This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
My parents had a WebTV when I was in highschool. They kept it for a very long time. it was awful.
I also have a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Pi Hole on my network. I don't think raspberry pi's are as unusual as some of the other things here. I know a lot of people who use them for various things.
30yo here. I've only owned a Raspberry Pi. I got one in college after a friend won in a contest and didn't know what to do with it so she gave it to me.
I did have a few toys growing up that were basically PDAs for kids.
49 year old here. I still own a 3D tv, but I've never actually used the 3D feature. I didn't even buy the TV. My dad gave my his old one when he upgraded.
I bought a Raspberry PI but never really did much with it.
I've never owned any of the others.
Many PDAs, DVD recorder on the computer (never for TV), no to webtv or 3D TV, many rpis (and banana pis and countless other embedded boards)... internet radio player... not as a separate device.
Despite spending my entire life designing and improving tech, I am actually kind of tech-adverse. A good laptop, good phone and good internet connection, and all the gadgets tend to be left behind. Smart home? Yes, but it runs off of HomeAssistant. Alexa? Yes, but only because the non-hive-mind solutions aren't quite there yet. Heck, my oven/range doesn't even have a timer.
edit: 46yo
I'm in your intended audience. I currently have a Pi. None of the other stuff appealed to me.
As a young adult, I've grown up with DVD recorders. Internet Radio Players and a Pi or two came along during my early teens. I had never heard of the others until today haha.
Great idea for a post!
-PDA? Yes- Handspring Visor. It was supposed to be the Palm killer (it did have some success, as I remember).
-DVD-Recorder? No
-WebTV? No, but my less tech savvy friend had one. Those seemed doomed to fail.
-3D Television? Yes- spend way to much on two pairs of glasses that were used less than five time.
-Raspberry PI? Yes, but haven't done enough with it.
-Internet Radio Player? No
I also had some type of smart pen around 2001 that would transfer what you wrote onto the computer. I think you had to plug the top of the pen into a USB port. It was a large pen (probably the size width of 5-6 normal pens combined). I can't find the name of it. I think you had to have a special notebook with it too.
Did those 3D tvs actually work?
They did. But even at the height of its popularity, there were only a handful of movies that had it.
The glasses were around $170 per (if I remember correctly). That was a big barrier to entry.
PDA: I loved my Palm Pilot and I can still write using that script (was quite nice when I noticed my Android keyboard supported it)
Raspberry Pi: this feels weird to be on this list! I still have one in the living room running Kodi
No to the others, although I did have one of these beauties:
I guess it depends on what counts as a PDA. Would you count a Blackberry? They sold them as PDAs when I got my first BB. But it wasn't really at all like a PalmPilot or one of those Motorola dudes.
DVD-R big time. I specifically got a recorder as my first player since I knew I would be ripping discs a lot.
WebTV came out when I was too young to afford a TV, and my parents wouldn't have gone for anything like that even if I begged.
Never had or wanted a 3D TV, as my first time hearing about them was literally seeing them in action and the effect was headache inducing. The Nintendo 3DS used the same tech, and I always kept the 3D slider at the minimum.
I do want a Raspberry Pi or some other micro computer; I just need a project and reason to get one. I have a 3D printer so I have too many awesome choices I could try.
I might have gotten an internet radio player... If I knew of their existence back when they would have been relevant. I was big time into Winamp's net radio scene in high school. Even ran my own. Reading your list was the first time I was made aware of them, though.
I am 38. I've never been on the bleeding edge, but I have tended to be an early adopter. If enough people try a thing and say it's cool, I come check it out. lol
At the height of PDA popularity the average person had a separate device for their phone calls. Generally speaking a PDA in 2000 I would consider a portable handheld device with a stylus but didn't have telephony capabilities.
Today a personal digital assistant the lines have been blurred.
About a decade too young for this, but - the only one of these I had was a dvd burner. I used it in high school to make video projects. Video projects were extremely popular assignments, and I had a lot of fun with them, too. I did a lot of stop-motion animation, claymation, etc. I had shitty software that I didn't even know how to use properly so I did things like play music from my ipod into the camera speaker instead of mix an audio track in "post." Haha. Was a lot of fun though.
I believe OP is talking about a DVD recorder that plugs in to your tv and records live tv to a dvd, not a dvd burner on your computer.
ohhhh haha no but my parents had a vhs recorder still that they used when I was a kid
I have a Raspberry Pi but none of the others.
PDA: Had a Palm Treo 90. Also owned a second-hand Nokia N810.
DVD Recorder: Obviously had DVD burners in my PCs, but not as a standalone device.
WebTV: Technically Yes, but got it for shits and giggles at a Goodwill and never had service.
3D TV: No. I don't even like it in theaters.
Raspberry Pi: I have a 3B+ running OctoPi for my 3D printer. I also have a couple of Picos, one in use in a handwired keyboard, but I don't they count.
Internet Radio: No, but my wife bought an early streaming device, a Muzo Pebble I think. It was annoying and never got used much.
Over-50 tech-ish. In the brief time I was an IT manager I ordered Blackberries for some of the staff but didn't use one myself. DVD recorder: not for TV but on the computer. No webtv, no 3d tv (I'm not much of a TV watcher anymore), no internet radio. With some programming help I recently set up a Pico W with a water sensor to monitor a water heater for flooding and ping my phone if it happens. That was pretty nifty.
I had 3 of those things.
A Compaq iPaq pda that ran Windows ce
An Internet radio alarm clock
I've got a raspberry pi that I use for pihole
I have (and in some cases still do) all but the WebTV and the Internet Radio Player.
Yes but there was very little content and the concept never took off with the major content providers.
PDA - Pretty much all the Palm devices from the Original (US Robotics) Palm 1000, III, V, even the m125
DVDR - Just in my computer not standalone
WebTV - Nope but 100% Tivo user (Standalone and Directv)
Raspberry Pi - I have one but it mostly sits in a drawer
Internet Radio - I had a friend work at SimpleDevices that was a standalone internet player (company long gone)
I still have a 3D Plasma TV. I haven't found a reason to replace it as it's still going just fine.
Not the target age (mid 20), but I daily drive a Dell Axim X5 with Windows Mobile 2003 on it. Still got a smart phone, but I enjoy using old PDAs as my alarm, jotting in appointments, calculating store prices, taking notes and making lists, and it's useful for swapping restaurant TVs away from Fox News!
useful for swapping restaurant TVs away from Fox News!
Why did phone manufacturers stop putting IR transmitters in phones? So damned useful it was having one!
Admittedly it's a garbage means of transferring data xD I once transferred Doom from a HTC phone to a PDA. It took many minutes to do, and I had to restart it at one point xD
I never owned a WebTV, but I do remember the first time I saw a Usenet post from a WebTV user. It was the start of the Eternal September.
Raspberry Pi doesn't quite seek to match the rest. What's so strange about that? I have two, a 1b PiHole and a Pi400 that I use as a Steamlink.
How about a Colecovision console, or a Laserdisc player?
LaserDisc goes back go the early 80's I didn't go back that far and I've never heard of a Colecovision console before..?
I had a Palm IIIe, and a couple Handspring Treos including the thin all aluminum one and a Compaq PDA that took full sized PCMCIA cards where i connected an Orinoco Silver Ethernet card. Also got a Nokia linux PDA, can't remember the model, and sadly it was too slow.
DVD recorder i got off of Woot back when they were a good service. CD player that was the size of a VHS. A VHS player while my best friend had BetaMax. Oh and one of those Toshiba rear projection big screen TVs.
No webtv or 3d.
Tons of Pis
AnonRadio on sdf.org. i have old time radio playing at home over Ice cast and mpd which also connected to VPN so i can stream stuff from anywhere.
Also got a Nokia linux PDA
I had the Nokia N810. Still one of the most satisfying bits of industrial design I've ever seen on a piece of Tech, but yeah, it was a bit of a slowpoke for the things I wanted it to do, and smartphones pretty quickly got good enough that I couldn't justify keeping it around for anything mobile.
PDA - HP ipaq, it ran windows CE and it was dope. I was in middle school and used it to look at boobies at night. I don't know how I convinced my parents to get it for me because it wasn't cheap.
nope, just VCR and eventually DVR
I don't know what webtv is
no 3d tv, that was a fad
rpi - yes, several, gen 1 and up
internet radio? I used Pandora but I didn't have a dedicated device for it.
Missed my favorite obsolete tech, the minidisc player. I Loved that thing. It was superior to CD in almost every way but never took off. Still loved getting 17 hours of music from one AA batt.
And the sounds! The articulated clamshell that popped open to receive the MD (where you could see all these miniature mechanisms), the slightly rattly plastic sound of putting the MD in the player, just chef's kiss. I had a couple in my last years of high school that I ordered from a Japanese importer. Seemed sooo futuristic. Almost forgot the inline remote! iPods had those for a minute years later but everyone gave up on inline remotes it seemed like.
That signature KaCHUNK and spinup <3
PDA - I had a WinCE thing I picked up, never really used it
DVD Recorder - Only in my PC.. 'backed up' lots of movies
WebTV - I think my current TV still runs WebOS..
3d TV - had one, wasn't suckered into the ยฃ150 active glasses and got a passive set where the glasses were about 10p. Had fun with it but it never caught on.
Raspberry Pi - Loads of the things..
Internet radio player - I guess my car counts.
PDA: I had a Palm Pilot I rescued from a scrap bin at work and installed an open source OS on. I used it as an ereader until the eye strain from reading on that small screen started giving me headaches.
DVD recorder: No. I gave up on broadcast TV when I was 17 and the amount of advertising time hit 25 minutes per hour. I watched everything on rented DVDs until video streaming and adblockers became a thing.
WebTV: No. It was never available in my country.
3D TV: No. I was waiting for the format to get more support, then it went away entirely.
Raspberry Pi: Yes! I could never get wifi working on it, which limited its usefulness. Still fun to play with until I somehow broke the HDMI out.
Internet Radio: Kinda. That's what I used the Pi for after breaking video.
