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I always found the off-brand ones to suck big time. Pretty much stuck with U.S. Robotics. Do they even still exist ???
 
used to love my notebook with all the COM/IRQ ports listed so i could keep track of what was on what port. hated chasing port conflicts to get something working. old serial port printers were the worst for conflicts no matter what it was set to
 


not sure if they do or not. think i bought a couple network cards of theirs back in the day but that was not recently at all. and yah my off brand modems were not the best. when you only got about 7 Kb/s total up/down, then losing even 1 Kb/s of that was a deal breaker.
 


I always used US Robotics as well. They eventually bought Palm, and then all were acquired by 3Com. But 3Com spun them off and IIRC they still make Modems of some sort today, but as a really small company.

http://www.usr.com/home/
 


So glad that we don't need expansion cards for everything anymore. You could buy a sound card now and they're so much better than what they were 20 years ago, but the fact that it's not a necessity anymore is definitely a good thing.
 


It's like car stereos.
Used to be, the factory thing sucked badly. So you went out and bought a new Alpine or similar, along with some 6x9's.

Now, the factory job is pretty good, and due to the configuration of the dash, and the intertwining of the audio into the whole car electronics, you can't really just slide a new one in.
Aftermarket stereo is for the serious car modder.
 


Yeah my old Pontiac that I used to have I had so many aftermarket things on it - the car alarm (and it was the cheapest car alarm ever), the CD player, the cruise control, and so on. Now on my Nissan everything is integrated.
 
my last few new cars had some pretty awesome factory radios it never even crossed my mind to replace it. when i was younger of course that was the first thing you did.

recall my first car, a 1982 Chevette, (stop laughing), had a single speaker in the dash for the fm radio in had. stopped on the way home with the car for the new radio plus speakers and amp and had it installed before i even took the car out to show everyone what i bought.

now you can get 1500w systems with 1000w subs in the trunk from the factory. they finally learned what people wanted and started including it.
 


One of my systems at one point had 3 graphics cards, 1 Sound card, and an ethernet card. The 3 graphics cards were an ATI 3D Rage II for the main graphics, a Power VR PCX2 gaming GPU, and a Creative Dxr2 DVD decoder card (only way to get DVD audio and Dolby Digital because the sound cards didn't support it yet). The PowerVR worked through the PCI bus, but the Creative card required a pass through VGA cable.




They learned people who want crazy systems will always do it, but the folks who want something better but not insane, and without the hassle are willing to pay more for it. So the guy who drops $899 on the upgraded factory system option normally would have bought a $200 radio and been done with it. Combined with fancier dashes and more integration into car systems (making things cheaper for them as well, 1 screen to control all of it = less buttons), and there you go.

Every car I had up until I bought my 2000 Vette in 2006 had a fairly crazy aftermarket stereo setup in it (I also worked at a Stereo shop for years), These days I'm happy with the Boston Acoustics factory system in my Camaro (although I do have the itch to upgrade it because with the windows down its a bit weak, and I think I damaged the passenger door speaker), and the Harmon Kardon Logic 7 system in my Benz is phenomenal. My Silverado is the only one with a weak stock system but its still more than good enough and considering the truck sits around most of the time, spending money on a radio and speakers for it is just dumb.
 
2008 focus SE has a USB port and Sync system has bluetooth and all that built in. 😛

my sister's Dodge minivan even has a built in hdd for music built in. usually they combine the good stereo set-up with sunroof in a package, making it a pretty good deal. can't imagine what it would be like trying to replace a stereo that was integrated into the car like some of these new systems are. is there even such a thing as a "base" stereo anymore.

my new Fusion has like 13 speakers all over the place and will rattle the windows at half volume. i don't really need much more than that as it'll make your heart skip a beat or two when it really gets going 😀
 
mine has to scan the drive plugged in everytime the card starts to get the catalog for the speak to play feature. i don't use it because of that. takes like 10 minutes everytime you go somewhere just for it to read the files on it. so i just do the bluetooth connection and control it that way.

might be better now but the older sync system was like this. not even tried it with newer system as i'm just used to the bluetooth way now.


so much nicer either way than the old pack of disks in the car that got scratched all to hell. or even back in the day with cassettes/8-tracks where you'd always get one or 2 that would unspool and get all knotted up in the glovebox/center console
 
ah
8-tracks
Click to expand...
I remember breaking one in the car one day caught on a comb in the glove box, had to use the silver from a cigarette pack packaging and rub it across the two broken parts to mend it to listen to it... yes I was that dedicated to the beegees in my 1978 Vega with aluminium block.. :)
 
nothing more vintage than an 8 track player :)

friend had an old VW rabbit from like 78 or 79. it had an 8 track so he had the cassette convertor that plugged into it. car broke down on us one day and we left it overnight. when we came back someone had stolen the 8 track player and the cassette adapter!! this was in like 1990 or so. other than to be a d***, no idea why they would steal such a thing
 
I transferred my radio shack 8 track player from car to car until mid 90's :) the quality of the 8 track sound was better than the 4 tracks casettes IMHO, beside too broke to buy again all my music I already had. it went to the scrap yard with my amc gremlin (wink talk about back to the past car)
 
4 door Ford Grenada, pale metallic blue ... put in my own Pioneer 8-track deck ... LOL
And The Paladin is right ... 8-tracks were way better than cassettes :)
 
hard to keep a bunch of old guys on topic :)

we just love to talk about the old days.

never had one of those tape back-ups, never had enough data to need to back up. but my dad worked for HQ corporate (old home improvement store now gone) and i remember seeing the huge real to reals they had to back up their databases
 
I think he means, when the first PC came out like the TRS-80 Model 1, you did a program, but to use the program again you have a casette tape machine and had to record the program on it before shutting down the pc, otherwise you have nothing left.... thankfully only had to suffer that for 2 years then got myself a nice 5.25" floppy drive add on
 


One of my first Gateways that I had I had literally every expansion slot and drive bay filled. I had a sound card, a 56K modem, a SCSI expansion card, a graphics card, and a Voodoo 2. And I had like 4 hard drives, a CD burner and a DVD player. And when I added my first CD burner the whole thing just went completely unusable. I can't remember what company it was from but I think it no longer exists.
 
had a friend who had one of the first WORM drives and he had nothing but trouble with it as well. if it worked a buffer underun error was likely half the time. those disks were expensive back then for a 50/50 shot at working. i went straight to the Zip drives for larger storage. the 250 mb ones were pretty good and i could carry it with me to college where we had fast enough access to actually be able to download something in a timely manner.

this was back when we could download audio cd's but still at full CDA size. so 700 mb for a full cd. no mp3 back then. good ol BBS access was the best you got for sharing stuff like that.
 
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