108 Rare and Bizarre Media
February 21, 2022 3:54 PM   Subscribe

YouTube's The 8-Bit Guy brings you 108 Rare and Bizarre Media Types [37m] which is not entirely satisfactory with its exploration of what everything is used for, but is certainly a gallery of storage that you probably didn't know about. Entertaining in a geeky way.
posted by hippybear (37 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks for posting this but I stopped watching his videos after he carelessly damaged some very rare computers and then defended his actions by telling us that he was in a hurry and he was borrowing the computers from someone else. Apparently he has a shady past, too, but I didn't know about that until after I unsubscribed from his channel. There are many other YouTubers who do interesting things with old computers and other tools/technologies without needlessly damaging them e.g., LGR, Adrian's Digital Basement. Techmoan, in particular, has a lot of videos about old or rare media formats e.g., slotMusic and slotRadio, HD-VMD, Pocket Records.
posted by ElKevbo at 4:13 PM on February 21, 2022 [20 favorites]


Oh my god. It’s 37 minutes of “This looks cool, I have no clue what it’s for. Let’s move on”

How do you end up collecting this stuff (and make videos about it!) without actually being curious about your collection?
posted by schmod at 4:14 PM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]


Milkshake! Duck!
posted by acb at 4:32 PM on February 21, 2022 [7 favorites]


How do you end up collecting this stuff (and make videos about it!) without actually being curious about your collection?

He's like the anti-foone. Foone makes long twitter threads that make the most boring shit super interesting, and this guy takes interesting stuff and makes it seem super boring.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:02 PM on February 21, 2022 [11 favorites]


He missed some of the ancient. Removable disk platters about 2' diameter stored in something that looks like a cake carrier with a handle on top. The drives were washing machine sized and worked the same way. Press button, wait for light to go off, lift the lid. Grab the handle and twist then lift, put the new one in and twist again. Close the door, press the button, wait for the lights. Bam! maybe more 5-10MB depending on how thick the cake was. I used to have one salvaged from a computer that was unceremoniously discarded by the university radio station. A whole rack of scheduling computer tossed out like it's nothing. Totally snagged it and then tore it apart for parts (resistors, capacitors, etc.). Good times.

I used to carry around 6 or 7 of those 3M 1/2" data tapes with the ring that hangs in those shelves that you roll back and forth with a handle on the end to make a walkway. On each arm, sorta looking like Popeye. Used to have one crammed full of Amiga software. AFAIK, WORK still has one tabletop SCSI drive for those for recovering things that people find lost in a box somewhere.

Have to watch again to see if he hit the QIC 1/4" formats, including the mini QIC-80 that I used for home backups on my first Linux system. Yes I was like that, build a computer, it includes tape backup. Another age.

Not sure of which one of the R/W magneto optical disks the NeXT used, but it was a bad decision. First thing people did was get rid of it for a spinning disk.

I used to have a plastic container of several PDP-11 punch(ed) tapes that I rescued from a dumpster.

All in all, a decent run through of media storage. I remember quite too many of them.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:45 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


Cathode Ray Dude also frequently gets into old A/V related media.

Adrian's Digital Basement and Techmoan are also fun to listen to when drifting off to sleep.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:24 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


It's neat seeing this stuff, but I'm puzzled by his claim that he doesn't know what's on the U-matic tape. It's printed right there on the label: the video for "Pretty Persuasion" by R.E.M.
posted by theory at 6:27 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


I used to love watching this guy's videos until I saw this 2018 donation unboxing where he put a letter on camera that clearly detailed how the items donated had belonged to a friend's deceased parents, and would he be so kind to mention them in the video - to which he said he was "not too clear on where the stuff actually came from." Putting aside the objects themselves, someone went to the trouble of boxing up and then spending spending over $80 to ship him all this stuff and he couldn't even bring himself to read all the way to the end of three post-it notes.

For some reason the... indifference to that person on the other end of the letter really stuck with me. It still does.
posted by curious.jp at 6:39 PM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]


The afore mentioned @foone does an explainer thread on Twitter for this video.

I'm not an 8 Bit Guy fan, and I checked out after the whole Thing above. But calling him sketchy because he's a gun fan who lives in Texas feels off. Not my thing, but absent some sort of ugly politics to go with it (and maybe it's there to find) guns are hardly a disqualifying matter in America.
posted by wotsac at 6:41 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


If you want ugly politics, well, there was the video he made about how he’s not going to pretend to feel upset about a school getting shot up because they were all strangers
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:04 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


And besides being a political chud taking a Dremel to old rare tech with zero planning or care. Dude sucks out loud.
posted by Ferreous at 9:08 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


He's like the anti-foone. Foone makes long twitter threads that make the most boring shit super interesting, and this guy takes interesting stuff and makes it seem super boring.

Whatever, I enjoyed it and found it not even slightly boring, thanks for the writeup, hippybear! If something's not for you, that's totally cool, but why come into random topics to declare that you find the submission boring? Seems a bit hostile. He actually thanks foone at the end for lending him some of the media, which would also explain:

How do you end up collecting this stuff (and make videos about it!) without actually being curious about your collection?

Not all of the stuff is his. And if you do any collecting yourself, you know that when people find out you're into stuff, sometimes you wind up with more stuff than you actually have time to look into. You put it aside with the vague goal of identifying and cataloguing the stuff in more detail but that's a whole other investment on top of whatever money you spent. Hackernews linked to an interesting blogpost a few weeks back, regarding how that time investment component is sometimes a lot more expensive than the money investment. Especially when collecting, a lot of times you end up with a whole bunch of crap you got from estate or garage sales, some of which just may not even be worth your time to do a deep dive on, but might be of interest to others. In his case, he's into old 20th century consumer computers (as expected by the nickname "8-bit guy" ). That may have some common ground with old minicomputers, much less with old mainframes, and many of those items (e.g. the Sony SD-1 cassette, for video production) have almost no applicability to his chosen interests. Still, I appreciated the "show" even if there wasn't much "tell."
posted by xigxag at 9:18 PM on February 21, 2022


I'm just here for the Sinclair Microdrives, there'd better be Sinclair Microdrives
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 10:58 PM on February 21, 2022


But calling him sketchy because he's a gun fan who lives in Texas feels off.

Calling him a gun fan who lives in Texas is enough to suggest to me, on the basis of past experience with video put out by gun fans who live in Texas, that my idle YouTube browsing time is extremely likely to be far more pleasantly spent watching stuff made by people less keen to reveal either of these qualifications.
posted by flabdablet at 11:13 PM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


i've watched this guy's channel for a while and had no idea he was the kind of ass who'd walk into a deli with an AK strapped to his back.. BUT his content is interesting, and some of these formats are things I never heard of. i agree it would've been nice to hear more about what each format was used for, though. But his vids about programming in obsolete languages are much better, and understandable and informative for total novices like me.

i guess what i'm saying is that disagreeing with a person's politics probably has some place in a thread like this, though i'm not sure exactly what it is. but putting up the pretext that why you really dislike him is that he impugned the honor of an old computer is.. uh.. not persuasive.
posted by wibari at 11:15 PM on February 21, 2022


Zip Disks? Rare? Bizarre?

They were ubiquitous here before USB flash storage blew them away. Were they not a thing in the US ?
posted by GallonOfAlan at 12:40 AM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


Were they not a thing in the US

They were very much a thing. Back in the day, practically every graphic designer had stacks of the things. Hell, you could get a G4 PowerMac with a Zip drive built-in.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:43 AM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


When I was studying post production in the late 90's we had Jaz drives attached to Silicon Graphics O2 machines. Our head tutor insisted that all work be saved to 1Gb Jaz disks - he delighted in telling us that the original purpose of Jaz disks were to save the topographical data necessary for cruise missiles - and here I am, years later with my end of course showreel saved on an obsolete storage medium under an obsolete file format using an obsolete codec.
posted by Molesome at 3:58 AM on February 22, 2022


Last night I completely forgot to give a shout out to 8 Bit Show And Tell which is a great channel that focuses on the C64 and other computers of that era and other weird ephemera like 5.25" floppy disks with full-color images printed on them.

Also the host has a very calming voice that's nice to listen to.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:25 AM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


If you want old A/V media discussed and demonstrated by someone, who is not a jackass, I cannot recommend Techmoan enough. Come for the obscure tape formats, stay for the occasional puppet sketches!
posted by bouvin at 4:44 AM on February 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


the original purpose of Jaz disks were to save the topographical data necessary for cruise missiles

Is this actually the case?

I think I have both ZIP and Jaz disks in storage in Melbourne. IIRC, I used the latter for backups.
posted by acb at 5:32 AM on February 22, 2022


Is this actually the case?

I have never found anything to corroborate the claim.
posted by Molesome at 6:07 AM on February 22, 2022


8 Bit Show And Tell ... the host has a very calming voice that's nice to listen to.

Robin's great. His pace is very soothing, which I'm told is a deliberate choice.
posted by scruss at 6:13 AM on February 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


Reel-to-reel computer tape: 'Believe it or not , these were still in use...up to around the year 2000'.
I haven't been in a mainframe computer room since 2003, but at that time, all 3 of my main accounts were using them then. I would not be surprised to seem them still used today.

Also, in my main experience with paper tape (Bell Tel account c. 1976), I would have classified paper tape as optical, not mechanical. I know there were several ways paper tape was read (including the 1403's 'read-only memory'[sic], but the tapes I saw that looked like the one he showed were read optically.
posted by MtDewd at 8:30 AM on February 22, 2022


Yep, magnetic tape is still used as a secure long term data storage format. I think newer tape cassettes can hold something like 500tb.
posted by Ferreous at 11:17 AM on February 22, 2022


... and he just keeps touching the grooves of his records.. gah!
posted by Harlo at 12:55 PM on February 22, 2022


Is this actually the case?

Yeah, this sounds like nonsense. Jaz drives weren't particularly reliable or secure. They were better than Zip disks but that's not exactly a feat.

I mean it's not outside the realm of possibility that Jaz drives were used to load data into cruise missiles but the DoD uses all kinds of consumer grade hardware when they feel like it, and Iomega wasn't exactly an A-list tech firm known for DoD contracts.

This also sounds like a case of mistaken identity for something like a magneto-optical disk like the Bernoulli drives or a WORM (write once, read many) magneto-optical or optical disks which would be more in line with the history and time line of cruise missiles compared to data storage costs and densitites - and as indicated in this thread 8BG isn't exactly a reliable researcher or computer historian.
posted by loquacious at 1:02 PM on February 22, 2022


Also, weren't JAZ drives and/or disks notorious for their fragility?
posted by acb at 1:32 PM on February 22, 2022


Back in the 2000 era all of our userlab machines had zip drives. And if you've ever maintained large labs, when you get a new replacement CPU bit you get at least a power cord and a blank zip disk in the box that you don't really need, maybe even another keyboard. Hence the big box that sat in the storage room full of power cords and keyboards and free zip disks for everyone. They all turned into the "go ahead, take one please!" sort of benefit. Same with the RJ-45 to DB-9 console adapters of various sorts (gah they're wired different, have to carry around three of them) and another short RJ-45 ethernet cable (take all you want). Same with manuals and install disks. Shit just accumulates.

Our backups then were on this giant silo petabyte tape system with a robot arm on the inside (and a cool little monitor to watch on the outside) such that you just copy things to a special NFS mounted per machine directory and it magically made it onto tape eventually. Restores were the same way, make a request and wait a bit and poof there it is in your backup mount. Not sure what tape they used, but it was some sort of cartridge thing.

I thought I had a big stack of zip drives in the closet but couldn't find them, probably tossed them out because they were probably blank. Ah the click of death of zip drives. Yeah, they were pretty ubiquitous for a few years.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:36 PM on February 22, 2022


Also, weren't JAZ drives and/or disks notorious for their fragility?

Not as far as I know, not like the ZIP drive format and its infamous "click of death" that was basically an electromechanical computer virus where drives were breaking disks in a particular way, which would then break the next drive it was used in and so on, which pretty much put the nail in the coffin for ZIP drives.

The Jaz drive was basically just an upgraded ZIP disk, yet another attempt at a superfloppy, but they were really popular for a while specifically because they were better than ZIP disks and had about ten times the capacity.

Before ZIP and Jaz here where a number of competing removable media types including the SyQuest drives, except these were mostly hard drives in a sealed case, barring magneto-optical drives.

These were often made of ceramic or metal and were notably more fragile and much more expensive because they were basically just hard drive platters in a (hopefully) self-sealing enclosure. They were also really expensive and had similar price points per MB to just buying a HDD, if slightly less.

The main benefit to these drives back then was that they were faster than tape drives and easily transportable for stuff like bringing large graphics files or CAD drawings to a service bureau for printing or blueprints, but this was before CD-Rs were cheap and thumb drives of flash drives were even a thing.
posted by loquacious at 3:06 PM on February 22, 2022


the video for "Pretty Persuasion" by R.E.M.

It could also have been a CD master for the song.
posted by ensign_ricky at 3:22 PM on February 22, 2022


Speaking of lost tape formats...
posted by Catblack at 3:39 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


Yeah, they were pretty ubiquitous for a few years.

Yeah, there was a weird period there where you could find stacks and stacks of them - often broken externals in their familiar blue cases - basically any computer lab, graphic design shop, photo lab or anywhere where people needed to move larger files around and it was like Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon, but with broken ZIP drives.

I remember giant boxes of the things and their stupidly huge power bricks and used up disk cartridges all over the place.

I remember one time during this period I was working some freelance design job and having to deal with balky ZIP disks and drives at a Kinko's computer lab and having to try practically every computer in the store to get the client's disk to read, all at Kinko's insane per minute rates for their slow, crufty "Desktop Publishing" computers while my client was right there freaking out about how much it was costing for my time and the computer fees and getting no where, and literally breaking out into a cold stress sweat for an agonizing 3+ hours of sheer computer hell.

And then it seemed like it was just a year later they were just... gone. Replaced by cheap CD-R drives and then flash drives.
posted by loquacious at 3:40 PM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


he just keeps touching the grooves of his records.. gah!

Texan gun fans, man. What are ya gonna do?
posted by flabdablet at 7:19 PM on February 22, 2022


ZIP drives ... and their stupidly huge power bricks

I've still got a few projects powered by surplus ZIP drive PSUs. They last pretty well, and far longer than the drives did.
posted by scruss at 9:24 AM on February 23, 2022


3-2-1 Disk Pack

Serendipitous find from a FPP. Those were the cake carrier with a handle things I mentioned.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:36 PM on February 23, 2022


I’m stuck with 20 audio tapes run through fisher price plx 2000.
I’ve bought a couple of the cameras and it won’t play. I would love
To have them transferred. Anyone have a clue.
( 8 bit guy is a god)
posted by JohnR at 12:41 PM on February 23, 2022


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