[dwyerm]

A Solari Split-Flap Display? I love that they're making new ones! Starbucks has been putting them in their Reserve Roasteries.

I'm also sort of happy with the 'modern' ones that are actually LCD screens with speakers making the noises. It's cheating, but it's a nice tribute.

[fapjacks]

There is something to be said for these kinds of vestigial remnants of technologies past. I've always been fascinated by them, and in fact this kind of thing in computer folklore -- for example parts of the docs that explain something exists "for historical reasons" -- are one of the things that got me into programming. For example the "size_t" size has pretty funny origins which I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. But this kind of thing also has a linguistic component which is also equally fascinating to me. For example how we still "dial" a phone, which then "rings" for the person being "called".

[benj111]

>"size_t" size has pretty funny origins

"Yep. Its origins lie in the old <std.h> header we developed at Whitesmiths, Ltd. in the late 1970s. We used the typedef BYTES as the type of sizeof, to be sure we could count all the bytes in the largest declarable (or allocatable) object. X3J11 chose size_t to follow the *_t convention that had begun to creep up in Posix."

https://bytes.com/topic/c/answers/221996-origin-size_t-curio...

Do we have different senses of humour, or have you heard something different???

[dwyerm]

If you're ever in my part of the world, you should visit the Connections Museum[1]. It is truly humbling to see how far we've come. At this museum, you can dial a phone, hear the 'thinking' of all the electromechanical switching crossing the room, before the phone starts ringing.

[1] https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/

[ceejayoz]

One of my favorite examples of this is the HTTP_REFERER. Someone made a typo in the RFC in 1996; software developers a century from now may well still be spelling it "referer" as a result.

[joezydeco]

A nice tribute, but also defeats one of the most important features of the split flap: the data remains visible even when the power is off