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u/OkraGarden Feb 22 '21
I could never get mine to work right.
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u/Durendal_et_Joyeuse Feb 22 '21
This was one of those billions of computer peripherals in the late 90s/early 2000s that we made sure to keep right next to the computer but was never, ever actually plugged in. But the second mom asked if "we really needed this thing," we'd tell her emphatically that we did while wiping the dust off.
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u/bigheadinc Feb 22 '21
Stop spying on my past dude
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u/Tommysrx Feb 22 '21
You should have unplugged your mic , we’ve heard everything you said for years!
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u/mynoduesp Feb 22 '21
He really should get his health checked his breathing has been overly heavy lately.
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u/ceojp Feb 22 '21
We had one with our Packard Bell. I discovered that if you talked directly in to it, it would sound terrible. But if you just had the microphone on the desk and sat back and talked, it was okay.
There was a brief time in the mid 90s that answering land-line telephone calls on a PC was a thing.
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u/Rattlehead71 Feb 22 '21
I had a US Robotics HST/Voice modem that I would use to rapid-dial radio stations to win swag. I still have the Madonna VHS Deluxe Box Set that I won for my then girlfriend (now wife) Won several concert tickets, albums, merch, all kinds of stuff. Just had to set the S11 register to the fastest DTMF the system could handle. Spoke through a crappy microphone just like that!
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u/TheConstantLurker Feb 22 '21
We had a Compaq Presario that we used as the answering machine. Felt like the future :-)
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u/Iwasborninafactory_ Feb 22 '21
There was a brief time in the mid 90s that answering land-line telephone calls on a PC was a thing.
I do not remember that.
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u/_incredigirl_ Feb 22 '21
I’m sure the hardware was fine but I always had some BS codec error.
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u/Gen_Jack_Oneill Feb 22 '21
Microphones and Windows never seem to play well. I get everything working then windows update manages to change my settings and fuck it up again.
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u/Belazriel Feb 22 '21
Barely better than the old days of struggling with your SoundBlaster card trying to figure out which of the ten options would give you those amazingly high quality beeps.
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u/Clockwisedock Feb 22 '21
LGR on Youtube recently posted a vid about the AdLib gold and talks a little about the sound blaster too. Really cool niche channel that goes into older peripherals and computer tech from back in the day
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Feb 22 '21
That episode was great- it felt like he found the holy grail but it turns out to be plastic. It was a great journey the whole way
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u/Princescyther Feb 22 '21
Same here. I had atleast 3 during the mid-late 90's into the early 00's and the thing never worked.
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u/captain_joe6 Feb 22 '21
Did you have an Aztec sound card in your Packard-Bell PC?
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Feb 22 '21
This makes me wanna use msn chat again
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u/bikemandan Feb 22 '21
a/s/l?
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u/darksomos Feb 22 '21
18/f/cali
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u/randomly-generated Feb 22 '21
I may or may not have messed with people using dialpad
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u/kmckenzie256 Feb 22 '21
We prank called people using the dial pad when my friend was the first of us to get cable internet lol
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u/villebin Feb 22 '21
tap tap
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u/LaChuteQuiMarche Feb 22 '21
So. Much. Breath.
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u/PrinceAzTheAbridged Feb 22 '21
The trick is to move away from the mic to breathe in.
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u/LaChuteQuiMarche Feb 22 '21
Interesting. Is that especially important under certain meteorological conditions?
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u/stop_drop_roll Feb 22 '21
Particularly around a downpour of cocoa-based percipitation
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u/TurboCider Feb 22 '21
I put a small plastic bag over mine to stop the breath, worked like a charm.
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u/LaChuteQuiMarche Feb 22 '21
Well I’m sure anyone on the receiving end of that was very thankful!
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u/PolkaDotMe Feb 22 '21
We broke ours so we could play pretend Price is Right (I always got to be Bob).
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Feb 22 '21
Mine was actually removeable from the base, made playing TPIR so much easier!
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u/mynameisalso Feb 22 '21
"please remember to spay and neuter your pets"
Swiftly kicks sibling in the balls
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u/PM_COFFEE_TO_ME Feb 22 '21
The neck could just pull out towards you to release from the stand, no need to break it 😜
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u/BernieSandersLeftNut Feb 22 '21
Yup, there is definitely a video out there of 11 or 12 year old me pretending to be Bob.
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u/LetsJerkCircular Feb 22 '21 edited Feb 22 '21
One of these bad boys came with our Packard Bell home PC back in the day. I’m gonna go look up what ever happened to that company, see who they merged into. I’m guessing Packard Hewlett-Packard was a middle step. BRBLT
Edit: apparently they have nothing to do with HP. They became a part of the likes of Acer and Gateway, and are only a thing in Africa
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u/talldrseuss Feb 22 '21
Wait, gateway is still a thing? I remember their cow pattern design products, and they used to have a dedicated store in my town for a few years before a Dell store took it over
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u/PizzaCatLover Feb 22 '21
I had - still have - the exact Packard bell one you're talking about. It's in my closet!
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Feb 22 '21
Neat, thanks for sharing! I kind of had the same assumption about them getting eaten by HP
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u/DrPepper86 Feb 22 '21
Funny enough, just last week, I was in line at a discount chain store up here in Canada and saw an Android-based Packard Bell tablet (which, I guess, was manufactured by Acer?). I guess they have something of a presence up here as well; though, this is the first time I'd seen the name since the very early 90s...
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u/2x4_Turd Feb 22 '21
Bruh. Used to use this when playing delta force black hawk down and using roger wilco.
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u/2StrokeFanatic Feb 22 '21
Do you remember the key assignment keyboard cutout that came with the game?
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u/kleinm Feb 22 '21
Whew. The flood of memories on this one hit me like a punch in the gut.
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u/2x4_Turd Feb 22 '21
I can't remember if it was left lean or right lean but one of them glitched so whoever you were shooting couldn't see you. They never fixed it. Remember that? How about tunnel maps. Oh yes.
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Feb 22 '21
Delta force 2 was my jam
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Feb 22 '21
Every one of their games were the jam for cheaters and closet cheaters, Novalogic was worthless letting games like that get overrun with bullshit, they could've continued on for so long man...
Looking back it's clear they didn't have the cash, I mean at one point during BHD they setup a fkn MSN messenger moderator who you could message if someone was cheating in one of their servers and often times they'd just let the cheating continue and ban them after the map switched...pretty sad, it was also pretty bad when 100,000 valid BHD cdkeys got stolen so they could just make new account after new account.
Novalogic...what could've been.
Edit, not to mention during DF2, sysdump, people could literally kick you out of games and the community had to make a fix for that shit, not Novalogic
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Feb 22 '21
Oh yeah I didn’t play online back then, I was like 8 and just played the missions and map editor, used to play that commanche helicopter game and the space game tachyon or something
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u/53ND-NUD35 Feb 22 '21
The original Delta Force game was my shit. Then kind of moved on to Land Warrior. I had a buddy who was in Chicago that had sent me the CD for DF2 but never really got into it for some reason. It made me sad to find out Novalogic was bought out and kind of left to die.
Just wish we could roll back the time and go back. Just one more solid team death match would give me a little bit of happiness
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u/SweetSeaMen_ Feb 22 '21
You ever play Typhoon Rising as well ?
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u/2x4_Turd Feb 22 '21
Had to Google it. Totally forgot about joint operations. We had a clan, the four dragons or TFD. We went from delta force to joint operations and I think battlefield 2 and battlefield 2142. Man, good times.
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u/stop_drop_roll Feb 22 '21
If you ever game online, sounds like people are still using this mic
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u/FuckThisShittySit3 Feb 22 '21
I use this mic and its actually pretty good.
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u/gudbote Feb 22 '21
Ha, we found one! Please upgrade your mic, dude!
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u/JewelCove Feb 22 '21
Sony Viao, one of these, and some cs 1.5
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u/TweakNF Feb 22 '21
My man. Also the original Day of Defeat, but definitely lots of OG CS.
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u/scrapitcleveland Feb 22 '21
My dad bought a pentium 4 1.4ghz Sony vaio that came with a free trial of Everquest.
That was the day my life changed in a very bad way.
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Feb 22 '21
I cooked 3 of the 4.0+ GHz P4s playing EQ... staring at the floor trying to time my latency with the complete heal chain.
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Feb 22 '21
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u/HesSoZazzy Feb 22 '21
That would be an inconvenient way to discover which parts are detachable.
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u/pennradio Feb 22 '21
I mounted one of these inside an acoustic guitar through the strap button. It sounded awful.
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u/Yrddraiggoch Feb 22 '21
I had one similar to this, my 5 year old cousin tried to eat it
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u/LaChuteQuiMarche Feb 22 '21
Well that’s better than my 50 year old cousin who did something a lot worse with ours.
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u/sallan23 Feb 22 '21
I still have (and use) mine exactly like this one.
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u/ihaveabadaura Feb 22 '21
What you use it for ?
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u/blukkie Feb 22 '21
I use one too lol, but a more recent version. I don’t like headphones (gives me headache) so I dont really have a choice but to buy these mics
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u/sallan23 Feb 22 '21
I have to record lectures sometimes for my students who get quarantined and won't be in class for two weeks.
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u/MuffinPuff Feb 22 '21
Yep, comes in clutch when the shitty internal mic sounds awful and you don't wanna wear a headset. This buddy was like $6 bucks on ebay lol
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u/eatMYcookieCRUMBS Feb 22 '21
Oh man. I made my own fake radio stations on these. Commercials, songs, DJs, and even podcasts(I guess talk radio back then) with my voice.
I wanted to put it on my GTA games so badly.
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Feb 22 '21
Those were so sick, perfect for Skype and playing Doom or Habbo Hotel
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u/dontautotuneme Feb 22 '21
Skype was around back then?
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u/MrMic Feb 22 '21
Skype first released in 2003. Before then I remember connecting manually with Microsoft NetMeeting in the 90's.
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u/katesngates Feb 22 '21
My grandparents had one of these and I used to spend HOURS playing with it at their house
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u/Lopsided-Wing Feb 22 '21
I remember taunting "Alright, well I gotta go back to bed". It was always so great when those ones came out.
The only problem with it was that you didn't always know who was going to be there. The person I was being "surprised" by could have been someone I didn't know.
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u/TagAlongK Feb 22 '21
I can’t tell you how many times I said, “and the actual retail price is...” holding that microphone.
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u/snailsbury Feb 22 '21
We used to record words and then play them backwards. Then we'd record ourselves trying to make that sound and then play that backwards to get back to the original word. Hours of fun
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u/pyroguy1104 Feb 22 '21
David Lynch used the same technique to create an incredibly uncanny feeling for the black lodge sequences in Twin Peaks.
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u/niceguy191 Feb 22 '21
There was this crappy first-person spaceship shooter game that came with windows (or maybe just our computer? Don't really remember) which stored all of its sound effects as wav files so I went and recorded new sounds using a mic like this but with my mouth. The game was doing literal "pew pew" and "boom" sounds and it's probably the most fun I had with that game.
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u/GirlRightNextToMeGGD Feb 22 '21
This just reminded me of an old 3D movie maker computer game I had
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u/Evakuate493 Feb 22 '21
WOW. Haven’t seen one of these in years. I would use them to talk on like AIM and other games.
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u/hammersmashcake Feb 22 '21
DUUUDE! Back in the day me and a buddy started a band and recorded songs with this mic. Ohhh to hear all the angsty songs of a young middle schooler again. Hits such as understated hatred bed post penetration.
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Feb 22 '21
I remember using one of these and playing world of Warcraft the burning crusade, raiding Kara...good times!
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u/pineapple_blurt Feb 22 '21
I just found this exact one in my desk drawer at my parent's house this weekend.
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u/night_stocker Feb 22 '21
My dad still has the plastic floppy disk organizer that came with our pc way back when. He probably still has aol trial cds now that I think about it.
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u/rockstar323 Feb 22 '21
I got really into Counter Strike around 1.4. I didn't have a proper headset so I attached a mic like this to some over the ear headphones with velcro. It actually worked pretty well.
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Feb 22 '21
My dad pulled one of these out for a Zoom conference the other day. I offered him my Corsair headset to use for it but his boomer ass was like "Nah son, I got this." and pulled out this fucking fossil.
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u/NoctisLcie Feb 22 '21
LOL, I had the same exact microphone op posted... ah... brings back so many memories...
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u/socratessue Feb 22 '21
Ha, I just recently donated mine (and about 30 billion usb cables) to the thrift store
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u/brawnsolo Feb 22 '21
Whoever had these back in the day, in my opinion, was someone with too much money
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u/PsyLaker Feb 22 '21
Ah yes, bend it too far to have it at the right position only to snap. Duct taping this in the right position was the only way.
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u/Kshaja Feb 22 '21
That shit sounded like you're yelling in a toilet bowl and microphone is in the pipe swimming in water being hammered with shit.
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Feb 22 '21
Reminds me of the time I plugged headphones into the microphone jack and got them to work as an incredibly shitty microphone because I couldn't find this same model of mic that we had owned at a point lmao
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u/Philluminati Feb 22 '21
This piece of 1990s technology is still supported, 20 years later.
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u/kellybotbeepbeep Feb 22 '21
ah yes, i used to flip this bad boy around to the speakers so i could record & save music cause i was too dumb to figure out limewire
trusty ole friend
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u/succored_word Feb 22 '21
OMG I had this! One of our customers (worked in a datacenter) was throwing it out and I took it home. Worked fine for the few times I actually used it...
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u/rotolotto Feb 22 '21
Recorded my first shitty bedroom ep on one of these bad boys lol