of pixels as motion and sends that information to the game to do something with.
I vaguely remember very early Nokia camera phones (probably other brands too) being equipped with CIF cameras. It was a strange size, but it worked well enough for the passive matrix 128x128 screens.
Netmeeting was amazing, it was ahead of its time, didn't need an online account to work and had multiple features. And in true Microsoft fashion, it was replaced with a shoddy replacement that could never fill the shoes of net meeting (I'm looking at you Live Meeting)
Thoroughly enjoyable video! I worked at CompUSA in the mid 90s and I remember how jealous I was of people rolling out shopping carts into the parking lot full of stuff like this to go with those mindblowing Pentium computers. I am gonna binge watch your content, really nostalgic about these things.
Been binge watchinng your vids since 15 plus hours. I just love the wit, you so sharp and amusing with it too. And to top it off i have learnt so much also. Dont know what i will do with it but I'm cool with that. I gravitate towards interesting and informative people. In my long winded way; I'm just trying to say thank you. 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
I love the explanation at the end of what old computer store experiences would be like!! Thank you so much for that. I also love the sticker on the computer, and thank you for these rad videos. You're really a cool content creator, and I hate it when people talk about forgetting about all the past "junk". I think this stuff is awesome. We still use a ball mouse and other quirky things with even our primary computers, to this day! My partner even does their writing on an old XP laptop they got for free and fixed up!
Even the Kinect failed at being a Kinect like 12 years later, so that’s definitely gonna be some nonsense on that webcam
It will be a lesser/earlier version of the Eye Toy, if it works at all.
I remember that ezonics camera. Software was buggy and I vaguely recall never getting the games to work. I might still have it..maybe. .
Holy crap, I used to have the webcam from the Web Meeting 2 Go kit. I even took a picture of the Ballard railroad draw bridge with it that I submitted to Jones Soda and they printed it.
Ah the late 90s - early 00s of computer accessories, where nearly every instance of the letter 'a' in a brand name had to be substituted with the @ symbol, because it's the web!
But to be honest I'm just very impressed at hearing someone using the word 'ersatz' nowadays.
Just wanted to say I really enjoyed the video. I had it saved to “watch later” for a long while haha. Thanks !
The “nose pore level” macro shot made me laugh for the first time in a week..
I had an early 2000 Logitech webcam that had built in games that uses the camera. One I remember clearly is it would show your face and chest on screen and bubbles would float around your image on screen and you could pop them with your finger and it would keep score. It worked pretty well.
What a blast from the past, you could hear how shitty some of that plastic and construction was. Thank you to the kind donator.👍
wow!! the cathode ray dude uploaded!!! i am having a rough time, and im really just looking forward to 45 minutes of y2k tech while i wait for the frozen lasagna to finish in the oven. thank you cathode ray dude, i can now distract myself from thoughts.
You look like a throwback from the 2000's and so do I! Loving your new videos. Keep up the great work.
"It works or it doesn't"
The mantra of the 90s and early 2000s PC user.
Seeing all this makes me miss Circuit City. A real blast from the past!
I had that ez cam and played those games... I'm in the process of watching and I just know this is going to be full of nostalgia
That handspring Visor device with the skytell modem/cellular service is quite literally the mother of all modern Smart phones. It is an important part of the history of computers and it belongs in the computer history museum.
At the time they had no idea how they could merge a Palm Pilot with a Cellular modem successfully.
So their hardware genious (a famous guy. U fortunately I can't remember his name off the top of my head) came up with the expansion port idea.
This allowed for multiple vendors to come up with modems,cameras, and other accessories some of which worked better than others.
Probably echoing others here, but getting a bunch of computer accessories in the late 80s and 90s, and then working at Best Buy and CompUSA in the late 90s, that thin paper over a slide out cardboard or styrofoam box was absolutely the norm… and oddly memory inducing. You are right, I think Apple was a big game changer there. Great video!
It's crazy seeing the Quest logo on that pad; we also had Quest before it was bought by CenturyLink; I also remember we had Bell before Quest.
Thank you so much for your channel. I didn't realize I was nostalgic for any of this kind of stuff but wow this is a treat. I am becoming more and more nostalgic for the 70's to 00's style of everything. The older I get the more new old things start to feel .
I had this D-Link cam back in the day and it was astonishing with how little abient light this thing was able to produce a somewhat clear image.
Best thing for me from this video, the reminder that mouse balls existed and taking them out to clean was a crap task I used to have to do
It's a little thing, but thank you for actually understanding how a boxcutter is supposed to work.
There is a definate 90s hardware look. Lots of very straight, sharp edges, with a few seemingly randomly placed shallow curves.
Seeing Skytel sparked some memories of weird old days where we all had beepers. "Do you know the importance of a Skypager?" I remember the really lucky kids had beepers that let you basically text back and forth. But it was arduous so nobody bothered.
Dunno how it's related, but the 352×288 resolution was also used for PAL/SECAM Video CD.
Skytel, for those who don't know what paging is, it was a massive pager service in the NE US and perhaps the world. It also was a primary service for 9/11 to route pretty much 1/3 of all the pagers in NYC to the flex/POCSAG transmitters that existed.
Boring [discards], Boring [discards], Boring [discards], Boring [discards], Boring [discards], SCAM [immediately dives deep and installs drivers]
❤️
The denim jacket looks FANTASTIC
This video is one of the most effective possible roasts of that person's dad.
AOpen is a legitimate brand though they are a spin off from Acer. They made tons of stuff too, CD-ROM drives but also whole computer systems (started with Small Form Factor System etc.) some pretty nifty stuff.
I had an AOpen CD Writer
i agree. a-open was Acer's Consumer peripheral components company.
So many memories here of the discount shelf at Egghead Software.
Do we really need to see a 45 min long video like this?
Ummm YES!!!! Please sir can we have some more? 😆
I had several of the items you unboxed. The Mouse-systems trackball, the InterCam, and a HandSpring Visor (did not come with the communications module). I'm pretty sure that a lot of that stuff is more like 1995-1998 than 2000, and was purchased on clearance.
Kensington was sort of a low-end Targus. Everything they made was cheesy.
As far as the Extreme-Mail (CyberMail?) kit goes, I expect the vendor had the capture card that they sold on its own, or more likely, failed to sell on its own, and then the Internet became easier to connect to and they figured "We have this receiver/capture card nobody is buying, lets add a cheap camera (had to be analog, since the capture card doesn't use a digital input), some e-mail software, and festoon the box with stuff to make everyone think it's a trendy product." 1 week later, they printed the outer box, shoved the inventory of video capture cards along with the other parts into the inner box, and sent it off to Circuit City.
The scanner card may have been SCSI. There were a lot of flat bed scanners that came with low performance SCSI cards. I have a few of those ISA cards in my collection of old computer parts.
There were two things that the father of your benefactor seemed to miss, the Gyro-Mouse, which had gyroscopes in it so you could move it in 3-space (it was wired), and liquid-crystal shutter 3D glasses that plugged into a game port. I'd offer to send some to you, but I sent the ones I had to electronics recycling about 5 years ago.
Kensington do have the pattent on the Kensington lock. That little slot put on a lot of electronic equipment to let you secure them from theft that even Targus sell locks to go into.
I could not help but notice that the boxes, even the unopened ones, all had sections removed from them. "I'm not going to bother using this item, but I'm snagging the UPC/Proof of Purchase anyways."
-- Coming to you from Bremerton
I remember a electronics company doing that If you were an employee so you cannot return it for the full price.
I've been watching tons of your videos lately and I'm glad I've found your channel. The tone and delivery is very pleasant. Keep it up!
Whoooaaah i just can’t believe that most to all accessoires are related to cameras whether webcams,phonecameras or fotocameras etc,, it’s just insane,BUT HOWEVER,
I will always miss the year 2000 ,no matter what will happen,nothing will top this off,because to me to year 2000 did felt like a reskin of the 80’s & 90’s with a new layer of sous over it,it felt like a mix of retro and modern mashed up together,it was a time when i was fall in love with a beloved girlfriend,a time when i was still on school etc,,,
Everything seemed to be good and fine i seemed to be on my way into a bright future,but in late march of 2001, things felt apart to be never the same again,no matter how i tried to turn things around,no matter how i tryed to recover things up ,i just eventually realized that things would never ever be the same again.
I notice most of those products have their UPC barcodes cut off so they were likely all returns to the store, some of which were re-shrunk wrapped (we had a shrink wrapper when I worked at a computer store in the late 80's).
all this old tech reminds me of the PC my friend had at his house, it was a Gateway 2000 Destination PC, had all the greatest things, you would have loved it
Those webcams might just work on a (older) Linux system so you don’t need to install all the crap that comes with it. It depends a bit on just how old they are.
Good thinking!
All the crap is part of the fun :) but if you just want to check the picture quality/functionality it makes sense.
Indeed - a lot of these pre-class-device USB cameras used bridge chips that worked in similar ways, so they all got collected into a driver called "gspca" (Generic Software Package for Camera Adapters) on Linux. Worth a try. The driver is still maintained, so I'd expect at least some of these cameras to pop right up and work even on a current Linux distribution.
thank you, Gravis
That Web Meeting camera looks just like the Aiptek PenCam I had around that same time! Wow, I'd almost forgotten about that!
CIF is also common on older CCTV DVRs.
Lead plates in cheap plastic crap is very common with "scameras/trashcams" from the 80s and 90s. Frequently seen with a label stating OPTICAL LENS rather proudly on the front of the "lens".
I love the subtle jokes poked at people who try selling equipment for ludicrous prices, more people like you please! 😂
I don't even remember how I found your channel but I love your content
I'm excited to see all the interesting things from this that get their own videos!
I love your vibe my dude, super chill, dont take yourself too seriously, loads of cool info great presentation!
The Glenayre/Skytel device likely used paging services. There was a brief time in the early 00’s when paging carriers were offering enhanced services such as news/email syndication as well as 2-way paging. This was the market that the early Blackberry devices were chasing.
The mobitex network I think is still operating in the US for mission-critical applications. Early blackberries ran on that before they added voice. It’s actually quite fascinating