Especially if your retrofitting stuff most of the time it's purely the aesthetic shell people want the insides mean very little unless your parting them out for other projects.
Fishtanks,lizard cages, computers, and I'm sure many other things can be put in a great big honking tube tv.
Again correct.
Old TV cabinets are just as much as furniture as they are as electronic devices. Plus they have some value if you are trying to recreate an authentic environment like a movie set in a certain period.
Something like a mini disc drive doesn't need to actually function in a movie. It just needs to look "authentic." If you are some bigshot Hollywood director shooting some retro tech thriller and the protagonist shoves a floppy disk into a 3.5" drive, it doesn't need a functional mechanism or drivers. It just needs a blinking light which some set flunky can mimic with a 10 cent LED and a drugstore battery.
At first I thought of slapping a cheap LED panel on it and call it a day but then realised it'd look... ugly, in my eyes at least. So began investigating about the og electronics, even got a service manual in pdf that definitely helps a lot, comes with some schematics and some nominal values to expect, I remember firing up the TV years ago to play with the famicom I had found, it didn't go well, the image was too dim and only B/W when it's a color device, that could've damaged something, powering up something that's been dormant for 40 years isn't a great idea.
Don't want to sell it for the cabinet alone, plus it's a learning experience and a challenge, and... I enjoy challenges. Upon inspection the CRT and valves seem to be in working order, it's the power delivery, wire insulation and minor components that are damaged, I'll have to work some magic and wire modern parts to it, not paying $300 for some old transformer. Speaker is gone as well but that's easily replaceable.
Back in the Nineties, most people interested in electronic typefaces looked at a paper typeface catalog and did mail or telephone order. I bought Garamond 3 (Linotype) and Garamond 3 Old Style this way, delivered on 1.44MB floppy discs by snail mail.
The Adobe Type Library CD-ROM disc with my NEC drive had the advantage of offering WYSIWYG previews. It also included a free version of the Adobe Type Manager extension for whatever OS my computer was running (my memory is hazy but I think it was System 6 for Macintosh).
One of the earliest CD-ROMs I bought was an encyclopedia. There was no Wikipedia back in the day. One silver 12cm disc held the contents of approximately three feet (1 meter) of book shelf space.
The earliest web browsers could easily fit on one 1.44MB floppy disc. This included NCSA Mosaic and what would eventually become Netscape Navigator. A few years later these became multi-disc installations and unsurprisingly old timers griped about bloatware. "We don't need a mail or newsgroup reader! Pine is a far better MUA!!!"
Interesting way of purchasing digital goods. I have some drives and disks around but they're only good to store ancient software and DOS/emulator games. A picture taken with a digital camera would require at least 3 diskettes to fit.
But almost, ha!
Yes ... I said previously that it feeds on CDs, now I have to add: but almost, ha! So Sony put 80mm CDs in a floppy-like case to achieve two goals: ruggedness and incompatibility.
The logical conclusion then is that the mysterious Chinon drives can (could) read these encased discs and normal 80mm CDs. Not anything magneto-optical.
We're talking about stuff from early 90s, so some incompatibilities may also be due to technical limitations, not only intentional.
Guess they thought of people grabbing CDs like vinyls and smearing them to the point they wouldn't be readable anymore and decided to put a protective case over them, makes sense.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. Well, maybe not stupid but unaware the discs could be damaged by doing something like that, scratching them, etc.
I also fould some devices whose funny shape revealed that they could record on 80mm (but not larger) CDs:
Sony MA-gnetic VI-deo CA-meras!
