Raymond Chen is one of the great treasures of the web.
michalpleban 49 minutes ago [-]
Of course I remember IR file sharing! And contact beaming from Palm devices.
jeffrallen 1 hours ago [-]
I remember waiting for IR file sharing. It was SLOW.
BalinKing 57 seconds ago [-]
I don't know if it's the same technology, but I had a microcontroller toy as a little kid where you'd 1) write the programs on your computer (or in my case, type them in from the tutorial book, without actually comprehending any of it) and then 2) transfer the compiled program to the device itself via (IIRC) this little puck-shaped thing with a blinking red light. It was pretty cool, I wonder if I still have it stashed away anywhere.
netsharc 26 minutes ago [-]
Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.
mschuster91 1 hours ago [-]
> The sketch demonstrated infrared file sharing and other mobile scenarios. Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
Oh hell yes I do. Dog slow but at least it worked decently well, something I can't say about Bluetooth.
Rendered at 20:18:50 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Since it's 2026, googling brings me nothing... had to ask Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHHzw4s5W4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
Oh hell yes I do. Dog slow but at least it worked decently well, something I can't say about Bluetooth.