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That is the nostalgic sound of science fiction, right there
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 16:27 |
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# ? May 23, 2024 15:45 |
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And anytime anyone was near a computer in Oz.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 16:32 |
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Oh man, my XT clone I got like a decade ago to screw around with (yup...) has exactly that hard drive, and makes exactly that noise. Fun fact: old hard drives like that used an actual stepper motor with a specially cut very thin stainless steel ribbon wrapped around its shaft to move the read/write head across the platters. The noise you are hearing is the stepper motor running. Modern hard drives use what's called a "voice coil" actuator, which is basically a pair of very strong magnets with an electromagnet coil suspended between them connected to the pivoting arm instead. The voltage across the coil (actually the current through it, but I digress) changing results in the angle of the arm changing.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 17:09 |
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Shugojin posted:Like an actual beep from a speaker or just a motor noise that sounded like a beep? Oh man it's hard to describe unless you've experienced it. That 20 meg drive (I'm assuming it's the same model as in the 286 XT) would positively SING. The video really doesn't do it justice.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 17:38 |
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A Pinball Wizard posted:Way back when in 95, my first computer was one of these: My old high school had a bunch of these sitting around well into the late 90s. There were about 20 machines sitting in the back of the library that I don't think anyone ever used while I was there. However, the office and guidance counselors were actually still using these daily as terminals to access the student database as late as 1999 when I graduated, maybe beyond that for all I know.
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 17:56 |
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I had an XT in the mid-90s myself. Only for six months or so before I upgraded to a still-old 386, but it was still a lot of fun to play with at the time. First hard drive was a 10MB full height one, though I soon upgraded it to a pair of 30MB half-height, and added a 720k 3.5" floppy so I could swap files more easily off more modern computers. (XTs wouldn't support high density floppies without extra controllers.)
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 18:14 |
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My family's first computer, purchased back around 1995/1996, was made by Canon (the camera people). They paid extra for some upgrades like a pentium 100 instead of a 486, 8mb ram, 28.8 modem, and a sweet Alps four-disc cd-rom drive. I think these magazine based multi-disc drives became popular with trunk mounted car cd players in the next few years. Having it for your computer was something else. Pivit has a new favorite as of 19:05 on Jun 23, 2013 |
# ? Jun 23, 2013 18:37 |
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All the Silent Steel discs inserted at the same time
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# ? Jun 23, 2013 19:25 |
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Pivit posted:My family's first computer, purchased back around 1995/1996, was made by Canon (the camera people). They paid extra for some upgrades like a pentium 100 instead of a 486, 8mb ram, 28.8 modem, and a sweet Alps four-disc cd-rom drive. I think these magazine based multi-disc drives became popular with trunk mounted car cd players in the next few years. Having it for your computer was something else. My first CD burner was kind of like this. It was 4 disc, and it didn't have a magazine, but it somehow just loaded everything in through the slot [slot, not tray]. It's been... jesus 15/16 years since I had that thing so my memory might be foggy, but I still remember the sounds it'd make during bootup/when it'd change discs. Thing was like $200+ too, cannot remember how I managed to convince my parents to buy that. e. I keep thinking about it and not using a magazine doesn't sound possible to me but I swear it didn't use one
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# ? Jun 24, 2013 17:52 |
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Krispy Kareem posted:It may have been a urban legend, but my mom spent 30 years at IBM and said the coke virus, which thanked you for being a loyal customer and popped open the CD drive for a cup holder, caused their IT department so much trouble. This was a virus? I remember my parents had it on a floppy, I think it was like cokegift.exe or something. That was the funniest poo poo when I was a kid, along with Elf Bowling.
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# ? Jun 24, 2013 18:06 |
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Code Jockey posted:My first CD burner was kind of like this. It was 4 disc, and it didn't have a magazine, but it somehow just loaded everything in through the slot [slot, not tray]. It's been... jesus 15/16 years since I had that thing so my memory might be foggy, but I still remember the sounds it'd make during bootup/when it'd change discs. There were multi-disc slot-load CDROM drives, but I don't think they ever made a burner like that.
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# ? Jun 24, 2013 18:14 |
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So I said I'd burn a few DVD's for a friend, I'd just need her to grab me some DVD-r's because I was out. She came back with eight of these: It is kinda hard to see because of the jewel case but that is a HD-DVD rewriteable disc. I didn't even realize what they were until I was inspecting the fancy raibow-cases. I'm tempted to hang on to them for a while. They were bought at this ghetto-rear end drug store in my town for less than a dollar each
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# ? Jun 24, 2013 20:41 |
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DNova posted:There were multi-disc slot-load CDROM drives, but I don't think they ever made a burner like that. You know what? I bet it was my first cdrom, not my first burner. Come to think of it, it was a Hi-Val 4 disc changer, but I can't find any pictures, googling tends to just turn up modern hi-val drives and like car stereo changers.
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# ? Jun 24, 2013 21:41 |
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DNova posted:There were multi-disc slot-load CDROM drives, but I don't think they ever made a burner like that. Imagine the power - you could coaster 4 discs from a buffer underrun without having to swap them round each time!
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# ? Jun 24, 2013 22:15 |
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Wow, I forgot about buffer underruns. The first CD burner we had was an external Backpack Re-Writer. I think it was some company owned thing my dad got from work, and it was like a coaster factory. It hooked up to the parallel port and had a pass through system so you could still connect your printer. As I recall it was supposedly capable of blazing fast 4x speeds. My father still has CDs burned with it, using mp3s he got off napster in the glory days.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 04:27 |
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two forty posted:My father still has CDs burned with it, using mp3s he got off napster in the glory days. Man, this just makes me think about how little I miss Napster. There are some songs I still expect to suddenly stop halfway through when I'm listening to them, because my downloads never seemed to want to finish. Also just having a gigantic directory full of random songs, each with their own unique naming scheme. Rare songs that would appear in a heartbeat, download for 5 seconds and then never resume or appear again. Makes me wonder why I even bothered, honestly!
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 15:32 |
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The worst was thinking you had downloaded an episode of Dragonball Z or Pokemon or whatever I watched back then, only to have it be childporn. I was only 13, goddamnit. I shouldn't have had to see that.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 15:51 |
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Episodes? As far as I remember, Napster was only for music. Lots of other stuff for series and cp - if that is your thing - though. I was the king of our school for having a 2x CD burner and a 128 kbps cable modem, I downloaded and burned out so many songs for people at my school, and earned a fat load of money on it too. Ah, those were the days …
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 17:47 |
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Taeke posted:The worst was thinking you had downloaded an episode of Dragonball Z or Pokemon or whatever I watched back then, only to have it be childporn. Kid Buu! NOOOOOOOOO!
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 17:50 |
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Yeah, if I had it to do over again I would've monetized the gently caress out of my first burner. I could've retired by now! [or more likely, I would've bought some gaming hardware that would've gone obsolete before I even had it installed]
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 17:50 |
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Speakning of burned CDs... I once got contact with a guy on IRC, him in Holland and I in Denmark. He was apparently a bit of a big time warez and media hustler, and we struck a deal where I sent him a shoebox full of common Magic the Gathering cards in exchange for a ton of stuff on burned CD-ROMs: Applications, games, movies, porn and music albums. We both got our stuff via mail and were happy. So utterly primitive today, though.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 21:35 |
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Datasmurf posted:Episodes? As far as I remember, Napster was only for music. You're right, I had it confused with kazaa I think.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 21:36 |
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Pilsner posted:Speakning of burned CDs... Ha ha, I did that at school too. But instead of a shoebox with MtG cards, it was a tote bag with latex gloves, a speculum, lots of those sticks the doctors use to check your throat, syringes, needles, those things you crap / puke in when you're at a hospital and what not. I got all that stuff for free (well, not the speculum, but nobody suspected me - at least I never heard anything about it), and I got lots of games andapps on burned CDs. Good times. Taeke posted:You're right, I had it confused with kazaa I think. Ah, yes. Kazaa. Or Kazaa Lite, Bearshare, Limewire, Frostwire, iMesh, EDonkey2k, Gnutella and my old favourite after Napster, WinMX. Interestingly enough, I've got the setup exes for all these (except LimeWire, because gently caress that crap). I should really clean up my old misc download folders.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 22:43 |
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Datasmurf posted:Ha ha, I did that at school too. Good lord. Good LORD.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 22:46 |
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DNova posted:Good lord. Good LORD. The less you think about it, the better.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 23:21 |
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I think you where supplying a serial killer.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 23:31 |
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Obviously someone was making a human centipede.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 23:34 |
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Pretty good scam really. Steal warez for free, and some kid puts together a pro rape kit for you. He probably used the money he saved to flash at prostitutes to get then into the limo.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 23:34 |
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Code Jockey posted:Yeah, if I had it to do over again I would've monetized the gently caress out of my first burner. I could've retired by now! We had a kid doing this at my junior high. He'd take requests and make you a cd for five bucks. I think he might have gotten suspended for it.
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# ? Jun 26, 2013 23:44 |
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mactheknife posted:We had a kid doing this at my junior high. He'd take requests and make you a cd for five bucks. I think he might have gotten suspended for it. I did this, minus the suspension. I'm pretty sure nobody in authority was even AWARE it was illegal.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 00:48 |
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Exit Strategy posted:I did this, minus the suspension. I'm pretty sure nobody in authority was even AWARE it was illegal. Most people over the age of forty do not understand the concept of paying for things you can do/get with your computer for free.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 00:51 |
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Kazaa started out as a great program but then when it went all spyware it forked into Kazaa Lite. Of all those WinMX is probably the most important since it (along with the work of Ian Clarke) influenced and gave birth to all the modern P2P clients through its unofficial successor WinNY and later WinNY's unofficial successor Perfect Dark. These are mostly used in Asia however, where WinMX and WinNY still have huge fanbases and piracy through torrenting isn't as common. I'm pretty sure this has a lot to do with certain Asian countries being really terrible at adopting new operating systems. Back in 09 I used to deal with people from Korea, Taiwan, China and Vietnam on a pretty frequent basis and the amount of people who would show up complaining they couldn't run some software for their class due to them running WINDOWS ME was insane. I don't know what it is about ME but that was where half of the Asian student populations computer problems stemmed from.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 01:20 |
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You see, having the drives wheels run against a set of smaller wheels instead of directly contacting the rails creates a gearing effect which totally speeds up the locomotives, and if you could just invest in a few hundred of then I could totally sell these efficient locomotives to the railroads and make us all rich! No, why on earth would you think this is a scam? But the damndest thing is that two of these things were actually built.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 01:52 |
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Datasmurf posted:Ah, yes. Kazaa. Or Kazaa Lite, Bearshare, Limewire, Frostwire, iMesh, EDonkey2k, Gnutella and my old favourite after Napster, WinMX. Interestingly enough, I've got the setup exes for all these (except LimeWire, because gently caress that crap). I should really clean up my old misc download folders. No one ever remembers Scour.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 02:14 |
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I also made some dough in early highschool by burning napster mp3s for $5 a pop. I think my burner was only a 2x and I had to convert every mp3 to a wav for it to burn right. Then in college I moved onto moding xboxs and loaded them up with bigger hard drives and tons of games or just burning the games to dvd...those were the days. DrBouvenstein posted:No one ever remembers Scour. I moved onto Direct Connect after the napster downfall. Someone ran the server on the school's network (which had no bandwidth limits inside the network) and restricted it to the school's ip addresses. It was amazing.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 02:19 |
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Ofaloaf posted:You see, having the drives wheels run against a set of smaller wheels instead of directly contacting the rails creates a gearing effect which totally speeds up the locomotives, and if you could just invest in a few hundred of This is interesting, what was it called? Looks like something out of a married to the sea comic. I know they've been discussed before, and the consensus was they aren't totally obsolete, but today I dug up my old Sharp MiniDisc player. A Japanese import that cost close to $500 in 1999, I bought it for $20 for kicks a few years ago. It has an array of pretty fancy features, I think there was even a way to record to it via a special TOSlink cable, and I see pictures in the instructions (mostly written in Japanese) of some sort of serial port adaptor. Songs could have the titles entered, and they would display on the backlit screen on the remote in between an animated swimming fish. What really struck me about it is what a precisely engineered, compact mechanical device it is. Interesting to think of how far we've come in 15 years. This was I guess pretty much the pinnacle of portable media players back then, recording to minidisc at 1x speed.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 03:04 |
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two forty posted:Interesting to think of how far we've come in 15 years. This was I guess pretty much the pinnacle of portable media players back then, recording to minidisc at 1x speed. I'm honestly surprised they lasted as long as they did, given that they were basically smaller CDs that stored data on the disc by a slightly different method. I sometimes wonder if it was technological advancement and price reduction in solid state digital media players that did them in, or recordable CD media prices dropping below $1/disc in the late 90s.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 03:19 |
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two forty posted:This is interesting, what was it called? Looks like something out of a married to the sea comic. They were built by the Holman Locomotive Company. I've no idea if they had any fancy name associated with them, but I'd be surprised if they didn't. In a less-scammy vein, railway engineers in the early 20th studied steam-powered ships and thought to themselves "Gosh, these steam turbines are pretty powerful and efficient in ships! I bet they would do wonders for a locomotive!" The results were failures across the board, but produced some pretty rad designs nonetheless. The German steam turbine locomotives were just Whereas the American steam turbine locomotives look like they belong in some caricature of the 1950s: I think there's a couple steam turbine locomotives preserved in Sweden, but all the super rad designs have long-since been scrapped.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 03:21 |
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Plinkey posted:I moved onto Direct Connect after the napster downfall. Someone ran the server on the school's network (which had no bandwidth limits inside the network) and restricted it to the school's ip addresses. It was amazing.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 03:26 |
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# ? May 23, 2024 15:45 |
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I did xbox modchips in college too... knowing how to solder well was a good skill to have. The DC++ network at my school was constantly being shut down because the netops group was a bunch of nazis. That being said, every oncampus system, student or otherwise, that wasn't part of critical infrastructure had a public static IP, so there was somewhat of a reasonable explanation for why it needed to be shut down.
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# ? Jun 27, 2013 03:43 |