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Ah, my doctor's office still uses a dot matrix printer to print billing sheets, for some loving reason. The patient info printed by the dot matrix printer never lines up properly with the fields on the pre-printed form. I always resent having to tear off the strips so the papers will sit neatly in my medical files  quote:On the plus side they were good for printing out long banners for birthdays and special occasions since the pages were all stuck together by default. When I was born, my much-older sisters used The Print Shop and our dot-matrix printer to print a welcome home banner when my mom brought me home from the hospital.  That printer still occasionally worked by the time I was old enough to play with it. I loved making random "signs" (clip art of an animal + text) and then running out of the room while it printed because the printer was so friggin' loud.I was really pleased to recently find that archive.org has The Print Shop from 1984 in their software archive. That's the Apple II version, which looked a tiny bit different from the DOS version we had, but it has all the same clip art.  I made a sign for my bedroom door with this pig on it when I was really little. The pig got colored in with a pink crayon, of course. Memories...
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Jan 3, 2016 07:50
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My dad got a pirated copy of Print Shop from somebody he worked with for our 386. That included a bunch of clipaet colllections as well. One day my aunt and cousins were over and he was playing around in Print Shop, where he stumbles upon Clipart renditions of people loving. My parents had a fun time explaining that they had no idea that was there.
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Jan 3, 2016 08:01
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Remember way back when, you could watch any movie (or listen to any music for that matter) and Skynet, er, the cloud wasn't watching every stupid poo poo thing you do? (and learning!) Technically this one doesn't count because the T.V. is not internet or a computer but: I miss snow. How am I supposed to see 1% proof of the big bang? Are there contrails? For real though. The television is a pretty amazing mix of sciences. Remember books?
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Jan 3, 2016 08:16
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drunk asian neighbor posted:e: he's one of those weird old-school computer nerds that is now getting too old to keep up with modern computers, like his brain is too full of PDP and Fortran and poo poo to figure out why programs are called apps in win10 and that kind of dumb crap I don't know PDPs or Fortran but I'm getting that way myself. I lack enthusiasm about my smartphone. I use it to read the forums when I have time to kill and I'm not in front of an actual PC, but that's probably about it. It's me, I'm the computer relic. quote:e2: also don't they use twinax for SATA nowadays? As a computer relic, I don't know about the latest developments in SATA, but I'm assuming they don't use the same TwinAx IBM Wikipedia says the IBM technology was capable of  1 megabit per second speeds!! One of my projects is to play with this old AS/400 terminal I have one day, see if I can hook it up to the PC. I think the lower levels of the protocol are documented, I'm not sure if you can find out about the higher levels though  Speaking of old networking technology with big cables, I never saw 10Base-5 (or "thicknet") Ethernet but remembered hearing about it. From Wikipedia: quote:Transceivers can be connected to cable segments with N connectors, or via a vampire tap, which allows new nodes to be added while existing connections are live. A vampire tap clamps onto the cable, forcing a spike to pierce through the outer shielding to contact the inner conductor while other spikes bite into the outer braided shield. Care must be taken to keep the outer shield from touching the spike; installation kits include a "coring tool" to drill through the outer layers and a "braid pick" to clear stray pieces of the outer shield.
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Jan 3, 2016 08:17
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BirryJoru posted:Technically this one doesn't count because the T.V. is not internet or a computer but: I miss snow. How am I supposed to see 1% proof of the big bang? Turn on a radio
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Jan 3, 2016 08:21
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Alceste posted:
Bannermania is the program I remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_Mania Before we had ANY games for our computer, we had Bannermania. 
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Jan 3, 2016 08:21
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Do any major movies still have websites that you can download a copy of a trailer to your computer's hard drive in avi, mov or wmv format rather than just streaming it from an embedded Youtube link?
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Jan 3, 2016 08:25
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blugu64 posted:Turn on a radio Yeah, sure. I can still hear it but I can't SEE it. Seeing and hearing is believing or some BS. Watch any lovely sitcom without the laugh track. It's kinda like that. (sad) Where did "Smell-O-Vision" go? Does anybody remember the cult classic that was supposed to smell more like blood the longer you played it as the laser would heat up the disc? Snatcher, I believe. Was this real or only an idea? Wiki doesn't help.
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Jan 3, 2016 08:49
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Buttcoin purse posted:As a computer relic, I don't know about the latest developments in SATA, but I'm assuming they don't use the same TwinAx IBM Had to look it up but as it turns out SATA 3 hides physical TwinAx cables within the sheath. What's old is new again, huh? Although it makes sense if you're able to repurpose an existing standard like that at some level, saves a lot of a money. At least until all these shiny new SSDs finally move over to PCIe in the consumer sector.
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Jan 3, 2016 08:59
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JediTalentAgent posted:Do any major movies still have websites that you can download a copy of a trailer to your computer's hard drive in avi, mov or wmv format rather than just streaming it from an embedded Youtube link? You can download anything from YouTube with the right software. I use 4K Video Downloader on my Mac.
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Jan 4, 2016 14:07
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Buttcoin purse posted:What's wrong with XP other than its default UI? iirc they were pretty much the same OS other than the default UI
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Jan 4, 2016 14:52
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I liked the default UI, especially if you changed the colors to either silver or olive. I have one coworker who, at every upgrade from XP to 10, the very first thing he does is change the UI and background back to the same gray bar/blue background it's been since '95.
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Jan 4, 2016 15:48
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I do the same. I like my Windows gray and boring.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:08
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I'm more computer knowledgeable than most people, but I will freely admit I'm hardly an expert on the stuff. Is there a reason IDE was replaced by SATA? I still have my OS drive from my PC from 2003, if I use an adapter I can plug it in and even boot the OS when it shows up in grub.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:37
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Nuclear Pogostick posted:I'm more computer knowledgeable than most people, but I will freely admit I'm hardly an expert on the stuff. Is there a reason IDE was replaced by SATA? I still have my OS drive from my PC from 2003, if I use an adapter I can plug it in and even boot the OS when it shows up in grub. I'm not 100% but I remember back then the theoretical limits of SATA were insane compared to IDE, but in reality they were pretty much the same performance wise but the future was pretty clearly going the SATA route. Also that was back in the real hayday of fan/light management and the fact it was a wayyyy smaller/thinner cable (compared to the IDE ribbon style) was a total plus. It would also look cooler through your modded case window lit up with your cold cathode. Tyson Tomko has a new favorite as of 17:13 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 16:57
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Nuclear Pogostick posted:I'm more computer knowledgeable than most people, but I will freely admit I'm hardly an expert on the stuff. Is there a reason IDE was replaced by SATA? I still have my OS drive from my PC from 2003, if I use an adapter I can plug it in and even boot the OS when it shows up in grub. In general terms, IDE was slowly getting obsolete as it's been around since 1988 or so, and the new decoupled 80-lead IDE cables were notoriously fragile and a pain in the rear end to work with.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:58
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GAY 4 ORGANS
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Also SATA is the same connection whether you're using a laptop or desktop-sized HDD. I've saved multiple people's laptop contents by being able to just plug their HD into my computer and go from there (I used to have an IDE cradle that did the same thing, but you get my point)
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Jan 4, 2016 17:21
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That's a good relic in itself. Remember when knowing the difference between serial and parallel communication ports/cables was a key chapter in any computer manual? You had to know the benefits and drawbacks of each, and know what kinds of peripherals used each one. Serial was slow but reliable and had a nice compact cable/jack (good for modems and mice/keyboards), whereas if you went parallel (like for printers or disk drives) you could transmit 8 or 12 or 47 bits at the same time and go super fast, but you had to have an enormous cable with a separate lead for every bit. Kinda like running SLI on your cables, complete with all the finicky electronics necessary to handle the intricate timing between transmission pulses (I seem to remember that above a certain speed and/or cable length, your parallel cables would start to exhibit wacky characteristics like some of the bits falling behind others or experiencing relativistic effects or something). I remember Apple II series manuals with cute cartoon drawings showing bits traveling serially or in parallel down a cable. I guess for anything external (and even anything internal that isn't soldered down), it gradually just became way easier and more advantageous to just crank up the clock speed and run your data serially rather than trying to parallelize poo poo.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:21
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Speaking of SLI, I still have a hard time believing that GPU SLI for gaming is good for anything other than giving Nvidia another $2-500 for no reason. e: though I think you're talking about a different SLI
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Jan 4, 2016 17:25
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Data Graham posted:That's a good relic in itself. Remember when knowing the difference between serial and parallel communication ports/cables was a key chapter in any computer manual? You had to know the benefits and drawbacks of each, and know what kinds of peripherals used each one. Serial was slow but reliable and had a nice compact cable/jack (good for modems and mice/keyboards), whereas if you went parallel (like for printers or disk drives) you could transmit 8 or 12 or 47 bits at the same time and go super fast, but you had to have an enormous cable with a separate lead for every bit. Didn't parallel cables also start losing data and poo poo if they were longer than a certain length? I think I remember The Complete Idiot's Guide to MS-DOS, 1993 edition, saying something about it.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:59
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http://www.oldcomputers.net/adam.html Had one of these in the house when I was growing up. Daisy wheel printer and a cassette drive! Played the Buck Rogers game until the tape wore out and birdnested the drive.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:59
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It's been ages since I looked at material for A+ certification. Do they still require you to know IRQ ports and hexadecimals?
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Jan 4, 2016 17:59
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Speaking of SLI, I still have a hard time believing that GPU SLI for gaming is good for anything other than giving Nvidia another $2-500 for no reason. Nah, same thing, just making an analogy. Like, hey, twice the processing power, in parallel! But then you have to have all that extra engineering to make it all sync up, and the cost of the complexity weighs down any speed gains, and eventually everyone just goes back to one giant fast pipeline (i.e. serial).
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Jan 4, 2016 17:59
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The problem at one time was the ability to take a serial signal and decode it fast enough whereas now it is not a problem hence making SATA possible. Parallel (and by extension IDE) can be faster than serial but is prone to crosstalk. Standard RS-232 is slow and actually quite unreliable in comparison to any twisted pair serial port spec since the voltage swing is so high and the cables themselves are prone to external noise.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:08
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Bonzo posted:It's been ages since I looked at material for A+ certification. Do they still require you to know IRQ ports and hexadecimals? I took it in 2013. IRQs were mentioned at length in the study material, but not on the exam.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:17
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I have one coworker who, at every upgrade from XP to 10, the very first thing he does is change the UI and background back to the same gray bar/blue background it's been since '95. It's me son jk i use osx these days 
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Jan 4, 2016 18:19
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Another bad thing about IDE was that it was deliberately under-engineered as to make it affordable for the average user in the late 80s. Back in the 286 and 386 days you had host adapter cards that were designed as simple plug-in replacements for the dying old ST412/506 subsystems. The head positioning and drive geometry was handled by AT BIOS, not the card itself, and this unwittingly introduced the drive size barriers and a ton of other problems which plagued the computers well into the 21st century.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:20
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A SWEATY FATBEARD posted:head positioning That reminded me of another relic...there was a "park" command we had to use on that old computer to move the hard disk head(s) to a safe position on shutdown. Otherwise, if you moved the PC, you risked damaging the drive platters even while it was turned off. I was terrified to make any sudden movements near that thing, on or off. Awesome that Print Shop is still around, by the way. My fourth and fifth grade classrooms each had one Apple IIe that only certain kids were privileged to use--including me, as a proto-geek back in 1986; if I'd known it would ruin my social life until late high school, I wonder if I would still have taken that special BASIC programming class that started it all--and what I mostly remember is printing banners on them for birthdays and stuff, forcing us to listen to those printers drone for HOURS. Speaking of that, I worked for a factory in the early 2000's that ran their MRP system on an AS/400 and they had one of those freezer-sized line printers too. I used to have to run monthly reports that would produce two inch thick stacks of that wide, green-white lined paper. That one, being new, was nice and quiet, but the one it replaced that sat on a pedestal in the open (like a plotter) was as loud as a siren. The printer and all of the green screen terminals ran Twinax on big fat round balun connectors that could be daisy chained to each other and only had two wires each. AFAIK the place was still running that way when it shut down a few years ago.
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Jan 4, 2016 18:43
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I remember the first time I saw an IDE setup, my buddy excitedly told me "the IDE interface is much simpler, most of the drive controller is built right into the drive. " No idea if that is true. I was an Amiga guy at the time, so the first PC I ever built for myself was 386 with IDE hard drives. Of course, the IDE controller was a separate card that plugged into the mobo. ISA I guess?
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Jan 4, 2016 18:52
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lol if you didn't have SCSI back in the day
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Jan 4, 2016 19:03
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Squashy Nipples posted:I remember the first time I saw an IDE setup, my buddy excitedly told me "the IDE interface is much simpler, most of the drive controller is built right into the drive. " Correct. Here's a host adapter card from 1992:  It was simpler to set up than the old ST412 interface, but many people had a difficult time wrapping their minds around the master/slave configuration and setting the jumpers on the drives themselves. These cards had parallel ports which was nice, but the serial communications were handled by a 8250 chip which could only 'talk' to devices with up to 9600 baud or so. For 33.6k modems, this was too slow, so if you were stuck with an old host adapter card (even if it was VESA - oh and that one were tremendous turds) you had no option but to get an internal modem.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:06
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blugu64 posted:lol if you didn't have SCSI back in the day lol if you weren't running 16Mb Token ring
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Jan 4, 2016 19:10
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Anyone remember the old ISA SB16s? Onboard audio took a really long time to match these bad boys. Yes I'll be dying alone and unloved surrounded by my Socket 7 poo poo. 
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Jan 4, 2016 19:49
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I remember taking apart my old 1541 floppy drive from my C64 to manually align the head when I was a little kid. The clashing and banging that thing did was tremendous but it was completely normal operation. I would be utterly horrified if anything sounded remotely like that on my PC.  I actually still have a C64 and monitor. I plugged them in for a bit of nostalgia a couple years ago. Fired up a couple of old games Sublogic Flight Simulator 2 and the original Ghostbusters. Man, did they both suck.
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Jan 4, 2016 19:55
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blugu64 posted:lol if you didn't have SCSI back in the day My SCSI card had dip switches.
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Jan 4, 2016 20:10
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Bonzo posted:My SCSI card had dip switches. I gave away my SCSI ISA controller card, together with a ton of stupid and badly aged poo poo, such as an external 4x CDRW drive with a power supply
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Jan 4, 2016 20:13
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IBM Deathstar: yip yip yip yip YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP SQUEEEEEEEEE *thwack* I went through three of these dreadful things, and all three of them were duds.
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Jan 4, 2016 20:45
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A SWEATY FATBEARD posted:Anyone remember the old ISA SB16s? Onboard audio took a really long time to match these bad boys. My first was a SB PCI128 Imagine... a sound card in a PCI slot!
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Jan 4, 2016 21:11
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Cable chat reminded me of these bad boys:
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Jan 4, 2016 21:17
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slidebite posted:I remember taking apart my old 1541 floppy drive from my C64 to manually align the head when I was a little kid. Cruising around in Ecto 1 vacuuming up ghosts while jamming out to the Ghostbusters theme song. That game was so drat repetitive but a classic nonetheless. Superior Bastard has a new favorite as of 21:24 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 21:22
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