Let's have a poll

[wellinghall]

[Poll #1679799]
ETA: That's a 5.25" floppy disk drive; none of this modern 3.5" stuff

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Oops! Read the ETA too late...

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Probably my fault for not typing what I meant in the first place. Or LJ's for not letting you edit polls.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You can change your answers, if you want (http://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=1679799&mode=enter).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I keep a 5.25" disk around for historical purposes but don’t have a drive (it doesn’t have anything very interesting on it anyway).

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

If you include the Stuff We Have, not necessarily use.
There is an 8 track player in one of our camping vans. It actually still worked as of 3 years ago. Can't get new tapes for it though.
And we still have some 8" floppy disk drives. I much prefer my 16 GB thumb drive thank you very much. ;)
Not only do we Audio Reel to Reel, but Video Reel to Reel. Nah, we don't use either one any more, but I recently found my audio tapes, should probably get those transferred before they die.
Never owned a Betamax. By the time we finally decided to buy a machine, VHS had already won the war.

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

I ended up getting rid of my record player (which could also play 78s) and VHS player after they finally broke. Then a while later got rid of all my records and virtually all my video tapes- I think I might have about three left.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Not really relevant to your poll, but... For reasons that made genuine sense at the time, I often used to use (3.5) floppies to transfer files from computer to computer at work, or from work to home. A year or two ago, I did this in the sight of one of my members of staff. "Wow!" she said. "This is amazing! You mean you can put that document onto that little tiny thing and it, like, copies it so I can see it on my computer? Wow!"

I really didn't have the heart to tell her that this Shiny New Technology she had just discovered was a good ten years out of date.

[inamac.livejournal.com]

Our DVD player is also a VHS video-converter (only 300+ tapes to go...) so is probably cheating. The CPU with a 5" floppy drive is in Lil's bedroom, sans keyboard and monitor, and copiously anointed by the cats - so is probably not in a condition to actually process anything. I'm not sure where the 78rpm records (which included 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' and Flanagan & Allen's If a Grey Haired Lady Says "How's Your Father?" - in which I was word-perfect at the age of five, and may explain a lot about me now) are, but the turntable would certainly play them.

Can you still get 120mm film? I miss the joys of double exposure.

I can only find one of my dipping pens at present - but I have loads of nibs (and a quill-cutter and collection of goose feathers...)

I may still be living in the wrong century.

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

Now I see what a dipping thing is. At one point recently I had one of those too, but I think I gave it to, or put it to one side for, sally_maria. Or a museum. Forget which.

[gurthaew.livejournal.com]

We have two, minimum, maybe 4 cassette recorders.
If you'd done this poll a couple of days ago I could have counted the APS camera that was here. I have cine film editors here, do they count?

[inamac.livejournal.com]

That reminds me, I too have a cine film editor, and a Bolex wind-up cine camera too - surely that counts?

The projector was thrown outlast month.

[gurthaew.livejournal.com]

We ahve all the cine films my late father-in-law took back in the 50s, 60s and 70s. We needed to keep something to view them on. The powered projectors all went to a specialist camera shop but I kept the hand wound viewer cum splicer as it seemed the least complex and the one most likely to work.

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

The 78rpm player is a digital one. We got it to record the record of ExMemSec's father's performance in a piano competition, which we haven't done yet.

I forgot that we have a film camera that takes those little cartridges .... it came in a cracker ...

The floppy disk drive is 3" (Amstrad PCW external drive).

[elegaer.livejournal.com]

I have a 120 camera

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

I haven't used the record player in years but it still exists. [I don't know what a floppy disc is. I think I must have missed that bit of computer technology completely!]

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I got rid of the 5" floppy drive in 2000, though I still have the 3.5 one on my older computer.

I do have a VCR player, but it's out of whack right now, and I need to replace it. I'm planning on getting a dual machine that will allow me to copy tapes to disc (I have too many video tapes to replace ALL of them with commercial discs).

I've kept all my records and hence the turn-table. Many of those recording have never been released on CD. Just can't find them. I still haven't gotten around to making transfers of them to play on newer machines.

[sally_maria]

We have a record/tape player that plays 78s as well as the normal types, and is also designed to rip them to a USB memory stick.

There might be a camera that takes those relatively new cassettes, that were quickly overtaken by digital cameras.

Somewhere out in the sun room, I think we have BBC 5.25" drive, though it no longer works.

The 8-track player was in our Volkswagen caravanette, and that went long ago.

[widsidh.livejournal.com]

Windows 3.11....

also, some of the hardware in your list, but won't specify on an open thread so not to get burgled for antiques!

[didiusjulianus.livejournal.com]

Actually, I (loosely) might also have a record player or several but would have to go and have a look if it/they are still there.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think the dipping pen is the odd one out in this group : the rest are more or less superceded technologies that are no longer manufactured (give or take the odd person with specialist use for a turntable, possibly).

Whereas dipping pens and nibs are still widely available from most art supply shops : they are not superceded, so much as being specialist items that some people like for specific tasks, in the same way that you can still buy paintbrushes, palette knives and drawing charcoal, even though to take a likeness, a camera is quicker and more accurate.

I have a couple dipping pens and nibs somewhere : I haven't used mine recently, but I know people do.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

Not that the 5.25" flurpy is actually in a computer - but I could fit it if I ever needed to.

[asklepia.livejournal.com]

Re film camera and floppy drive - I only have them because I haven't thrown them out yet, I haven't used them in years. I ought to throw out the VHS player too, but there's no hurry.

I still use my dipping pen though, I like it.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

The 5.25" floppy disk drive is attached to Skordh's old BBC Micro, which after spending most of the last few decades in the loft (or before that his parents loft) is now sitting on a table in our living room, where Fro likes to play 'Thrust'.

We don't have an 8-track, but do still have the 4-track we inherited from Gimli, which he used to use for recording the Taruithorn Singers stuff. I do own a record player (which plays 78s) but it is at my parents' house, along with my record collection, so I haven't included it. We *may* still have my original camera, which was a 120mm, still knocking around if we haven't got round to chucking it out, it was certainly around a few years ago.

My family never had a Betamax - our first player was a Video 2000 (an excellent format: recorded on both sides of the tape so effectively gave you long-play but with better quality before long-play was ever invented, displayed *actual time* while the tape played/recorded/rewound etc rather than meaningless numbers so much easier to figure out how to get to the bit of the program you wanted/ whether you had space to record another program etc. But sadly was never really in the running to win the format war.)

I agree with Bunn about dipping pens being now a specialist rather than an outdated technology and thus the odd one out in this poll.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Dipping pens - also, they can be something of a collectable/ antique item, a bit like having, say, a sextant. They might then be on a par with say a box brownie or a gramophone for possible answers to the poll, but not (yet!) on a par with average old record players or cameras. Obviously there are people who collect 1960s/70s/80s tech, and indeed very interesting museums which display them, but I'd consider that to be a different specialisation to more 'classic antiques'.