As I said, I consider the invite system a plus, and invites can be customised. One server I am in has a permanent invite link on the website of the scholarly organisation they represent. Even with that, the amount of spammers and what I would call casual users (the ones that just wander in on Facebook groups and don’t understand that the group has a specific goal and represents a specific community) is near zero. Other groups are more restrictive, which further depresses that number.
As for the chat format: I fail to see the difference to somewhere like this BBS to be honest: there are different channels for different topics and within them people talk asynchronously. You can use it more real-time than a forum like this because you don’t have to refresh when someone else posts, but most servers I’m in are decidedly asynchronous with occasional bursts of side conversations breaking out when two or more people discuss something and happen to be online at the same time. But that happens here, too!
That’s exactly what I want! I want a closed-off backroom where Dave from Wigan and Carol from Omaha don’t barge in when I discuss (as an example) experimental archaeology or post-medieval earthenware because Facebook steered them into a group that was originally set up for professionals to exchange experiences (both real examples of topics but [barely] fictional people). That might sound elitist, but such spaces are necessary.
This is a fascinating read. Worth noting while Fujitsu TEN may have failed with this experiment, they would eventually become main supplier of in-car entertainment systems for Subaru, Toyota, and others.
Tech like servers who came to your table and write down the order on a pad of paper with a pen or pencil.
I actually didn’t know where else to put this, LOL! But I remember the Pizza Hut on Eight Mile Rd. between Hayes and Kelly Rds. in Detroit, and they had the BEST meatball subs there!
And maybe I can get one this summer, lol! Just not in Detroit.
I certainly appreciate having a server physically take my order. I know its likely not the first time others have talked/complained about this but placing an order at a restaurant through an app or QR code is annoying. I’ve never found it convenient or enjoyable. Some food trucks here in Austin will also really go out of their way to not talk to customers, they only want you to order online and it’s a huge turn-off.
On the plus side, a while ago I noticed McDonalds’ drive through workers started having every interaction start with “did you order through our app”, not with “can I help you” or “what would you like”. On a recent road trip I didn’t encounter this once, so maybe they’ve dropped it.
A good pizza place nearby that we would occasionally pick up for guests, stopped taking orders over the phone, had to go online. Pissed me off and I think they are overpriced anyway so I don’t order there anymore.
I had one of these back in 2001-2002 or so. It’s in a box somewhere at this point, but it was great to be able to store 60GiB of MP3s and play them back in the car.
I never had one of these – it was way outside of my budget, but I remember thinking how cool this was and how much I wanted one. I also vividly remember how around this time people were doing wild things like rigging up a PC, LCD display, and custom-built UX to play MP3s. (The video briefly touched on this.) Once the iPod came out and I could easily connect it to my car stereo;s aux jack, it became pretty pointless to bother with something else.
I still haven’t watched the video yet, but wanted to add a bit more context from my experience. I bought mine on a fire sale after Rio acquired Empeg, rebranded it as the Rio Car, and then ended the product line entirely. Due to the Open Source nature of the product and a small but dedicated community, it was useful long after the original lifespan. In fact, a quick search turns up that the old BBS is still around, and there were software updates released in 2019! Apologies if CRD already covered some of this.
At the risk of repeating CRD again, I also owned a Rio Karma, which I used up until I replaced it with a Toshiba Gigabeat F40 running Rockbox, which I think I’ve mentioned before. The Karma was a great device out of the box, and shared a lot of similarities with empeg/Rio car.
The video was actually very detailed and informative. It did cover how there’s a cult-like following keeping this device alive.
I had a Diamond Rio which I bought from Fry’s at a deeply discounted price as my first MP3 player. I want to say it went for like $20 or something, which in the early 2000s was cheap enough for me to say, “fuck it, why not”. It was of course awful, but a neat novelty. My first “real” MP3 player was a first gen Creative Labs Nomad which had a massive capacity for its time, but was so big, clunky, godawful slow, and incapable of properly rendering anything in CJK characters. The iPod was a revalation in comparison. Small, fast, able to display all my media. The big downside is it wasn’t supported on Windows, which meant for a while at least I was struggling with 3rd party solutions to get it working until Apple finally officially supported the platform.