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0toShifty posted:My grandpa originally got this monitor stand power strip thing for his Micron PC in 1994. It has been connected to ever computer he's had since then.  Those things used to be everywhere.
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Jan 5, 2016 16:58
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This weird as gently caress game where apparently the character could learn and react to danger (I remember settings for age and intelligence when starting up). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLiZsijShbY
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Jan 5, 2016 17:30
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Using a KVM switch to administrate the LAN because Terminal Server wasn't a thing yet and it was the only way to connect to and work with 8 towers without 8 keyboards and mice on your desk.
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Jan 5, 2016 17:41
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TheMostFrench posted:This weird as gently caress game where apparently the character could learn and react to danger (I remember settings for age and intelligence when starting up). I watched that video but I didn't see any learning. It just wandered around like a dipshit until the player clicked an elevator
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Jan 5, 2016 17:49
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TheMostFrench posted:This weird as gently caress game where apparently the character could learn and react to danger (I remember settings for age and intelligence when starting up). Before I hit the link, I was sure you were referring to this:  About ten or so years ago, you could play it online through a browser. It is unusual.
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Jan 5, 2016 17:56
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Dirk Squarejaw posted:The best MP3 player I ever used was an iRiver H10. Sound was awesome, but it was the glitchiest piece of poo poo I've ever owned. Yes the iRiver H10 sounds amazing because it has a great Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). As for it being a glitchy piece of poo poo, there's a pretty easy way to give it custom software which is 1000% better: http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IriverPort It does cool poo poo like let the drive act as a USB hard drive (instead of a media device) and it can browse folders and via filename if you don't wanna do by tags.
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Jan 5, 2016 18:19
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Ehud posted:oh man what about PC Gamer demo discs? My first MP3 player was this iRiver, all 512Mb of it. 
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Jan 5, 2016 18:41
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I got my first mp3 player in I think 1999? It had a whopping 32mb of memory, which was enough for one cd at very, very low bitrate. It cost £150. I upgraded to an extra 64mb of memory for another £75.
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Jan 5, 2016 19:09
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Casimir Radon posted:There was also a pretty cool demo for HOMM II. The nifty thing I remember about the HOMM II demo is that it was actually the full version of the game with the maps and campaign folders removed. Meaning you could install the expansion pack over it and it would run like the full game. You could even download and run custom maps on it. This is the closest 13 year old me ever got to being an elite hacker.
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Jan 5, 2016 20:01
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0toShifty posted:My grandpa originally got this monitor stand power strip thing for his Micron PC in 1994. It has been connected to ever computer he's had since then. My dad still uses this on his PC today. It's the same model in your picture. Still waiting on that thunderstorm this will protect against.
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Jan 5, 2016 20:20
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Loqieu posted:My dad still uses this on his PC today. It's the same model in your picture. Still waiting on that thunderstorm this will protect against. For what it's worth - I have quite a lot of experience with power surges. Our house was on the top of a hill in Colorado near Pikes Peak. We got lightning strikes several times per year, always on the same spot on the house - the corner of a skylight. You could see the scorch marks. We had tripp-lite surge protectors on EVERYTHING -so the lightning seemed to only destroy telephone equipment. It took out six caller ID boxes, four answering machines, 4 sets of cordless phones, and three computer modems. On one of the computers - the modem was sort-of built into the motherboard on a riser card like thing - the lightning fried something on there too. The computer still worked, but had lots of hardware errors and bluescreens. Every time a storm came we'd frantically run around the house unplugging everything - but we couldn't always be there - so we just left everything unplugged when we left. I'm still in that habit to this very day. We had this old bell phone just like this one:  The lightning never killed it. My mom still uses it because of that. It sucks because it has no pound or star keys - so when you're working with voicemail or whatever - you can't always use it.
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Jan 5, 2016 20:47
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Data Graham posted:Hard drives started out as add-on luxuries. That's not entirely correct. Having two floppies were a luxury and many would have just one. That was not very useful; often you would have one floppy for your applications and another for your documents (the app floppy would be full and write-protected). Therefore DOS emulated two floppies using just the one floppy. It would remember which drive you wrote to last (say A:) and if the application next requested writing to the other (say B:) DOS would automatically prompt you to swap floppies. For the longest time, most computers had A: and B: as floppies so if you installed a hard disk it would naturally become C: Know why DOS/windows uses \ for directory separator while Unix uses /? DOS version 1 didn't have directories and decided to use / for parameters. When DOS added support for directories it had to go with another character, and that's how a random decision 35 years ago annoy cross-platform programmers to this day.
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Jan 5, 2016 21:14
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Melmac posted:Yes the iRiver H10 sounds amazing because it has a great Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). As for it being a glitchy piece of poo poo, there's a pretty easy way to give it custom software which is 1000% better: http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IriverPort My first MP3/media player was the Creative Labs Zen Vision W  It had a hell of a hard drive for the time it came out (30GB) and allowed me to fill it up with my pirated tv shows and movies. It even came pre-packaged with software to cut the resolution down and make the file size MUCH smaller. Also came with a cord that converted to RCA outputs, so I could bring it with me to a friends hose, plug it in, and we could watch the latest movie I just downloaded.
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Jan 5, 2016 22:22
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y2k compliant
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Jan 5, 2016 22:29
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0toShifty posted:We had this old bell phone just like this one: You can always use it to bludgeon an intruder. Those old things were solid.
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Jan 5, 2016 22:35
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drunk asian neighbor posted:
My freshman year of college (2005) I got one of these new in box at a yard sale for $20. Worked beautifully for years, great sound, reasonable interface. My only complaint was that it didn't act like USB mass storage. You were expected to use some hosed in the head Windows program to transfer music, and I was a Linux guy through and through. Luckily I found a Linux utility to do it; it was half assed but frankly no worse than the loving Windows tool. I still have the player but the screen stopped working at some point; it was set to shuffle all at that point so it's still marginally useful but I don't bother these days. I also got a free Zune in a contest or something but gave it away to a friend when I failed to sell it on Craigslist (nobody even wanted to pay $30 for it, and it was brand new)
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Jan 6, 2016 00:48
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(Zen Xtra, 40GB, removeable battery which was awesome)
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Ehud posted:oh man what about PC Gamer demo discs? hooooly poo poo i forgot about these nice pull
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Jan 6, 2016 00:49
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While we're on the subject of obsolete MP3 players, this was my first one: I can't really complain about that thing; sound quality may have been so-so, but it was as sturdy as a brick and still has my favorite shuffle functionality.
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Jan 6, 2016 01:06
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Pham Nuwen posted:My freshman year of college (2005) I got one of these new in box at a yard sale for $20. Worked beautifully for years, great sound, reasonable interface. My only complaint was that it didn't act like USB mass storage. You were expected to use some hosed in the head Windows program to transfer music, and I was a Linux guy through and through. Luckily I found a Linux utility to do it; it was half assed but frankly no worse than the loving Windows tool. I still have the player but the screen stopped working at some point; it was set to shuffle all at that point so it's still marginally useful but I don't bother these days. once again Champion Music Player/Llama Simulator WinAMP saves the day. I had a plugin that let me manage my music on it in a much easier fashion. Also you could technically use it as mass storage if you took the files you wanted to transfer, put them in a .zip, renamed it to .mp3 and put it on the player, then reverse the process at the destination. Winamp loving ruled. When I finally caved and got an iPod I was King of Music for a while since back in the day it was a massive pain in the rear end to get music on/off an iPod if you weren't using iTunes on the 1 computer you registered it with, but Winamp let me access all my friends' iPods and load/unload music onto them.
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Jan 6, 2016 01:23
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0toShifty posted:My grandpa originally got this monitor stand power strip thing for his Micron PC in 1994. It has been connected to ever computer he's had since then. There is one of these ancient bastards in every cube at the office; we're required to keep our laptop docks hooked up to them. Because reasons.
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Jan 6, 2016 01:31
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So much time spent on this. The Orcs of Kor were unstoppable.
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Jan 6, 2016 01:35
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 Here is my first digital player, a Sony S2 Sports Walkman. Great design, great interface, nice and light, was perfect for jogging (which is what I bought it for). So what sank it? loving Sony had to implement a proprietary music format, ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding). Nope, MP3 was just too popular for them to use.  Loqieu posted:My dad still uses this on his PC today. It's the same model in your picture. Still waiting on that thunderstorm this will protect against. Yeah, this is a real thing. Back in 1994, I was living in a brick rowhouse in Powelton Vilage, Philly. I had a Mac IIsi with a Global Village Teleport external modem, which plugged into my keyboard through the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB).  I was using an electronic telephone (on a landline, of course) when a sudden thunderstorm struck. The computer was turned off, and the phone I was using was on a different floor. There was a crash of thunder. I don't know if my house got hit or not, but it was VERY close. Then I heard an awful sound through the phone before it went dead. The phone was fried, as was my modem... and the entire motherboard for the Mac. Was NOT a cheap repair. This is why surge suppressors used to have an RJ11 pass through for your phone line.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:00
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This is the map from Computer Ambush, 1984-5. You'd go through your guys one by one, and manually enter a long string of movement/scan/firing commands. Your turn would end, and the computer would plug in its orders for the Nazi soldiers. Once that was done, you'd wait 10-20 minutes with a blank screen while the computer hashed out all the moves and opportunity firing. You'd hear footsteps and shooting and the occasional yell. THEN, when all that was over, you'd get to watch a replay and assess the activity. Lather, rinse, repeat. The turns took so long to process that we'd play board game Risk between CA turns. You'd actually plot out movement using grid coordinates and a grease pencil on a laminated map, and then laboriously enter the orders. It sounds dopey now, but it was some of the most fun I've ever had. 
Baxter has a new favorite as of 02:13 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 02:10
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0toShifty posted:We had this old bell phone just like this one: Back before the FCC forced AT&T to split up the Bell companies, you not only had to buy your phones from Bell but also pay monthly for each phone in your house. I remember my parents installing an illicit second extension upstairs and my mom playing dumb when The Phone Company called. "You hear a second ring on our line? Oh, sure! When somebody calls, our phone goes ring-ring, ring-ring." Anyway that's the story of my family committing fraud, thanks for reading
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Jan 6, 2016 02:41
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Howard Beale posted:Back before the FCC forced AT&T to split up the Bell companies, you not only had to buy your phones from Bell but also pay monthly for each phone in your house. I remember my parents installing an illicit second extension upstairs and my mom playing dumb when The Phone Company called. "You hear a second ring on our line? Oh, sure! When somebody calls, our phone goes ring-ring, ring-ring." I'm old enough to remember those days, and also the pre-modular multi-pin phone jacks. I recall how shortly after Bell was broken up there were a bunch of independent "phone stores" that sprang to life, letting you actually own your own phone and get something other than the Henry Ford-esque line of models that had been established for years.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:44
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Chief McHeath posted:
From a million pages back but this was the first PC I bought for myself as an adult. It was heavy enough to put a permanent bow in my desk and just crapped out and was unfixable 3 years of use. Which pissed me off because it cost the equivalent of like 6 months of my rent. Pocket Billiards has a new favorite as of 02:59 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 02:56
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Ratjaculation posted:Somethingawful
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Jan 6, 2016 02:58
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Mak0rz posted:I watched that video but I didn't see any learning. It just wandered around like a dipshit until the player clicked an elevator Yeah it was a pretty weird selling point. If you set the age/intelligence to minimum it pretty much wouldn't move and just make noises at you. You had to click the spider itself to kind of encourage it to turn that direction, and it would still mindlessly wander into traps etc. In the bit where it crosses a platform with a rotating obstacle the spider was jumping in an attempt not to be hit, this is supposed to be one of the learned behaviours it uses to keep itself alive. You still basically babysit it until it decides to go the right direction, and the player is still responsible for manipulating the world and flicking switches and opening doors no matter what intelligence level it has.
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Jan 6, 2016 03:12
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My first mp3 player: Just enough space to make the BEST PLAYLIST EVER (of poorly encoded dance music)
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Jan 6, 2016 03:19
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Squashy Nipples posted:
Sony can't help but gently caress up their stuff with weird proprietary reinventions of the wheel, it's in their nature. After seeing more old Japanese domestic market computers and some of the things in early Honda vehicles I'm wondering if it's just some sort of strange Japanese corporate/engineering culture thing.
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Jan 6, 2016 03:29
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Pham Nuwen posted:Sony can't help but gently caress up their stuff with weird proprietary reinventions of the wheel, it's in their nature. After seeing more old Japanese domestic market computers and some of the things in early Honda vehicles I'm wondering if it's just some sort of strange Japanese corporate/engineering culture thing. it's a miracle they made a digital camera that used the regular 3.5in floppy instead of some new weird sony format 
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Jan 6, 2016 03:31
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thathonkey posted:it's a miracle they made a digital camera that used the regular 3.5in floppy instead of some new weird sony format I had one of these fuckers  The thing was the size of a 3.5" floppy drive because it was one. But not only that, it also took the Imation SuperDisk, which had 120MB capacity  Thing could actually shoot usable (small and grainy and short) video, in 2000. E: I actually had to use it as an external USB floppy drive a few years later to pull some data off an old floppy I found; none of my computers had an actual drive anymore, but yay for obsolete oddities taking up space in my closet!
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Jan 6, 2016 03:42
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thathonkey posted:iirc they were pretty much the same OS other than the default UI I thought Windows XP was supposed to be better designed than 2000 for gaming or something. Maybe it's just that it had DirectX pre-installed or something  Nuclear Pogostick posted: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. They used to make adapters for at least one direction. drunk asian neighbor posted: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) Or for a few  you can get a USB device which has SATA, IDE and laptop-sized IDE connectors on it  (and a power brick to power the drive)
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Jan 6, 2016 03:49
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Howard Beale posted:Back before the FCC forced AT&T to split up the Bell companies, you not only had to buy your phones from Bell but also pay monthly for each phone in your house. I remember my parents installing an illicit second extension upstairs and my mom playing dumb when The Phone Company called. "You hear a second ring on our line? Oh, sure! When somebody calls, our phone goes ring-ring, ring-ring."  now.
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Jan 6, 2016 03:53
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Buttcoin purse posted:I thought Windows XP was supposed to be better designed than 2000 for gaming or something. Maybe it's just that it had DirectX pre-installed or something I don't remember exactly but I played PC games back then and dont ever recall having problems with 2000 or XP in that department
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Jan 6, 2016 03:54
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Re: wasted youth How about hours/days typing in listings in the back of Compute! magazine for programs that sucked eggs. Yes, this coupon database is just the ticket, oh wait, I have to manually type in each coupon and maintain a db, whoops, Commodore business justification nullified. http://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/12/first-encounter-compute-magazine-and-its-glorious-tedious-type-in-code/?comments=1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
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Jan 6, 2016 04:04
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Howard Beale posted:Back before the FCC forced AT&T to split up the Bell companies, you not only had to buy your phones from Bell but also pay monthly for each phone in your house. I remember my parents installing an illicit second extension upstairs and my mom playing dumb when The Phone Company called. "You hear a second ring on our line? Oh, sure! When somebody calls, our phone goes ring-ring, ring-ring." I remember those days. We did same things with cable TV in the 80s and 90s. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Radio Shack went under is because no one needs 25ft of phone cable or cable TV splitter boxes.
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Jan 6, 2016 04:08
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Bonzo posted:I remember those days. We did same things with cable TV in the 80s and 90s. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Radio Shack went under is because no one needs 25ft of phone cable or cable TV splitter boxes. But they sure as hell have four of the six resistors I need
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Jan 6, 2016 04:20
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for the longest time there would be that ONE thing you needed in a pinch and had to go pay like 50% markup at radioshack
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Jan 6, 2016 04:22
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Data Graham posted:But they sure as hell have four of the six resistors I need yeah but only 1 of them is in the right place, 2 are mixed in with fuses and the last is in a pile of other components on top of the drawers. Oh and the system says they should have over 10 of them in stock.
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Jan 6, 2016 04:37
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