The Cybiko Experience: a Handheld Computer for Year 2000 Teens
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 20 май 2021
- An LGR Retrospective on the Cybiko: a neon PDA-like handheld device providing wireless mobile computing for tweens and teens! This episode's got it all, folks. Tech history, monochrome gaming, a road trip, unboxing, teardown/repair, dumb 2000s marketing, wireless chat rooms, Frankie Muniz, Windows 98 serial cable shenanigans and more. CYBIKO.
● Check out Luke's channel and related video here:
/ lukeisafinename
• Shooting APX 400 in Ra...
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Here's that video collection of Cybiko news coverage:
• Cybiko Wireless Inter-...
● Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound:
www.epidemicsound.com
#LGR #Retro #Handheld 
Наука
You really goofed revealing your actual address in this video, and now I've taken the liberty of ordering a hundred pizzas to 69 Balls Rd.
What kind of pizza(s)? I hope it includes boobie pizza, maybe a dong pizza as well.
@@stephengnb Fresh oats pizza
there's a legitimate 420 N High Street in a town near me 😎🌿
You joke, but i live near an actual Balls Road lol
There's a Preacher's Bottom Road in Wilkes County, NC. I hope I never find out what preacher's bottom they're talking about!
The fact that a magazine ad for this thing literally had a speech bubble reading "Make #1 Sexy Chat" will never not be funny.
#1 sexy chat in all of Kazakhstan, great success!
The Cybiko really has that early 2000s 'Okay, so it's got to be a shape, but make it weird, and cover it in translucent plastic' look perfectly
I miss that look
@@steveshin820 It looks like something straight out of nickelodeon's marketing department.
@@javkiller Mom: we have a GameBoy at home
The GameBoy at home:
I love transluscent plastic, hell I just modded my nintendo switch to be completely clear
@@JessicaFEREM nice, I needa learn how to do that too.
22:24 To be fair in 2000 there wasn't a bunch of other signals in the air for the cybiko to compete with, that might be why the range isn't as good as promised
Yep. I know wifi interferes with picking up radio stations. A lot of stations would just be static til i unplugged the wifi box.
@@chrismooney2240 that's likely not the Wi-Fi signals themselves interfering with the radio, rather it's the noise generated from the router's power supply.
@@chrismooney2240 Wifi itself can't interfere as it uses a whole different frequency range as radio
Nah even in the article he showed the author said the reception was terrible even in 2000
I bet money it was always garbage lol
sometimes i forget how much the early 2000's were still the 90's, truer words have never been spoken
Just like the early 70s were still the 60's
Now 2010s is just 2011
I spoke truer words just last night during an hour long drive home, when I said "Man, I REALLY have to poop".
Boy, did I have to poop or what. It was quite an understatement, actually. It ended up being my toilet-clogger of the year!
@@Corn0nTheCobb I'm literally ROLLING 🤣🤣🤣
That's the y2k era.
3:20 ''Ah that marketing... Sometimes I forget how much the early 2000s were still the 90's...'' instant classic
They really were
The 90s didn't become the 2000s imho until the combination of the dot-com crash and the 9/11 tragedy spiraled USA pop culture into edgy, antisocial depression.
Everything was more Xtreme back then.
yeah thats how it goes, its like the 80s didn't really end until like 95/94, and with current we didn't see a change until like 2014 etc
@@NonsensicalSpudz Yeah, I've always thought that decades run from 5 to 5 rather than 0 to 9
I wish I still had mine. Me and a group of friends all got them in middle school and we did indeed use them to play games and chat from separate class rooms before teachers or schools could imagine what “texting” was. The experience was only fun cuz like 8 of us had them so it did make a decent network around the school and at whoever’s house we sat around playing in. I believe we all got that memory add on too so we could actually install a decent number of games. Thanks for the 30 minutes of reminiscing.
I still have mine with the mp3 player attachment too lol
I'm so jealous of you. I didn't even know about this until now and I'm from a very techy family at that time.
But there was SMS in 2000 already? I think everyone got Nokia 3330s etc. around that time, or even earlier. So texting was definitely a thing
@@lurchilurch5507 SMS was a thing, but cell phones and plans were still relatively expensive for every day usage, and every text cost money.
@@lka1988 I know, I was there! People still used them though
This is amazing, that "who's nearby" thing is almost exactly like the StreetPass thing Nintendo did over a decade later.
Did that ever work? I know I lived in the sticks and rarely left the house to walk around an actual street but the idea of passing someone with a DS, with it switched on, on streetpass mode, or on the same game as you AND on Streetpass, was astronomical, and I can tell you that I only 'streetpassed' someone on Nintendogs ONCE in 5 years for every weekend that I sat in the car for half an hour there every Saturday and half an hour a Sunday back.
So yeah.... No real chance? XD
I wonder what that one person thought having streetpassed me that one Walk....
@@Roadent1241 When I was living at a campground,my 3DS managed to street pass someone who had Fire Emblem Shadows of Valentia Echoes. That was the only time it ever streetpassed someone.
@@angelicgalaxy4534 I dunno why they made it seem like something that happened lots enough that multiple games had the feature XD
@@Roadent1241 It worked much better in Japan. It was slightly myopic of Nintendo that they pushed the feature so hard globally.
I've heard that it did work, but obviously you had to go to places that had a naturally high 3DS population like a convention or even a (maybe on the affluent side) school. Out on the street? not unheard of but not necessarily common.
The one that never worked was the PS Vita one, because that did need the app to be constantly running.
My jaw still aches from the constant screaming of the late 90's and early 2000's, good times. Great video
screaming & hair gel
You stopped? Is that why people give me those looks?
It was the screaming that separated the men from the boys
Why screaming?
@@isiraratnayake9491 because awsome
It's my lifelong dream to find a happily married couple that met over Cybiko. There's gotta be at least one.
Unless it's a fever dream I feel like I once saw someone talking about how they met their spouse over Cybiko either in one of the comment sections of a Cybiko video or on a forum.
Yea.. they guy is 50 and the girl is 30... well. She wasnt 30 back then.....
@@matsv201 How views have changed. I immediately noticed the problematic side-effects of an anonymous communication device that is used to find children... I wonder if they thought of that back then.
@@JoshuaJacobs83 Do you guys ever have proper conversations tho? Like that's a big gap tf yall gonna talk about 😂😂
@@R0XYF0X There really wasn't need for that in that time. I don't know any molesting type events that would've happened at that time. It was more that grownups just didn't have interest in such things. Plus I think it would've immediately caught attention if elder people would've used thing like that.
"WAP browsers were taking off like a certified freak, seven days a week!"
Clint.
Amazing
make that pull-out game weak
Since it's a mobile phone thing, wouldn't that be a "certified phreak"?
I STILL think this thing has one of the coolest Y2K tech designs around. So charismatic and truly futuristic looking.
@@generfeld According to LGR in this video, new batteries are pretty easy to find. He even tells us what specification exactly to look for.
Ah yes. "I have a Cybiko and I must scream"
I have no Cybiko, and I must scream.
Scream, Harlequin, said the Ticktockman
Thanks for reminding me of a book I was happy to forget I had read.
@@cpuwizard9225 Same...
Unfortunately, your Cybiko's battery leaked, damaging your speaker connection, so no one can hear you... Cybiko scream... or whatever it would be called.
Being a dysgraphic (fine motor disability that particularly impedes handwriting) public school student whose family couldn’t afford a laptop until I entered high school, Cybiko and Cybiko Xtreme’s word processing capabilities and ability to export text documents via cable literally carried me through middle school.
This thing is absurdly capable for a time period when many people let alone kids didn’t even have candy bar Nokia phones yet, if this thing had gameplay performance on par with the original Game Boy the Cybiko would have been an unstoppable beast, and as it was, it featured predecessor capabilities that predicted modern smartphones.
Great to see you cover this thing.
Also, the Cybiko Xtreme was the first device I ever used that accepted SD cards, done via an adapter.
Cybiko was a decent idea but in 2007 Ipod and Iphone monopolized all the gadgets
@@HanzoHimemiya Cybiko as a platform device was dead by 2003/2004 at the latest, it’s not even a contest, it was off the market for years by then ha ha.
@@SuperTrainStationH GBA kicked him early
That’s cool! But it didn’t literally carry you. 😉. It’s good to see people using tech to overcome setbacks
@@HanzoHimemiya I wouldn't exactly say monopolize. I got Nokia 5800 XM before iPhone was here and it essentially had everything and more than iPhone had. Ie. it had vastly better GPS, maps and connectivity. I had it for several months before I saw first iPhone used anywhere. It took couple iterations for iPhone to get features right. Though admittedly Apple did the touchscreen much better. Not to mention that Nokia had all the features way earlier. Touchscreen was the only lackluster thing in Nokia's and slightly incoherent OS that they struggled with.
"The early 2000s were still the 90s."
That hit me like a rock!! What a realization. 😁😁😁
It helps if you think about things more in terms of 3 year chunks or so than decades. 1999 to 2001 had a good deal more in common than 1999 and 1991.
@@Belgand True. A lot of the most popular music from 1991 was still characteristically 80s sounding.
The 90's pretty much ended in 1998 for me
This is basically every decade. The early 90s were still in the 80s. The early 80s were still in the 70s and so on...
In truth, basically every decade's culture for the first 5 years are determined by the last 5 years' culture. It's weird.
2:57 I just like that it being green and having "buttons and stuff" is a positive according to this one kid.
The 2000s really were the "Before its Time" time of tech. Especially the first half lol.
I remember getting all excited when a >64mb MP3 player became available. I could finally hold 30 songs instead of 12. Fast forward 20 years and my $50 MP3 player can fit thousands.
@PiK i had one too (casio) but they already had wireless handheld mini TVs since the early 80s [song watchman, 1982]
Despite the speed, the internet was ten times better
@@lennybrewster4673 not really. There more to do now. It's just social media and news outlets but that's a side effect of freedom
I remember going to Walmart and buying an internal CD burner for my Compaq PC and feeling like I was living on another planet when I got it working
You win the internet for taking the time to enter the DN3D theme music into the music app. That's top LGR energy right there.
@@randomeverythingboy Too late. It's back now.
@@jeremyfirth guys, Jeremy said it so it’s gotta be true
@@randomeverythingboy old technology is bringing back old lingo
@@randomeverythingboy This video is about a device that released in 2000 SO DEAL WITH IT!
@@Pixiesfairiedust Uber pwnage right there!
My middle school wanted to test the viability of using these in the classroom. My class was the one chosen to test it so we all got Cybikos for free from the school! My friends were so jealous. Pretty neat gadget but all it did was mostly distract us from paying attention to the teacher. The chat really was so much better than passing notes! I'm not sure what the range was but there were enough Cybikos to communicate with my classmates in other classrooms occasionally. The games weren't great but the novelty was. I still have my black and yellow model somewhere. Great memories!
I got cybiko in middle school. The only other 2 cybiko's I ever connected to were my 2 friends in school who I convinced to buy one. I think we played games on it at school for like a week before it got boring.
I was obsessed with these. I remember they had an online store where you could play games, win points and get prizes, including a new cybiko. I also remember when the store had a bug that allowed you to spend the same points over and over, I got 2 free units this way and gave them to friends. I only ran into another unit once or twice. I was the only one who had this.
Just out of curiosity were the 1 or 2 units u ran into the ones you gave to your friends?
Haha yeah, i spend all My birthday money on the Xtreme after seeing a popup commercial, It was perfect on paper, but useless becouse i was like the only one in Sweden that had one :/
Nice! Might be at that point they didn't care about people getting units for free, if nobody was buying them anyway. Saves them money on warehousing them.
I never came across another one.
@@xLucidor Same for me in the UK, I did have fun trying out the free games though as they had many. Not super advanced however
I can't imagine would disappointing it would be to ask your parents for this, get it, and then realize none of your friends got one, and it doesn't actually connect to anything besides other cybikos.
That was me! Lol I had to pretend and avoid the classic I told you so from parents haha.
@@edwardmenendez You're bringing up some repressed memories of mine. 😂
joe steffe had one too. we only had homeroom together, and that 15 minutes was barely enough time to connect them.
it was. i know
I was 17 years old at the time. I spent my own money on one of these things.
If I rememberer correctly, I was able to take it back to the store for a refund.
I guess in a way the Cybiko lives on, on the show Cyberchase. The sqwak pads that the kids on the show used look a lot like the Cybiko. And Cyberchase is STILL coming out with new episodes, like 20 years after it debuted!
It also sorta lives on in the show Lain. The people also use something similar to the cybiko for studying and stuff, as does Lain herself.
Looks like the software dev(s) really tried to get the most out of the hardware here, which is always nice to see.
In my period era experience, we had stable chats and games with multiple Cybikos going on at the advertised ranges.
There's a decent chance the part of the spectrum around the Cybiko has been reassigned for phones or other uses, or suffers from splatter from adjacent frequencies. That would have the observed effect; a useable range of a few feet
My guess is that nowadays there's a lot more of devices on those ranges, so there's a lot more of interference
@@jbruijn or it could basically be the wall of radio interference that is basically all over the civilized world and cuts your 1980s transistors radio range down to effectively/listenably the next town over.
@@jbruijn splatter, that's a good word for it.
@@jbruijn your probably right on that one, they have been cutting down on the amateur bands for years (RIP 2.4 GHz)
also smart electric meters and overloading pager towers could decrease range (pagers are at 930 mHz, so harmonic distortions are possible, and smart meter interference has been getting overwhelming in the past few years.)
also solar activity has changed a lot in 30 years so signals may not propagate as well (there was a geomagnetic storm a few weeks ago... although mostly lower bands are affected by such)
So, I usually kinda wanted stuff like this, but was always turned off by the 0% chance that anyone I wanted to communicate with actually had one.
Yep that was the problem with this kind of stuff, you had to hope someone else had one. It's like in the early 90's I only knew one kid in my entire school that had a GameGear, so having a link cable for 2 player games was pointless for me.
I had one of these and yes that was they issue. Cool if everyone had one...Not so much when its just you and your brother
I mean Nintendo has a similar system with the DS. And that thing is very popular.
@@Toxicity1987 People bought Nintendo DS mainly for the first-party games though, the wireless gaming was mostly a bonus. Cybiko's main marketing was about communicating with other Cybiko users wirelessly.
Hah, yeah. I guess this type of things could've worked in bigger cities, but ie. where I lived my friends lived around 5km's away. So it was time for bicycle or landline call to know if they're home 😂
Just imagine if by some cosmic fluke everyone has one of these today instead of these smartphones.
Alternative reality :o
"Vinegar, scraping and alcohol"
My typical Friday night.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
28:03 When Clint said "that means I can pay the bills", it set off this Pavlovian response from years of watching RUclips where I fully expected him to start talking about NordVPN
Or when he segues to today's sponsor, Glasswire!
RAID SHADOW LEGENDS
I came out with a new game: "Legends Raiding Shadows." I fully intend on using 90% of the investment into advertising, 2% on the "game" and the remaining 8% on my Mega Yacht and the crew to operate it.
Not gonna lie, the number of fleshed out apps for this thing is actually really impressive from a programming point of view. Even one of these games/apps would take a decent amount of time to program.
Ehhh... I doubt they reprogramed any of it. I had a Game Boy cart that had most of the same tools in the mid 90s, they're probably licensed from a company who specializes in that type of software
@@lonedog80 No, there used to be a pretty good sized programming community for it. I didn't participate but I looked into it
I remember playing a few RPGs on my Cybiko. I made a racing game, too.
@@MikeStavola There were quite a few indie developers. It had some cool functionality -- only problem was you needed to find other people with cybikos and there weren't all that many, at least where i was
I remember spending lots of time on the music app, and playing the labyrinth game at school with a friend who had one. It was a terrible experience trying to use the wireless features, and I think we both lost faith in the product after that. However this was the first device I could connect to my PC and manage the files, install updates and new games and such - I'm grateful for that experience since I was a fledgling nerd and needed an outlet for tinkering with things.
Rip Cybiko, the world wasn't ready for how cool you were
The radio must die over time because when I had one of these growing up I could connect to people 2-3 houses down the road from me. One kid at the end of the road actually had two of these (he broke the first one) and used that one to provide an internet gateway for everyone else in the neighborhood.
Today there's a lot more of wireless devices, so probably it has a lot more of interference thus the range is shortened
@@RhinoBlindado Thing is though with that radio band, 900Mhz, there really shouldn't be that much more than there was in 2000. I would argue perhaps there's even less devices operating in that frequency today.
900Mhz was really popular for baby monitors and cordless phones but those two devices have been pretty much replaced by cell phones and WiFi cameras neither of which use that spectrum. Yes I know those devices are still around, but they generally use 2.4Ghz now.
Even scada has mainly been replaced by cellular at this point. The only thing I can think of that still uses 900Mhz are wireless bridging systems where you can't have line of sight, but even then I doubt that that's common where they were testing.
@@antikommunistischaktioneven without being active 900 has a lot of background noise these days
Nickelodeon promoted the HELL of this thing in 2000, and even showed it in action in the movie Big Fat Liar. I never knew anyone that owned one, though, and never had any desire to own one. It looked too weird
finally something im to young to remember
@@JonathanCandor lol it was actually a frequent prize on Slime Time Live on weekdays after school.
I was born in 1995. I guess I'm too young to remember this being promoted
This is bothering me...I would have been about 13-14 when this came out and don't remember the Cybiko AT ALL. It seems this thing was exactly +/-1.5 years behind/ahead of its time.
@@chainlightning58 I would have been around 7 or 8 and frequently watched Nickelodeon, I've even seen Big Fat Liar a lot as a kid, but I don't remember this *at all*.
I'm shocked at the smooth scrolling and transitions in the UI and the general level of polish on show, for a thing meant for kids it was pretty seriously done
Translucent colored plastic is such an underrated material. I love it, whish it was around more these days.
Yeah, imagine a PS5 made with translucent plastic. Would look sick.
Imagine how excited these Cybikos would be in the Toy Story universe to have other Cybikos in range after 20 years. Like "Yes, we are making a comeback!."
Haha top comment
Thanks for the new Toy Story Headcanon!
What the fuck
Four restored Cybiko's!?! Dude that is going to be one lit party!
on one of them, the antenna does not work
1:56 I love 90s/early 2000s packaging and ads. Look at closeups of screaming faces. Lol Everything back then had to have an EDGE to it. It had to be IN YO FACE and have attitude! Lmao I miss it.
"Everyone was screaming! All the time!" I can't tell if he's talking about the year 2000 or the year 2021.
Ah, common misconception, people in 2001 were screaming due to how awesome new tech was, people in 2021 are screaming due to... well, take your pick really, but mostly screaming in horror.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 tru doe
In 2021 they just keep their mouths open, in mock surprise and submission. Making no noise.
Or 2001
In 2020 people weren't screaming, they were mostly coughing and then dying alone.
OMG, I was so much in awe when a second LGR appeared!!! 😱
Stefan Urquelle
Luigi to Mario!
IKR? Brown haired Clint appears!
You should see his xmiss specials
"You type in the type of kid you are and the type of kids you want to meet."
Are we sure the FBI didn't create this device? ಠ_ಠ
Yeah, the slogan "find kids within a 300 ft radius" sets off a whole bunch of alarms from today's point of view lol.
I haven't seen that emote in years.
I'm just concerned about the body image Clint has, looking for people from 5'3 to 5'11, 60 to 80 lbs. Have some realistic expectations, Clint! Bump that up to at least 85.
Not with that terrible wireless range, they didn't! LOL
Imagine spoofing your dimensions to attract kids.
Wow, this is absolutely everything I ever dreamed my TI-84 calculator could do, even in 2015 (we weren’t allowed to bring out anything else during class).
I had one of the originals when it came out. I was SO excited to get it, it made me feel important lol. Until I realized I was the only kid in town with one, so it was basically a paperweight with batteries. The idea behind it was so cool and the asthetic was perfect for a 12 year old kid in that time. The marketing really did work. They may have been ahead of their time by just a few years with the tech.
The range extension thing if there are other Cybiko's nearby sounds like a mesh network. I did not expect a toy, lest of all an early 2000s toy, to have a full-fledged mesh network. That's pretty good.
Yeah the idea is good. The tech to support it just wasn't there back then and even if it was, there was no way it would be available at a price point to be sold for use by kids.
it literally is that.
Yeah it's what modern motorcycle bluetooth headsets only in recent years implemented......... And the feature makes the price hike significantly so makes me wonder if the patent ran out recently
It was exactly that. In a world without internet, these people could still communicate. I can't think of a widely-accepted way to do this in 2022, other than going back to low-tech solutions like FRS radios.
As a European, I never ever even heard about this. It absolutely is a device that could only exist around the 2000s, that's for sure! Everything portable was so whimsical and cumbersome back then. The first rays of the new dawn of technology that lurked around the corner.
I haven't seen this thing back in the day or something anything like it here in Europe. I had a palmtop PDA though with Bejeweled which was cool. Although that could've been a bit later when this thing came out.
That was the time when everyone in Europe were already getting cellular stuff. 9600 bps was the speed of cellphone data before this came out, though half that was often encountered. At those speeds avoiding the overhead of wrapping stuff in Internet protocols still made sense.
As a Russian, I've never seen these too. Still vote for p2p networks. (But with 50-100m range, please)
Your comment made me nostalgic. 😌
Dont feel too left out.. I was in the US and part of the key demographic at the time and never heard of this.
I had something like this in the early 2000's called IMfree by motorola. It was a portable AIM device you used around the house. had a usb wireless base unit it would connect to, i would sit on the couch downstairs and chat with my friends. I thought it was the coolest thing at the time I had it.
14:05 "69 Balls Rd." had me laughing
It's exactly the kind of thing I would have put in there
I mean, look what I chose for my youtube usename back in the 2000s
I love when you sneak a tech tale in, don't think we didn't notice
More Tech Tales!!!
I'm honestly not sure if this would be more of a tech tales or an oddware video. Seems like something in-between.
I don’t think I ever encountered another cybiko in the wild, despite taking it to a hockey game and other public events. What a weird era
Were you within 6ft of the other users? We'll never know
The only one I ever came across was my sister’s.
Plus the video seems to indicate this has like 10 channels. I'm not sure if these would scan other ranges, but that could've been a downfall too.
@@mikehoward5012 i don’t recall being able to scan multiple channels? Would have to go back 20 years and check haha
Same only me and my brother had one lol
Blast from the past! These had a short run at my school back in around 2004, when a retailer sold them for £5.
The got so popular that the teachers ended up buying their own to figure out our names and confiscate them 😂
I remember there was supposed to be a CyWIG device that was supposed to be an optimised internet gateway for Cybiko’s.
Looks like it ended up being vapourware, but pictures of it exist on Google.
My brother and I had these as kids. The only thing I remember using them for was chatting with each other at night when we were supposed to be sleeping. (Which was actually exciting at the time!)
But most of time we had to hold them up against the wall separating our rooms to get them to communicate with each other.
We eventually replaced these with another device called a "Friend Link" IIRC, which was made just for chatting, but even with those, we had issues with them seeing each other through a wall
The early 00's-ness of this product is both nostalgia inducing and existentially terrifying. That "transparent casing" trend died a sudden and hard death, didn't it! xD
Honestly miss being able to see the internal circuits of devices.
Modern tech has got a bit tedious with the obsessive minimalism
ahh that transparent casing wouldve matched my inflatable furniture so well though
@meow purr 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 don't know if this is top comment or worst 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Not if you're in prison.
@@UNSCPILOT it's making a comeback thou, i have seen a shit ton of transparent PCs lately (with lots of lights too)
17:37 Nice to see you and X-mas Clint are having fun together :)
I was thinking about saying something like that.
I love your humor and writing. Your videos are always interesting to watch. You deserve a TV show for yourself.
All I can say is I really feel like I remember them connecting with anyone on the bus or classroom easily. Maybe it's just nostalgia but I feel like I got a huge use out of it. Also a huge coincidence that LGR put this up a mere month before I felt like explaining cybiko to a zoomer.
Can you imagine the excitement if Clint and his brother connected with another Cybiko user while walking around Raleigh? That would be like stumbling into the last Blockbuster Video while looking for a movie to watch during a catastrophic internet outage.
I had the same thought.
i've been in that blockbuster
Who's clint?
Even better than finding a Street Pass in 2022
Sounds like they may have just seen each other's lime green handsets before connecting.
My childhood! I worked on software for this device. My first job haha.
Nice
Edit: spelling.
Cool, got any good stories you could share with us?
If you worked on software for this how could it be your childhood?
@@milkyoni I got into programming in middle school. This came out while I was in high school, and pushed me further into it
@@milkyoni many of us early coders learned to code in middle school or even earlier. I picked up programming in 4th-5th grade and by 9th grade I was already writing full fledged programs and games. Since I went to engineering college at 16 yrs of age, I got my first real software engineering job at 3 months before turning 18. I remember the job offer was contingent on finishing my degree (which had 1 semester left) and by the time I actually finished the degree I was already promoted to mid-level dev haha! Good ol' days! Many think I'm way older when I tell them I've been in the industry for nearly 20 years, lol but I'm just 36.
"That's not quite 300 feet." Followed by Clint immediately losing it made me laugh really hard. XD
I and 4 other people had this at my middle school. I had to get file transfers from my friends for new games because I had an iMac without a serial port. The turn based games were fun! My friend got us all cellular antenna boosters which extended the range dramatically and we were able to chat with each other across the school in different classrooms. I miss my cybiko
That's a cool story :) what kind of antenna boosters did you guys use? Did it just replace the aerial?
"OK so we need to stand 6 feet apart"
"Oh, for social distancing?"
"Social what? No no that's just how far these Cybikos can talk to each other from"
Well it is social something or other!
They got well over 6 feet in 2000-2001 when I was using them in highschool, you could chat reliably across most of the cafeteria and definitely in any classroom
I’m sure these things worked way past 6 feet, I get it it’s only a joke but it only works if the joke is true
@@airthrowDBT I think the antenna for these may have been defective or Damaged
Im actually really sentimental for these Cybikos. I was so excited for the tech and really wanted them to catch on. Ubiquitous LTE and Wifi makes the concept pretty obsolete though
I really do miss the late 90s-early 00s translucent plastic aesthetic
And neon colors
And the little soft plastic buttons in numerous curved shapes. Yeah, it's certainly a look.
@@noecarrier5035 Those buttons were the worst. They felt cheap and always seemed to wear out way too fast. The clear plastic was fun however.
@@AbbieOates Yeah, they had that black plastic liner underneath that seemed to abrade the white plastic during use. The cheaper ones were made with ink that would rub off on your fingers and you'd have no idea what the button did. My baby sister would also chew on them obsessively for some reason so never could be left out for long.
I want a translucent plastic case for my phone, now.
Holy cow this just unlocked a tonne of memories, I HAD one of these! :O I had completely forgotten gosh what a mind bend...
This is the first LGR video I ever watched! And now a year later I have loads of retro stuff of my own and have built 4 different Pentium III machines. Thank you LGR for your awesome content and inspiration.
I had one, I remember my grandma going to Target to get me one cause I wanted one so bad cause I thought it was so awesome. Looking back at it I didn't really do much with it, dunno what happened to mine.
Bless my grandma for always trying to make me happy.
Same experience I had with mine lol
I got one of these during summer vacation. I was sooo excited for school thinking of all the other people who would have one. We'd be able to send secret messages and everything it would be amazing! I was the only one who had one...
Yup.. same here. My buddy finally got one and we were able to chat during one class otherwise we were too far. Ah the early 2000's tech. still love it.
Hah, late 90's to early 2000's tech was stuff which created forever alone memes. I mean the stuff was so all over the place. Really good innovations here and there, but no compatibility between. It was quite exciting time when internet connection came affordable that you could actually be online for something else than downloading something and got actual viable online messaging, like ICQ and Messenger.. SMS texting was so damn expensive at the beginning. Though fun times trying to cipher those weirdly compacted 160 characters back then :)
Yeah during this time period there really were a lot of toys, electronics, games exc that basically required multiple people to own them which always caused kid me to be disappointed.
This was one of my favorite devices ever, it felt impossible at the time, it was so weird looking and was some of the most fun I had at school
My eyes lit up when I saw the thumbnail, I had a blue cybiko and I loved that thing. I could never get it to work where I could find anyone else using it tho so I was frustrated with that but it was still an awesome gift
17:37 Rare footage of Clint having a good time with his Christmas Clone.
3:11 "Hey dude... It's under a hundred and twenty nine dollars..."
*Literal death scream*
Dude You're Getting a Dell
My brother and I got a cybiko each one christmas and I remember it being the most exciting thing ever, just watching your video brings back that feeling, good days!
Me and my brother had Cybikos, they were great. Thanks for reminding me about them! I couldn’t find the name in a simple google search.
Me and one of my best friends both got one of these for Christmas when we were 14. I remember the signal was terrible, we could barely connect unless we were like the next classroom over... but at the time everyone at school thought they were so cool. Glad to see this video, I had nearly forgotten about these days.
I just love the way stuff from this era looks. I was too young to experience things like this myself, but they still feel like part of my past. It's hard to believe how much time has passed since 2000 in part because of that. I'm quite glad that you're documenting this kind of stuff.
I remember having mixed feelings about it at the time. Someone needs to do a proper documentary on the "90's tech style".
I feel the same way I was only 9 or 10, and am living vicariously through these lol.
Good old times when things weren't a feautureless copies of each other and color range was wider than shades of grey.
@@Roninkinx Exactly, I keep getting older tech at garage sales, and stuff of about this age and forward is much of what I find. I played GameCube, NES, N64, and OG Xbox right alongside my 360 not long ago. Growing up seeing 90s cars and still seeing them on the road today has a similar effect. Really makes me feel older than I am, and I grew up in the early 2000s
I had one. But never was able to connect with anyone. I must have been the only one using it. 😄
That ICQ "uh-oh" sent a cold chill down my spine.
I can personally vouch for his account of the screaming people of 2000. Thought they were going to die... then they didn't... so that made them scream more... it was a whole thing and a half you really had to be there
9/11
@@manuel0578 Didn't see that coming
@@manuel0578 It was the millennium itself. The end of everything. The return of the christ child. A soda called Surge that would make energy drinks look like juice boxes (and it was marketed for teens) ...I digress many reasons to scream.
"Owners can put in what kind of kid they are, and what kind of kid they want to meet."
Someone please inform Datelines: to catch a predator.
My thoughts exactly.
@@mattelder1971 *Chris Hansen has enter the chat.*
Ikr
@@miracleeskimobattleship2874 you mean Chris Handsome
about 6 years short of the whole DS Pictochat panic
You put a lot of work into your videos and it shows. Thank you for the content.
Oh gosh, that ICQ sound really got me!
The fact that there is a coffee shop in Raleigh called "Sir Walter Coffee" is absolutely killing me right now.
Must be big fans of Walter Scott's writing.
Me too, but more literally.
Their use to be a Chevrolet dealer in raleigh called Sir Walter as well
I was there a couple days ago. It's alright.
@@octane613 and ?
That American Psycho reference was nearly the end of me. Couldn't breathe.
Nintendo must have drew inspiration from this device or devices like it, particularly with all its proximity features.
The original DS’ Pictochat and the later 3DS’ StreetPass comes to mind.
Pretty ingenious looking back at it. Kids were still glued to these devices, but because of the short range on them, they still had to get out and meet their friends or hang around other kids to have the most fun with their devices.
I guess nowadays you can chat, game, exchange files, collab on projects and video call in crystal clear audio and video with anybody around the world without ever leaving your room. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your habits I guess haha.
We live in truly amazing and equally bizarre times.
This is what I imagine “communicators” in any Minecraft fanfiction looks like and I totally love it.
My uncle got me one of those for Christmas when I was in highschool. I used it in school over this clunky portable word processor that my school gave me to take notes on in class because of my dyslexia and dysgraphia. I loved that thing.
Ahh yes, dysgraphia, otherwise known as "not trying hard enough."
Lost my stools at the "and perhaps the condition of your colon" comment 😂
2002 middle school, there were 6 of us in the school that had either this or the newer Extreme version. Our grad was all in the same wing of the school so as long as the we were in the main grade wing, we had our chats rolling. Signal was good enough to go across the hall or through the wall to the neighboring room so it ended up working for us. I think the distance through the mesh style network extended 4 classrooms at one time. Good luck trying to chat from another wing of the building though. I can't imagine 2.4ghz signal interfering these, but somehow in 2002 these had much better range
I had one of these in middle school and me and my friends used to use these to chat in class instead of passing notes 😂
You're getting really good at the Christmas clone VFX, Clint! I don't know how you even did that one! But you know it's only May, right?
Haaaa
Clint has successfully created artificial life through countless hours of rigorous computations, tinkering with circuitry and building his exact likeness in droid form to help combat those pesky Christmas Clones. He disguised the drone as his “brother” to keep both himself and the droid safe from the US government.
@@artchic528 I always thought the droids were the ones battling the clones!
ICQ noises still bring a flood of nostalgia. Almost more than AIM sounds.
AO
Me-meow!
Got one on super clearance at toysrus back in high school. Hated the weak rumble so I wired in a motor from a busted dualshock controller and stuck it in place with glue and duct tape. Then once pulled off a 4-move checkmate on my friend in the middle of math class. His expression when he glanced at his screen the next time the teacher looked away brings a grin to my face to this day 😄
I hope you added back-EMF protection if it was a Classic you modded!
Man I remember when everyone was constantly screaming around the time the Cybiko came out. It was really weird when everyone stopped. I blame it on the advent social media; everyone just yells on there now.
The mouth screaming advertising needs to come back, because the 2020s make me constantly want to scream.
90% of mobile game icons now have those, and half of those click-baity youtube previews too.
Man I remember being 13 having the Cybiko, PS2 and 32" CRT TV. I thought I was on top of the world. Good times.
CRT TVs have 0% Input Lag and instant response time, CRTs also have a magic filter that makes 2d Pixel Art and jagged Ps1/2 games look good.
You "thought" you were on top of the world?
You *WERE* on top of the world
you were at the top of the world, what do you mean?
@@Vishnu_Karthik
You obviously werent around back then
CRT tvs were pixely shit
Everything looked blurry
They would constantly break too
You must be the only one claiming that CRTs had HD quality
@@joecool9739 I never said CRT had HD quality. That's you putting words into my mouth, kid. If you were older than 18, you'd know that Pixel Art games and PS2/PS1 games look great on a CRT Screen because the Scanlines&Phosphorous CRT Glow acts like Anti-Aliasing.
LCD screens are sharper, all the Pixels of the 2d Games and all the Jagged Polygons of PS2/PS1 are going to stick out like a sore thumb.
LGR, you're always so professional so that 14:03 watermark joke caught me completely off guard
The design aesthetics of 90s and early 2000s is oddly fascinating.
@@alysdexia No one calls it that. That decade is mostly referred to as "the two thousands"
It's XTREME
I had a cybiko in high school and 2 other kids had them, the chat and gaming over RF worked GREAT in the classroom. I wonder if it would work as good now with so much more electronic noise in our environment.
That's what I was thinking too - could it be that the range has been nerfed by all the wi-fi and bluetooth interference?
@@darkfalzxUnlikely, since those are on 2.4GHz and wouldn't pass FCC cert if their harmonics 'nerfed' the ISM band. The biggest sources of RF noise are cheap, uncertified switching power supplies - all bets are off on them. The most likely culprit here though is that one of the units had a broken antenna - this sort of performance is about what you'd expect without using one. This is further reinforced by the fact he got the same performance in a suburban park. Yes, receiver ICs' sensitivity, noise rejection and so on have improved significantly since 2000, but even back then the performance would be expected to reach the quoted specs. I'm willing to bet if LGR measured continuity on those antennae to the RF output on the PCB with an ohmmeter, he'd find one that wasn't connected. It's also not credible that RF engineers hired from one of Russia's pre-eminent military engineering uni depts would produce a design that's less than 10% of spec - that uni programme was essentially the equivalent of MIT, except more selective and aimed at control systems for things that fly very fast, make a very, very big boom and it is absolutely essential that this boom happens, and happens in the right place. "Comrade CEO, we have coded an entire OS and hundreds of games in assembly by hand, and created a mesh network a decade before DARPA started funding them, but we have utterly failed at properly matching an antenna, the theoretical basis for which our own scientists have pioneered half a century ago!"
"Damn, how I want a device like that. It's really cool!"
I type, on my smartphone...
This is fascinating. If I had the money, I'd definitely try to start a collection of old technology. Starting with this and Gizmondo
This was a head of its time. They really were on the right track. The device just was a couple years too early for the tech it would have needed.