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Foone's profile
foone
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foone
@Foone

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foone

@Foone

Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (they/them) ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing 

floppy.foone.org/w/Main_Page
Joined February 2008

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    foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

    HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS A ONCE IN A LIFETIME AUCTION Do you see this TV? do you realize why it's special?pic.twitter.com/gaMMsskzTl

    12:43 PM - 5 Aug 2021
    • 1,993 Retweets
    • 9,479 Likes
    • Chris Cox Shah Din John Hinnigan ray k victoria, antifascist ace bard 💜🖤🗽 Nostromo's Cat Amosun Elisha Carl Martinsson Bigly
    306 replies 1,993 retweets 9,479 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        So over on tyhis panel you've got the usual controls. On off, and tuning, with some strange hue/volume/gain controls. It's a Teledyne Packard Bell, which isn't special...pic.twitter.com/2tZ8e7S4zd

        7 replies 16 retweets 761 likes
        Show this thread
      3. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        The back looks pretty normal, although there's some weird connectors over there on the right...pic.twitter.com/DsVV4AfBF2

        4 replies 13 retweets 716 likes
        Show this thread
      4. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        So let's open the left side and WAIT A MINUTE WHAT IS THISpic.twitter.com/rHHmGaOMhL

        15 replies 30 retweets 907 likes
        Show this thread
      5. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        So Cartrivision is an early (1972) home video format which had some wacky DRM nonsense (well, ARM I guess, it's not digital) and it only lasted about a year, and one of the reasons it's impossible to play now is that you couldn't just buy a VCR for it.pic.twitter.com/2DjQPaNb03

        16 replies 66 retweets 1,089 likes
        Show this thread
      6. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        instead you had to buy a TV with a cartrivision player built into it, and since those were all huge 1970s console TVs the number of them that have survived until the modern day is basically zero.pic.twitter.com/J0f9RTlntj

        7 replies 51 retweets 1,199 likes
        Show this thread
      7. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        The wacky DRM thing was that most movies only came on red tapes, and the key distinction between red tapes and black tapes is that YOU COULDN'T REWIND RED TAPESpic.twitter.com/EDdS8D7MRK

        21 replies 79 retweets 1,198 likes
        Show this thread
      8. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        so not only did you have to rent them, you could only watch them once.

        7 replies 18 retweets 1,031 likes
        Show this thread
      9. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        the other slightly weird thing is that you didn't just go to a store and peruse their tapes and take one home. Instead you'd go there and pick one from a catalog and it'd be mailed to the store, so you had to go back and pick it up

        3 replies 14 retweets 902 likes
        Show this thread
      10. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        if they just mailed them to the customer they would have invented proto-netflix in 1972, but nooooo, cartrivision had to do absolutely everything wrong.

        11 replies 49 retweets 1,783 likes
        Show this thread
      11. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        anyway it's an obscure failed format from 1972, so there is very little hardware remaining out there. At any time there'll be like two tapes on ebay.

        2 replies 11 retweets 940 likes
        Show this thread
      12. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        Once a tape contained a recording of a lost basketball game and it was so hard to get the video back off that the media recovery company that did it made a documentary about it and won a fucking emmy for it.pic.twitter.com/j2O9YTp6dI

        22 replies 231 retweets 3,926 likes
        Show this thread
      13. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        and at any moment there's maybe like 1.5 working machines in the world, owned by retrovideo weirdos like me, in strange disassembled forms they're constantly having to repair and jury-rig to get working.pic.twitter.com/udIsTaDJ7T

        4 replies 23 retweets 1,268 likes
        Show this thread
      14. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        But this auction is for a COMPLETE UNIT STILL IN THE TV, which is something I have never seen for sale, ever. This may very well be the first time it has come up for sale on ebay, and it will almost certainly be the last. https://www.ebay.com/itm/265252238312 …pic.twitter.com/1Igfp2zpK8

        15 replies 53 retweets 1,783 likes
        Show this thread
      15. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        and I am not at all going to bid on it!

        9 replies 5 retweets 884 likes
        Show this thread
      16. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        I have like 4-5 tapes and they are going to just shatter if you try to play them. You don't just play moisture-sensitive tapes from nearly a half century ago, they will just break and destroy the mechanism.

        5 replies 7 retweets 839 likes
        Show this thread
      17. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        the mechanism which, I might add, is already broken. Have you ever tried to use a laserdisc player? They pretty much only come in two sorts now: 1. Broken 2. Repaired.

        12 replies 15 retweets 957 likes
        Show this thread
      18. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        at some point there was another category, the mythical "still working" but we are way, way past that point. Rubber belts and rollers have a finite lifespan, capacitors go bad, lubricant dries up or leaks out.

        8 replies 9 retweets 762 likes
        Show this thread
      19. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        This thing is older than laserdiscs by 6 years. The chances of it working are about negative infinity percent.

        7 replies 10 retweets 824 likes
        Show this thread
      20. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        can it be repaired? Yeah, probably. You'd need a lot of time and money and skill with analog video electronics, but you could figure out how to get it working again.

        5 replies 6 retweets 592 likes
        Show this thread
      21. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        I've already got enough projects and I don't have 1000$ to spend on this or time to go pick it up locally in Wisconsin.

        15 replies 5 retweets 572 likes
        Show this thread
      22. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        so I will let some other collector get this one, for sure. But MAN am I envious. This is an amazing thing to just pop up for sale, and even though 1000$ seems like a lot, it's probably way less than this is really worth.

        3 replies 5 retweets 726 likes
        Show this thread
      23. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        I would not be at all surprised if it turned out this was literally THE ONLY one of these left on the planet. Cartrivision did not sell well and it failed quickly, and left behind TVs that were massive, not to mention swiftly outdated.

        3 replies 15 retweets 728 likes
        Show this thread
      24. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        You don't just keep this thing around for fun. Most of these were quickly replaced by much smaller, more functional TVs, and the Cartrivision TV consoles headed right for a junkyard.

        2 replies 4 retweets 498 likes
        Show this thread
      25. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        Cartrivision is a format I've talked about many times, as I find it fascinating. It's also not one many people know about, even people who religiously watch retro-format people like Tech Moan or Technology Connections and the like.

        5 replies 9 retweets 667 likes
        Show this thread
      26. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        and I think there's a very simple and sad reason why it doesn't get covered in those videos: You can't show it working.

        1 reply 6 retweets 620 likes
        Show this thread
      27. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        You can get some tapes off ebay and hold one up as a prop, maybe play some demo footage someone ripped once, but the players themselves and the video the tapes store? Nope. That's not gonna happen.

        2 replies 5 retweets 462 likes
        Show this thread
      28. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        LabGuy has a unit that is sometimes working. His site has some info: http://www.labguysworld.com/Museum018.htm 

        2 replies 9 retweets 422 likes
        Show this thread
      29. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        And there's a couple videos about it on his youtube channel:https://www.youtube.com/user/videolabguy/videos …

        1 reply 4 retweets 360 likes
        Show this thread
      30. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        foone Retweeted foone

        here's a thread where I looked through their catalog. One of the other reasons this thing failed was that their movie selection was never great. They didn't get buy-in from the studios, so it mainly was a bunch of older films or b-movies.https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1013526217301954560 …

        foone added,

        foone @Foone
        So I was looking up info on Cartrivision, a neat home video format from 1972-1973, which was the first to offer pre-recorded films to the home. Check out this list of Sci-Fi films they had available! pic.twitter.com/37aDm59NlB
        Show this thread
        10 replies 8 retweets 422 likes
        Show this thread
      31. foone‏ @Foone 12h12 hours ago

        BTW one of my favorite things about Cartrivision (and there are so many of those!) is this tape (which I own). Not only did they put the final score on the front (SPOILERS, MAN) but Cartrivision tapes maxed out at 114 minutes.pic.twitter.com/oKbNNWK1dG

        9 replies 15 retweets 664 likes
        Show this thread
      32. Show replies

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