By now, we're all painfully aware of how quickly technological innovation can turn a brag-worthy, state of the art machine into an anachronistic door stop. The quick pace of improvement certainly has its costs (Spectrum editor Sandra Upson has chronicled how electronic obsolescence chews up tax money and IEEE TV has a nice segment about the challenges of recycling "end of life devices"), but I continue to be impressed with what happens when you mix a little ingenuity with old technology. It's nice to see old machines we knew and love injected with new purpose. Take this video made by James Houston, for example. Who'd have thought that combining a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 8-bit PC, a HP Scanjet 3c scanner, an Epson LX-86 printer, and an array of ten hard drives could make for such a compelling reinterpretation of Radiohead's song Nude? (You probably want to skip ahead to about the 1:09 mark when the song actually starts).


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

From James's description of the project:

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to.

I really like the idea of old electronic devices struggling to learn new tricks. Of course, many old electrical components work just as they were designed to--I'm thinking of vacuum tubes in amplifiers or individual transistors in a digital clock. So what devices do you miss or remember fondly? If you have any ideas for DIY projects that re-purpose old technology, we'd love to hear about it.

And bonus points if together we can think up some way to make use of the computing power of the 426 000 cell phones Americans get rid of each day...