August 2022

A little bit of history: USRobotics

I always found the USRobotics modems of the 90s to be quite iconic. I was seeing them everywhere. The company USRobotics also has an interesting history.

Wii Mini – The Nintendo Top loading Wii (2012-2017)

The Wii mini was the 3rd revision of the Nintendo Wii console. The first revision had GameCube support, the second and third revision did not.

Sim card reader (Early 2000s)

Back in the early 2000s, many companies made phones with different operating systems, most did not support transferring contacts directly to another phone.

Media Vision – Pro Audio Spectrum sound card included Leisure Suit Larry game. (1991 / $295)

Back in the day hardware often came with demos, or full versions of games. This one came with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, but you could trade it in for a game suitable for younger players such as Kings Quest V or Mixed Up Mother Goose.

Atari Jaguar – The Last Atari Console (1993)

Released same year as the 32 bit 3DO, The Jaguar was the First “64 bit” console. It contained two 32bit processors in parallel and a Motorola 68000 coprocessor. The complex architecture made programming difficult.
This led to bad games, looking worse than the SNES that came out 2 years before.

Nokia 3650 (2003)

Nokia was experimenting with this unique rotary phone style keypad. It was an interesting choice.

Casio TV-1400 Pocket size Television (1988)

Pocket sized TV’s were really cool to have at the time. Other entertainment choices on the go would be portable tape players, portable CD players, game boy, or have a book or magazine. All these items have been replaced by the modern smart phone.

Iomega FotoShow – A Zip drive for your TV (2000)

The Iomega FotoShow can transfer media (Compact Flash, SmartMedia, Microdrive) to Zip disk, edit photos, and connect to your TV and/or PC.
It was marketed to photographers, business presentations, and family to show photos on the TV.

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Nokia 3300b – Nokia Music Phone (2003)

The Nokia 3300 was released as a music phone alternative to the Nokia N-Gage gaming phone. It can play MP3 and AAC format, and also has stereo FM Radio. The phone holds its music on MMC Cards (64GB MMC Included with phone). The Nokia 3300 used 2G GPRS GSM 900/1800 and the 3300b used 2G GPRS GSM 850/1900.

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Microsoft 3D Movie Maker Version 1.00 (1995)

This is a game to make animated videos by picking a background then placing a 3D character, adding sounds, text, actions, and more. Video can be exported to .3mm file at 6 to 8 FPS in 256 colors. The BRender engine ran this game and other games such as Carmageddon 1 and 2.

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